Three Famines

by Keneally, Thomas

  As people starved, the predictable typhus and cholera became common killers. Peasants ate grass, roof thatch, ground acorns, sawdust, moss and animal manure. They hunted rats and domestic pets. They devoured cigarette butts. Those with enough strength fled to the towns, if possible taking their scarecrow horses with them to exchange for bread. Vast crowds tried to catch trains to Moscow, but the government put limitations on travel to prevent the spread of famine diseases. The woman of Clonakilty reappeared in myriad form in the Volga region, and madness crept on and cannibalism began. So did it increasingly in other regions. A Russian from the steppes was convicted of eating several children, and in his confession declared that in his village everyone ate human flesh but pretended they didn’t. There were several cafeterias in the village, he declared, and all of them served up the flesh of children.

  That winter, people stacked the dead in barns as a food source. Corpses were even stolen from graveyards. If any of this was worse than Bengal or Ethiopia or Ireland, it has to be taken into account that the Russian peasant was already demoralised by the reality of Bolshevik collectivisation. It was often compassion for one’s family, as well as the individual derangement of starvation, that drove people to cannibalism. One doctor who committed cannibalism wrote of ‘the insuperable and uncomfortable craving’ which people acquired for the flesh of the dead.

  All the requisitions of food in the countryside did not save the middle class of the cities. At Moscow University, said one survivor, a professor hanged himself, Russia’s foremost geologist took potassium cyanide, and as for the rest of the faculty, they were dying of influenza, pneumonia and cholera.

  There was the familiar late acknowledgement of famine’s existence by government. Maxim Gorky, however, wrote an appeal to the world, which began, ‘Tragedy has come to the country of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Mendeleyev, Pavlov, Mussorgsky, Glinka and other world-prized men.’ The All-Russian Public Committee to aid the hungry was founded as a result of Gorky’s appeal to Lenin. Constantin Stanislavsky was a member, as was Alexandra Tolstoya, the writer’s daughter, who had already suffered at the hands of the Cheka, the secret police. Prince Lvov, former Tsarist cabinet minister, collected aid in France. President Herbert Hoover offered to send the American Relief Administration (ARA) to Russia, on the conditions that it was allowed to operate independently of government and that US citizens be released from Soviet gaols. But Lenin was furious at the offer. Even the Gorky-instigated public committee was closed down for having received American aid. All its office holders except Gorky and one other were arrested by the Cheka and accused of counter-revolutionary activities. Gorky, admired universally, was urged by Lenin to go overseas for his health. Shocked by the way the authorities had handled the famine, Gorky left Russia.

  The ARA did manage to operate in Russia and at the height of its activities was feeding ten million people a day. Its donations of seed made it possible for a new harvest to be planted, and the harvest of 1922–3 helped bring an end to the famine. The Bolsheviks – perhaps not entirely without some justification, but certainly with paranoia – accused the ARA of spying and of trying to discredit and overthrow the Soviet regime. So the central government interfered relentlessly with ARA’s operations – again a pattern that would be seen in Mengistu’s Ethiopia later in the century.

  Seven million children would become the orphans of the famine. Some of them had been abandoned by their parents. They lived in railway stations, abandoned houses, building sites, dumps, cellars and sewers. Nearly all of them became child prostitutes.

