Stalin's "Crimes"?

[Communist Mutant From Outer Space]

What is the impartial take on actions attributed to Joseph Stalin and crimes put against him? What would be the realistic figure of the deaths he caused and what would be the realistic take on how authoritarian his regime was? I am not asking because I necessarily believe this, but I'd need to see sufficient evidence to convince me either way and I have none. MLs and MLMs defend his accusations as false or grossly overblown but what is the realistic amount from an ML or from a non-ML?

[Aslan]

I'll going to play devil's advocate here but most estimations of Stalin's death toll are either inflated or are intentionally skewed (ie infant deaths, Casualties of war, Famine, Disease). In the so called black book of communism those researchers even said he inflated his statistics. What is certain is that Stalin did send many unfortunates to Gulags (estimates vary). And no amount of Tankie/NatBol apologetics can prove otherwise. I'll also add that many of those deaths are because Kulaks (feudal bureaucrats) stubbornly resisted nationalization of food stores. This was to the detriment to the Ukrainian peasants who were their underlings in the Feudal system.

[ComradeOm]

The academic consensus has been pretty settled for almost two decades now. Between 1928-40 the Soviet regime was responsible for approximately 1.5-3 million repression deaths, that is direct executions and those who died in the Gulag, during deportation, etc. In addition there were a further 5-7 million famine deaths, much of the responsibility for which the state also shares. Ellman's Soviet Repression Statistics and Wheatcroft's The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings are solid places to start for summaries.

But, to be honest, I don't really see the point. Tankies love to harp on about discredited Cold War estimates (discredited for two decades now) but what's the difference between 20m executions and 2m executions? Oh, only 6m people died from the horrendous mismanagement of agriculture in the 1930s, not 12m. What a relief that is.


I'll also add that many of those deaths are because Kulaks (feudal bureaucrats) stubbornly resisted nationalization of food stores. This was to the detriment to the Ukrainian peasants who were their underlings in the Feudal system.I'm not sure you know what any of those words mean...

[Rafiq]

I'll also add that many of those deaths are because Kulaks (feudal bureaucrats) stubbornly resisted nationalization of food stores. This was to the detriment to the Ukrainian peasants who were their underlings in the Feudal system.

Things were not exactly so simple. "Kulaks" (who were merely 'rich peasants', often times just non-subsistence peasants, not feudal bureaucrats), resisted, yes, but so did a massive portion - if not a majority - of the peasantry.

One should also understand that much of this related to the overwhelming ignorance of the peasants - life on the countryside provided no actual means of rationally articulating the events, many peasants viewed collectivization, which radically transformed a way of life that they could not even think beyond, as literally the end of the world. Some peasants, in a frenzy thought that Soviet collectivization meant the return of the old landowners and a return to serfdom. They articulated the events in a way that conformed to the categories of life that made sense to them.

Still, the "kulak" is not a worthless category, for it merely referred to those peasants who had too much to lose for collectivization, who further had influence over other peasants in this regard - even if it was a huge chunk of them. If "Kulak" is a worthless category, then so is - for example, comprador vs. national bourgeoisie in China. Class categories are not unimportant just because they arise out of partisan controversies (taking a side).

The notion that collectivization itself was a crime is nonsense. Collectivization was absolutely necessary for the modernization of the country and there was no indication that the prerogatives of rightists like Bukharin would have solved the existential Soviet crisis of the peasantry. The Soviet leadership were not complete idiots - the prospect of another war with imperialist powers was a great one, and before collectivization not only was the technical or productive capacity lacking for the Soviet Union to be able to withstand an invasion, the ability to mobilize millions for the war was also lacking because peasant life was relatively 'outside' the political control of the state.

Certainly there were mishaps and many mistakes, but these mistakes were retrospective ones. There would really have been no way of knowing about how to prevent the Ukrainian famine before it actually happened - and I mean this. Many point to arguments made about how collectivization vis a vis an extension of the NEP would be "catastrophic", but this is a piss poor argument: There was no alternative to collectivization, the peasantry were not organized in a way that would have even allowed for the private ownership of land to be used in a way that would fit the holistic developmental needs of the Soviet Union.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

The notion that collectivization itself was a crime is nonsense. Collectivization was absolutely necessary for the modernization of the country and there was no indication that the prerogatives of rightists like Bukharin would have solved the existential Soviet crisis of the peasantry. The Soviet leadership were not complete idiots - the prospect of another war with imperialist powers was a great one, and before collectivization not only was the technical or productive capacity lacking for the Soviet Union to be able to withstand an invasion, the ability to mobilize millions for the war was also lacking because peasant life was relatively 'outside' the political control of the state.


The issue isn't over collectivization itself but the methods utilized to realize that end.


Certainly there were mishaps and many mistakes, but these mistakes were retrospective ones. There would really have been no way of knowing about how to prevent the Ukrainian famine before it actually happened - and I mean this. Many point to arguments made about how collectivization vis a vis an extension of the NEP would be "catastrophic", but this is a piss poor argument: There was no alternative to collectivization, the peasantry were not organized in a way that would have even allowed for the private ownership of land to be used in a way that would fit the holistic developmental needs of the Soviet Union.

There were specific policies of the USSR which obviously exacerbated famine, however. If you forcefully take most of a peasant's food production and export it to foreign countries to buy industrial equipment, you are liable to cause them to starve to death. Moreover, it simply doesn't make economic sense to starve your peasants while attempting to increase agricultural production.

[Rafiq]

The issue isn't over collectivization itself but the methods utilized to realize that end.

Of course, but nothing like this had ever been done in history, and even if one could have the hindsight to carry it out without any catastrophic consequences, that would assume a level of control and even organization that did not exist in the Soviet Union.

Many make the mistake of being so terrified by the Soviet state exercising "absolute control" all the time, but the reality is that catastrophes like the Ukrainian famine were wrought from pure chaos, not some coldly calculated plan.


There were specific policies of the USSR which obviously exacerbated famine, however. If you forcefully take most of a peasant's food production and export it to foreign countries to buy industrial equipment, you are liable to cause them to starve to death.

