Holodomor

[Seth]

Why do stalinists deny the genocide against Ukrainian people? It's all there in black and white and denying it makes you look like Holocaust deniers...because that's what you are.

Can someone give me good proof that it did happen, for future reference when some stalinist denies the famine?

Edit: this is no longer my position.

[Rafiq]

Stalin never committed "genocide" against the Ukrainians. Not once in the history of the Soviet Union, or any other isolated socialist country was there a deliberate famine. Only a fucking idiot would think otherwise.

I mean you actually think Stalin starved the Ukrainians on purpose? What the hell is wrong with you?

[Seth]

Hitler never committed "genocide" against the Jews. Not once in the history of the Third Reich, or any other Axis country was there a genocide against Jews. Only a fucking idiot would think otherwise.

I mean you actually think Hitler gassed the Jews? What the hell is wrong with you?


.....

[Seth]

This is what I'm talking about. you have no idea how insulting this is to ukrainains.

[tir1944]

God fucking damn it.

[Rafiq]

This is what I'm talking about. you have no idea how insulting this is to ukrainains.

The famine that hit Ukraine hit other parts of the Soviet Union as well.

Did Stalin deliberately do that as well? Speaking of which, who the hell is dumb enough to think Stalin was some kind of puppet master anyway? What an Idealist assertion.

I mean the fuck if I am a Stalinist, but for the sake of Historical accuracy let's not stoop ourselves to such a point of desperation where we have to resort to Bourgeois-Liberal baseless and innacurate criticisms of the fSU...

[The Man]

Why do stalinists deny the genocide against Ukrainian people? It's all there in black and white and denying it makes you look like Holocaust deniers...because that's what you are.

Can someone give me good proof that it did happen, for future reference when some stalinist denies the famine?

Basically, due to inflated prices of grain, lack of treatment for common diseases, and uprisings against kulaks, and a bunch of lies from Nazi Germany that eventually was picked up by the Chicago Tribune; there was a famine.

Read this by Mario Sousa:


The myth concerning the famine in the Ukraine

One of the first campaigns of the Hearst press against the Soviet Union revolved round the question of the millions alleged to have died as a result of the Ukraine famine. This campaign began on 8 February 1935 with a front-page headline in the Chicago American '6 million people die of hunger in the Soviet Union'. Using material supplied by Nazi Germany, William Hearst, the press baron and Nazi sympathiser, began to publish fabricated stories about a genocide which was supposed to have been deliberately perpetrated by the Bolsheviks and had caused several million to die of starvation in the Ukraine. The truth of the matter was altogether different. In fact what took place in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1930s was a major class struggle in which poor landless peasants had risen up against the rich landowners, the kulaks, and had begun a struggle for collectivisation, a struggle to form kolkhozes.

This great class struggle, involving directly or indirectly some 120 million peasants, certainly gave rise to instability in agricultural production and food shortages in some regions. Lack of food did weaken people, which in turn led to an increase in the number falling victim to epidemic diseases. These diseases were at that time regrettably common throughout the world. Between 1918 and 1920 an epidemic of Spanish flu caused the death of 20 million people in the US and Europe, but nobody accused the governments of these countries of killing their own citizens. The fact is that there was nothing these government could do in the face of epidemics of this kind. It was only with the development of penicillin during the second world war, that it became possible for such epidemics to be effectively contained. This did not become generally available until towards the end of the 1940s.

The Hearst press articles asserting that millions were dying of famine in the Ukraine - a famine supposedly deliberately provoked by the communists - went into graphic and lurid detail. The Hearst press used every means possible to make their lies seem like the truth, and succeeded in causing public opinion in the capitalist countries to turn sharply against the Soviet Union. This was the origin of the first giant myth manufactured alleging millions were dying in the Soviet Union. In the wave of protests against the supposedly communist-provoked famine which the Western press unleashed, nobody was interested in listening to the Soviet Union's denials and complete exposure of the Hearst press lies, a situation which prevailed from 1934 until 1987! For more than 50 years several generations of people the world over were brought up on a diet of these slanders to harbour a negative view of socialism in the Soviet Union.

The Hearst mass media empire in 1998

William Hearst died in 1951 at his house in Beverly Hills, California. Hearst left behind him a mass-media empire which to this day continues to spread his reactionary message throughout the world. The Hearst Corporation is one of the largest enterprises in the world, incorporating more that 100 companies and employing 15,000 people. The Hearst empire today comprises magazines, books, radio, TV, cable TV, news agencies and multimedia.

52 years before the truth emerges

The Nazi disinformation campaign about the Ukraine did not die with the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. The Nazi lies were taken over by the CIA and MI5, and were always guaranteed a prominent place in the propaganda war against the Soviet Union. The McCarthyite anti-communist witch hunts after the Second World War also thrived on the tales of the millions who died of starvation in the Ukraine. In 1953 a book on this subject was published in the US. This book was entitled 'Black Deeds of the Kremlin'. Its publication was financed by Ukrainian refugees in the US, people who had collaborated with the Nazis in the Second World War and to whom the American government gave political asylum, presenting them to the world as 'democrats'.

When Reagan was elected to the US Presidency and began his 1980s anti-communist crusade, propaganda about the millions who died in the Ukraine was again revived. In 1984 a Harvard professor published a book called 'Human Life in Russia' which repeated all the false information produced by the Hearst press in 1934. In 1984, then, we were finding Nazi lies and falsifications dating from the 1930s being revived, but this time under the respectable cloak of an American university. But this was not the end of it. In 1986 yet another book appeared on the subject, entitled 'Harvest of Sorrow', written by a former member of the British secret service, Robert Conquest, now a professor at Stamford University in California. For his 'work' on the book, Conquest received $80,000 from the Ukraine National Organization. This same organisation also paid for a film made in 1986 called 'Harvest of Despair', in which, inter alia, material from Conquest's book was used. By this time the number of people it was alleged in the US had lost their lives in the Ukraine through starvation had been upped to 15 million!

Nevertheless the millions said to have died of starvation according to the Hearst press in America, parroted in books and films, was completely false information. The Canadian journalist, Douglas Tottle, meticulously exposed the falsifications in his book 'Fraud, famine and fascism - the Ukrainian genocide myth from Hitler to Harvard', published in Toronto in 1987. Among other things, Tottle proved that the photographic material used, horrifying photographs of starving children, had been taken from 1922 publications at a time when millions of people did die from hunger and war conditions because eight foreign armies had invaded the Soviet Union during the Civil War of 1918-1921. Douglas Tottle gives the facts surrounding the reporting of the famine of 1934 and exposes the assorted lies published in the Hearst press. One journalist who had over a long period of time sent reports and photographs from supposed famine areas was Thomas Walter, a man who never set foot in the Ukraine and even in Moscow had spent but a bare five days. This fact was revealed by the journalist Louis Fisher, Moscow Correspondent of The Nation, an American newspaper. Fisher also revealed that the journalist M. Parrott, the real Hearst press correspondent in Moscow, had sent Hearst reports that were never published concerning the excellent harvest achieved by the Soviet Union in 1933 and on the Ukraine's advancement. Tottle proves as well that the journalist who wrote the reports on the alleged Ukrainian famine, 'Thomas Walker', was really called Robert Green and was a convict who had escaped from a state prison in Colorado! This Walker, or Green, was arrested when he returned to the US and when he appeared in court, he admitted that he had never been to the Ukraine. All the lies concerning millions dead of starvation in the Ukraine in the 1930s, in a famine supposedly engineered by Stalin only came to be unmasked in 1987! Hearst, the Nazi, the police agent Conquest and others had conned millions of people with their lies and fake reports. Even today the Nazi Hearst's stories are still being repeated in newly-published books written by authors in the pay of right-wing interests.

The Hearst press, having a monopolist position in many States of the US, and having news agencies all over the world, was the great megaphone of the Gestapo. In a world dominated by monopoly capital, it was possible for the Hearst press to transform Gestapo lies into 'truths' emitted from dozens of newspapers, radio stations and, later on, TV channels, the world over. When the Gestapo disappeared, this dirty propaganda war against socialism in the Soviet Union carried on regardless, albeit with the CIA as its new patron. The anti-communist campaigns of the American press were not scaled down in the slightest. Business continued as usual, first at the bidding of the Gestapo and then at the bidding of the CIA.

Robert Conquest at the heart of the myths

This man, who is so widely quoted in the bourgeois press, this veritable oracle of the bourgeoisie, deserves some specific attention at this point. Robert Conquest is one of the two authors who has most written on the millions dying in the Soviet Union. He is in truth the creator of all the myths and lies concerning the Soviet Union that have been spread since the Second World War. Conquest is primarily known for his books The Great Terror (1969) and Harvest of Sorrow (1986). Conquest writes of millions dying of starvation in the Ukraine, in the gulag labour camps and during the Trials of 1936-38, using as his sources of information exiled Ukrainians living in the US and belonging to rightist parties, people who had collaborated with the Nazis in the Second World War. Many of Conquest's heroes were known to have been war criminals who led and participated in the genocide of the Ukraine's Jewish population in 1942. One of these people was Mykola Lebed, convicted as a war criminal after the Second World War. Lebed had been security chief in Lvov during the Nazi occupation and presided over the terrible persecutions of the Jews which took place in 1942. In 1949 the CIA took Lebed off to the United States where he worked as a source of disinformation.

The style of Conquest's books is one of violent and fanatical anti-communism. In his 1969 book, Conquest tells us that those who died of starvation in the Soviet Union between 1932-1933 amounted to between 5 million and 6 million people, half of them in the Ukraine. But in 1983, during Reagan's anti-communist crusade, Conquest had extended the famine into 1937 and increased the number of victims to 14 million! Such assertions turned out to be well rewarded: in 1986 he was signed up by Reagan to write material for his presidential campaign aimed at preparing the American people for a Soviet invasion. The text in question was called 'What to do when the Russians come - a survivalists' handbook'! Strange words coming from a Professor of History!

The fact is that there is nothing strange in it at all, coming as it does from a man who has spent his entire life living off lies and fabrications about the Soviet Union and Stalin - first as a secret service agent and then as a writer and professor at Stamford University in California. Conquest's past was exposed by the Guardian of 27 January 1978 in an article which identified him as a former agent in the disinformation department of the British Secret Service, i.e., the Information Research Department (IRD). The IRD was a section set up in 1947 (originally called the Communist Information Bureau) whose main task it was to combat communist influence throughout the world by planting stories among politicians, journalists and others in a position to influence public opinion. The activities of the IRD were very wide-ranging, as much in Britain as abroad. When the IRD had to be formally disbanded in 1977, as a result of the exposure of its involvement with the far right, it was discovered that in Britain alone more than 100 of the best-known journalists had an IRD contact who regularly supplied them with material for articles. This was routine in several major British newspapers, such as the Financial Times, The Times, Economist, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Express, The Guardian and others. The facts exposed by the Guardian therefore give us an indication as to how the secret services were able to manipulate the news reaching the public at large.

Robert Conquest worked for the IRD from when it was set up until 1956. Conquest's 'work' there was to contribute to the so-called 'black history' of the Soviet Union fake stories put out as fact and distributed among journalists and others able to influence public opinion. After he had formally left the IRD, Conquest continued to write books suggested by the IRD, with secret service support. His book 'The Great Terror', a basic right-wing text on the subject of the power struggle that took place in the Soviet Union in 1937, was in fact a recompilation of text he had written when working for the secret services. The book was finished and published with the help of the IRD. A third of the publication run was bought by the Praeger press, normally associated with the publication of literature originating from CIA sources. Conquest's book was intended for presentation to 'useful fools', such as university professors and people working in the press, radio and TV, to ensure that the lies of Conquest and the extreme right continued to be spread throughout large swathes of the population. Conquest to this day remains for right-wing historians one of the most important sources of material on the Soviet Union.

[Seth]

The famine that hit Ukraine hit other parts of the Soviet Union as well.


But Stalin had food specifically taken from Ukrainians. Not just grain and cattle, if they had any soup, it was poured out in public.

This is in any history book, or bett er yet talk to someone who survived.

[Seth]

Did Stalin deliberately do that as well? Speaking of which, who the hell is dumb enough to think Stalin was some kind of puppet master anyway? What an Idealist assertion.

??

Stalin was the dictator. this reminds me of hitler apologist functionalist excuses for jews dying

[Susurrus]

It seems more idiocy and corruption than intentional.

