Food Dictatorship of the Bolshevik Regime – a Means of Organization of Famine in Ukraine (1921–1923)

The article examines the process of establishing a food dictatorship by the Bolshevik authorities against the Ukrainian rural population, which led to the starvation of millions of Ukrainians in 1921–1923. But the most vulnerable were the Bolsheviks’ procurement and export of peasant bread and food to Russia. Using coercive harsh methods, the procurement campaign was carried out in the drought-stricken southern regions of Ukraine. This criminal action was led by O. Shlichter and M. Vladimirov sent by the Russian government in accordance with numerous government orders and directives involving the poorest sections of the peasantry and specially trained military units. In the spring of 1921, wealthy peasants had almost no grain left, and the need for a solution to the food problem by the Bolshevik government only grew. In order to eliminate the resistance of the peasants, which the Bolsheviks regarded as political banditry, the idea of the so-called stratification of the village into separate classes (poor semi-proletarians, middle peasants, kulaks) was introduced by mobilizing tens of thousands of workers in industrial centers. The People’s Commissar for Land Affairs of the USSR D. Manuilskii consciously pursued a predatory policy of destroying productive farms. Attempts by the Ukrainian leadership to stop harvesting bread in Ukraine have failed several times at a time when about 4 million people are on hunger strike in the country. The actions of the Bolshevik government contradicted the realities of peasant life at the time, as did the entire population, which suffered from famine and crop failure, backed by numerous taxes, the forcible confiscation of the last peasant food supplies, and military aggression. After the official recognition of the critical state of agriculture and famine in Ukraine, no assistance was provided by the government other than permission to appeal to the international community.