Yes, of course, the famine was undoubtedly not some "natural" occurrence (whatever that even means). But the modernization of the country was the highest priority, as far as sustaining the existence of the Soviet state was concerned. The line between famine and subsistence in this instance was very thin, as we all know - the transition to industrial agriculture was never a 'smooth' one in history, that is before globalization at least (and even this is questionable in some instances).

[Invader Zim]

"Kulaks" (who were merely 'rich peasants', often times just non-subsistence peasants, not feudal bureaucrats), resisted,

Actually, 'Kulak' is a worthless category, because, for all practical purposes the definition was applied so loosely and arbitrarily that it held no real meaning. Certainly, for the ruling echelons of the term was arbitrary and it bore little, if any, relationship to that used by other layers of Soviet state bureaucracy.


Certainly there were mishaps and many mistakes, but these mistakes were retrospective ones. There would really have been no way of knowing about how to prevent the Ukrainian famine before it actually happened - and I mean this. Many point to arguments made about how collectivization vis a vis an extension of the NEP would be "catastrophic", but this is a piss poor argument: There was no alternative to collectivization, the peasantry were not organized in a way that would have even allowed for the private ownership of land to be used in a way that would fit the holistic developmental needs of the Soviet Union.

There is no such thing as an unpreventable famine. You're right that nobody, not Stalin, not anybody could predict the natural factors which triggered the famine (and they were many -- too many to go into here). But the potential outcomes of the regime were at least partially predictable, and the actions it took once the evidence of mass hunger began to emerge were to ignore it and press on regardless. A view which did not change even after it became clear that a demographic disaster was about to unfold -- make no mistake about it, the famine was the regime's fault as was the mass loss of life. They had it in their means to prevent it and failed to do so. The story was much the same in China under Mao; in Ireland under British rule; in Europe during the Great Famine of 1315-1317. There is, quite simply, no such thing as a natural famine. I also do not buy the argument that there was no alternative but collectivisation, or at least not without the caveat that if collectivisation was necessary it did not need to be rolled out in the foolish manner in which it was.

Incidentally, on another point entirely, of the "Kulaks" deported some 40% were children which gives lie to the idea that the deportation programme was designed to root out the least co-operative of the Kulaks. The object of dekulakisation had nothing to do with class, which is why it was a purely arbitrary term, it was merely a tool of repression to compel peasants to conform to the state's disastrous agricultural collectivisation policies.

[Rafiq]

There is, quite simply, no such thing as a natural famine. I also do not buy the argument that there was no alternative but collectivisation, or at least not without the caveat that if collectivisation was necessary it did not need to be rolled out in the foolish manner in which it was.

With what was known at the time, if the goal is to modernize and industrialize the country as quickly as possible then no, there was no alternative. Of course the manner in which it was rolled out was catastrophic: But again, even if the hindsight was there, the organizational and structural means to prevent it was lacking. The Soviet bureaucracy was among the most chaotic, disorganized (yet) centralized state formations to ever exist - at least before the great purges.


The object of dekulakisation had nothing to do with class, which is why it was a purely arbitrary term, it was merely a tool of repression to compel peasants to conform to the state's disastrous agricultural collectivisation policies.

What a silly thing to say. The object of dekulakization had "nothing to do with class" - mind you, how would one qualify peasants? An ethnicity?

Indeed the term "kulak" is a class category for the simple reason that classes are historic formations. Even if 100% of peasants in the Soviet Union were kulaks, that would not make it a 'worthless category' for the simple reason that the goal of collectivization and subsequently the modernization of the country was the destruction of the peasantry as a class. "Kulak" here, like how the CCP used the term "Comprador bourgeoisie" in China is meaningful because it designates sections of classes in relation to their historic position.

For example, the comprador bourgeoisie was an "arbitrary" term used to designate members of the bourgeoisie who sided with foreign imperialists. Partisanship has implications at the level of class. The kulak stands for nothing more than those peasants who resisted their own annihilation as a class, or that element of the peasantry which was predisposed to holding on to previous conditions of life.

This is why China perfected Stalinism: the peasantry took active part in their own destruction as a class so that by the time of the reforms the transition to proletarianization was almost seamless.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Of course, but nothing like this had ever been done in history, and even if one could have the hindsight to carry it out without any catastrophic consequences, that would assume a level of control and even organization that did not exist in the Soviet Union.

Many make the mistake of being so terrified by the Soviet state exercising "absolute control" all the time, but the reality is that catastrophes like the Ukrainian famine were wrought from pure chaos, not some coldly calculated plan.


Whether or not we sympathize with the Soviet bureaucrats of the 30s, it is significant to critique these measures so their costs can be avoided in the future. It is also reasonable to ask whether things could have been done differently, and if we should hold those who put those policies in place responsible.



Yes, of course, the famine was undoubtedly not some "natural" occurrence (whatever that even means). But the modernization of the country was the highest priority, as far as sustaining the existence of the Soviet state was concerned. The line between famine and subsistence in this instance was very thin, as we all know - the transition to industrial agriculture was never a 'smooth' one in history, that is before globalization at least (and even this is questionable in some instances)."Modernization" is not an end in and of itself. It is only significant insofar as it brings serious material and social benefits. If a bunch of people have starved to death, it's hard to see how they have benefited from these reforms.

Moreover, the long term impact for others in Soviet society is questionable too. Let's look at the fruits of this "modernization". Many peasants were brought into the working class, but at the expense of alienating these people through the starvation of their neighbors and relatives by unaccountable bureaucrats. While the improved industrial capacity of the USSR helped it to withstand the assault of Nazi Germany and slowly catch up with an industrial race with the US for some time, the alienation of many Ukrainians drove them into the hands of reactionary Banderites and other pro-fascist forces. Later, the USSR was stuck purchasing agricultural goods from Western powers for much of its history due to insufficient production. This was disastrous during the oil glut when the Soviet Union lacked the finances to buy American food in the 80s. Finally, when the USSR finally collapsed, regions like the Ukraine were more than happy to leave despite demonstrable drops in living standards for a significant portion of society. Simply put, the results of starving the future "rural proletariat" (i.e Ukrainian peasants) were mixed at best for the Soviet Union. It neither makes political nor economic sense to starve the very people who produce your food.