  If anything, ideologically induced famine would be more naked still with Stalin in the 1930s. There was a bad harvest in 1932. Stalin kept up grain exports from Russia throughout the famine years that followed. Cannibalism was common in this period as it had been in the early 1920s. But police and army and party officials were set the task of ensuring that the economic and political changes made by Stalin and the politburo in 1928 would stay intact. These had given priority to heavy industry at the expense of the production of food. Marxist theory overruled extremities of want. By December 1931, peasants were again eating dogs, horses, bark and rotting potatoes. An American Communist visited a village near Kharkov in the Ukraine. He found only one mad woman left alive, and rats feasting on the dead. Just the same, on 6 June 1932, Stalin and Molotov issued a joint statement to the effect that no deviation regarding amounts of food or delivery deadlines could be permitted. Stalin saw the famine as an affront to him and the Central Committee. He wrote, ‘The Ukraine has been given more than it should get.’ He suggested to one of the Central Committee who had reported on the famine that he was simply a good storyteller, ‘fabricating such a fairytale about famine!’ He urged that the man, Kaganovich, who had had a great deal to do with the planning that created the famine in the first place, should join the Writers’ Union, where he could concoct stories and fools could read them. But other members of the Central Committee knew what was happening in Ukraine – the people in the countryside boarding trains for Kiev and arriving there as corpses. Stalin remained firm in denial, speaking of the ‘glaring absurdities’ of the news of the emergency.

  No one knows how many died for the sake of feeding those who built smelters and tractors, but it may have been as high as 10 million, as Stalin himself seemed to believe. During World War II, he told Churchill that he had been forced by famine to destroy 10 million. It was fearful, he confessed, and the process lasted four years. But, ‘It was absolutely necessary … it was no use arguing with them.’ Naturally, at the time of the famine, there was an anti-government political reaction in the regions, which the state security police, the OGPU, repressed by its customary vigorous methods.

  In northern China, drought was a great trigger for famine. The mountain regions to the west of the northern Great Plain were always treeless, barren and blighted by low rainfall. Elsewhere, however, flood was the destroyer.

  There had been great works as early as 200 BC to protect areas against flood and to use water creatively. The Chengdu Plain in Szechuan to the south was irrigated and referred to as ‘the garden of western China’, and there were great flood-mitigation works in Shensi province, neighbouring Shansi and in Hunan.

  In modern times, the crops the Chinese planted were diverse and included an array of wheat varieties: spring wheat, winter wheat-millet, another winter variation named kaoliang. Other crops were Szechuan and south-western rice, Yangtze rice and tea. The floods that regularly wiped away such lowland crops had caused famines throughout Chinese history, most notoriously on the banks of the Yellow River. Under the old imperial regime, the conservancy of the Yellow River was under the control of only one bureaucrat, who reported directly to the Emperor. It was not enough.

  Whenever the Huai River in eastern and central China flooded, there was a loss of food on a level that would affect the lives of tens of millions. In the 1920s, a scholar declared that from the point of view of famine distress, no area was in greater need of flood prevention than the Huai. Catastrophic floods occurred every few years in Hebei region, south of Beijing, as well.

  A total of 435 famines across twenty provinces occurred between 1850 and 1932, and most were created by flood. For much of the nineteenth century, and even earlier in history, particularly under the incompetent and corrupt Manchus, Chinese provinces were ruled by warlords who were totally indifferent to the issue of food, drought or famine. Peasants did not attribute famines to mayhem and rapacity, but to the anger of the river gods. Perhaps the gods were also to blame for the locusts, which were a regular blight.

  After the overthrow of the emperor in 1911, a sum equivalent to £3 million was devoted to flood mitigation in the entire country. But each provincial governor had charge of his section of the river and there was no unified control. This system, of course, contributed to the famine in the early 1920s.

  A weak central government, both under the Manchus and the republic, spent its money on ammunition, artillery and aircraft. Epochs of resul
tant hunger in the countryside generated banditry. The bandits, former peasants or defeated members of warlords’ forces, became unproductive raiders of other people’s food, burning villages and towns. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, many people left their homes and withdrew into the mountains, some to die because of the operation of bandits. As well as the predatory bandits, the army lived off the provinces in which they were garrisoned, and were considered just as bad as bandits. Domestic animals were seized to pull wagons loaded with ammunition and supplies for the army. Meanwhile, there was heavy and unpredictable taxation by various officials. Farming families were thus victims of plunder after plunder, exaction after exaction. In many provinces people turned to growing opium, though every acre producing the Lethean chemical was taxed as well, and provincial officials took a share of, or frequently control of, the opium traffic. The growing of opium, of course, further reduced the amount of land under food cultivation.