[Seth]

It seems more idiocy and corruption than intentional.

I can't believe what I'm reading. I thought even lots of stalinists admitted it happened

[Rafiq]

But Stalin had food specifically taken from Ukrainians. Not just grain and cattle, if they had any soup, it was poured out in public.

This is in any history book, or bett er yet talk to someone who survived.

Really which ones? The ones that are taught in schools, that, you know, indoctrinate children? Great source!

And can I have a source other than an American text book (which sais Karl Marx invented Communism and was a Utopian) or some 1930's American newspaper? All of this shit would be in Soviet Archives, trust me. They put all their shit in the archives, secretly hidden away from society.

[Koba1917]

I can't believe what I'm reading. I thought even lots of stalinists admitted it happened

Maybe you should stop using emotional appeals and look at the evidence. There is no evidence to put forward that Stalin or the Bolsheviks forced this famine.
Read Fraud, Famine and Fascism to understand where tons of these stories and the 'Journalists' were from.

[Tablo]

Stalin wasn't some dude plotting with the legion of doom to kill as many people as possible. It happened due to the incompetence of the Soviet leaders and bureaucrats.

[Rafiq]

It seems more idiocy and corruption than intentional.

It wasn't corruption, and it wasn't idiocy. It was the result of

1. Bad planning

2. The outcome of Socialism in one country

[Seth]

But this is a fact recognized by most countries, except, not surprising, Russia.

Turkey denies genocide too, hmm

[Rafiq]

??

Stalin was the dictator. this reminds me of hitler apologist functionalist excuses for jews dying

Dictators do not exist as independent rulers with their own self interest. All dictators serve some sort of class, and the interests of that class are embodied into him.

No, I don't think Stalin acted upon the interests of the Proletariat or even the peasantry. Stalin acted upon the interests of the Soviet Bourgeoisie. That doesn't mean he killed people for fun, though.

[The Man]

It wasn't corruption, and it wasn't idiocy. It was the result of

1. Bad planning

2. The outcome of Socialism in one country

Actually, what bad planning? It was the kulaks that inflated the prices of grain that forced collectivization.

Can you be more specific when you say 'The outcome of Socialism in one country'?

[Seth]

Well at least you admit there was a famine, that's better than the Soviet Minitrue's official story. :rolleyes:

[Seth]

Can a mod please change the title of this thread to "Holodomor Denial"?

[Seth]

Dictators do not exist as independent rulers with their own self interest. All dictators serve some sort of class, and the interests of that class are embodied into him.

Fine then, Stalinist Russia killed Ukrainians. It makes no difference.

[Zostrianos]

Part of the Holodomor was designed to crush Ukrainian nationalism. And to those who deny that the famine was intentional, there was a policy in place by the NKVD where Ukrainians who didn't look skinny or malnourished enough were arrested on charges of stealing food and executed.

[The Man]

Part of the Holodomor was designed to crush Ukrainian nationalism. And to those who deny that the famine was intentional, there was a policy in place by the NKVD where Ukrainians who didn't look skinny or malnourished enough were arrested on charges of stealing food and executed.

Mind telling me what policy that is?

[tir1944]

First of all,it's Golodomor-Голодомор.
Holodomor means starvation by cold.

The term "Holodomor" was invented by certain PR experts as to somehow equate it with the Holocaust.

[Zostrianos]

Mind telling me what policy that is?

The one Stalin passed in August 7th 1932, decreeing that all food was property of the state, and anyone who had food in their possession was in violation of the law.

[The Man]

The one Stalin passed in August 7th 1932, decreeing that all food was property of the state, and anyone who had food in their possession was in violation of the law.

Where in the collectivization act (Which was 100% necessary to the welfare of the Soviet people because of the previously mentioned famines.) does it say that people that were not malnourished got a bullet in their head?

[Seth]

The one Stalin passed in August 7th 1932, decreeing that all food was property of the state, and anyone who had food in their possession was in violation of the law.

Can I get a source for this, comrade? Thanks.

[Koba1917]

Can I get a source for this, comrade? Thanks.

You haven't sourced anything yourself. Do you have any sources that the Soviet Government forced the Famine?

[Seth]

You haven't sourced anything yourself. Do you have any sources that the Soviet Government forced the Famine?

I could cite Conquest or google eyewitnesses, but you'll just laugh it off and pretend its not real.

I'm interested in the specifics of this law azaran is talking about.

[Zostrianos]

From the Encyclopedia of genocide and crimes against humanity (http://www.holodomoreducation.org/index.php/id/186), vol. 3:


It was not only the confiscation of foodstuffs, but also the way the confiscation was carried out that created hardships for Ukrainian peasants. In theory, the land worked by the kolkhoz belonged to the stale, whereas the harvest belonged to the kolkhoz. But the kolkhoz could divide the crops among its members only after the state took its share and reserves were set aside for the next sowing. In the meantime, kolkhozniks were supposed to fend for themselves. Many tried to take an "advance" for their work by cutting a few sheaves of unripened wheat, or competing with mice for the gleanings that the harvesters left behind. On August 7,1932, however, Stalin imposed a new law that made the "plunder of state property" a crime punishable by death or, in extenuating circumstances, ten years' imprisonment.
Fifty-five thousand people were soon arrested for pilfering grain that they themselves had cultivated, and 2,000 individuals were condemned to death. In November, a blacklist was Introduced to punish kolkhozes that failed to meet their monthly grain deliveries. A blacklisted collective lost the right to all commercial transactions, including the sale or such basic necessities as salt, matches, and kerosene, and the kolkhoz administration that harbored such criminals was usually purged. In early 1933, 200,000 kolkhoz employees were inspected, and one-fourth of them were dismissed or otherwise purged. Included in these numbers were 11,420 kolkhoz chairmen, of whom 6,089 were purged.
Individual peasants who were in arrears in meeting their quotas were subjected to food fines and confiscations, which often meant the confiscation of everything edible, including the bread or vegetables found on their kitchen tables. Groups of activists, comprised of city workers or members of local ''committees of poor peasants," went from house to house, prodding the earthen floors with metallic spikes to uncover hidden food reserves. To prevent peasants from fleeing the village or even merely seeking provisions outside their village, a passport system was introduced on December 27.1932. Only city dwellers were entitled to passports. The peasants were thus confined to the village. As they had been in the days of serfdom, the peasants were once more bound to the soil. Peasants wandering in the cities were rounded up: the luckier ones were sent home, while Others were punished for the crime of speculation.
Left with insufficient food, the peasant population starved. Famine broke out in the winter of 1931 and 1932, and reached a high point that spring. Hundreds of thousands of people died before the new harvest brought some relief. A new phase of food shortages began in the fall of 1932 and peaked the following spring. Foreign eyewitnesses and native survivors, who either escaped or outlived the Soviet regime, have described the horrors of this famine in contemporary accounts. Starving peasants consumed domestic animals, including dogs and cats, together with various food surrogates like tree buds, weeds, and herbs. Some resorted to cannibalism, and dug up human corpses and the carcasses of dead animals. A nearby forest or river saved many an amateur hunter or fisherman. People died by the hundreds of thousands. The exact number who died from starvation in Ukraine will never be known. Deaths due to malnutrition were not recorded. Deductions made from the official censuses of 1926 and 1939. and the suppressed census of 1937, have given rise to various interpretations and conclusions. Estimates for Ukraine vary from four to ten million. Six million was the figure a Kharkiv official gave an American newspaper editor in 1933.Ten million was the figure Stalin gave Churchill.

[Zostrianos]

And some extracts from Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands (http://books.google.ca/books?id=n856VkLmF34C&printsec=frontcover&dq=bloodlands&hl=en&ei=XjqiTqz_Dofb0QH4l5XaBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false), in the Soviet Famines chapter:

Watchtowers went up in the fields to keep peasants from taking anything for themselves. In the Odessa region alone, more than seven hundred watchtowers were constructed. Brigades went from hut to hut, five thousand youth organization members among their members, seizing everything they could find. Activists used, as one peasant recalled, “long metal rods to search through stables, pigsties, stoves. They looked everywhere and took everything, down to the last little grain.” They rushed through the village “like the black death” calling out “Peasant, where is your grain? Confess!” The brigades took everything that resembled food, including supper from the stove, which they ate themselves.

Like an invading army the party activists lived off the land, taking what they could and eating their fill, with little to show for their work and enthusiasm but misery and death. Perhaps from feelings of guilt, perhaps from feelings of triumph, they humiliated the peasants wherever they went. They would urinate in barrels of pickles, or order hungry peasants to box each other for sport, or make them crawl and bark like dogs, or force them to kneel in the mud and pray. Women caught stealing on one collective farm were stripped, beaten, and carried naked through the village. In one village the brigade got drunk in a peasant’s hut and gang-raped his daughter. Women who lived alone were routinely raped at night under the pretext of grain confiscations—and their food was indeed taken from them after their bodies had been violated. This was the triumph of Stalin’s law and Stalin’s state.48

Raids and decrees could not create food where there was none. Of course peasants will hide food, and hungry people will steal food. But the problem in the Ukrainian countryside was not theft and deceit, which might indeed have been solved by the application of violence. The problem was starvation and death. Grain targets were not met because collectivization had failed, the harvest of autumn 1932 was poor, and requisition targets were too high. Stalin sent Molotov to Ukraine to urge comrades forward in the “struggle for grain.” But the enthusiasm of Stalin’s servants could not change what had already happened. Even Molotov was forced to recommend on 30 October that quotas for Ukraine be reduced somewhat. Stalin accepted the recommendation, but soon he was more categorical than ever. As of November 1932 only about one third of the annual target had been met.49

The next day Stalin approached the problem of the famine with a new degree of malice. He placed the blame for problems in Ukraine at the feet of Ukrainian comrades and peasants. Two politburo telegrams sent out on 8 November 1932 reflected the mood: individual and collective farmers in Soviet Ukraine who failed to meet requisition targets were to be denied access to products from the rest of the economy. A special troika was created in Ukraine to hasten the sentencing and execution of party activists and peasants who, supposedly, were responsible for sabotage. Some 1,623 kolkhoz officials were arrested that month. Deportations within Ukraine were resumed: 30,400 more people were gone by the end of the year. The activists told the peasants: “Open up, or we’ll knock down the door. We’ll take what you have, and you’ll die in a camp.”51

As Stalin interpreted the disaster of collectivization in the last weeks of 1932, he achieved new heights of ideological daring. The famine in Ukraine, whose existence he had admitted earlier, when it was far less severe, was now a “fairy tale,” a slanderous rumor spread by enemies. Stalin had developed an interesting new theory: that resistance to socialism increases as its successes mount, because its foes resist with greater desperation as they contemplate their final defeat. Thus any problem in the Soviet Union could be defined as an example of enemy action, and enemy action could be defined as evidence of progress.52 .......

Stalin never personally witnessed the starvations that he so interpreted, but comrades in Soviet Ukraine did: they had somehow to reconcile his ideological line to the evidence of their senses. Forced to interpret distended bellies as political opposition, they produced the utterly tortured conclusion that the saboteurs hated socialism so much that they intentionally let their families die. Thus the wracked bodies of sons and daughters and fathers and mothers were nothing more than a facade behind which foes plotted the destruction of socialism. Even the starving themselves were sometimes presented as enemy propagandists with a conscious plan to undermine socialism. Young Ukrainian communists in the cities were taught that the starving were enemies of the people “who risked their lives to spoil our optimism.”54

Ukrainians in Poland gathered money for food donations, only to learn that the Soviet government categorically rejected any assistance. Ukrainian communists who asked for food relief from abroad, accepted by Soviet authorities in the early 1920s during the previous famine, got no hearing at all. For political reasons, Stalin did not wish to accept any help from the outside world. Perhaps he believed that if he were to remain atop the party, he could not admit that his first major policy had brought famine. Yet Stalin might have saved millions of lives without drawing any outside attention to the Soviet Union. He could have suspended food exports for a few months, released grain reserves (three million tons), or just given peasants access to local grain storage areas. Such simple measures, pursued as late as November 1932, could have kept the death toll to the hundreds of thousands rather than the millions. Stalin pursued none of them.55

In the waning weeks of 1932, facing no external security threat and no challenge from within, with no conceivable justification except to prove the inevitability of his rule, Stalin chose to kill millions of people in Soviet Ukraine. He shifted to a position of pure malice, where the Ukrainian peasant was somehow the aggressor and he, Stalin, the victim. Hunger was a form of aggression, for Kaganovich in a class struggle, for Stalin in a Ukrainian national struggle, against which starvation was the only defense. Stalin seemed determined to display his dominance over the Ukrainian peasantry, and seemed even to enjoy the depths of suffering that such a posture would require. Amartya Sen has argued that starvation is “a function of entitlements and not of food availability as such.” It was not food shortages but food distribution that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine, and it was Stalin who decided who was entitled to what.56

Though collectivization was a disaster everywhere in the Soviet Union, the evidence of clearly premeditated mass murder on the scale of millions is most evident in Soviet Ukraine. Collectivization had involved the massive use of executions and deportations everywhere in the Soviet Union, and the peasants and nomads who made up the bulk of the Gulag’s labor force hailed from all of the Soviet republics. Famine had struck parts of Soviet Russia as well as much of Soviet Ukraine in 1932. Nevertheless, the policy response to Ukraine was special, and lethal. Seven crucial policies were applied only, or mainly, in Soviet Ukraine in late 1932 or early 1933. Each of them may seem like an anodyne administrative measure, and each of them was certainly presented as such at the time, and yet each of them had to kill.