[Rafiq]

While the improved industrial capacity of the USSR helped it to withstand the assault of Nazi Germany and slowly catch up with an industrial race with the US for some time, the alienation of many Ukrainians drove them into the hands of reactionary Banderites and other pro-fascist forces.

This is really exaggerated. The grand, overwhelming majority of Ukrainians who "welcomed" the Nazis were those in the newly annexed western Ukrainian regions that were compromised of a population that had only been a part of the Soviet Union for a few years. The majority of the Ukrainians, former peasants whose standard of living, cultural level, ETC. unarguably increased as a result of industrialization and collectivization, were loyal to the Soviet state during the war.


Later, the USSR was stuck purchasing agricultural goods from Western powers for much of its history due to insufficient production.

The history is far more complex. Firstly, the Soviet Union was a major agricultural exporter, their agricultural output was far better than before. That is not up for debate. It tried to maintain both exporting agricultural produce and using it for domestic purposes, which obviously led to complications. Despite any fall backs, it is silly to think that the Soviet Union didn't objectively modernize and industrialize its agricultural production. It did.

And O.K., no one is saying that the Soviet Union was actually sustainable or that there were no problems. The point is that only the Soviet Union, or something like it, was capable of destroying old traditional bonds and paving way for modern capitalist relations to exist. This isn't a debate about how able the Soviet Union was in serving the needs or desires of its population, but what was necessary to destroy old, precapitalist bonds.

And despite any of that, the goal in the 1930's was simply one of immediate survival. If the country did not industrialize or modernize, it would not survive, nevermind what might happen 60 years later which was beyond anyone's grasp, it was literally the only option, not only for the defense of the country but the only actual means of mobilizing sections of society and the state, in other words, it was the only means of actually re-invigorating society to do something rather than degenerate into chaos, political strife between rivaling factions (i.e. a civil war even!), or outright collapse.


Finally, when the USSR finally collapsed, regions like the Ukraine were more than happy to leave despite demonstrable drops in living standards for a significant portion of society

In every republic where the referendum on retaining the USSR was held in 1991, the overwhelming majority of people sought to retain it. 70% of Ukrainians in particular voted for the retention of the USSR. I don't really know what you're getting at.

[Invader Zim]

With what was known at the time if the goal is to modernize and industrialize the country as quickly as possible then no, there was no alternative. Of course the manner in which it was rolled out was catastrophic: But again, even if the hindsight was there, the organizational and structural means to prevent it was lacking. The Soviet bureaucracy was among the most chaotic, disorganized (yet) centralized state formations to ever exist - at least before the great purges.

Are you attempting to suggest that the regime's leadership and its middle-ranking functionaries existed in a vacuum, unaware of the growing disaster which was unfolding? That it was incapable of proper planning and consultation in order to construct sensible policy? Or that it was, somehow, incapable of reversing or even relaxing policy which was manifestly in the midst of plunging millions into famine?


What a silly thing to say.

You may believe it 'silly', but that does not prevent it being true.


Indeed the term "kulak" is a class category for the simple reason that classes are historic formations.

You are not addressing the point I made -- which is that the dekulakisation programme was not one concerned with addressing a class problem, but rather a tool of negative enforcement designed to terrify the peasantry into acquiescing to the regime's agricultural reforms.


Indeed the term "kulak" is a class category for the simple reason that classes are historic formations.

I have no idea what you mean by 'historic formation'. Is this to imply that they hold their basis in history, that they emerged in the past? Then it was very swift to germinate given that the entire tripartite class strata envisioned by the Soviets was a product of agricultural reforms only fifteen years prior to the Russian Revolution. But if so, then this does not mean that the idea of the 'kulak' had any real relevance to the Soviet agrarian system by second quarter of the 20th Century. The fact that neither the regime nor its functionaries had any measure of what actually constituted a 'kulak', and rounded up huge numbers of peasants virtually at random, should surely make that clear. The peasants certainly didn't know what it meant and neither did the regime.

Class designations, if they are to be meaningful and manifestly (yet again) the regime did not know what it meant as it applied to individuals, nor did its functionaries, and nor did the peasants. This isn't like the term 'bourgeoisie' which specifically refers to a specific group of individuals identifiable by their relationship to the means of production. 'Kulak' had no such precision in its meaning, rather by the time of collectivisation it was often interpreted as to simply mean 'wealthy' peasant. But 'wealth' is purely subjective and still harder to define. The result being that its wasn't meaningfully defined and, by extension, nor was the term 'kulak'.


The kulak stands for nothing more than those peasants who resisted their own annihilation as a class, or that element of the peasantry which was predisposed to holding on to previous conditions of life.

And there we have it, the term 'Kulak' does not have to mean anything beyond opposition, or at least perceived opposition, to measures which threatened the 'previous conditions of life', which for many actually included being able to live at all. In practical terms, it meant failure to obey the regimes agricultural commandments. Of course, some of those policies included sending goons to impoverished communities and seizing grain any opposition was sufficient to make that individual a 'kulak'. Of course, many others were simply rounded up, which explains why up to 40% of "Kulaks", imprisoned, deported to Siberia or outright murdered, were children under the age of 16 -- in other words, individuals who did not own land themselves and who were not wealthy.


This is why China perfected Stalinism: the peasantry took active part in their own destruction as a class so that by the time of the reforms the transition to proletarianization was almost seamless.

This is again totally ahistorical. In fact the Chinese peasantry was not destroyed as a class, either by itself or by the regime. Nor did the Great Leap Forward meet without opposition and nor was it a good idea either. Rather it was a total unmitigated disaster. A policy derived by individuals who had little understanding of agriculture and put into place by often brutal functionaries who realised that if they did not meet collectivisation targets then they would be dead. Meanwhile, as news of the unfolding crisis reached the regime's leadership, the response was to dismiss the plight and growing death toll as losing 'just one finger out of ten'.

[Emmett Till]

The issue isn't over collectivization itself but the methods utilized to realize that end.