  In the famine of 1921, the funds distributed by the central government in Peking (Beijing) were too small to lengthen life by more than a few days. Most philanthropic societies were restricted in what they could give, despite their wish to do more. The American Red Cross adopted a plan for employing able-bodied members of stricken families – an echo of Ireland. In return for a day’s labour on public works, it was hoped that sufficient relief would be provided to support the labourer and his dependants. The wages paid on a piece-work basis were intentionally kept below the normal wage scale to prevent exploitation of the charity. The non-foreign China International Relief Commission was founded after the particularly massive famine in northern China in 1921, and its personnel resisted corruption and worked in the manner the Ethiopian Relief and Rehabilitation Commission was meant to. It offered loans and investments rather than handouts.

  Still in existence under the Communists, its efforts would not ultimately prevent a further, astonishing famine in 1958–61. According to government statistics, there were 15 million excess deaths in those three years, to which the government referred as the ‘three years of natural disasters’. It powerfully resembled Stalin’s famine of the early 1930s. Forced collectivisation and the preference for heavy industry over agricultural work, with millions of peasants taken from the land and relocated to the factories in a process named the Great Leap Forward – all this was the true cause of the famine. One contemporary wrote that in Xinyang in western China, people starved at the doors of the grain warehouses. As they died, they shouted for the Communist Party and Chairman Mao to save them. Indeed, had government granaries been opened, no one need have died.

  ‘I went to one village and saw one hundred corpses,’ wrote a witness in a generic famine passage that could stand for any of the famines narrated here, ‘then another village and another one hundred corpses. No one paid attention to them … People said that dogs were eating the bodies. Not true, I said. The dogs have long ago been eaten by the people.’

  The provincial mess halls for party officials absorbed and wasted supplies of food during this Chinese famine of the Great Leap Forward. Over 2 million tonnes of grain were requisitioned in some provinces and sent to feed the cities. In formerly agricultural areas, over-fervent party officials sucked up rural labour into small, backyard ironworks, massive irrigation and other labour-intensive work. Less food was planted, and calorie needs rose and were not answered because of the heavy labour that ambitious party officials, on probation with the party, demanded from conscripted peasant workers. The same earnestness had been shown by Mengistu’s cadres in Ethiopia in their demands for labour from peasants whose food supplies were similarly on the decline. In both cases, the party seemed to offer the official a lien on the gratitude of his masters.

  In the closed society of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, a famine that was triggered in 1995 first by drought and then by catastrophic floods - but also by the loss of manufacturing and other contracts with Russia - would go on to kill perhaps one million people. At least, that is the figure given by most experts, but being an expert on North Korea is a hard exercise.

  Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, cited the floods as his reason to call for aid. He was, like Mengistu before him, suspicious of Western aid bodies, because he believed that aid was an extension of American politics. It is hard to agree in any form with Kim Jong Il, but the reality is that aid is coloured by politics, and the enthusiasm of religious aid organisations - as pure as their intentions might be - to take part in relief in such an extremely Stalinist, God-denying nation, could be seen as a proof that both ideology and the Cross followed the bags of emergency food. For these reasons, and because he could not let the West see that his governance had failed his people, Kim did not let international agencies carry out any research into the level of malnutrition in North Korea, the size of the threatened population, or the mortality rate among them.

  There were complaints by agencies that food resulting from their aid went to the favoured and the army. As in Ethiopia earlier, the death rate certainly confirmed the fact that aid was not reaching all those who needed it. In fact, in 1997, to strengthen the support of the military for his regime, Kim frankly put in place a songun, or a ‘military-first’ policy.