1. On 18 November 1932, peasants in Ukraine were required to return grain advances that they had previously earned by meeting grain requisition targets. This meant that the few localities where peasants had had good yields were deprived of what little surplus they had earned. The party brigades and the state police were unleashed on these regions, in a feverish hunt for whatever food could be found. Because peasants were not given receipts for the grain that they did hand over, they were subject to endless searches and abuse. The Ukrainian party leadership tried to protect the seed grain, but without success.57

2. Two days later, on 20 November 1932, a meat penalty was introduced. Peasants who were unable to make grain quotas were now required to pay a special tax in meat. Peasants who still had livestock were now forced to surrender it to the state. Cattle and swine had been a last reserve against starvation. As a peasant girl remembered, “whoever had a cow didn’t starve.” A cow gives milk, and as a last resort it can be slaughtered. Another peasant girl remembered that the family’s one pig was seized, and then the family’s one cow. She held its horns as it was led away. This was, perhaps, the attachment that teenaged girls on farms feel for their animals. But it was also desperation. Even after the meat penalty was paid, peasants still had to fulfill the original grain quota. If they could not do this under the threat of losing their animals, they certainly could not do so afterward. They starved.58

3. Eight days later, on 28 November 1932, Soviet authorities introduced the “black list.” According to this new regulation, collective farms that failed to meet grain targets were required, immediately, to surrender fifteen times the amount of grain that was normally due in a whole month. In practice this meant, again, the arrival of hordes of party activists and police, with the mission and the legal right to take everything. No village could meet the multiplied quota, and so whole communities lost all of the food that they had. Communities on the black list also had no right to trade, or to receive deliveries of any kind from the rest of the country. They were cut off from food or indeed any other sort of supply from anywhere else. The black-listed communities in Soviet Ukraine, sometimes selected from as far away as Moscow, became zones of death.59

4. On 5 December 1932, Stalin’s handpicked security chief for Ukraine presented the justification for terrorizing Ukrainian party officials to collect the grain. Vsevolod Balytskyi had spoken with Stalin personally in Moscow on 15 and 24 November. The famine in Ukraine was to be understood, according to Balytskyi, as the result of a plot of Ukrainian nationalists—in particular, of exiles with connections to Poland. Thus anyone who failed to do his part in requisitions was a traitor to the state.60

Yet this policy line had still deeper implications. The connection of Ukrainian nationalism to Ukrainian famine authorized the punishment of those who had taken part in earlier Soviet policies to support the development of the Ukrainian nation. Stalin believed that the national question was in essence a peasant question, and as he undid Lenin’s compromise with the peasants he also found himself undoing Lenin’s compromise with the nations. On 14 December Moscow authorized the deportation of local Ukrainian communists to concentration camps, on the logic that they had abused Soviet policies in order to spread Ukrainian nationalism, thus allowing nationalists to sabotage the grain collection. Balytskyi then claimed to have unmasked a “Ukrainian Military Organization” as well as Polish rebel groups. He would report, in January 1933, the discovery of more than a thousand illegal organizations and, in February, the plans of Polish and Ukrainian nationalists to overthrow Soviet rule in Ukraine.61

The justifications were fabricated, but the policy had consequences. Poland had withdrawn its agents from Ukraine, and had given up any hope of exploiting the disaster of collectivization. The Polish government, attempting to be loyal to the Soviet-Polish nonaggression pact signed in July 1932, declined even to draw international attention to the worsening Soviet famine. Yet Balytskyi’s policy, though it rode the coattails of phantoms, generated local obedience to Moscow’s policy. The mass arrests and mass deportations he ordered sent a very clear message: anyone who defended the peasants would be condemned as an enemy. In these crucial weeks of late December, as the death toll in Soviet Ukraine rose into the hundreds of thousands, Ukrainian activists and administrators knew better than to resist the party line. If they did not carry out requisitions, they would find themselves (in the best case) in the Gulag.62

5. On 21 December 1932, Stalin (through Kaganovich) affirmed the annual grain requisition quota for Soviet Ukraine, to be reached by January 1933. On 27 November, the Soviet politburo had assigned Ukraine a full third of the remaining collections for the entire Soviet Union. Now, hundreds of thousands of starvation deaths later, Stalin sent Kaganovich to hold the whip hand over the Ukrainian party leadership in Kharkiv. Right after Kaganovich arrived on the evening of 20 December, the Ukrainian politburo was forced to convene. Sitting until four o’clock the next morning, it resolved that requisition targets were to be met. This was a death sentence for about three million people. As everyone in that room knew in those early morning hours, grain could not be collected from an already starving population without the most horrific of consequences. A simple respite from requisitions for three months would not have harmed the Soviet economy, and would have saved most of those three million lives. Yet Stalin and Kaganovich insisted on exactly the contrary. The state would fight “ferociously,” as Kaganovich put it, to fulfill the plan.63

Having achieved his mission in Kharkiv, Kaganovich then traveled through Soviet Ukraine, demanding “100 percent” fulfillment of the plan and sentencing local officials and ordering deportations of families as he went. He returned to Kharkiv on 29 December 1932 to remind Ukrainian party leaders that the seed grain was also to be collected.64

6. As starvation raged throughout Ukraine in the first weeks of 1933, Stalin sealed the borders of the republic so that peasants could not flee, and closed the cities so that peasants could not beg. As of 14 January 1933 Soviet citizens had to carry internal passports in order to reside in cities legally. Peasants were not to receive them. On 22 January 1933 Balytskyi warned Moscow that Ukrainian peasants were fleeing the republic, and Stalin and Molotov ordered the state police to prevent their flight. The next day the sale of long-distance rail tickets to peasants was banned. Stalin’s justification was that the peasant refugees were not in fact begging bread but, rather, engaging in a “counterrevolutionary plot,” by serving as living propaganda for Poland and other capitalist states that wished to discredit the collective farm. By the end of February 1933 some 190,000 peasants had been caught and sent back to their home villages to starve.65

.......

7. Even after the annual requisition target for 1932 was met in late January 1933, collection of grain continued. Requisitions went forward in February and March, as party members sought grain for the spring sowing. At the end of December 1932, Stalin had approved Kaganovich’s proposal that the seed grain for the spring be seized to make the annual target. This left the collective farms with nothing to plant for the coming fall. Seed grain for the spring sowing might have been drawn from the trainloads bound at that very moment for export, or taken from the three million tons that the Soviet Union had stored as a reserve. Instead it was seized from what little the peasants in Soviet Ukraine still had. This was very often the last bit of food that peasants needed to survive until the spring harvest. Some 37,392 people were arrested in Soviet Ukrainian villages that month, many of them presumably trying to save their families from starvation.66 This final collection was murder, even if those who executed it very often believed that they were doing the right thing. As one activist remembered, that spring he “saw people dying from hunger. I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, still breathing but with vacant, lifeless eyes.” Yet he “saw all this and did not go out of my mind or commit suicide.” He had faith: “As before, I believed because I wanted to believe.” Other activists, no doubt, were less faithful and more fearful. Every level of the Ukrainian party had been purged in the previous year; in January 1933, Stalin sent in his own men to control its heights. Those communists who no longer expressed their faith formed a “wall of silence” that doomed those it surrounded. They had learned that to resist was to be purged, and to be purged was to share the fate of those whose deaths they were now bringing about.67

In Soviet Ukraine in early 1933, the communist party activists who collected the grain left a deathly quiet behind them. The countryside has its own orchestra of sound, softer and slower than the city, but no less predictable and reassuring for those born to it. Ukraine had gone mute.

Peasants had killed their livestock (or lost it to the state), they had killed their chickens, they had killed their cats and their dogs. They had scared the birds away by hunting them. The human beings had fled, too, if they were lucky; more likely they too were dead, or too weak to make noise. Cut off from the attention of the world by a state that controlled the press and the movements of foreign journalists, cut off from official help or sympathy by a party line that equated starvation with sabotage, cut off from the economy by intense poverty and inequitable planning, cut off from the rest of the country by regulations and police cordons, people died alone, families died alone, whole villages died alone. Two decades later, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt would present this famine in Ukraine as the crucial event in the creation of a modern “atomized” society, the alienation of all from all.68

Starvation led not to rebellion but to amorality, to crime, to indifference, to madness, to paralysis, and finally to death. Peasants endured months of indescribable suffering, indescribable because of its duration and pain, but also indescribable because people were too weak, too poor, too illiterate to chronicle what was happening to them. But the survivors did remember. As one of them recalled, no matter what peasants did, “they went on dying, dying, dying.” The death was slow, humiliating, ubiquitous, and generic. To die of starvation with some sort of dignity was beyond the reach of almost everyone. Petro Veldii showed rare strength when he dragged himself through his village on the day he expected to die. The other villagers asked him where he was going: to the cemetery to lay himself down. He did not want strangers coming and dragging his body away to a pit. So he had dug his own grave, but by the time he reached the cemetery another body had filled it. He dug himself another one, lay down, and waited.69

A very few outsiders witnessed and were able to record what happened in these most terrible of months. The journalist Gareth Jones had paid his own way to Moscow, and, violating a ban on travel to Ukraine, took a train to Kharkiv on 7 March 1933. He disembarked at random at a small station and tramped through the countryside with a backpack full of food. He found “famine on a colossal scale.” Everywhere he went he heard the same two phrases: “Everyone is swollen from starvation” and “We are waiting to die.” He slept on dirt floors with starving children, and learned the truth. Once, after he had shared his food, a little girl exclaimed: “Now that I have eaten such wonderful things I can die happy.”70

[CleverTitle]

I could cite Conquest or google eyewitnesses, but you'll just laugh it off and pretend its not real.
You just need to be careful of sources. It is in the best interests of the ruling class to publish information (however inaccurate) that benefits it. Given the fact that the very same ruling class also handles the ebb and flow of most information (including academic and historical info), you shouldn't be surprised that people will question sources. It is only natural to maintain some skepticism.

As for the discussion of Holodomor, I'm getting out of this thread immediately.

[Seth]

RRRNNNGH teh Jews control the media!!!11 ^

[Zostrianos]

RRRNNNGH teh Jews control the media!!!11 ^

It's actually the Illuminati and the Reptilian aliens.

[Hiero]

It wasn't corruption, and it wasn't idiocy. It was the result of

1. Bad planning

2. The outcome of Socialism in one country

Idiocy can be another word for bad planning.

Seth you are confused. No one is denying that mass starvation and famine occured in the Ukraine. What people are contesting is the genocide label.

There are many sources you can cite that indicate that the USSR was partially or fully responsible for the famine. However I have never seen a source that indicated the intent of the USSR to cause a famine to eliminate or severely decrease the Ukrainian people.

Reponsibility does not always equate with intent. I could drive my car drunk hit and kill someone, I am responsible, but I did not have the intent to kill anyone. I should no be charged with murder, but manslaughter.

The same can be said for the USSR. Clearly the USSR was responsibility due to it's irresponsibility. I don't know if this is the case, but the USSR and Mao's China as another example never seemed to do any assessment about the risk that policies had towards people. I think that was a major hole in communism in the 20th centuary.

