State-induced famine in its worst form is intentional and kills large numbers of people. In a moral sense, it is a state food crime of the highest order; in the legal sense, as will be discussed in Part III, it is not properly singled out as a crime. Reckless famine – continuing policies known to cause mass starvation – is also a serious moral crime that ought to be singled out for punishment under international law.

The famines I review in this chapter – in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, China from 1958 to 1962, and Cambodia in the 1970s – were induced by totalitarian communist states. Totalitarianism controls all aspects of people's lives, including how and by what means they can procure food. In the early twenty-first century very few totalitarian states existed, although one, North Korea, is the first case study in Part II. But non-totalitarian states that cause starvation and/or malnutrition follow a path of rights deprivation similar to the paths taken by these three historical examples, depriving their citizens of all civil and political rights, the rule of law, citizenship rights, mobility rights, property rights, and the right to work. They follow these paths of rights deprivation even if they were once democracies, such as Venezuela and perhaps Zimbabwe, or are democracies that colonize other people, as was Israel.

Famine in the Soviet Union 1932–33

The Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917 with the slogan “peace, land and bread,” renaming the country the Soviet Union. Peasants all over the country reacted to the Bolshevik takeover with a mass movement to seize land; however, this caused productive and distributional difficulties, as much of the grain necessary to feed the cities and to export to foreign countries had come from the large landholdings that the peasants seized (Scott 1998, 206). A four-year civil war followed the Bolshevik Revolution. During this period, the government introduced “war communism,” a “policy that repealed peasants’ land seizures, forcibly stripped the countryside of grain to feed city dwellers, and suppressed private commerce” (Jones 2006, 190). The result was a massive famine that swept several regions in 1921–22, especially in areas that had suffered most from food requisitions.