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Assessing the change in the level of Soviet welfare in the first half of the twentieth century presents many problems. There are the problems associated with the reliability and accessibility of Soviet statistics, and there are those associated with the problem of understanding the peculiar nature of the Soviet situation in which a trend toward rapid secular improvements in welfare and life expectancy were accompanied by massive shortterm welfare and mortality crises. These problems are made even more complicated by the intense politicization of this question. In this paper I address all of these problems.

Most western and all Soviet studies of the Stalinist economy have ignored the role played by the stockpiling of grain in the agricultural crisis of the early 1930s. Thus in his major work on Stalinist agriculture published in 1949, Naum Jasny frankly admitted that data were insufficient to reach a conclusion, merely noting that “stocks from former years probably declined during 1932.” Baykov, Dobb, Volin and Nove said nothing about grain stocks. At the time, western commentators did pay some attention to the possibility that the stockpiling of grain exacerbated the famine. In autumn 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria, and in spring 1932 British diplomats reported that Karl Radek had told them that, owing to the threat of war in the far east, enough grain had been stored to supply the army for one year.