Mike Haynes, "Joseph Stalin and the Harvest of Death".
Paper presented at the New Socialist Approaches to History seminar, Institute of Historical Research, December 6th 2003
- Online introduction
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This paper summarizes and extends some of the arguments in M.Haynes & R.Husan, A Century of State Murder? Death and Policy in Russia in the Twentieth Century, 2003 - especially its chapter 3 which sets out the scale and pattern of death under the Stalin regime in the years 1928-1953.
Russia has had one of the worst ‘demographic histories’ in the twentieth century. The population suffered more than any other in (1) two world wars and a civil war as well as lesser conflicts; (2) periodic famines; (3) bouts of intense repression; (4) and general social pressures creating levels of life expectancy which have meant that the experience of premature death was commonplace. Since the late 1980s new problems have emerged with extraordinary falls in male life expectancy; war in Chechnya; and the failure of political change to deliver a more decent society which respects human rights (continuing forms of hidden repression, high levels of imprisonment etc). This obviously prompts the question of whether these patterns can be charted accurately and explained. The worst period by far was the Stalin years which saw World War 2, two major famines (1932-1933 and 1946-1947), mass repression and pressure on society to devote resources to the military industrial sector at the expense of raising living standards and therefore conditions of life.
A Century State Murder? hopes to break new ground in 3 areas:
- by being the first work to bring together the 4 aspects of demographic history noted above. The only comparable work is Alain Blum’s Naitre, Vivre et Mourir en L’URSS.
- by providing the most accurate account possible of the data in an area where slapdash use of statistics is notorious
- by trying to set out as clearly as possible both the immediate and underlying causal mechanisms.
At the center of the analysis is an attempt to see the history of Russia as determined by class relationships and to trace how the class nature of society worked through different mechanisms to affect the pattern of death. The relationship between class and death has been discussed in the west to the embarrassment of governments – for example, the Thatcher Government’s response to the Black Report in the 1980s. But this understanding has not been integrated into historical work in the West. It has hardly been applied at all in Russia even in the medical and demographic literature, let alone to the pattern of development as a whole.