If the USSR did intend to harm the Ukrainian people there were many other ways to do it. Such as mass deportation. And secondly if they did intend to do away with Ukrainian people (as in a real genocide) why did they stop the famine? Why not continue it?

Compare the "Holodomor" to other genocides, like Nazi Germany or Rwanda 1994. Thoose regimes were intent on killing a whole group of people and only stoped due to external forces.

[Seth]

Well the government doesn't have to look at a group of people and say "they should die" a la nazis for it to be genocide. The government caused a famine by getting tangled in bureaucracy and rushing to industrialize and collectivize after a drought, causing failed harvest and starvation. On top of that, individual hard-handed policies worsened everything.

So the Ukrainians got the brunt of it for whatever reasons, making it a genocide against Ukrainians.

[Tablo]

Well the government doesn't have to look at a group of people and say "they should die" a la nazis for it to be genocide. The government caused a famine by getting tangled in bureaucracy and rushing to industrialize and collectivize after a drought, causing failed harvest and starvation. On top of that, individual hard-handed policies worsened everything.

So the Ukrainians got the brunt of it for whatever reasons, making it a genocide against Ukrainians.
Genocide - the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.

[Rafiq]

Actually, what bad planning? It was the kulaks that inflated the prices of grain that forced collectivization.

Can you be more specific when you say 'The outcome of Socialism in one country'?

1. I will be totally honest, I just parroted what another user said. Perhaps you may be right, or you may be wrong. I'd have to look more into it.

2. There is a reason Marx specifically said Socialism cannot operate within the borders of one country. Had socialism existed internationally this famine would have been put out quickly, or may not even had happened at all.

The Soviet Union was constantly under sabatoge by Imperialist powers, this is an undeniable fact. Had those Imperialist powers experienced revolutions ten years prior the SU wouldn't have been constantly under siege and socialism would have been able to manifest and grow. Instead it degenerated into something horrible, and eventually, back to capitalism. I don't blame Stalin, though. Only a fool would blame Stalin.

[Rafiq]

Fine then, Stalinist Russia killed Ukrainians. It makes no difference.

Now that is no better, it's just Nationalist and equally Idealist.

"Russia" didn't kill anyone. And Stalin was Georgian, if you didn't know. The Material and Social conditions of the Soviet Union are what made the Ukrainians starve. It wasn't deliberate, and it wasn't on purpose.

[Rafiq]

Part of the Holodomor was designed to crush Ukrainian nationalism. And to those who deny that the famine was intentional, there was a policy in place by the NKVD where Ukrainians who didn't look skinny or malnourished enough were arrested on charges of stealing food and executed.

Source?

[Rafiq]

I could cite Conquest or google eyewitnesses, but you'll just laugh it off and pretend its not real.

I'm interested in the specifics of this law azaran is talking about.

because it is probably bullshit

[Rafiq]

Bunch of unproven bourgeois propaganda

Right, great source there

[The Man]

I could cite Conquest or google eyewitnesses, but you'll just laugh it off and pretend its not real.

I'm interested in the specifics of this law azaran is talking about.

Did you even read that essay I gave you in the first page?

[The Man]

1. I will be totally honest, I just parroted what another user said. Perhaps you may be right, or you may be wrong. I'd have to look more into it.

2. There is a reason Marx specifically said Socialism cannot operate within the borders of one country. Had socialism existed internationally this famine would have been put out quickly, or may not even had happened at all.

The Soviet Union was constantly under sabatoge by Imperialist powers, this is an undeniable fact. Had those Imperialist powers experienced revolutions ten years prior the SU wouldn't have been constantly under siege and socialism would have been able to manifest and grow. Instead it degenerated into something horrible, and eventually, back to capitalism. I don't blame Stalin, though. Only a fool would blame Stalin.

Well, Engels did in fact say that a revolution couldn't happen within borders. However, material conditions for international revolution in 1917 were not right either. So by this logic, should the Bolsheviks not have started a revolution, and let the Czar continue to reign oppression?

[Rafiq]

Well, Engels did in fact say that a revolution couldn't happen within borders. However, material conditions for international revolution in 1917 were not right either. So by this logic, should the Bolsheviks not have started a revolution, and let the Czar continue to reign oppression?

No, the October revolution was perfect and should have been fully supported, along with the bolsheviks.

The problem, was the failure of the European proletariat to achieve revolution, like the failed German revolution of 1919, etc.

[The Man]

From the Encyclopedia of genocide and crimes against humanity (http://www.holodomoreducation.org/index.php/id/186), vol. 3:


It was not only the confiscation of foodstuffs, but also the way the confiscation was carried out that created hardships for Ukrainian peasants. In theory, the land worked by the kolkhoz belonged to the stale, whereas the harvest belonged to the kolkhoz. But the kolkhoz could divide the crops among its members only after the state took its share and reserves were set aside for the next sowing. In the meantime, kolkhozniks were supposed to fend for themselves. Many tried to take an "advance" for their work by cutting a few sheaves of unripened wheat, or competing with mice for the gleanings that the harvesters left behind. On August 7,1932, however, Stalin imposed a new law that made the "plunder of state property" a crime punishable by death or, in extenuating circumstances, ten years' imprisonment.
Fifty-five thousand people were soon arrested for pilfering grain that they themselves had cultivated, and 2,000 individuals were condemned to death. In November, a blacklist was Introduced to punish kolkhozes that failed to meet their monthly grain deliveries. A blacklisted collective lost the right to all commercial transactions, including the sale or such basic necessities as salt, matches, and kerosene, and the kolkhoz administration that harbored such criminals was usually purged. In early 1933, 200,000 kolkhoz employees were inspected, and one-fourth of them were dismissed or otherwise purged. Included in these numbers were 11,420 kolkhoz chairmen, of whom 6,089 were purged.
Individual peasants who were in arrears in meeting their quotas were subjected to food fines and confiscations, which often meant the confiscation of everything edible, including the bread or vegetables found on their kitchen tables. Groups of activists, comprised of city workers or members of local ''committees of poor peasants," went from house to house, prodding the earthen floors with metallic spikes to uncover hidden food reserves. To prevent peasants from fleeing the village or even merely seeking provisions outside their village, a passport system was introduced on December 27.1932. Only city dwellers were entitled to passports. The peasants were thus confined to the village. As they had been in the days of serfdom, the peasants were once more bound to the soil. Peasants wandering in the cities were rounded up: the luckier ones were sent home, while Others were punished for the crime of speculation.
Left with insufficient food, the peasant population starved. Famine broke out in the winter of 1931 and 1932, and reached a high point that spring. Hundreds of thousands of people died before the new harvest brought some relief. A new phase of food shortages began in the fall of 1932 and peaked the following spring. Foreign eyewitnesses and native survivors, who either escaped or outlived the Soviet regime, have described the horrors of this famine in contemporary accounts. Starving peasants consumed domestic animals, including dogs and cats, together with various food surrogates like tree buds, weeds, and herbs. Some resorted to cannibalism, and dug up human corpses and the carcasses of dead animals. A nearby forest or river saved many an amateur hunter or fisherman. People died by the hundreds of thousands. The exact number who died from starvation in Ukraine will never be known. Deaths due to malnutrition were not recorded. Deductions made from the official censuses of 1926 and 1939. and the suppressed census of 1937, have given rise to various interpretations and conclusions. Estimates for Ukraine vary from four to ten million. Six million was the figure a Kharkiv official gave an American newspaper editor in 1933.Ten million was the figure Stalin gave Churchill.

This is the website that Glenn Beck used on his T.V. series on Communism. Not to mention, this entire thing is full of bullshit. For example, They are actually using Michael Parenti as a source for that Churchill-Stalin figure. In 1945 at the Yalta Conference, Churchill asked Stalin how many died in the Ukrainian famine, and Stalin put his hands up into the air and walked away. Churchill took this as '10 million deaths' because Stalin had 10 fingers. It's actually quite stupid.

[Aurorus Ruber]

First of all,it's Golodomor-Голодомор.
Holodomor means starvation by cold.

The term "Holodomor" was invented by certain PR experts as to somehow equate it with the Holocaust.

From what I understand, the Ukrainian language pronounces the letter Г as something like "h" rather than the "g" sound that Russian has for it. So the transliteration "holodomor" would make sense in the Ukrainian pronuncation.

[tir1944]

Yeah, you're right.I stand corrected about that.

[Rooster]

However, material conditions for international revolution in 1917 were not right either. So by this logic, should the Bolsheviks not have started a revolution, and let the Czar continue to reign oppression?

That's narrow mindedness drivel viewing things in isolation. Russia may not have been ready for revolution but the world was and that was the point. That was the whole push for the Bolsheviks. You remember all that jazz about international revolution, yeah?

[tir1944]

Please explain to me,how can one know if a country is "ready" for a revolution?

[Nox]

Why do stalinists deny the genocide against Ukrainian people? It's all there in black and white and denying it makes you look like Holocaust deniers...because that's what you are.

Can someone give me good proof that it did happen, for future reference when some stalinist denies the famine?

When you look at the facts of what happened, you quickly realise that Stalin can't be blamed for the famine, and that much less people died than you think (around 6 million maximum).

I'm no Stalinist, I'm just telling it how it is.

[Rafiq]

Please explain to me,how can one know if a country is "ready" for a revolution?

If they are industrialized.

[Zostrianos]

Source?

I posted a couple of extracts previously. I'll have to find a reference for that specific policy, I read it a few years ago and the source escapes me.

But would it be that surprising, considering all the other stuff they did?

I'll leave you with this for now:

"After over half a century of denial, in January 1990 the Communist Party of Ukraine adopted a special resolution admitting that the Ukrainian Famine had indeed occurred, cost millions of lives, had been artificially brought about by official actions, and that Stalin and his associates bore criminal responsibility for those actions (Holod, 1990, pp. 3-4)" (from Century of Genocide, 78)

[Seth]

Someone showed me this (http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Russia&month=0205&week=a&msg=G9gRj0I/eXnblGCPQyYXlA&user=&pw=) by a researcher named Getty who is an expert on the purges and other topics of Stalin's rule.

In it he admits it was caused artificially, but:


That familiarity leads me to believe that there are no simple answers to this. A "man-made" famine is not the same as a deliberate or "terror-famine". A famine originally caused by crop failure and aggravated by poor policies is "man aggravated" but only partially "man-made". Why in this field do we always insist on absolutes, especially categorical, binary and polemical ones? True/false. Good/evil. Crop failure/Man made. Reminds me of the Stalinist approach.

If that's true, then it would rule out the genocide approach, or at least turn it into a semantic question.

[Nox]

From what I understand, the Ukrainian language pronounces the letter Г as something like "h" rather than the "g" sound that Russian has for it. So the transliteration "holodomor" would make sense in the Ukrainian pronuncation.

Actually, Russians and Ukrainians generally pronounce it the same/very similarly.

The transliteration of the letter Г is 'Gh' - it is sometimes pronounced as a G and sometimes as an H. It all depends on the letters before and after it.

