Why did Stalin keep the famine of 1932 a secret?

1932

There are two chief interpretations of the 1932 Soviet famine, or especially the more infamous Ukrainian component, the Holodomor. That the famine was at least partially caused or exacerbated by Soviet policies is well established. The main difference between the schools of thought is the degree to which Soviet authorities perpetuated or even intentionally orchestrated the famine and its resultant immense human costs.

Regardless of your preferred interpretation, there are obvious and compelling reasons to keep quiet about the disaster. It is a constant feature throughout history for ruling regimes to take pride in their ability to govern well, or at least not horribly. This is true both institutionally and on an individual level. Causing a catastrophic famine, even inadvertently, is not the sort of thing people like to be held responsible for. And the Soviet government was responsible for this particular famine.

In the famine of 1932/1933, the policies adopted by the highest Soviet authorities had devastating effects ... while Soviet citizens starved, grain was exported from their country. In Ukraine, peasants were forbidden to travel to areas of Russia where there was grain. There is little dispute today that the famine of 1932/1933 in Ukraine could have been avoided and that the Soviet regime was responsible for it.

_{- Curran, Declan, Lubomyr Luciuk, and Andrew G. Newby, eds. Famines in European Economic History: The Last Great European Famines Reconsidered. Routledge, 2015.}

Even if the famine had been a genuinely unintentional outcome of disastrous policies, the Soviet government could quite understandably decide against owning up to its mistakes. Particularly so when the failure occurred at a time the Soviet Union was trying to convince observers both domestic and abroad of its philosophical superiority. In that case, one way to pretend there was nothing wrong with your policies, is to pretend that the catastrophe they caused isn't happening.

You obviously disagree with the other interpretation, that the famine was intentionally caused or exacerbated by Soviet policies. I'll note that being intentional does not necessarily dictate the famine was a genocide - it has also been thought to have been an attempt to break the peasantry in order to further state control.

Stalin believed that the peasants were concealing food and that local party officials were not ruthless enough in taking it from them. So Party pressure was drastically increased to teach the peasants a great lesson: The state simply took its procurement quota without regard to what would be left over ... And the famine worked. It at last brought victory to the Party in the countryside. The peasants would never again have the will to defy Soviet power.

_{- Malia, Martin. Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia. Simon and Schuster, 2008.}

The specifics are unimportant, however. It should be immediately obvious that intentionally starving your own peasants is the sort of thing governments tend to keep secret.

1921

A commenter questioned why this was not the case for the 1921 famine. That disaster was triggered directly by droughts, but also exacerbated by the Soviet policies. By seizing all surplus from the peasants to fuel the war effort, the Bolsheviks left them with no reserves to survive on in the event of crop failures.

Note that, unsurprisingly, the Soviet leadership denied their share of the responsibility.

Quite naturally, of course, they said nothing about the famine actually being the terrible result of the Civil War. All the landowners and capitalists who had begun their offensive against us in 1918 tried to make out that the famine was the result of socialist economy.

_{- Lenin's speech at the Fourth Congress Of The Communist International, 13 November 1922}

However, a major difference is that unlike 1932, the Soviet Union of 1921 was in an extremely precarious state. Russia, already exhausted by the First World War, had not quite finished fighting its bloody civil war. The nascent Soviet regime had defeated its main white army rivals by 1920, but remain beset by insurrections and discontent, including the Tambov and Kronstadt rebellions.

Millions of desperate, starving peasants has not generally been a recipe for stability. Stalin in 1932 could shrug off the death of millions as a statistic. To the far weaker Soviet state of 1921, however, the famine was a potentially lethal disaster. While the reluctance to take responsibility for policy failures was the same, the Soviet leader felt the famine to be an existential threat, a threat that would take foreign assistance to weather.

By March 15, 1921, no less than Vladimir Lenin himself warned the 10th Party Congress that:

If there is a crop failure, it will be impossible to appropriate any surplus because there will be no surplus. Food would have to be taken out of the mouths of the peasants ... since we cannot take anything from people who do not have the means of satisfying their own hunger, the government will perish.

_{- Weissman, Benjamin M. Herbert Hoover and Famine Relief to Soviet Russia, 1921-1923. Vol. 134. Hoover Press, 1974.}

Lenin's fears would materialise over the following rainless months. It became apparent by June that a famine was in progress, and that the central government could do very little to alleviate the stricken provinces. Lenin would later reflect that:

In 1921 discontent undoubtedly prevailed among a vast section of the peasantry. Then there was the famine ... the famine was indeed a great and grave disaster which threatened to nullify the results of all our organisational and revolutionary efforts.

_{- Lenin's speech at the Fourth Congress Of The Communist International, 13 November 1922}

Even then the Soviets remained reluctant to officially admit the famine, only allowing Maxim Gorky to make a public appeal to the West for assistance in July. Fortunately, this successfully drew in Herbert Hoover and his American Relief Association. Still, an agreement for how they could operate in Russia was only reached on 20 August.

Considering that accounts of an extremely severe famine were published in Pravda as early as 26 June, this was not really very early at all, as far as disaster relief goes. Moreover, although the ARA was ultimately given a wide berth, this only came about at Hoover's insistence that they were necessary conditions for operating the relief operation.

In fact, the sticking points are revealing of Soviet designs:

The negotiations dragged on for ten days, bogging down over the American insistence on guarantees that the aid would not be diverted to the Red Army and over Soviet reluctance to grant true freedom of action to the ARA representatives in Russia.

_{- McElroy, Robert W. Morality and American Foreign Policy: the Role of Ethics in International Affairs. Princeton University Press, 2014}