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The Political Economy of Famine: The Ukrainian Famine of 1933

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 March 2021

Natalya Naumenko*
Affiliation:
Natalya Naumenko is Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, George Mason University, 4500 Roberts Rd, Carow Hall, Office 10, Fairfax, VA, 22032. E-mail: nnaumenk@gmu.edu.

Abstract

The 1933 Ukrainian famine killed as many as 2.6 million people out of a population of 32 million. Historians offer three main explanations: weather, economic policies, genocide. This paper documents that (1) available data do not support weather as the main explanation: 1931 and 1932 weather predicts harvest roughly equal to the 1924–1929 average; weather explains up to 8.1 percent of excess deaths. (2) Policies (collectivization of agriculture and the lack of favored industries) significantly increased famine mortality; collectivization explains up to 52 percent of excess deaths. (3) There is some evidence that ethnic Ukrainians and Germans were discriminated against.

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© The Economic History Association 2021

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Footnotes

For helpful comments and support, I thank Maxim Ananyev, Dan Bogart, Joseph Ferrie, Carola Frydman, Andrei Markevich, Cormac Ó Gráda, Yannay Spitzer, two anonymous referees, seminar participants and conference audiences at Northwestern University, Oxford Graduate Workshop in Economic and Social History (2016), LSE Workshop in Economic History “Command Economies and State Intervention in Economic History” (2016), Economic History Society Annual Conference 2017 in London, the World Congress of Cliometrics 2017 in Strasbourg, “The Greatest Economic Experiment Ever: The Economic Consequences of the October Revolution” conference at Northwestern University 2017, and the NES 25th Anniversary Conference in Moscow 2017. I express my most profound gratitude to my mentors Joel Mokyr and Nancy Qian. This research is supported by the Balzan Foundation and by the Economic History Center at Northwestern University.

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