[Seth]

I was also pointed to this post by one of the forum historians.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1356546&postcount=58


Virtually nobody denies that a mass famine occurred in the Ukraine during these years but the term Holodomor is exclusively used by those who argue that the deaths were deliberately orchestrated by Moscow as part of a campaign that was tantamount to genocide. The whole topic is extremely controversial and debate continues to rage in both academia and beyond

Which illustrates the (rather, a) major problem with this thread. I could easily present half a dozen sources that conclusively prove that Stalin masterminded the whole affair. I could also present an equal number of works that state, just as conclusively, the exact opposite. This is particularly true when presenting population estimates (and anyone who claims to have hard and exact figures is simply lying) from the USSR

For what its worth - and all figures below are drawn from 'Davies et al, (1994), The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union 1913-1945' - there was a significant drop in the grain harvest of 1932/33 which amounted to less than 19m tons collected; this compares to 23m tons collected in 1931/32 and 1933/34. There were similar, although longer lasting, drops in livestock figures. This was not limited to the Ukraine. Actual deaths... well this is murky with conflicting projections throughout the decades, but the authors conclude that a total of 10 million excess deaths occurred in the period 1927-38, of which 8-8.5 occurred during 1927-36. Virtually all sources are in agreement that the vast bulk of the deaths took place during the famine years

All of which has to be qualified by the circumstances. Certainly there is nothing to suggest that Stalin decided to "do in" the Ukrainian peasantry. As I said above, this was a famine first and foremost. The weather during the early thirties was poor - on average an index of weather conditions was down 0.37 tsentners per hectare (edit: old unit used to measure mass of crops) - but there were also human errors at work. The agricultural system introduced by collectivisation was over centralised (farmers need to be able to react to their own a regional/provincial circumstances) and collectivisation itself was a huge disruption to agriculture. In particular the drop in livestock numbers was a disaster - horses were still employed on the vast majority of farms and their losses (approx 50% were killed from 1929-35) proved irreplaceable

I've seen it suggested that this livestock issue was foreseen by the Party but it was expected that the benefits from mechanisation of agriculture (which were very real) would compensate. Unfortunately the projections for tractor production were wildly optimistic and the result was a humanitarian disaster. It would take years to achieve the desired levels of mechanisation (the inspiration for which, incidentally, was the huge farms of the USA)

So there you have it. A horrible convergence of poor weather, poor planning, and human error. Although its interesting to place the whole collectivisation effort against the backdrop of Stalin's attempts to simultaneously industrialise and crush peasant dissent (see Sheila Fitzpatrick's The Russian Revolution) and it has to be noted that a major drain on the country's grain requirements was the explosion of the urban population during this decade


-----

Quote:
What about this?
Famines, no matter what Wikipedia says, are not acts of genocide. Unless of course the Soviet government somehow found a way to actively prevent tens of millions of peasants from actually growing their crops. That's how agriculture works - the peasants grow the food before passing it on. As long as the crop is there and can be harvested the peasantry will survive

For example, I can argue, and I often do, that the deaths resulting from the Great Famine in Ireland were the result of dire British economic mismanagement. But it would be absurd to claim that it was a deliberate case of genocide or that Queen Victoria secretly introduced the Blight to Ireland in order to kill off a few million Catholic

Quote:
The question is not whether times were poor (whether there was actually a famine), but whether the Ukrainians were targeted for political reasons. The page also says this:
So what, Stalin deliberately targeted the Ukrainians and then threw in a few million Russians for the sake of it? :confused:

As I noted in my post, agriculture is regional in character. This is especially true when discussing a nation that stretched across several timezones and when the relevant area is larger than Western Europe. That the Ukraine suffered more than most can be attributed to both regional draughts and the fact that it was designated a Producer Region; that is, the primary purpose was the production of foodstuffs and it was thus far more agriculturally originated than a Consumer Region. Obviously peasant societies (and is true of all countries at all times) are far more at risk of famine than more economically advanced societies

Quote:
I find it odd that you are less eager to lay the blame on Stalin than on socialist planning itself
I've never been one to think that each and every mistake or policy of the Soviet Union was due to Stalin's personal interference. Was he involved in the process of setting policy and targets, of course. Did he draw up crop/tractor projections, enact agricultural policies across the entire USSR, deal with famine relief on the ground, or stalk the Ukraine killing individual peasants... of course not. Stalin was merely at the summit of the regime and blame must be allocated on a much wider basis. At the same time suggesting that Stalin maliciously set out to kill millions of Ukrainians is without merit and simply consists of rehashing tired old political grudges

In short - look past the individuals and focus on the systems and institutions that were involved. That's where the lessons are to be learned. Unfortunately even Marxists are far too prone to obsessing about what 'their' Great Man said or did

Quote:
That's not to say that I think agricultural collectivization is a "socialist" policy; I don't. But those who defend Stalin usually seem to believe that his policies were basically correct socialist ones. You can let me know if that is what you believe.
Collectivization failed. There is no question of that. Might it have worked under different circumstances? Perhaps... personally its led me to believe that there is no 'socialist answer' to the peasantry. Some may argue that it was necessary for Soviet industrialisation, that's not a debate I'm particularly interested in

That goes for this whole thread. Stalin is dead and so, with the odd exception, are those who take his theories/practices seriously. We can analyse his programmes and their effects but there's no real point in arguing whether or not they were 'socialist' or whatever. I think that's the idea behind the OP's call for reasoned analysis using sources but you can see for yourself how that turns out


-----

Quote:
ComradeOm, maybe I will reply to all of that later, but probably not. You basically say that a priori famines cannot be anyone's fault, so what's the point?
No, I am saying that famines are never intentional. That does not excuse the Soviet state apparatus, or its leader, from any economic mismanagement prior to the event, or lacklustre reaction after it. Its simply stating that famines are acts of nature

Quote:
When people in a region with separatist/nationalist tendencies suffer much worse from a famine than people without such tendencies, people will ask if this was a coincidence. If a Chinese famine killed 10 million people from tiny Tibet or tiny Taiwan, and only 5 million from China proper, this would raise some eyebrows
This is my problem with the whole line of reasoning that proclaims the famine a genocide. We know that Stalin was not particularly soft hearted and we know that the Ukrainians are not Russian*, ergo he actively set out to kill millions of Ukrainians. Frankly that's some leap of logic. I hate to agree with GeorgiDimitrovII here but if there's no evidence to suggest that this was a deliberate act of genocide on Stalin's part (and as far as I know there is not any "smoking gun") then there is no case

Is it really too much to expect that the famine hit the most agriculturally intensive region of the USSR (its famed bread basket, as it had been since Tsarist times) harder than most regions? Which is not to forget that millions of peasants also died outside the Ukraine. To answer your question, I would not be surprised if famine in China devastated Tibet if Tibet was a net agricultural producer based on peasant farming

*Although its extremely easy to play up this last fact up. Ukrainian nationalism as a mass movement was less than three decades old at the time of the famine. Furthermore, the eastern parts of the region were heavily Russian in character (particularly around Kiev which was essentially a Russian city). Those who argue that Stalin was deliberately seeking to crush a nascent nationalist movement are likely to be projecting today's attitudes back in time. If Stalin did want to "do a number" on the Ukrainian peasants its far more likely that it was because they were peasants first and Ukrainians second. Again, I refer to the background of class conflict between workers and peasants (Fitzpatrick)

Quote:
However, according to the Encyclopedia Brittanica cited on the wiki page, the opposite occurred and the Soviet gov't was actually requisitioning grain during this period
You'll note that on a page with almost a hundred references the Encyclopedia Brittanica (one step up from Wikipedia) is the only one to make that claim. You'll also note that the same reference states that "that no physical basis for famine". That's simply false

Quote:
I am not an expert in history, but I can spot which historical facts are relevant and which are not. So far you have not given any that I would consider relevant to the claims made in the wiki article.
Naturally. I produce detailed numbers as to weather conditions, livestock quantities, and grain collections and you consider these worthless. You in turn produce Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Brittanica, and completely unfounded accusations as to Stalin's culpability. Really, what can I do here?


-----

Quote:
What you are ostensibly replying to, however, was this:
You are the only one who can take issue with sources? The Encyclopedia Britannica reference is extremely unsatisfactory. Firstly because of its source which is not specialised and does not appear in any other reference on the Wikipedia entry. Secondly because other aspects of the claim are blatantly false. It asserts that the famine was "a man-made demographic catastrophe" and that "no physical basis for famine existed in Ukraine". This is simply not true, as I'd hoped to have proven above, and throws into question the verifiability of the whole source

It even confuses the practice of forced grain procurements (prodrazvyorstka) which characterised War Communism, and were largely abandoned thereafter, with the rationing system designed to channel grain from the countryside to the urban settlements! But its worth elaborating on this for a bit...

It is of course true that the massive growth of the industrial proletariat (Consumer Regions) placed the agricultural Producer Regions under immense stress. However the great push to reduce the grain retained in the countryside (and which succeeded in doing so by about 15%) came not in the 1930s but in 1927/28. This still left the vast bulk of farm produce (46m tons to 16m tons) in the hands of the peasants and the ratio of grain distribution was largely actually increased (in favour of the cities) in the later 1930s. The problem during the famine years was not in the level of the imposed quotas but, as Davies et al admit, "the lack of produce to distribute"

The greatest problem with grain quotas, and again I've seen nothing to suggest that they were applied differently to the Ukraine, was that the need for food for the cities, which were also on the brink of starvation, was so great that it disrupted crop rotation cycles and added to the disruption caused by collectivisation itself. But then I've never pretended that that policy was particularly well implemented and have expressly labelled poor planning as one of the factors behind the famine

Its also worthwhile asking however that if, as you contend, the quotas were unnecessarily harsh... then just where was all this grain going? Foreign exports of agricultural produce were slashed by over 4/5s (Davies again) during the famine years and, as we've seen, the deaths and starvation were not limited to the Ukraine. Furthermore there was extensive rationing of food stuffs in the cities* until 1935. So perhaps Stalin himself was eating millions of tons of grain a year?

*"In Moscow, working class consumption of meat fell by 60% and dairy products by 50% between 1929 and 1932. The average worker's diet during the first five year plan was to a large extent one of enforced vegetarianism, the bulk of it consisting of rye bread, potatoes, and cabbage. Rations, even bread, were not always issued in full to all workers" Davies et al

Quote:
Right. And that's stupid, because allegations have been made that this one was. One should attempt to refute these allegations if one can.
No. You are asserting that this was genocide and therefore the burden of proof lies on you and you alone. I've pointed out the difficulties with this theory (can you even name another "deliberate famine"?) and the lack of logic/evidence but I cannot disprove something that did not happen

It should be relatively easy to find paperwork engineering the famine, if there was any, but its obviously a lot more difficult to find an internal Party memo that just happens to state that "no, Comrade Stalin does not plan any engineered famines in the Ukraine this year" :rolleyes:

Quote:
OK, so your argument is that no credible source claims the Ukranian Famine was a deliberate punishment for Ukranian nationalism?
Plenty of people have claimed that it was. I've not yet come across anything convincing in my reading. No smoking gun, as they say. It may well be out there and if you do produce it then I'd obviously re-evaluate my theories. But in this discussion the onus remains on you to to provide evidence that supports your accusations

Quote:
I don't think anyone claims that there wasn't a famine
Except of course for the Encyclopedia Britannica

Quote:
The point being what? That they died because of their labor conditions as peasants under collectivization? I thought it was a point of agreement that they died of starvation, so I'm not totally sure what you mean by this.
As I said before, peasant economies are particularly susceptible to famine. Subsistence farming, as its name suggests, is first and foremost about providing for the farmer. Surplus goods may be sold, bartered, or requisitioned but the overriding priority is self-sufficiency. In contrast, urban or more advanced farming societies draw their food sources from a much wider number of streams. Indeed the former, urban settlements, rarely produce their own foodstuffs at all

Now this is particularly true in the Ukraine which, yet again, was officially designated the Southern Producer Region by the Soviets. This means that the vast majority of the food consumed in the region was grown in the region and the surplus exported to the rest of the country. The undeniable feature of pre-collectivised Russian agriculture was one of subsistence farming. When famine hit, thus turning the major disruption of collectivisation into a major humanitarian disaster, it devastated the peasant holdings and ensured that they had not enough food to survive the winter. This in turn forced the mass cull of livestock which further deepened the crisis

Had this famine visited either the Central or Eastern Producer regions with the same force as it hit the Ukraine then the results would have surely been just as devastating. Indeed as many as five million Russians may well have died during the famine of 1921 which primarily affected the Central Producer Region... what was Stalin's reason for killing them?

What's your take on this, Azaran?

[Zostrianos]

The 1921 famine was caused by the chaos that was occurring in Russia at the time, and the government did attempt relief efforts; there was no intention of worsening the famine in order to kill. During the Ukrainian famine, however, the authorities intentionally deprived the population of food , knowing the disaster that would ensue, and at one point even denied that there was any famine. Read my previous post with the extracts from the Bloodlands book.

