It is now accepted that Joseph Stalin perpetrated mass murder in the Ukraine Soviet Republic in 1932 and 1933. A famine occurred throughout the Soviet Union but the most severe impact was in the vital wheat-growing Ukraine because Stalin wanted to wipe out Ukrainian resistance to the Soviets.
“Farms, villages, and whole towns in Ukraine were placed on blacklists and prevented from receiving food,” writes Anne Applebaum in Britannica. “Peasants were forbidden to leave the Ukrainian republic in search of food.” Apparatchiks even entered homes and stole food. (The Soviets could requisition as much food as they wanted from those who produced it.) Millions died.
Many Western observers visited the Soviet Union around that time, but few revealed the true conditions. Most famously, Walter Duranty received a Pulitzer Prize for his generally positive stories from the Soviet Union in 1931; the worst horrors were going on a year later, but he did not report them.
Thomas Campbell (right) with the vice minister of agriculture of the Kazakhstan Soviet Republic. For credit see below.
Thomas D. Campbell was a farmer and mechanical engineer. In 1918, when he was 36 years old and World War I was spurring demand for wheat, he started a 95,000-acre wheat farm in southeastern Montana. It was the largest farm in the United States and possibly the world. Located primarily on land leased from the Crow Indian reservation, the farm obtained a $2 million investment from New York financier J. P. Morgan.
As time went on, Soviet agricultural experts visited Campbell’s farm to learn how to use so many machines efficiently, and Campbell went to the Soviet Union as a technical adviser, where he met Josef Stalin. Campbell was famous, influential, and popular. His farm continued well beyond his death in 1966.
Over time, many historical events take on a romantic aura that obscures what actually occurred. As I have written previously, that was true of the passage of the 1862 Morrill Act, which launched land-grant colleges..
The 1862 Homestead Act, too, acquired “a halo of political and economic significance which has greatly magnified the importance to be attributed to it,” as historian Paul Gates wrote in 1936. [1] Free land! Yes, it sounded (and still sounds) humanitarian. Under the Homestead Act, a person could obtain ownership of 160 acres (320 acres for a husband and wife) by building a cabin, improving the land, and living on it for 5 years.
Some years ago in my search for causes of the West’s prosperity I came across Deepak Lal’s 1999 book Unintended Consequences. The book planted the seed of an idea that has recently borne some exotic fruit.[1]
According to Lal, in 597 AD Catholic missionaries were trying to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons in England. Augustine, a monk who later became Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote to Pope Gregory I asking him whether several of the converts’ marriage habits were allowed.
In his reply, the pope was strict. He did the following: 1) he rejected marriage to close relatives or to close in-laws (called affines by anthropologists), 2) he banned the adoption of children, and 3) he prohibited concubines. (Divorce was already prohibited, based on scripture). Why? Continue reading “The Medieval Church and Its Consequences”
As you know, I’ve paid a lot of attention to child labor in British factories during the Industrial Revolution. Child labor was a big issue back then; public agitation probably started in 1796, when the Manchester Board of Health issued a devastating paper about the health of families in that increasingly industrial city.
But it wasn’t until 1833 that Parliament passed a law that was effective in limiting the hours young children worked. Earlier acts had no method of enforcement. The Factory Act of 1833 (also called “Althorp’s Act) did have teeth: it required inspectors.
