Famine in Soviet Union (Ukraine)?

[NorwegianCommunist]

A lot of people tells us that communism is bad. To me they always mention the "famine"
I never belived it occured, and I still don't

I watched this youtube video which I think is great!

Search for; Stalin and Ukraine and choose the video uploaded by RedNickII

Do you believe that the famine in Ukraine occured or not?
- Watch the video before commenting please.

[Zealot]

Anyone who denies there was a famine is an idiot... I think you're meaning that a genocide didn't occur in Ukraine.

[MustCrushCapitalism]

Anyone who denies there was a famine is an idiot... I think you're meaning that a genocide didn't occur in Ukraine.

^He's got it.

Famines were occuring all throughout the USSR at the time, but Stalin wasn't satisfied with that, so he went on to purposely cause an even famine in the breadbasket of the USSR for no reason whatsoever. This was before he killed the population of Earth with his own hands twice, by the way.

[NorwegianCommunist]

Anyone who denies there was a famine is an idiot... I think you're meaning that a genocide didn't occur in Ukraine.

Yes of course. There was famines, but up to 10 millions didn't die because of the famine in Ukraine*

[NorwegianCommunist]

^He's got it.

Famines were occuring all throughout the USSR at the time, but Stalin wasn't satisfied with that, so he went on to purposely cause an even famine in the breadbasket of the USSR for no reason whatsoever. This was before he killed the population of Earth with his own hands twice, by the way.


I have also heard; Better bread-lines, then no bread.

Im sure there was a reason. Where did you read about that bread-shortage?

[Sir Comradical]

Mortality rates reflect excess deaths above a given norm meaning that if the norm was India, it would appear that no one in the USSR died. If you applied those same standards to the US, it would mean that 7 million people died during the Great Depression.

[Nox]

It's pretty obvious it wasn't a genocide, I'm fairly sure that's accepted as a fact by anyone with significant knowledge on the subject.

[NorwegianCommunist]

Mortality rates reflect excess deaths above a given norm meaning that if the norm was India, it would appear that no one in the USSR died. If you applied those same standards to the US, it would mean that 7 million people died during the Great Depression.

That is true. I understand what you mean =)
Can you tell me some more about the Great Depression?
I am curious :p (If you have the time of course)

[Sir Comradical]

That is true. I understand what you mean =)
Can you tell me some more about the Great Depression?
I am curious :p (If you have the time of course)

Here's the article.
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/19-05-2008/105255-famine-0/

There were food shortages in the USSR which caused mortality rates to increase considerably but unlike the Russian Civil War period & WW2, the population of the USSR didn't actually fall.

This Ukraine famine hysteria has already been debunked here a few times. Check out this thread.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/7-million-people-t138742/index.html?highlight=ukraine+population

[Rooster]

How can you not think there wasn't a famine? There was a famine, a quite terrible one. One that was brought on by exceedingly poor policy choices (or that were actively pursued; see ComradeOm) by the USSR bureaucracy.

[NorwegianCommunist]

How can you not think there wasn't a famine? There was a famine, a quite terrible one. One that was brought on by exceedingly poor policy choices (or that were actively pursued; see ComradeOm) by the USSR bureaucracy.


No, no, I know there was a small famine, but I didn't believe in the genocide.
But I have managed to clear up some info about Holodmor now =)

[Rooster]

No, no, I know there was a small famine, but I didn't believe in the genocide.
But I have managed to clear up some info about Holodmor now =)

Small? Millions died and a millions more suffered a sever depression in the quality of their lives. It wasn't genocide but it could have been called a deliberate attack or just a complete mess brought on by the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy knew they did something terrible so they covered it up and suppressed information about it until the collapse in the 1990s.

[NorwegianCommunist]

Small? Millions died and a millions more suffered a sever depression in the quality of their lives. It wasn't genocide but it could have been called a deliberate attack or just a complete mess brought on by the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy knew they did something terrible so they covered it up and suppressed information about it until the collapse in the 1990s.


Millions didn't die during the Holodomor famine.
Where did you get that number?
Whatch this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K89wf9QOnCM

This will clear things up =)

[Seth]

First of all the Soviet Famine of 1932-1933 should not be associated with Ukraine. That was a part of it.

Basically, Stalin made extremely ambitious plans to industrialize the USSR to catch up to the rest of the world after the NEP. He had various motives for doing this, suffice to say it was necessary for the advancement of socialist construction in the USSR in his view as well as the Union's geopolitical, industrial, military, etc. standing in general. So a planned economy was adopted. Problem was, no one was experienced or really remotely competent. The entire Soviet bureaucracy was learning on the job. So basically, poor planning, corruption, over-ambition, and drought led to a massive disaster and desperate, draconian, measures with dealing with it, all while juggling that with a food crisis in general, industrialization, growing urban populations, an urban housing crisis, etc.

[Seth]

Millions didn't die during the Holodomor famine.
Where did you get that number?
Whatch this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K89wf9QOnCM

This will clear things up =)

I don't care about your mickey mouse sources. 4 - 7 million people died.