There were specific policies of the USSR which obviously exacerbated famine, however. If you forcefully take most of a peasant's food production and export it to foreign countries to buy industrial equipment, you are liable to cause them to starve to death. Moreover, it simply doesn't make economic sense to starve your peasants while attempting to increase agricultural production.

This is not accurate. By far the best account is Wheatcroft's The Years of Hunger, which made clear that the export of some food for purchases was actually drastically reduced as soon as famine broke out. The only reason it wasn't ended altogether by Stalin, as was pointed out by a scholar in West Virginia whose name I've forgotten was that they had contracts with the Brits who had issued war threats if they weren't honored. Moreover as Wheatcroft explains, despite official Soviet claims that there was no famine in Ukraine, quietly significant famine relief programs were undertaken, they were just too little too late to prevent the catastrophe.

Basically, forced collectivization was, after the French expression, "worse than a crime, it was a mistake." The top Stalinist bureaucrats had managed to persuade themselves that most of the peasantry were eager to be collectivized, except for nasty conspiratorial kulaks. Being Stalinists, the last thing they would do is listen to voices of reality from below.

They thought that collectivization would *increase* food production! And it would have, if they had built all those tractor factories and cranked out lots of tractors before collectivization, instead of after.

The collossal ultraleft stupidity of the forced collectivization program meant that when the famine hit, the USSR actually didn't have enough grain stored to feed everybody, as the main form of peasant resistance in the Ukraine in particular (in some parts of the USSR it actually was fairly popular) was to say, you want to run agriculture, well, go ahead, include me out. So you had a vast decrease in food production, which Stalin naturally blamed on evil kulak conspiracies.

So, Stalin had two possible choices. Either (1) let peasants starve to death or (2) let workers, Red Army soldiers and Soviet bureaucrats starve to death. There were no others.

So, the USSR being a workers state run by a privileged bureaucracy, peasants starved to death.

BTW, although it is true that when millions of people die it's pretty much equally horrible exactly how many millions die, if quoting Wheatcroft one should use Wheatcroft's actual figures. His figure for Ukraine famine deaths was 3 million, not 5-7.

He also guessed 1.5 mill for Kazakhstan, but as we are talking about a nomad population where there were no censuses and nomads on camelback in huge numbers frequently crossed the Soviet/Chinese border in both directions, that's strictly guesswork, not based on solid research as with the Ukrainian situation.

[VivalaCuarta]

Stalin's crimes: the disastrous misleadership of the Chinese revolution, the "third period," the popular front, the murder of Leon Trotsky.

[Emmett Till]

Are you attempting to suggest that the regime's leadership and its middle-ranking functionaries existed in a vacuum, unaware of the growing disaster which was unfolding? That it was incapable of proper planning and consultation in order to construct sensible policy? Or that it was, somehow, incapable of reversing or even relaxing policy which was manifestly in the midst of plunging millions into famine?....


Rafiq is quite capable (indeed more than capable) of speaking for himself, but that is exactly what I am saying, and it is quite true, as Trotsky and Rakovsky pointed out at the time. And Wheatcroft has established that when the famine hit, despite desperate attempts to reverse the policy to the degree possible without factory workers instead of peasants dying of hunger, it was too late.

By the way, Oleg Khlevniuk, the best contemporary Russian historian in Russia, among his other very useful books published the minutes of the Politburo in the 1930s.

During the 1930s, there was exactly one attempt, ever, for Stalin's underlings to reverse one of Stalin's decisions. It was in the aftermath of the famine in 1934. Ordzhonikidze and Kaganovich, while Stalin was on vacation, tried to override Stalin's insistence on *ending* the importing of desperately needed steel pipe from abroad for factories, so that rubles could be shifted to agriculture. Naturally Stalin when he got back from vacation put an end to that!

[Emmett Till]

Stalin's crimes: the disastrous misleadership of the Chinese revolution, the "third period," the popular front, the murder of Leon Trotsky.

Yeah, them too. But ignoring economic policies that led to the death of millions of people is pretty problematic. "La Cuarta" in Trotsky's time most certainly didn't.

[Invader Zim]

Till here makes claims and cites Wheatcroft, yet can't even get the figures, or the central thesis or even the authorship of the book right -- poor old R. W. Davies is consigned to oblivion.

The argument presented in the book does not absolve the regime from blame and nor does it contradict my point. It was not until 1933, when failure had evolved to disaster, that disaster had evolved to famine, and that famine had long since evolved to mass mortality that serious action was taken. Before then, procurement targets remained ludicrously high, grain exports were retained, the collectivisation policies which had led to the collapse in live stock, ad infinitum, continued with only minimal change. In other words, they shrugged off action and refused to accept facts until after it was too late. And the argument that nothing could have been done in 1931 or 32 is absurd and contradicts your other assertions.

[ComradeAllende]

One should also understand that much of this related to the overwhelming ignorance of the peasants - life on the countryside provided no actual means of rationally articulating the events, many peasants viewed collectivization, which radically transformed a way of life that they could not even think beyond, as literally the end of the world. Some peasants, in a frenzy thought that Soviet collectivization meant the return of the old landowners and a return to serfdom. They articulated the events in a way that conformed to the categories of life that made sense to them.

I don't think "ignorance" is a proper characterization of the Soviet peasantry's motives; "risk-averse self-interest" seems to fit more adeptly. The peasants would have undoubtedly benefited from collectivization if it meant more access to higher-quality goods, but it would require a significant increase in agricultural (and thus industrial) productivity that would take years, if not decades, to materialize. Meanwhile, they'd have to tolerate the state "requisitioning" large portions of their product, all in the name of future prosperity.


The notion that collectivization itself was a crime is nonsense. Collectivization was absolutely necessary for the modernization of the country and there was no indication that the prerogatives of rightists like Bukharin would have solved the existential Soviet crisis of the peasantry...There was no alternative to collectivization, the peasantry were not organized in a way that would have even allowed for the private ownership of land to be used in a way that would fit the holistic developmental needs of the Soviet Union.