Also, here's some findings from the Commission on the Ukraine Famine (http://faminegenocide.com/resources/findings.html). And before any of you start dismissing this as US, or capitalist propaganda, note that the commission also determined that the US knew about the famine, but denied its existence and actually gave official recognition to Stalin's government in 1933, making the situation worse:

Findings of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine

Based on testimony heard and staff research, the Commission on the Ukraine Famine makes the following findings:

There is no doubt that large numbers of inhabitants of the Ukrainian SSR and the North Caucasus Territory starved to death in a man-made famine in 1932-1933, caused by the seizure of the 1932 crop by Soviet authorities.
The victims of the Ukrainian Famine numbered in the millions.
Official Soviet allegations of "kulak sabotage," upon which all "difficulties" were blamed during the Famine, are false.
The Famine was not, as is often alleged, related to drought.
In 1931-1932, the official Soviet response to a drought-induced grain shortage outside Ukraine was to send aid to the areas affected and to make a series of concessions to the peasantry.
In mid-1932, following complaints by officials in the Ukrainian SSR that excessive grain procurements had led to localized outbreaks of famine, Moscow reversed course and took an increasingly hard line toward the peasantry.
The inability of Soviet authorities in Ukraine to meet the grain procurements quota forced them to introduce increasingly severe measures to extract the maximum quantity of grain from the peasants.
In the Fall of 1932 Stalin used the resulting "procurements crisis" in Ukraine as an excuse to tighten his control in Ukraine and to intensify grain seizures further.
The Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 was caused by the maximum extraction of agricultural produce from the rural population.
Officials in charge of grain seizures also lived in fear of punishment.
Stalin knew that people were starving to death in Ukraine by late 1932.
In January 1933, Stalin used the "laxity" of the Ukrainian authorities in seizing grain to strengthen further his control over the Communist Party of Ukraine and mandated actions which worsened the situation and maximized the loss of life.
Postyshev had a dual mandate from Moscow: to intensify the grain seizures (and therefore the Famine) in Ukraine and to eliminate such modest national self-assertion as Ukrainians had hitherto been allowed by the USSR.
While famine also took place during the 1932-1933 agricultural year in the Volga Basin and the North Caucasus Territory as a whole, the invasiveness of Stalin's interventions of both the Fall of 1932 and January 1933 in Ukraine are parallelled only in the ethnically Ukrainian Kuban region of the North Caucasus.
Attempts were made to prevent the starving from travelling to areas where food was more available.
Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932-1933.
The American government had ample and timely information about the Famine but failed to take any steps which might have ameliorated the situation. Instead, the Administration extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet government in November 1933, immediately after the Famine.
During the Famine certain members of the American press corps cooperated with the Soviet government to deny the existence of the Ukrainian Famine.
Recently, scholarship in both the West and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union has made substantial progress in dealing with the Famine. Although official Soviet historians and spokesmen have never given a fully accurate or adequate account, significant progress has been made in recent months.

[Apoi_Viitor]

And before any of you start dismissing this as US, or capitalist propaganda, note that the commission also determined that the US knew about the famine, but denied its existence and actually gave official recognition to Stalin's government in 1933, making the situation worse:

So? The commission critiqued the past US Government for not being anti-communist enough... Not that motive matters, only sources do. Of course the link you posted lacked those, and was just a bunch of unsubstantiated claims.

[Seth]

Official Soviet allegations of "kulak sabotage," upon which all "difficulties" were blamed during the Famine, are false.Reasonable.


The Famine was not, as is often alleged, related to drought.This point is totally false.


Stalin knew that people were starving to death in Ukraine by late 1932. Aid started in 1933, iirc.

Attempts were made to prevent the starving from travelling to areas where food was more available. Getty addressed this, that would have made everything worse and it would have also hampered future food production.

As for the govt denying the famine, it's not shocking they didn't come out and say "yeah we made a mess in the 1930s".

[Zostrianos]

Well then, I've said all I have to say.

[Invader Zim]

Stalin never committed "genocide" against the Ukrainians. Not once in the history of the Soviet Union, or any other isolated socialist country was there a deliberate famine. Only a fucking idiot would think otherwise.

I mean you actually think Stalin starved the Ukrainians on purpose? What the hell is wrong with you?

The problem here is you, not him/her. The question of whether there was a genocide is a serious question still regularly debated by very serious historians and economists. Davies and Wheatcroft, Conquest and the economist Michael Ellman actually had a protracted arguments, in print, over this subject in the peer-reviewed journal Europe-Asia Studies.

[North Star]

The genocide classification if we use traditional definitions is problematic. I do not believe and that Stalin targeted Ukrainians specifically. Anyone opposed to the Soviet government suffered. One could make a case the the Tatars were targeted more for being Tartars then the Ukrainians for being Ukrainian actually. I recommend the books by Lynne Viola, "The Unknown Gulag" and "The Best Sons of the Fatherland". They show how local officials and the zealous cadres of the 25 000ers also play a significant role in the terror unleashed in the countryside. Stalin of course had no problem with terror, but a significant amount of it came from the local and regional level. Viola does not believe that Ukrainians were specifically targeted because of their nationality, but certainly shows the terror suffered by peasants of all ethnic groups in the USSR. Had Ukrainians been targeted as a group, you would have seen specific anti-Ukrainian purges in the CPSU. This did not happen. Khruschev's rise through the nomenklatura demonstrates this. The appropriation of the famine by Ukrainian nationalist groups certainly helped their cause. For example in Canada, people of Ukrainian decent who came to Canada before the Russian Revolution often voted left and there were many Ukrainians in the Communist Party of Canada. Ukrainians coming after the revolution, as well as the holodomor reports helped push Ukrainian-Canadians to the political right even among the working class. Like the Israeli and Cuban lobbies today, the Ukrainian Lobby took a tragic event and used it for their own ends, ignoring the suffering by other groups as well as the context of the famine in the USSR and twisted it into a genocide comparable to the holocaust. I am certainly not here to minimize the famine in the USSR in the early 1930's and I do believe that several millions may have perished. I believe that famine was the result of poor planning, indifference by Stalin and the careerism of local officials and party cadre who sought to advance by claiming they have collectivized significant amounts of farm land and deported lots of kulaks. That being said conditions were not helped by those peasants who resisted by burning their crops and killing their livestock, but that does not absolve the Stalinist bureaucracy. I do not believe they set out on the road to collectivization to create such a famine, they were not planning a "terror-famine" but the CPSU certainly did not do much to alleviate the situation when they saw their opponents suffering. Pretending that there was no famine and the whole thing was fabricated is comparable to Holocaust denial in my opinion. It's similar because it's the inability to acknowledge evidence that does not conform to one's world view. Accepting that the famine happened does not mean socialism is flawed. It is an indictment of Stalin however. People who deny the famine, like the holocaust claim that they are only interested in the "historical truth." In fact they are not interested in truth or justifying socialism but simply promoting Stalin. There are no examples of holocaust deniers who are apolitical historians, they are all connected to pro-Hitler and neo-Nazi organizations in one way or another.

[Hiero]

The problem here is you, not him/her. The question of whether there was a genocide is a serious question still regularly debated by very serious historians and economists. Davies and Wheatcroft, Conquest and the economist Michael Ellman actually had a protracted arguments, in print, over this subject in the peer-reviewed journal Europe-Asia Studies.

Can you provide the abstracts?

[Tim Cornelis]

Regardless of whether it was intentional or caused by incompetent planners, I doubt it was genocide. Democide seems to be more accurate.

[Iron Felix]

No, comrade! The Ukrainian people did not experience a famine caused by Stalinist incompetence! In fact they under Stalin most Ukrainians lived 150-200 years! This is because Glorious Leader was so beloved by the Ukrainians! Also the famine was orchestrated by fascist-Trotksiyites/Bukharinist collobarators and counter-revolutionaries! But there was no famine.

The conditions that lead to the tragic famines were directly consequences of Stalin's actions. There is no way that can be ignored. What else can't be ignored is that during the Holodomor, Stalin was actually forcing Ukraine to export it's grain and he prohibited any migration from the famine-effected areas. What is clear is that Stalin did nothing to alleviate the suffering of the Ukrainians and actually made their situation worse and that the famine was man-made, but whether or not it was done on purpose can be debated. Either way, Ukrainian nationalism was exterminated and millions died, even though there was enough food to feed them all but this was completely ignored.

[Invader Zim]

Can you provide the abstracts?

This lists a few of the disputes between Tauger and Conquest:

http://history.wvu.edu/faculty_staff/current_faculty/dr_mark_tauger/soviet_articles

And this is the reply from Wheatcroft and Davies to Ellman.

http://www.jstor.org/pss/20451229

On of Ellman's articles:

http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/soviet/famine/ellman1933.pdf

Conquest on Wheatcroft:

http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/CNQ-Comments_WCR.pdf

[ComradeOm]

I was also pointed to this post by one of the forum historiansFor what it's worth my own views have substantially changed on this topic since those posts were made. Or at least shifted the emphasis. I still believe that there was no intentional policy of genocide on the part of the Stalinist government; however I would no longer argue that Soviet agriculture was particularly susceptible to famine or that drought was the leading factor in the deaths

Instead I would identify the root cause as lying squarely with the misguided and callous policies of the Soviet government at the time. The role of the state in mismanaging the agricultural economy was much greater than I believed over two years ago. The catastrophe was largely avoidable and would not have occurred in the absence of collectivisation and the rest of the Stalinist programme. Even if not an intentional campaign of genocide, blame for the deaths must therefore lie with the Soviet government


Aid started in 1933, iircThe first signs of hunger were noted with the poor harvest of 1931 (of which the state ominously collected a bumper amount) and the early reports of famine started to filter through in mid 1932. It wasn't until six months later that the Stalinist leadership acknowledged, privately of course, that famine conditions might exist. Prompt action was stymied by the political structure of the USSR and the myopic paranoia of its leadership

[Philosopher Jay]

The primary source of information about the alleged famine apparently comes from articles written by Gareth Jones when he visited the Ukraine in March, 1933.

According to this website (http://www.garethjones.org/soviet_articles/soviet_articles.htm) dedicated to him, "Early in 1933, Gareth made an extensive tour of Europe . In February one month after Adolf Hitler had been made Chancellor of Germany (and just 3 days before the burning of the Reichstag), Gareth was afforded the 'privilege' to become the first foreign journalist to fly with the newly elected dictator to a rally in Frankfurt-am-Main."

Apparently, one month after meeting with Adolf Hitler, Gareth snuck into the Ukraine to gets his information regarding the famine there. He had predicted the famine would happen the previous year. The soothsayer Gareth found the evidence that he had been correct.

Gareth was starting in 1931 in the pay of Ivy Lee (http://pr.wikia.com/wiki/Ivy_Lee). Ivy Lee was a "public relations expert," who worked for Rockefeller. Note this:


Lee, in December, 1914, was hired as personal advisor to the wealthy Rockefeller family were being savaged in the press for their strike-breaking, anti-union reputation, gained after the 1914 Ludlow, Colorado massacre in their mining operation there. Humorist Robert Benchley was said to have mocked Lee for seeming to suggest "that the present capitalist system is really a branch of the Quaker Church, carrying on the work begun by St. Francis of Assisi."
But Lee's advice to industrialist John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (1839-1937) truly helped soften the image of both he and his family. Rockefeller, who was very eld allowed himself to be filmed playing golf and giving away dimes to children. By the time of his death in 1937, it was said more people remembered Rockefeller's dimes than the massacre.
It is also noteworthy that "From 1929 onwards Ivy Lee became public relations counsel for I. G. Farben in the United States." See The Empire of I.G. Farben (http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/wall_street/chapter_02.htm). (http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/wall_street/chapter_02.htm) Note also this quote from that article "Farben was Hitler and Hitler was Farben." (Senator Homer T. Bone to Senate Committee on Military Affairs, June 4, 1943.)

William Randolph Hearst, used the material from Gareth in 1935 to spread the idea of a great famine in the Soviet Union in 1933.

So the one contemporary independent eyewitness to the famine, Gareth Jones appears to have met directly with Adolf Hitler a month before his famine reports and to have been in the pay of a man who was in the pay of I.G. Farben, a German company that supported Hitler.

This does not make Jones' reports of a famine in the Ukraine simply Nazi propaganda . It does suggest that we have a strange set of coincidences in the ways that our best source of evidence for the famine is tied to the Nazi propaganda machine and its agents.

[A Marxist Historian]

The primary source of information about the alleged famine apparently comes from articles written by Gareth Jones when he visited the Ukraine in March, 1933.

According to this website (http://www.garethjones.org/soviet_articles/soviet_articles.htm) dedicated to him, "Early in 1933, Gareth made an extensive tour of Europe . In February one month after Adolf Hitler had been made Chancellor of Germany (and just 3 days before the burning of the Reichstag), Gareth was afforded the 'privilege' to become the first foreign journalist to fly with the newly elected dictator to a rally in Frankfurt-am-Main."

