The Grey and Hazy Politics of Famine: An Evolving American Disposition to Russian Hunger
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Perception of famine in the 20th century transformed from a Malthusian reality to a governmental liability. In this period of developmental flux, assistance to the starving in the form of humanitarian aid took on a new political role on the international stage. As part of an Undergraduate Summer Student Research Fellowship (USSRF) my research broadly examined the political utility of humanitarian aid between the United States and the Soviet Union during this period. This research project was centrally concerned with tracing the conceptual evolution of the ‘hungry Russian’ in American society. My research looked specifically at incidences of famine in the Soviet Union from 1921-1922, 1932-1933, 1946-1947, and American perceptions thereof. In order to understand the central question of this research project I combined secondary source reading with primary source archival research. I draw on archival material in the form of newsprint from the New York Times during the respective famines. I traced the frequency of discussion of Russian famine and compared this to the relative scale of famine devastation in the form of human deaths. Ultimately this process allows for conclusions to be drawn on the role of political interests in the humanitarian endeavor of providing relief during these famines. This research has both theoretical implications for understanding the conceptual shift surrounding humanitarian aid that occurred during this time period; as well as practical implications for critically-minded citizens who are interested in the historical weight behind state-sponsored humanitarian aid.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".