I'm curious as to why the Soviet government couldn't impose a tax on peasants and use the money to purchase their produce and subsidize technological development, as opposed to forcible confiscation. I guess my real question is why couldn't the government "stay the course" with the NEP (as opposed to full-blown collectivization)?

[ComradeOm]

On kulaks, it will come as little surprise to anyone that Rafiq is wrong and Zim is correct. I wrote a quick post on the subject a couple years back. (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2631504&postcount=7) I'd probably tweak it today, to account for how kulak was a 'discursive category', but the essence should still be correct. Soviet observers struggled with peasant categorisation because the social and political labels applied by outsiders to the peasant world bore little relation to realities within it. By the 1930s there was no real class content to a term like 'kulak' or the likes of 'kulak choirboy'.


This is not accurate. By far the best account is Wheatcroft's The Years of Hunger, which made clear that the export of some food for purchases was actually drastically reduced as soon as famine broke out. The only reason it wasn't ended altogether by Stalin, as was pointed out by a scholar in West Virginia whose name I've forgotten was that they had contracts with the Brits who had issued war threats if they weren't honored. Moreover as Wheatcroft explains, despite official Soviet claims that there was no famine in Ukraine, quietly significant famine relief programs were undertaken, they were just too little too late to prevent the catastrophe.

...

So, Stalin had two possible choices. Either (1) let peasants starve to death or (2) let workers, Red Army soldiers and Soviet bureaucrats starve to death. There were no others.This is what you got from that book? You didn't pick up on the degree to which gross state mismanagement of agriculture had created a poor harvest environment (in the quality of the sowing, the lack of draught power, etc)? Or that the struggle with food supplies had been a constant since the start of the FFYP? Or that all the warning signs in 1932 had been ignored? Or that the Politburo only admitted, privately, to famine in Feb 1933? Or that the state's response was half-hearted in light of previous Russian/Soviet famines?

Oh dear.

As Afanasev later put it, Stalin had the knack of turning crises into catastrophes. The Stalinist relentless crash programme, the product of the same blinkered TINA view that some inexplicably still defend today, was an unmitigated disaster for agriculture. It sparked food shortages throughout the FFYP (complaints against 'starvation rations' were rife from 1930 onwards) and placed the lives of millions on a knife-edge. As Davies said in an earlier work: "the policy of the Soviet government, which gambled every year that the harvest in the year concerned would be a good one, was inherently unrealistic".


BTW, although it is true that when millions of people die it's pretty much equally horrible exactly how many millions die, if quoting Wheatcroft one should use Wheatcroft's actual figures. His figure for Ukraine famine deaths was 3 million, not 5-7.No, Davies and Wheatcroft's "actual figures" are an estimate of approximately 5.7 million deaths. That is, almost at the centre of the range provided. It includes (rightfully) estimates as to both Kazakh and unregistered Soviet deaths. If quoting Davies and Wheatcroft one should use the numbers they provide, rather than arbitrarily subtracting entire categories to make the figures smaller.

[Rafiq]

On kulaks, it will come as little surprise to anyone that Rafiq is wrong and Zim is correct.

Holy shit, how predictable he is!

If you actually payed attention to the discussion, rather than inferred the most boring cliche's about my designation of the Kulaks as a legitimate class category, you would know that I already know that the Kulaks simply referred to those peasants who resisted collectivization, this understanding is implicit in my argument. You see where that groundless ignorance gets you?

And before you go on a tangent about how ridiculous that sounds to you, you should actually pay attention to the fucking discussion I am having with Zim which allows me to elaborate. God, like he thinks he's actually teaching everyone a lesson my pointing out a banality, something which is basically rudimentary knowledge anyone should have about collectivization.


Are you attempting to suggest that the regime's leadership and its middle-ranking functionaries existed in a vacuum, unaware of the growing disaster which was unfolding? That it was incapable of proper planning and consultation in order to construct sensible policy? Or that it was, somehow, incapable of reversing or even relaxing policy which was manifestly in the midst of plunging millions into famine?

No, but it seems you are suggesting you lack basic elementary knowledge about how giant, centralized bureaucratic states function. The thing about bureaucracy, especially in the Soviet Union is that even if every single middle ranking functionary, as well as the regime's leadership had a general idea about how to prevent the famine, this would get so entangled and chaotic that they probably would not have been able to prevent it anyway. Such was the disorganization of the Soviet state.

In hindsight, it may have been capable of "proper planning" and the construction of a "sensible" policy but that is a worthless observation: We know that's true because a famine such as the one that occurred in Ukrainje never occurred again in the Soviet Union. Ditto for post-GLF China. They learned from their mistakes.

The point which you lack appreciation for is the fact that collectivization of this sort had never occurred before in human history, this kind of consciously driven social transformation, in other words, had never occurred in history. In every "natural" destruction of old social bonds, and proletarianization - in western countries that is - there was always catastrophe, mass death by war, and famine, and in many the death tolls and level of catastrophe far exceed what happened in the Soviet Union. There is not one single exception. Yet historians will brush these off as "natural" and "inevitable" occurrences of life. What happened in the Soviet Union, given the circumstances, could not have been prevented. You can talk about the leadership "ignoring warning signs", fine. But why did they ignore them? There were plenty of "warnings" about collectivization in general from the rightists, among which that it was a task that simply could not be done in the time frame that was necessary. They were wrong.

Historians will excuse the "natural" famines of virtually every other region of the world that existed around the same time period because china's and the Soviet Union's famines were "man made", i.e. men ruthlessly manipulating social forces instead of letting nature take its course. That is why sensitivities regarding collectivization are nothing more than crocodile tears for any Communist in most circumstances. Yes it was catastrophic, but it was nowhere near the level of not only the famines proceeding it in other parts of the world experiencing industrialization, but parts of the world where hunger and starvation were normal parts of everyday life that no one gives a fuck about


You are not addressing the point I made -- which is that the dekulakisation programme was not one concerned with addressing a class problem, but rather a tool of negative enforcement designed to terrify the peasantry into acquiescing to the regime's agricultural reforms.

