So, while storehouses bulged with grain, farmers had nothing to eat and nothing to plant the next spring. The result was that farmers had no grain, no seeds, and no tools. Famine set in. When, in , Mao was challenged about these events at a Party conference, he purged his enemies. Tens of millions died. No independent historian doubts that tens of millions died during the Great Leap Forward, but the exact numbers, and how one reconciles them, have remained matters of debate.
The overall trend, though, has been to raise the figure, despite pushback from Communist Party revisionists and a few Western sympathizers. A wall showing the damage caused by an earthquake that occurred on May 12, in Sichuan province is decorated with portraits of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong, in Beichuan County, Sichuan province, May 31, More than 68, people died in the quake and around 4.
On the Chinese side, this involves a cottage industry of Mao apologists willing to do whatever it takes to keep the Mao name sacred: historians working at Chinese institutions who argue that the numbers have been inflated by bad statistical work.
His conclusion: famine killed only 3. The first reliable scholarly estimates derived from the pioneering work of the demographer Judith Banister, who in used Chinese demographic statistics to come up with the remarkably durable estimate of 30 million, and the journalist Jasper Becker, who in his work Hungry Ghosts gave these numbers a human dimension and offered a clear, historical analysis of the events. Later scholars refined this methodology by looking at local histories compiled by government offices that gave very detailed accounts of famine conditions.
Triangulating these two sources of information results in estimates that start in the mid millions and go up to 45 million. Two more recent accounts give what are widely regarded as the most credible numbers. One, in , is by the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng , who estimates that 35 million died. Communist Party officials beat to death anyone suspected of hoarding grain, or people who tried to escape the death farms by traveling to cities.
Regardless of how one views these revisions, the Great Leap Famine was by far the largest famine in history. It was also man-made—and not because of war or disease, but by government policies that were flawed and recognized as such at the time by reasonable people in the Chinese government.
Can all this be blamed on Mao? Traditionally, Mao apologists blame any deaths that did occur on natural disasters. We can discard natural causes; yes, there were some problems with drought and flooding, but China is a huge country regularly beset by droughts and floods. Chinese governments through the centuries have been adept at famine relief; a normal government, especially a modern bureaucratic state with a vast army and unified political party at its disposal, should have been able to handle the floods and droughts that farmers encountered at the end of the s.
What of the explanation that Mao meant well but that his policies were misguided, or carried out too zealously by subordinates? But Mao knew early enough that his policies were resulting in famine.
He could have changed course, but he stubbornly stuck to his guns in order to retain power. In addition, his purging of senior leaders set the tone at the grass-roots level; if he had pursued a less radical policy and listened to advice, and encouraged his underlings to do so as well, their actions would surely have been different.
The Cultural Revolution—the year period of government-instigated chaos and violence against imagined enemies—resulted in probably 2 to 3 million deaths, according to historians such as Song Yongyi of California State University Los Angeles, who has compiled extensive databases on these sensitive periods of history.
He estimates 32 million in the Great Leap Forward, 1. As the famine worsened, many tried to flee in search of places with more food. They killed and ate pets and consumed flowers, leaves, tree bark and roots.
One woman who found some dried beans was so hungry that she ate them on the spot without cooking them, and reportedly died when they expanded in her stomach. Waves of refugees fled the villages in search of food in the cities and beyond the borders of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. By the summer of , some of the collective farms had only a third of their households left, and prisons and labor camps were jammed to capacity.
A string of carts with bread confiscated from peasants, circa The Russian government that replaced the Soviet Union has acknowledged that famine took place in Ukraine, but denied it was genocide.
Genocide is defined in Article 2 of the U. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Senate, in a resolution , affirmed the findings of the commission that Stalin had committed genocide. About , Polish civilians were killed between and , with each regime responsible for about half of those deaths.
It was this policy that brought asphyxiation by carbon monoxide to the fore as a killing technique. Beyond the numbers killed remains the question of intent. Most of the Soviet killing took place in times of peace, and was related more or less distantly to an ideologically-informed vision of modernization. Germany bears the chief responsibility for the war, and killed civilians almost exclusively in connection with the practice of racial imperialism.
Germany invaded the Soviet Union with elaborate colonization plans. Thirty million Soviet citizens were to starve, and tens of millions more were to be shot, deported, enslaved, or assimilated. Such plans, though unfulfilled, provided the rationale for the bloodiest occupation in the history of the world. The Germans placed Soviet prisoners of war in starvation camps, where 2. A million Soviet citizens also starved during the siege of Leningrad.
Some , German soldiers died in Soviet captivity. Suitcases that belonged to people deported to the Auschwitz camp. This photograph was taken after Soviet forces liberated the camp. Auschwitz, Poland, after January Hitler came to power with the intention of eliminating the Jews from Europe; the war in the east showed that this could be achieved by mass killing. By December , when it appears that Hitler communicated his wish that all Jews be murdered, perhaps a million Jews were already dead in the occupied Soviet Union.
Most had been shot over pits, but thousands were asphyxiated in gas vans. As the Holocaust spread to the rest of occupied Europe, other Jews were gassed by hydrogen cyanide at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Overall, the Germans, with much local assistance, deliberately murdered about 5. A few hundred thousand more Jews died during deportations to ghettos or of hunger or disease in ghettos. Most Holocaust victims had been Polish or Soviet citizens before the war 3.
The Germans also killed more than a hundred thousand Roma. All in all, the Germans deliberately killed about 11 million noncombatants, a figure that rises to more than 12 million if foreseeable deaths from deportation, hunger, and sentences in concentration camps are included. For the Soviets during the Stalin period, the analogous figures are approximately six million and nine million.
These figures are of course subject to revision, but it is very unlikely that the consensus will change again as radically as it has since the opening of Eastern European archives in the s. Since the Germans killed chiefly in lands that later fell behind the Iron Curtain, access to Eastern European sources has been almost as important to our new understanding of Nazi Germany as it has been to research on the Soviet Union itself.
The Nazi regime killed approximately , German Jews. Apart from the inacessibilty of archives, why were our earlier assumptions so wrong? One explanation is the cold war. Our wartime and postwar European alliances, after all, required a certain amount of moral and thus historical flexibility. In Germany and the Soviet Union were military allies. During the cold war, it was sometimes hard for Americans to see clearly the particular evils of Nazis and Soviets.
Hitler had brought about a Holocaust: but Germans were now our allies. Stalin too had killed millions of people: but the some of the worst episodes, taking place as they had before the war, had already been downplayed in wartime US propaganda, when we were on the same side.
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