Besides your being reminiscent of a comical, anachronistic commie shill circa the 1930s
you have become confused about your own post. My response showed that even assuming YOUR claim, repeat, YOUR claim that the harvest was low, your claim of no genocide, and that of your single crackpot pseudo-historian that there was no genocide, in opposition to the determination of the whole history profession, is unsupportable.
It is sad to an obviously intellgent person reduced to ad hominem attacks and failure to apply the scientific method and economic analysis that he was, or should have been taught.
Tauger is not an isolated crackpot - he has also done work on the Bengal famine and the history of agriculture.
As I keep saying, just repeating ad nauseum that someone is wrong without a thorough logical case does not make them wrong.
"Natural disaster and human actions in the Soviet famine of 1931-1933 (The Carl Beck papers in Russian & East European studies)
Reviews
"...Professor Tauger empirically examines all environmental and human factors causing one of the most studied - and misrepresented - human catastrophes of the 20th century. The "Holodomor" has become politicized as nationalist mythology, and questioning this near-divine truth has now become an actionable crime in The Ukraine. Yet to smear Professor Tauger's short but thorough study as another form of "Holocaust denial" merely shows the shaky basis for an official dogma as narrow-minded as Stalin's "Five Year Plan in Four." Natural disaster in the form of drought, unseasonal rains, pests and rot would have produced famine or near-famine conditions anyway; the haste, waste and mismanagement of the early kolkhoz system - combined with an uncoordinated but self-destructive peasant backlash - guaranteed it. A useful corrective to the propaganda now claiming hold as orthodox "history", but unfortunately one shunted to the sidelines in favor of politically correct mythology.
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his is without a doubt the most thorough analysis of the causes of crop failure in the harvest of 1932 which led to the famine that killed about 2.5 million Ukrainians and another couple million non-Ukrainians. Cold War propaganda has long-maintained that the crop of 1932 was perfectly adequate to feed people and that famine only occurred because of the exports of food. This line has been further advanced by willfully distorting the facts about what was exported and when. In fact, most of the grain exported in 1933 (about five-sixths of the total) was exported after the 1933 crop was in at a time when the famine was essentially over. Yet hoaxers like James Mace and Robert Conquest used to imply that most of this was exported during the time of famine in an effort to suggest that the famine could have been almost entirely avoided if only such exports had not been done. In reality, actual crop failure was the principal source of the famine. The Soviet government can be charged with having underestimated the extent of the problem as a case of real crop failure. But most of the charges circulating claiming that the famine was deliberately conjured up in an effort to destroy "Ukrainian nationalism" are without foundation.
Tauger here provides a clear analysis on how and why the crop failure of 1932 occurred. He discusses a myriad of causes, the most important of which was plant rust. Rustic plant diseases had the capacity to reduce the quantity of grain growing within an individual stalk, while the stalks themselves grew and hence created the appearance of an abundant crop. This was what fed the rumors of a plentiful crop and consequently the paranoia that someone (kulaks, communists, etc.) had taken the crops away and thereby created the famine "artificially." As Tauger establishes in detail, the famine was in no way artificial but was the result of an actual natural disaster. That natural disaster was then aggravated by the human failure to identify natural disaster as the root cause and to see that only massive imports of food from abroad could reduce the famine.
Tauger's work is representative of the real benefits which have come from opening up many archives from the old Soviet files. It's unfortunate that many people hold to the misconception that THE BLACK BOOK OF COMMUNISM is representative of what the archives have revealed. In fact THE BLACK BOOK simply repeats Cold War versions which were already being debunked by the newly opened archives at the time THE BLACK BOOK was published. Studying Tauger's work will give people a better grasp of what the archives have actually shown.
http://www.amazon.com/Natural-disas...=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1306612122&sr=1-2
"..Statistical falsification in the Soviet Union: A comparative case study of projections, biases, and trust (The Donald W. Treadgold papers in Russian, East European, and Central Asian studies)
This is a perfect compliment to another piece by the same author, NATURAL DISASTER AND HUMAN ACTIONS IN THE SOVIET FAMINE OF 1931-1933. Whereas the latter deals with the conditions of natural disaster at the time of famine and the failure of Soviet authorities to grasp the state of affairs, this piece is focused upon analyzing the data of production statistics as they were obtained from the archives after 1991. Although more prudent historians have long recognized the problems with relying on the officially published Soviet statistics of that time, the more sensationalistic versions promoted more widely in public have usually obfuscated this point. This was how James Mace framed the issue back in the days of the Cold War:
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... it was not, like most famines, due to some natural calamity or crop failure. Figures on the Ukrainian harvest were published in the press at the time, and they show that the grain crop was only a little below the pre-collectivization average; there was certainly no crop failure capable of causing a famine.
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-- Olexa Woropay, edited with an introduction by James Mace, THE NINTH CIRCLE: IN COMMEMORATION OF THE VICTIMS OF THE FAMINE OF 1933, pp. ix-x.
Those figures published in the Sovit press of that time were worthless and so Mace's whole argument is shot to pieces. In fact there certainly was a major crop failure capable of causing a famine. Tauger's NATURAL DISASTER covers one side of these issues; this piece on STATISTICAL FALSIFICATION covers another very important aspect.
In describing the process of statistical falsification Tauger goes much further thn simply documenting the falsity of Mace's reasoning above. He tracks things back to the Czarist era when it became a normal thing for officials compiling statistics of grain production to always assume that peasants were underreporting the true production figures and to routinely augment all such data received from peasant sources. This had become a long-running practice by the time of the 1932 famine. Tauger also establishes with greater clarity the effects of collectivization in raising the annual grain crops.
A study which he notes by Holland Hunter had attempted to argue that without collectivization Soviet agriculture would have reached higher production figures. Unfortunately for Hunter's argument, it rests on false statistics. Hunter had used inflated pre-collectivization figures published officially by the USSR to extrapolate to what later production could have been, but when the figures are corrected it nullifies Hunter's whole argument. In fact collectivization did improve Soviet agricultural output. That fact has been obfuscated by the reality that when natural disaster created the conditions of famine the Soviet government failed to recognize the reality of crop failure and so exacerbated what was a famine crisis caused first of all by nature. But the long-run effects of collectivization on agrarian output were for the better.
This study will rank for a long-time as the leading work on what has been revealed since 1991 by formerly secret archives about Soviet grain output in the years of the famine. The previously officially published inflated Soviet figures are still repeated in many prominent publications such as Andrea Graziosi, THE GREAT SOVIET PEASANT WAR. Works such as this which repeat older official data that implies no serious crop failure must now be set aside to incorporate the data which archival researchers such as Tauger have brought to light.
Taugers other books
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_n...ripbooks&field-keywords=mark+tauger&x=11&y=19
Happy Reading Rick
Comrade Stlin