Do you carve up my posts and respond to them before you even read the whole thing? Yes I addressed the point you made, and the reason it is a silly one is simple: You claim it was "just a tool to terrify the peasantry into submission" and yet not a real class category. Collectivization eliminated the peasantry as a class and destroyed old traditional bonds in the countryside. Stalin prided himself on calling it the second revolution, and for good reason - it was a revolution, both socially, culturally, ETC.

For you to claim that "kulak" is not a relevant class category just because it has political, partisan significance emanates a deep lack of an understanding of what class actually means: They are historic categories insofar as they exist in juxtaposition to historic developments, so taking a side in the face of a moving history, which of course is political (i.e. "refusing to submit to the state") is relevant insofar as it refers to an element of a class which refuses its self-destruction.

I mean, take Trotsky, extrapolated from a logic deeply ingrained in Marx since the 18th Brumaire, and his analysis of the French revolution. The Jacobins were bourgeois even if most of the bourgeoisie did not support them. Why? Because of their historic relation to the prerogatives of the bourgeoisie who could not fulfill their own interests by merit of their immediate egotism. Or, more pertinently, take the big bourgeoisie of the English Civil War, who mostly sided with the absolutist state (as absolutism itself was a means of "compromising" with them, there were inevitable winners of this bargain) compared to the small landowners (who many mistaken for 'peasants' or 'lords') who sided with parliament.

The class categories wrought by Marxists for those events are still significant, because class is historic, we only become "class conscious" when we are Communists and proletarians - no other class in history can be class conscious.


I have no idea what you mean by 'historic formation'. Is this to imply that they hold their basis in history, that they emerged in the past? Then it was very swift to germinate given that the entire tripartite class strata envisioned by the Soviets was a product of agricultural reforms only fifteen years prior to the Russian Revolution.

You see Zim, you always wave your dick around about being such a great professional or whatever, and yet you have no notion of what these terms mean for Marxists. This is why I do not have any regard for your pretenses to "history", because history as understood by Hegelians is not history as understood by formalists.

History for Marxists is a moving thing, one that involves qualitative changes and new totalities. FOR EXAMPLE, a landed aristocracy in the 19th century is not the same as a landed aristocracy in the 14th century, EVEN IF in a vacuum they are identical, for the simple reason that they have different historic connotations and different relations to different totalities. ISIS is not actually a return to some Caliphate any more than Caesar's Legion is a return to the late Republic in the game Fallout: New Vegas (because you're a gamer, I hope you get this reference).

No, history does not refer to "the past", it refers to an active present in relation to underlying change, the emergence of a new totality, and so on. Or if you can wrap your mind around this 'common sense' Anglo-translation: Something is historical because it is about to "make history". Marx criticizes rivaling political economists on the basis that their understanding of capitalism is ahistorical, does not understand the present historical implications of capitalism.

Classes are historic formations because they relate to a moving history. In the case of Stalinism, history becomes immediately dependent on conscious action. So indeed, "refusing to capitulate to the Stalinist bureaucracy" or whatever CAN constitute a legitimate social category, because the prerogatives of that Stalinist bureaucracy have over-reaching transformative ramifications at the level of class relations.

Of course, the notion that it is just an 'excuse' for them to do what they want emanates a lack of an understanding of: WHAT do they want to do and WHY? "Personal gain"? What constitutes "personal gain" in the context of the early 1930's Soviet Union, and why? Cynics are such stupendous failures when it comes to matters of history.


and rounded up huge numbers of peasants virtually at random, should surely make that clear. The peasants certainly didn't know what it meant and neither did the regime.

So "randomly rounding up peasants" means rounding up those who resisted the new social transformation and collectivization? That's random how?


'Kulak' had no such precision in its meaning, rather by the time of collectivisation it was often interpreted as to simply mean 'wealthy' peasant. But 'wealth' is purely subjective and still harder to define. The result being that its wasn't meaningfully defined and, by extension, nor was the term 'kulak'.

This is a formalist notion of class only Stalinists, and "analytical Marxists" think is scientific. It is alien to both Marx, Lenin and our tradition in general. Classes can be partisan categories in relation to emerging social-historical formations. One does not "observe" class as some neutral person, the very notion of class itself is "biased" because it implicitly assumes classes are not 'natural' but in fact historic provisionalities. Ironically, Stalinists were very threatened by this notion of class, because would have squarely placed them on the historic chopping block in the long term, as their only historic significance was the elimination of old traditional bonds and making way for capitalist relations:

Read Stalin's understanding of class, he basically says "any neutral, passive scientist who is so inclined can see the truth of Marxism"

This is alien to the Marxism of Lenin (and all Marxists proceeding him). Classes only refer to those in relation to the conditions of life itself, not simply 'the economy' but the whole mode of life. Production for Marx was not production for the egoist bourgeoisie - it referred to the production and reproduction of societies themselves. If it were any other way, then Popper would be 'right' in saying that historical materialism is unfalsifiable because it attributes positivie causality to one factor "among many others" with equal 'empirical' evidence to sustain them, such as "religion" or "technology", ETC.


And there we have it, the term 'Kulak' does not have to mean anything beyond opposition

Incidentally it did, but Kulak more accurately refers to those elements of the peasantry that resisted the destruction of old social bonds. The goal was the elimination of the peasantry. "KULAK" was a NECESSARY term because it implied that not all peasants were kulaks or had to be, given that collectivization was at first somewhat attempted voluntarily and failed.

In the long run, most peasants did benefit from collectiivzation, in fact this is what instilled such great loyalties during WWII among them. As revisionist historians will point out, much of the "hoopla" was NOT simply totalitarian propaganda - people were really amazed at how rapidly things improved for them. The cult of personality, for example, was purely a result of this 'second revolution' and the means by which the social gains were interpreted by the peasants.

The problem was that there was no way of measuring beforehand, for peasants, how they could have had their lives improved with the narrow conditions of life they experienced: Think about many indigenous hunter-gatherer societies which refuse modernization in 2015. The peasants had no way of articulating, in their own understanding of the world, why or how they should abandon old traditional bonds. Hence, many peasants thought that their old landowners were coming back and serfdom was returning. Many thought it was the end of the world.



