Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

A few days later, in another set of letters to Kaganovich and Molotov, he elaborated further, clearly having thought about the matter some more during his seaside holiday. A new law, he now worried, was an insufficient deterrent. In order to get people to stop stealing food, the law must be supported by a propaganda campaign fully grounded in Marxist theory. Capitalism had defeated feudalism because capitalism ensured that private property was protected by the state; socialism, in turn, could defeat capitalism only if it declared public property—cooperative, collective, state property—to be sacred and inviolable too. The very survival of socialism might well depend on whether or not the state could prevent “anti-social, kulak-capitalistic elements” from stealing public property.98 Stalin’s obsessive belief in Marxist theory once again triumphed over what he would have called “bourgeois morality.”