[GoddessCleoLover]

Didn't Stalin tell Churchill that millions died?

[Seth]

Didn't Stalin tell Churchill that millions died?

IIRC, according to Churchill, Stalin told him it lasted 4 years and around 10 million died.

[GoddessCleoLover]

If Stalin conceded that figure wouldn't it likely be in the ballpark with respect to its veracity? What reason would Stalin have had to exaggerate the death toll?

[Seth]

If Stalin conceded that figure wouldn't it likely be in the ballpark with respect to its veracity? What reason would Stalin have had to exaggerate the death toll?

Like I said, it was according to Churchill, but even if true, Stalin wouldn't necessarily know. All he would have known was that there was a huge mess in the grain producing regions and millions were dying.

And then few modern estimates are that high.

[NorwegianCommunist]

I don't care about your mickey mouse sources. 4 - 7 million people died.


Don't just make up numbers!

[Seth]

Don't just make up numbers!

Troll.

[Rooster]

Don't just make up numbers!

Go search for ComradeOm's posts on the subject. I think it might have been in a thread called "Holodomor" or something like that.

[NorwegianCommunist]

Thank you, but this a thread for Holodomor. And millions didn't die.

[Agathor]

The Ukraine was one of the regions that resisted collectivization the hardest, and they were punished with abnormally high grain procurement levels. Stalin didn't intend to cause a famine, but once it began he did very little to alleviate it.

And forcing the most productive and efficient farmers, the so-called kulaks, into lumber camps in Siberia while the Kolkhoz were administered by incompetent party loyalists probably didn't help.

[Tifosi]

Thank you, but this a thread for Holodomor. And millions didn't die.

This (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1356546&postcount=58) post is useful. Sources and everything.

[Aspiring Humanist]

Of course the famine occured, its pretty well known knowledge and I don't think I've heard of anyone denying the famine occurred before :confused:. Obviously it was very exaggerated, regularly hear figures like 60 million people died, while the next "historian" says 20 million etc etc. Most of these figures are based on the black book of communism, whos author admitted he made up statistics
But to say it didn't happen at all is complete bullshit and it sounds like the rhetoric of a holocaust denier. Recognizing bullshit fabrication is one thing but spouting ignorant things about a historical event like the famine didn't happen to fit your political worldview is absolutely despicable

[NorwegianCommunist]

This (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1356546&postcount=58) post is useful. Sources and everything.
Haha funny.
I have written my sources ;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)

[A Marxist Historian]

Small? Millions died and a millions more suffered a sever depression in the quality of their lives. It wasn't genocide but it could have been called a deliberate attack or just a complete mess brought on by the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy knew they did something terrible so they covered it up and suppressed information about it until the collapse in the 1990s.

Complete mess, yes. Deliberate attack? That's the fallback position of bourgeois historians now that the "ethnic genocide" thesis has been discredited.

It wasn't a "deliberate attack," for the simple reason that Stalinist planning had messed up so badly that the USSR simply didn't have early enough food to go around. So somebody, in fact millions of somebodies, was going to go hungry and starve to death, and at that point the only question was who, the workers or the peasants. As the USSR was a workers state, it naturally turned out to be peasants.

To my mind, that is a more powerful condemnation of Stalinism than paranoia about how Stalin deliberately wanted Ukrainian peasants to starve to death.

Which, even if true, would only mean the Soviet bureaucracy should have chosen a nicer guy to lead it than Stalin.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

The Ukraine was one of the regions that resisted collectivization the hardest, and they were punished with abnormally high grain procurement levels. Stalin didn't intend to cause a famine, but once it began he did very little to alleviate it.

And forcing the most productive and efficient farmers, the so-called kulaks, into lumber camps in Siberia while the Kolkhoz were administered by incompetent party loyalists probably didn't help.

Nah. The Ukrainian procurement levels were high because Ukraine had always been the breadbasket of Tsarist Russia, where the grain was grown to make the bread that the workers in Moscow and Petrograd, etc., ate.

But compulsory collectivization was indeed resisted more strongly in prosperous Ukraine, with its rich peasants, than elsewhere, so you had high production quotas despite grain production dropping like a rock. If they had been lowered, either they would have had to be jacked up to the starvation point elsewhere, or the workers instead of the peasants would have starved to death, as during the Civil War.

The so-called kulaks were kinda so-called in some parts of Russia, but not in Ukraine! The division between rich and poor peasants was sharper there than jus about any place else in the USSR, except for the Cossack lands, where you ended up with a famine even worse than in Ukraine, and for the very same reasons.

It's true that the rich capitalist peasants, who often owned the grain mills and sometimes even had tractors and often had farm laborers working for them, were much more efficient grain producers than poor peasants just trying to survive.

So Stalin's compulsory collectivization and "dekulakization" was an ultra left disaster of the sort that so many anarchoid or "left communist" Revleft participants disconnected from real life advocate.

-M.H.-