Of course, some of those policies included sending goons to impoverished communities and seizing grain any opposition was sufficient to make that individual a 'kulak'.

Yes, a common pathological archetype of not only collectivization but also the civil war. Such is the nature of bureaucracy, this is what you do not understand: at times of crisis, the holistic needs of the country came before the particular needs of this or that community. Such 'cold' thinking was necessary in the circumstances, and ditto goes for China. Unless you want to suggest the grain was seized so goons, local administrators or Stalin himself could bake 4000 cakes a day for self-consumption or some other clownish, pseudo-cynical explanation.


Of course, many others were simply rounded up, which explains why up to 40% of "Kulaks", imprisoned, deported to Siberia or outright murdered, were children under the age of 16 -- in other words, individuals who did not own land themselves and who were not wealthy.

Yes, I'm going to call bullshit on the notion that 40% of Kulaks sent to the gulag were kids. Attempting to find a source for this, I fail, but you can go ahead and give us yours.

Keep in mind what is wrought from common sense: IS IT POSSIBLE that those who were deported were in fact the orphaned children of the other 60% of kulaks who were deported? The idea that Soviet authorities were randomly taking people's kid away violates reason itself.

40% were 'deported'. Of course conditions were deplorable. But for the devil's advocate's sake, if they were orphaned, what alternative was there to relocating them? Leaving them on the street? Like what a pathetic, gross exaggeration - you are deliberately misleading everyone in this thread with such opportunism.

I know this because I am familiar with how the children of gulag parents were handled - if they were small enough, they were left to the care of their mothers in the camps, and when they got older they were removed. Not even the most slanderous lies have accused the Soviet state of sending kids to gulag camps to work. Please, it's so cute how such bourgeois sensitivities are so pathological. Even through basic Soviet ideological discourse, tehre is a soft-spot for children: Children, in Soviet ideology, were innocent at least at an official level, and were capable of being redeemed. This is a reoccuring theme in Soviet propaganda, and no, it was not cynical - it is an integral part of Stalinist discourse.

What you say contradicts all of the historians who talk about how children whose parents were arrested faced social stigma and discrimination by teachers and peers - which is believable. Saying that they were outright sent to camps for no fucking reason is just stupid. Even from an evil man's perspective, children under 16 can't do any work, and furthermore, it is expensive to imprison them.


This is again totally ahistorical. In fact the Chinese peasantry was not destroyed as a class, either by itself or by the regime. Nor did the Great Leap Forward meet without opposition and nor was it a good idea either. Rather it was a total unmitigated disaster.

K, where is the Chinese peasantry today? The marginalized Chinese rural workers, and petty bourgeoisie in 2015 are not peasants in any real sense of the term, they are a historic malformation. Of course the Chinese peasantry, or the older social bonds were destroyed with the active mass mobilization of actual peasnats throughout the countryside. This is what was the BASIC DISTINGUISHING feature of Maoism vis a vis orthodox Marxism Leninism: Maosim was of the rural petty bourgeoisie, it mobilized them for the romantic bourgeois revolution where the national bourgeoisie, fat from China's backwardness, could not lead.

And not here to debate about the GLF, I imagine this post is long enough for you. I'll just leave it at: The GLF would have led to society-wide collapse had the peasantry not remained loyal to the state at the time, even figures would talk about how it was only the "goodness of the people" that prevented outright collapse.

[Rafiq]

I'm curious as to why the Soviet government couldn't impose a tax on peasants and use the money to purchase their produce and subsidize technological development, as opposed to forcible confiscation. I guess my real question is why couldn't the government "stay the course" with the NEP (as opposed to full-blown collectivization)?

Because industrialization, simply put, also meant the necessity of industrial, mechanized agriculture, necessary labor power for urban factories, urban developments that were impossible so long as most were in the countryside, and so on. Industrialization required a massive social transformation that was not going to be facilitated 'naturally', in other words. The Russian empire might have been industrializing, but this was combined and uneven development - major urban centers were industrializing but old social bonds would be left in place. No land reform would have solved this problem, the peasants were simply at a social level too immersed in old traditonal bonds.

I cannot stress enough that not every nation takes the same route as the west - there is no reason to think that china, the middle east, would have 'naturally' reached what we call modernity on their own. The Aztec empire emerged in the 1500s, and in Africa 'traditional' state formations (Great Zimbabwe, Ashanti, ETC.) did not emerge until around the same time or later. This is all arbitrary: there are multiple paths history can take, at different times, for totally arbitrary reasons. Most of history is the result of the diffusion of practices, but again, without the clash with Greece, there is no reason to think Persia's "asiatic" production would have not endured, and so on.

They could have had technological development all they wanted, but how would they implement it? What happened during the NEP showed that the peasantry were not going to 'naturally' industrialize agriculture, many would get parasitically rich and fattened at the expense of the whole country. As Trotsky noted, the historical development of the Russian Empire was not the same as it was in the west - Trotsky even went as far as to compare the rural development of the Russian nation to that of China, rather than the west. Solzhenitsyn is right to accuse the Bolsheviks of importing "western, alien values" to Russia, and we commend them for it. Only scum fetishize old traditional bonds, "traditional" leaders like Buthelezi were on the payroll of the apartheid government while the ANC imported "alien" western ideas, the same goes for the history of virtually every other country - Saudi Arabia, Pakistan vis a vis the bonapartist secular states, and so on.

Maybe if the whole country survived up until globalization, something different could have happened (I highly, highly doubt this by the way). But who would have known that, and furthermore, to assume this would have even been possible without a catastrophe 1000x worse is very naive.

[Emmett Till]

Till here makes claims and cites Wheatcroft, yet can't even get the figures, or the central thesis or even the authorship of the book right -- poor old R. W. Davies is consigned to oblivion.

The argument presented in the book does not absolve the regime from blame and nor does it contradict my point. It was not until 1933, when failure had evolved to disaster, that disaster had evolved to famine, and that famine had long since evolved to mass mortality that serious action was taken. Before then, procurement targets remained ludicrously high, grain exports were retained, the collectivisation policies which had led to the collapse in live stock, ad infinitum, continued with only minimal change. In other words, they shrugged off action and refused to accept facts until after it was too late. And the argument that nothing could have been done in 1931 or 32 is absurd and contradicts your other assertions.

