Authors

Jonathan Sicotte¹;  ¹ People's Friendship University of Russia, Russian Federation

Discussion

By summer 1932, a combination of poor harvests, crash collectivization, and gross negligence had initiated what would become the Great Famine of 1932-1933. Through access to newer archival sources, not available during the Cold War, we have now been given the ability to conduct a more complex analysis of how food was transferred from famine struck areas in Ukraine and the North Caucasus to Baku as was part of a greater strategy of transferring staples from expendable agricultural areas to the critical export-ordinated oil industry surrounding the heart of Baku’s urban core.
In my proposed paper, I will attempt to uncover the reasons behind these transfers from the fall of 1932 to the summer of 1933. My two topics of interest: the internal rationale for these transfers, and how these transfers, largely to feed oil workers and the local party apparatus, exacerbated starvation in famine-struck areas. At the heart of this work is an investigation of how authorities in Moscow and Baku used the economic rationale of keeping oil production operative to transfer staples in order to further subsidize oil exports, an essential element of Soviet trade strategy.
I will utilize archival resources from Soviet archives in Russia and Azerbaijan, including the Russian State Archive of Social-Political History (RGASPI), in order to investigate the internal the internal dynamics of how the leadership of the Communist Party in both Baku and Moscow dealt with issue.