Apparently, one month after meeting with Adolf Hitler, Gareth snuck into the Ukraine to gets his information regarding the famine there. He had predicted the famine would happen the previous year. The soothsayer Gareth found the evidence that he had been correct.

Gareth was starting in 1931 in the pay of Ivy Lee (http://pr.wikia.com/wiki/Ivy_Lee). Ivy Lee was a "public relations expert," who worked for Rockefeller. Note this:
It is also noteworthy that "From 1929 onwards Ivy Lee became public relations counsel for I. G. Farben in the United States." See The Empire of I.G. Farben (http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/wall_street/chapter_02.htm). (http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/wall_street/chapter_02.htm) Note also this quote from that article "Farben was Hitler and Hitler was Farben." (Senator Homer T. Bone to Senate Committee on Military Affairs, June 4, 1943.)

William Randolph Hearst, used the material from Gareth in 1935 to spread the idea of a great famine in the Soviet Union in 1933.

So the one contemporary independent eyewitness to the famine, Gareth Jones appears to have met directly with Adolf Hitler a month before his famine reports and to have been in the pay of a man who was in the pay of I.G. Farben, a German company that supported Hitler.

This does not make Jones' reports of a famine in the Ukraine simply Nazi propaganda . It does suggest that we have a strange set of coincidences in the ways that our best source of evidence for the famine is tied to the Nazi propaganda machine and its agents.

There are far, far better sources about the great Ukrainian famine than this dubious Jones character. In particular, you have the old Soviet archives, now open, which confirm that a famine took place in which millions died.

Invader Zim posted useful abstracts from the ongoing debates in academia on the topic. The definitive work on the Great Famine is Wheatcroft's book, The Years of Hunger, which came out about a decade ago. The last as far as I know in the extremely valuable multi-volume Soviet history series begun by E. H. Carr all the way back in the 1950s and continued by Robert Davies after his death.

Conquest's "Ukrainian genocide" thesis is pretty much disproven at this point, though it still dominates the popular media, especially in Ukraine of course. Though the current Ukrainian government, which has fewer sympathies for fascist anti-Soviet Nazi collaborators like the UPA than the previous "Orange Revolution" regime, is allowing more historical objectivity.

Wheatcroft's figures for the Ukrainian death toll, which are extremely well documented as he is a professional demographer, are less than the usual version you hear in the media, about two to three million. Still a lot of people in my book, to say the least.

Basically, it happened because of forced collectivization before the Ukrainian peasants were ready for it. Surprise surprise! Peasants shoved into collective farms whether they liked it or not lost interest in their work, and the city folk who had grabbed control of the countryside initially didn't know what they were doing. So food production dropped like a rock, and the USSR ran out of food.

It's true that the Soviet regime extracted food from the Ukrainian countryside forcibly, resulting in starvation. But, since the USSR had basically run out of food, if they hadn't done that the Soviet working class would have starved to death instead of the peasants.

So the Great Famine happened due to the cruel logic of zero sum economics, and the fact that the Soviet Union was after all a workers' state, not a peasant state.

The export of grain Conquest harped on was reduced to a minimum by 1933, and could not have been reduced further, as there were signed contracts with the British and so forth, and the British had made threats of major retaliation if the contracts weren't fulfilled. (Tauger documents that).

What should Stalin have done? Well, first admitted that yes there was a famine, and yes it was due to his disastrous, insanely ultraleft economic policies, and appealed to the world for famine aid.

Maybe the Americans, who had done it before in 1921, with Hoover himself in charge of the aid program, had just recognized the USSR, and had a huge food surplus that farmers couldn't sell at the height of the Great Depression, might have been willing to help out. In 1933, the Roosevelt administratrion was burning down grain bins and conducting mass slaughters of pigs to try desperately to keep up farm prices and prevent all the farmers from going broke. While Americans starved too...

Of course, if Stalin had done that, within a year he would probably have been swinging from a Moscow lamp post, and real revolutionaries might have come back in charge, like Trotsky. Which is why he didn't.

Too bad!

-M.H.-

[Omsk]

Holodomor?No.

Its Golodomor.

And to be precise,its the famine of 1932.

It was not a man-made famine,it was not some fanatical plan by Stalin and the NKVD,it was not genocide.

The communist managament of Ukraine fought against the famine,the USSR sent help to the parts endangered by hunger.


There was famine in the Ukraine in 1932-1933. But it was provoked mainly by the struggle to the bitter end that the Ukrainian far-right was leading against socialism and the collectivization of agriculture.
During the thirties, the far-right, linked with the Hitlerites, had already fully exploited the propaganda theme of `deliberately provoked famine to exterminate the Ukrainian people'. But after the Second World War, this propaganda was `adjusted' with the main goal of covering up the barbaric crimes committed by German and Ukrainian Nazis, to protect fascism and to mobilise Western forces against Communism.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 113 [p. 96 on the NET]

Many of the photos were also revealed as complete hoaxes.
It is obvious that the hunger in Ukraine was not some planed genocide..




, if Stalin had done that, within a year he would probably have been swinging from a Moscow lamp post, and real revolutionaries might have come back in charge, like Trotsky. Which is why he didn't.




Oh please..

[Philosopher Jay]

The problem is that the sources contradict each other to an absurd degree. For example in "Demographic trends and patterns in the Soviet Union before 1991" By Wolfgang Lutz, Sergei Scherbov, Andreĭ Gavrilovich Volkov, on page 427, they say, "The famine started in Spring 1933 and ended in 1934.
On the other hand Wheatcroft assures us that the famine was over by August or September of 1933. Putting them together, it seems together, we have a famine that begins in March or April of 1933 and ends five or six months later in August or September of 1933.
Why do some reports say the famine was throughout most of 1932, 1933 and 1934 and others say it took place only in 1933? What does it mean that the statisticians cannot pinpoint with any agreement or accuracy even when the famine took place either over a six month period or over a three year period?


Let us take Wheatcroft's figure of 4.5 million excess deaths (http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=3838)throughout the Soviet Union due to the famine. He himself admits that he is throwing in 1-2 million unregistered and non-civilization deaths, (apparently just to appease those who have manipulated the statistics to create much higher levels). he thinks the famine was worse outside the Ukraine in other areas. This suggests a possible figure of under 2 million in the Ukraine.
The Washington Post reports (April 27, 2008 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/26/AR2008042602039.html?sub=new) ) talking about the Ukraine famine "There are no exact figures on how many died. Modern historians place the number between 2.5 million and 3.5 million. Yushchenko and others have said at least 10 million were killed."
Now if by manipulating statistics we can get 2.5 or 5 or 7.5 or 10 million, perhaps these statistics might be subject to such great guesswork and manipulation that they are not valid at all. Perhaps, the number of extra deaths were not in the millions, but in the hundreds of thousands, and perhaps those extra deaths simply reflect relatively normal fluctuations that occur in all mortality statistics in large countries from year to year.

The statistics in this case does not convince that a famine took place.

We might also consider that in the capitalist world, In 2006, more than 36 million (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate) people died of malnutrition, so famine is clearly not a problem only with a socialistic system of production.

[A Marxist Historian]

Holodomor?No.

Its Golodomor.

And to be precise,its the famine of 1932.

It was not a man-made famine,it was not some fanatical plan by Stalin and the NKVD,it was not genocide.

The communist managament of Ukraine fought against the famine,the USSR sent help to the parts endangered by hunger.

True, though it was very much a case of too little and too late.

As for H and G, doesn't that relate to whether you're speaking Russian or Ukrainian? The letter in question, as I understand it, is pronounced like an English G in Russia but an English H in Ukraine, which is after all where the famine happened so the H seems more appropriate I think.


Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 113 [p. 96 on the NET]

Many of the photos were also revealed as complete hoaxes.
It is obvious that the hunger in Ukraine was not some planed genocide..

[QUOTE=Omsk;2335020] Which photos do you mean? No doubt many photos were hoaxes, but the famine did happen and did carry away millions of people. Real photos, if they had been available, might have looked worse than phony ones.

But yes, the "planned genocide" folk like Conquest are full of it. What happened in Ukraine was, as the French put it,

"worse than a crime, it was a mistake."

[QUOTE=Omsk;2335020] Oh please..

Glad to know I have pleased you.:D

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

The problem is that the sources contradict each other to an absurd degree. For example in "Demographic trends and patterns in the Soviet Union before 1991" By Wolfgang Lutz, Sergei Scherbov, Andreĭ Gavrilovich Volkov, on page 427, they say, "The famine started in Spring 1933 and ended in 1934.
On the other hand Wheatcroft assures us that the famine was over by August or September of 1933. Putting them together, it seems together, we have a famine that begins in March or April of 1933 and ends five or six months later in August or September of 1933.
Why do some reports say the famine was throughout most of 1932, 1933 and 1934 and others say it took place only in 1933? What does it mean that the statisticians cannot pinpoint with any agreement or accuracy even when the famine took place either over a six month period or over a three year period?


Let us take Wheatcroft's figure of 4.5 million excess deaths (http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=3838)throughout the Soviet Union due to the famine. He himself admits that he is throwing in 1-2 million unregistered and non-civilization deaths, (apparently just to appease those who have manipulated the statistics to create much higher levels). he thinks the famine was worse outside the Ukraine in other areas. This suggests a possible figure of under 2 million in the Ukraine.
The Washington Post reports (April 27, 2008 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/26/AR2008042602039.html?sub=new) ) talking about the Ukraine famine "There are no exact figures on how many died. Modern historians place the number between 2.5 million and 3.5 million. Yushchenko and others have said at least 10 million were killed."
Now if by manipulating statistics we can get 2.5 or 5 or 7.5 or 10 million, perhaps these statistics might be subject to such great guesswork and manipulation that they are not valid at all. Perhaps, the number of extra deaths were not in the millions, but in the hundreds of thousands, and perhaps those extra deaths simply reflect relatively normal fluctuations that occur in all mortality statistics in large countries from year to year.

The statistics in this case does not convince that a famine took place.

We might also consider that in the capitalist world, In 2006, more than 36 million (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate) people died of malnutrition, so famine is clearly not a problem only with a socialistic system of production.

I wouldn't make too much out of the date inconsistencies, which basically are definitional, how you define the word "famine."

Food problems started developing in the spring of 1932, but didn't get totally disastrous until the failure of the '32 summer wheat harvest. The summer harvest in 1933 however was fairly successful.

Death toll wise, you did already have some people dying of hunger before the crops came in (such as they were) in the summer of '32, so you can say that the famine began spring '32. And, since even the successful '33 harvest didn't solve the grain problem immediately, you still had people dying of hunger, albeit in smaller numbers, till the bountiful '34 harvest came in the next year.

So where you put the date cutoff points is fairly arbitrary.

Yes, that extra 1-2 mill Wheatcroft throws in arbitrarily above proven totals was indeed just a peace gesture to appease his critics. After all, he has worked in Ukraine together with Ukrainian scholars, and a lot of his stuff has been translated into Ukrainian and published there. So he felt he had to throw the scholars he works with a bone, to keep that up.

It is true that given the chaos of the famine, there probably were a lot of unrecorded deaths, possibly even as many as over a million. But it's certainly a soft figure.

Most of those deaths are guesswork about the famine in Kazakhstan, which had a nomadic population and no censuses. The famine there was even worse than in Ukraine, as the local leaders, quite insanely, had decided that a nomadic populationon on horse and camelback were going to become farmers right away, whether they liked it or not. Even Stalin thought that was crazy when he finally noticed what was going on (Kazakhstan was the least of his concerns at the time), and fired and arrested them all pronto.

But as to how many died there, absolutely nobody really knows, in the West at least. There was a big population decline, but much if not most of that may have been due to entire Kazakh settlements galloping off to Chinese Turkestan and elsewhere to escape forcible settlement on the land.

Kazakhstan is now fairly prosperous as ex-Soviet states go, and even has a strong radical left, currently being repressed by a dictatorship. It'd be interesting to find out if there are honest historians now in Kazakhstan who have studied what really happened back then, without kowtowing either to Stalinist myths or Kazakh nationalist myths.

-M.H.-

[seventeethdecember2016]

Holodomor was done by Lazar Kaganovich. The Ukrainian state recognizes that it was Kaganovich.
The famine was also not only in Ukraine.

[A Marxist Historian]

Holodomor was done by Lazar Kaganovich. The Ukrainian state recognizes that it was Kaganovich.
The famine was also not only in Ukraine.