  Though the end date of the country’s famine is generally given as 1998, some argue it has never ended. The famine cycle there is said to have become nearly intractable – the soil is eroded by over-farming in Stalin and Mengistu-style collectives, and people have been taken away from farming for the sort of great industrial surges favoured by Stalin and Mao. Acceptance of a two-meal-a-day policy has become one of the standards of loyalty to juche, the philosophy by which Kim Jong Il’s edicts are the driving force in individual choice. But because of the highly secretive nature of the country, and despite the window that NGOs opened on it during the official famine, North Korea remains a place where another million or more could die, and news of it would remain as obscure a rumour as might a famine in a distant kingdom in the Middle Ages.

  Meles Zenawi, the pragmatic Marxist leader of the Tigrayan rebels who became prime minister of Ethiopia in 1991, has, since then, been faced with many food emergencies, most of whose existence he has denied. It seems that there is a virus in Ethiopian government that transfers itself from regime to regime. Ethiopians who have left their country ask why the Ethiopian government fails to put in place permanent policies to reduce emergencies brought on by drought. And both domestic Ethiopia and Ethiopia dispersed point to the great agricultural companies of the world for charging high for seed and paying low for product.

  Like the Irish, the chief and unqualified aid the Ethiopians overseas remitted home was money for their families, and that was enormous in scale, flowing from cab drivers and parking-station attendants, storekeepers and professionals all over the earth.

  By 2008, the bulk of employment in Ethiopia was in its bureaucracy, and members of opposition parties had been imprisoned and tortured. In 2003, according to the New York Times, more than 12 million were at risk from famine in Ethiopia, half of them children under fifteen years. More recently UNICEF has said that 8 million Ethiopians are ‘chronically food insecure’, an unnecessary bureaucratic term, which conveys the reality that farming families do not produce enough to avoid being hungry and malnourished. At least 3.4 million of these were in immediate need of emergency food relief. Yet, like Mengistu, President Meles Zenawi told the National Assembly in March 2008 that reports of drought-induced deaths were false, denied that pastoralists in the south were losing livestock to drought, or that malnutrition was anything near the levels foreign aid workers claimed. Accusations were made, too, that Zenawi had stood in the way of the flow of relief by charging excessive fees for transportation, and limiting the means of distribution to a trucking company in which he was accused of having interests. Like Mengistu, he was vigilant to punish any aid agency who tried to take a political stance on freedom of expression and other rights. Photographs of the starving were banned, and aid workers in the fie
ld were told not to give interviews to foreign journalists.

  In August 2008, Zenawi said that UNICEF’s estimations of the numbers at risk were overblown. He was skilled at using the new cynicism about relief to his advantage. ‘The more gruesome the picture, the better chance you have of getting your share of those resources.’ In an interview, Zenawi assured those who questioned him that the Ogaden was being looked after adequately and with the same level of care as other provinces. ‘I suspect we will always have pockets of hunger. The big question is whether we have enough in our own economy to be able to finance the safety net program. We have not reached that stage yet.’

  When this interview was posted on an Ethiopian news site on the internet, the focus of Ethiopians who responded was chiefly on getting rid of Zenawi, although one Tigrayan read the criticism as part of the hatred of his ethnic group by Amharas in exile.

  Zenawi’s famine existed not only in the countryside but also among the slum dwellers of the city. As one woman said, ‘We give birth to the children, but we can’t grow them.’ In 2008, malnourished children were being brought to feeding clinics. It was not uncommon for four-year-old children who weighed twenty pounds to appear at the field hospitals. They were weighed in a nylon harness attached to a scale and their arm circumference was measured. Those most under-nourished were kept in the clinic for up to a month, and the rest went home with a week’s supply of Plumpy-nut, a nutritional paste. This high-protein mixture of peanut paste, vegetable oil, powdered milk, powdered sugar, vitamins and minerals was designed in 1999 by André Briend, a French scientist. It was manufactured in France and packed in silver foil designed to resist the effects of heat and distance. In the early twenty-first century, Plumpy-nut has become what the high-protein biscuit, otherwise known as BP-5, had been in late-twentieth-century food crises.