Kaganovich didn't really have that much to do with the famine. He was in Moscow by then, he'd left Ukraine in 1928. The Ukrainian state "recognizes that it was Kaganovich" because Kaganovich was Jewish, and anti-Semitism has been popular in Ukraine for hundreds of years.

-M.H.-

[Philosopher Jay]

Hi A Marxist Historian,

Thanks for the good points.

It seems to me the statisticians are trying to build two diametrically opposed cases. On the one hand you have the Ukrainian Nationalists who are trying to prove that the famine was the result of Stalin's (or communism's) deliberate and brutal policies. They are interested in showing that the harvests were good in the 1931-1933 period to put the blame squaring on the communist's ruthlessness. The Internationalists, see the famine as being more general, throughout the Soviet Union and want to blame it more on the collectivization process. They are interested in showing that the harvests were bad in 1931-1932 and that this and not any deliberate policy of starvation or genocide led to the harvest.

The "Ukranians" are interested in showing that Stalin and all Communists are immoral and evil, and aren't concerned if they're good or bad farmers.
The "Internationalists" are afraid that the Ukranians are discrediting serious Soviet/Anti-Soviet studies by putting forward a "Them is the Devil" hypothesis, which has little persuasive evidence to back it up. They wish to prove simply that socialism is economically a failed system. They are not concerned with the theological aspects of the issue.

The more daring and honest Internationalists even suggest it may have been primarily weather problems that hurt the harvest and caused the famine.

It still seems to me that the nature and extent of the events of this period are subject to vastly differing interpretations.



I wouldn't make too much out of the date inconsistencies, which basically are definitional, how you define the word "famine."

Food problems started developing in the spring of 1932, but didn't get totally disastrous until the failure of the '32 summer wheat harvest. The summer harvest in 1933 however was fairly successful.

Death toll wise, you did already have some people dying of hunger before the crops came in (such as they were) in the summer of '32, so you can say that the famine began spring '32. And, since even the successful '33 harvest didn't solve the grain problem immediately, you still had people dying of hunger, albeit in smaller numbers, till the bountiful '34 harvest came in the next year.

So where you put the date cutoff points is fairly arbitrary.

Yes, that extra 1-2 mill Wheatcroft throws in arbitrarily above proven totals was indeed just a peace gesture to appease his critics. After all, he has worked in Ukraine together with Ukrainian scholars, and a lot of his stuff has been translated into Ukrainian and published there. So he felt he had to throw the scholars he works with a bone, to keep that up.

It is true that given the chaos of the famine, there probably were a lot of unrecorded deaths, possibly even as many as over a million. But it's certainly a soft figure.

Most of those deaths are guesswork about the famine in Kazakhstan, which had a nomadic population and no censuses. The famine there was even worse than in Ukraine, as the local leaders, quite insanely, had decided that a nomadic populationon on horse and camelback were going to become farmers right away, whether they liked it or not. Even Stalin thought that was crazy when he finally noticed what was going on (Kazakhstan was the least of his concerns at the time), and fired and arrested them all pronto.

But as to how many died there, absolutely nobody really knows, in the West at least. There was a big population decline, but much if not most of that may have been due to entire Kazakh settlements galloping off to Chinese Turkestan and elsewhere to escape forcible settlement on the land.

Kazakhstan is now fairly prosperous as ex-Soviet states go, and even has a strong radical left, currently being repressed by a dictatorship. It'd be interesting to find out if there are honest historians now in Kazakhstan who have studied what really happened back then, without kowtowing either to Stalinist myths or Kazakh nationalist myths.

-M.H.-

[Ocean Seal]

Hitler never committed "genocide" against the Jews. Not once in the history of the Third Reich, or any other Axis country was there a genocide against Jews. Only a fucking idiot would think otherwise.

I mean you actually think Hitler gassed the Jews? What the hell is wrong with you?
Do you know how stupid and baseless this ad-homenim attack on Rafiq was?
When you draw a parallel try to think about it.

The famine of 1932-1933 was a really horrible famine. It was not a Ukrainian famine, it was a Soviet famine. The fact that you call it a Ukrainian famine, it completely offensive to the other Soviet peoples who perished in this famine. Hitler on the other hand directed deliberate genocide against several peoples who he forced into work and death camps and then had them gassed and their remains charred. The party under Stalin wasn't plotting to get rid of the Ukrainian people.

The famine happened because of a series of factors.

1. Isolation of the Soviet Union caused by the rise of fascism.
2. Depression in the industrialized capitalist countries and the inability to break free from relations with them.
3. Class relations in the SU
4. Poor central planning

And yes you really have to be a liberal to believe all the shit you just spouted has any truth within it.

Germany has a remembrance day for the evils of East Germany, but does that make it an evil boogeyman country coming to control your population 1984 style?

[Rafiq]

.....

Hitler killing the Jewry of Europe was essentially a campaign by the German Bourgeoisie to retain it's position in class power. The common belief was that the Jews tried to infiltrate Aryan society and sabatoge it.

This was never the case in Ukraine. There is absolutely no reason, gain or benefit for a genocide to be put into place by the Soviet ruling class. Why didn't the Soviets just eradicate the whole Ukrainian population, if your analogy is legitiment? Oh wait, he did, since he (personally) killed 30 million people, which was larger than the whole Ukrainian population.

[A Marxist Historian]

Hi A Marxist Historian,

Thanks for the good points.

It seems to me the statisticians are trying to build two diametrically opposed cases. On the one hand you have the Ukrainian Nationalists who are trying to prove that the famine was the result of Stalin's (or communism's) deliberate and brutal policies. They are interested in showing that the harvests were good in the 1931-1933 period to put the blame squaring on the communist's ruthlessness. The Internationalists, see the famine as being more general, throughout the Soviet Union and want to blame it more on the collectivization process. They are interested in showing that the harvests were bad in 1931-1932 and that this and not any deliberate policy of starvation or genocide led to the harvest.

The "Ukranians" are interested in showing that Stalin and all Communists are immoral and evil, and aren't concerned if they're good or bad farmers.
The "Internationalists" are afraid that the Ukranians are discrediting serious Soviet/Anti-Soviet studies by putting forward a "Them is the Devil" hypothesis, which has little persuasive evidence to back it up. They wish to prove simply that socialism is economically a failed system. They are not concerned with the theological aspects of the issue.

The more daring and honest Internationalists even suggest it may have been primarily weather problems that hurt the harvest and caused the famine.

It still seems to me that the nature and extent of the events of this period are subject to vastly differing interpretations.

Historians always argue about causes and interpretations of historical events, that's what they do for a living after all. The first rule of historical research is that there is no such thing as an event with only one cause.

And there was definitely a drought going on which played some role in what happened. But ascribing it all to the drought would be as ridiculous as ascribing the "Dust Bowl" in the US in the 1930s just to bad weather, which indeed existed there too.

On the actual *facts* of whether there was a famine or not, there is too much evidence there for any real disagreement except over how many, and an ironclad consensus that the victim count was in the millions.

Your "internationalists," who by the way include most of your definitely non-internationalist patriotic Russian historians, who all resent the idea that this was all Russian chauvinist anti-Ukrainianism, do tend to agree that it was a system failure, but that begs the question, was it a failure of socialism or a failure of Stalinism?

Not at all an abstract question, as the Trotskyists, the Zinovievists, the Bukharinists, lots of other dissenters, and for that matter most of the membership of the Ukrainian CP and quite a few of its leaders, all disagreed strongly with Stalin's agricultural policies (albeit covertly by and large, except for the Trotskyists.)

-M.H.-

[Philosopher Jay]

Hi A Marxist Historian,

Good points again.

What would you say is the best evidence for the famine? The articles I have read so far make claims that go far beyond the evidence that they use to back it up. The statistical evidence seems open to manipulation and interpretation. Soviet statistics are used when they supports the writers' interpretation and dismissed when they do not.

We know how effective propaganda can be in getting people to believe in things that did not happen. We all remember that after a very short propaganda campaign, more than 70% of Americans believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, although there was never any real evidence to support that conclusion.







Historians always argue about causes and interpretations of historical events, that's what they do for a living after all. The first rule of historical research is that there is no such thing as an event with only one cause.

And there was definitely a drought going on which played some role in what happened. But ascribing it all to the drought would be as ridiculous as ascribing the "Dust Bowl" in the US in the 1930s just to bad weather, which indeed existed there too.

On the actual *facts* of whether there was a famine or not, there is too much evidence there for any real disagreement except over how many, and an ironclad consensus that the victim count was in the millions.

Your "internationalists," who by the way include most of your definitely non-internationalist patriotic Russian historians, who all resent the idea that this was all Russian chauvinist anti-Ukrainianism, do tend to agree that it was a system failure, but that begs the question, was it a failure of socialism or a failure of Stalinism?

Not at all an abstract question, as the Trotskyists, the Zinovievists, the Bukharinists, lots of other dissenters, and for that matter most of the membership of the Ukrainian CP and quite a few of its leaders, all disagreed strongly with Stalin's agricultural policies (albeit covertly by and large, except for the Trotskyists.)

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Hi A Marxist Historian,

Good points again.

What would you say is the best evidence for the famine? The articles I have read so far make claims that go far beyond the evidence that they use to back it up. The statistical evidence seems open to manipulation and interpretation. Soviet statistics are used when they supports the writers' interpretation and dismissed when they do not.

We know how effective propaganda can be in getting people to believe in things that did not happen. We all remember that after a very short propaganda campaign, more than 70% of Americans believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, although there was never any real evidence to support that conclusion.

That there was a famine is I think indisputable, far far too many survivors have told their stories, and the Soviet archives thoroughly confirm it. Exactly how many people died and what were the causes is what is under dispute, not whether there was a famine or not.

What's the best, most objective, most reliable account around? In English, that would be Wheatcroft's book The Year of Hunger. Not a casual Internet snippet, but a serious 500-600 page book. His peace gesture thrown to his colleagues with a somewhat higher figure than really would be proper occupies only a few pages in the book, and slightly contradicts the overall picture he draws. No big deal, can be disregarded really.

If you really want to see all the evidence and get the full picture, I'd suggest getting hold of the book and spending a day or so studying it.

-M.H.-

[Philosopher Jay]

Thank you.

I have ordered the book and I am looking forward to reading it. I'll try to write a review or express my thoughts about it here.

[A Marxist Historian]

Thank you.

I have ordered the book and I am looking forward to reading it. I'll try to write a review or express my thoughts about it here.

Cool! That's the serious attitude to take to this kind of thing. Gold (red?) star in my book.

-John-

[seventeethdecember2016]

Why would the Soviet Union, the most internationalist country in the world, commit such a nationalist-type crime?
This famine happened because of Bureaucratic failures, not Stalin.

[A Marxist Historian]

Why would the Soviet Union, the most internationalist country in the world, commit such a nationalist-type crime?
This famine happened because of Bureaucratic failures, not Stalin.

"Holodomor" means "hunger plague" in Ukrainian. Literally speaking, that's a pretty accurate word for what happened. Of course, the nationalists have imputed a genocidal deliberately-kill-the-Ukrainians significance to the word, which is absolutely false.

The famine happened because of bureaucratic failures for which the head bureaucrat, Stalin, was directly responsible.

-M.H.-

[mykittyhasaboner]

"Holodomor" means "hunger plague" in Ukrainian.


It's Golodomor (Голодомор). i don't know the story behind the "H".

[khlib]

It's Golodomor (Голодомор). i don't know the story behind the "H".

In Ukrainian, G's are pronounced as H's.

[daft punk]

Lenin and Trotsky wanted to encourage the small peasants into coops via subsidies. They also wanted to tax the richer ones to pay for the vital development of industry. Also they wanted to cut down on bureaucracy. But Stalin got in power and did the opposite of all that.

Then he realised his mistake and collectivised, but he did it too late, too fast, very brutally, and for the wrong reasons.

Food production slumped.

[A Marxist Historian]

It's Golodomor (Голодомор). i don't know the story behind the "H".

Simple story. It's a word in Ukrainian for which you are giving the incorrect Russian transliteration. In Ukrainian that initial letter is pronounced H not G.

Ukrainian and Russian are very similar languages, almost identical alphabet, almost identical grammar, somewhat different vocabulary. H and G are the only letters with a significantly different sound in the two languages that happen to use the same Cyrillic character.

-M.H.-