Yeah, I might have mentioned Davies, except that Wheatcroft was previously wrongly cited in this thread not Davies. Also the fact that I've met and chatted with Wheatcroft had an influence, I like the guy. I could easily cite stuff by Davies making similar points to the ones I made. I've always liked his line abut the USSR under Stalin as the "dictatorship of the ex-proletariat." Figures wrong? Your memory is failing you. Maybe W and D said 3.1 million in Ukraine instead of 3 million, big deal.

On the grain exports, Mark Tauger (now I remember the name from the guy from W.Va.) wrote the decisive analysis. He and Wheatcroft have had their disagreements, but not on that point.

Famine only really began spring '32, and illusions that it was a temporary pre-harvest affair that would resolve itself once the grain came in were rampant at the top early on. And by then the policy was essentially irreversible except in minor ways, as later in spring '33. The forced grain procurements from Ukraine were the only thing preventing mass urban starvation.

I should hope the analysis in the book did not absolve the regime for responsibility for the famine. I certainly don't!

[Emmett Till]

On kulaks, it will come as little surprise to anyone that Rafiq is wrong and Zim is correct. I wrote a [url=http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2631504&postcount=7]

This is what you got from that book? You didn't pick up on the degree to which gross state mismanagement of agriculture had created a poor harvest environment (in the quality of the sowing, the lack of draught power, etc)? Or that the struggle with food supplies had been a constant since the start of the FFYP? Or that all the warning signs in 1932 had been ignored? Or that the Politburo only admitted, privately, to famine in Feb 1933? Or that the state's response was half-hearted in light of previous Russian/Soviet famines?

Oh dear.

Yes, I picked up on all those things. In the exact context of the posting I replied to, they were of secondary relevance. Although that the Politburo was only willing to admit even to themselves behind closed doors that there was a famine helps prove my point I should think.


As Afanasev later put it, Stalin had the knack of turning crises into catastrophes. The Stalinist relentless crash programme, the product of the same blinkered TINA view that some inexplicably still defend today, was an unmitigated disaster for agriculture. It sparked food shortages throughout the FFYP (complaints against 'starvation rations' were rife from 1930 onwards) and placed the lives of millions on a knife-edge. As Davies said in an earlier work: "the policy of the Soviet government, which gambled every year that the harvest in the year concerned would be a good one, was inherently unrealistic".

Sure. Trotsky and Rakovsky, as I pointed out earlier, said exactly the same things at the time.


No, Davies and Wheatcroft's "actual figures" are an estimate of approximately 5.7 million deaths. That is, almost at the centre of the range provided. It includes (rightfully) estimates as to both Kazakh and unregistered Soviet deaths. If quoting Davies and Wheatcroft one should use the numbers they provide, rather than arbitrarily subtracting entire categories to make the figures smaller.

As has been pointed out already on this thread, exactly how many millions died is besides the point for evaluation, millions of people dying are equally condemnable whether you are talking about 3, 5, 7, or any other number in single digits. But since you raised it...

I said he said 3 million in Ukraine. Right or wrong? This thread is about the "holodomor," the "famine plague" in Ukraine, so those are the relevant figures. I did not give a total USSR figure, so did not engage in any "arbitrary subtractions."

I think whereas his estimates for Ukraine are well researched and solid on his part, including research trips to Ukraine as well as actual Soviet census figures, his million and a half for Kazakhstan is speculative with a weak foundation. If you look at what he wrote in the book, you'd find it hard to claim otherwise.

Now, in Kazakhstan as opposed to Ukraine, you had a nomadic population on camelback being forced into agricultural collectivization, a much worse idea than forced collectivization in Ukraine actually. Which was Stalin's attitude also. He had simply ignored Kazakhstan altogether, and when he finally got around to noticing what the local leadership was up to, he had them purged and the policy was immediately abandoned. How many Kazakhs died as a result of local irresponsibility for which Stalin certainly bears the ultimate responsibility is something much harder to determine, but this is a very different story from Ukraine (and the Cossack lands btw, a similar story to Ukraine).

[ComradeOm]

No, but it seems you are suggesting you lack basic elementary knowledge about how giant, centralized bureaucratic states function. The thing about bureaucracy, especially in the Soviet Union is that even if every single middle ranking functionary, as well as the regime's leadership had a general idea about how to prevent the famine, this would get so entangled and chaotic that they probably would not have been able to prevent it anyway. Such was the disorganization of the Soviet state.

In hindsight, it may have been capable of "proper planning" and the construction of a "sensible" policy but that is a worthless observation: We know that's true because a famine such as the one that occurred in Ukrainje never occurred again in the Soviet Union. Ditto for post-GLF China. They learned from their mistakes.Resolve this contradiction for me. Your first paragraph argues that the Soviet state was such a bureaucratic mess that it could not have stopped a famine even if it had wanted and known how to. The second praises the state for learning its lesson and preventing further famines (and that it could in fact plan sensibly?).

So how did the experience of the famine transform the Soviet state? I mean, if 'disorganisation' made action impossible before 1933 then what changed within the apparatus to make it possible post-1933? Why did the bureaucratic paralysis suddenly lift, and 'sensible planning become possible, only after millions had died?

While you're answering that, why was this secret knowledge exclusively gained through the 1932-33 famine? Russia/USSR had experienced two major famines within living memory prior to the 1930s and the struggle for grain had been a defining feature of the previous decade. What was special about the knowledge gained in 1933 that couldn't have been learnt from previous crises?

But let's move past the contradiction and look at this alibi of impotence further.

Disorganisation made any response impossible but then who was responsible for the policies that actually caused this famine? If the state was so grossly incompetent that it was effectively powerless then who was making and promulgating policy? Who was handing down targets for area sown and grain yields? Where did the quotas come from? Why was it that collective farm membership actually did change depending on Moscow's whims? Why was a change of course impossible in 1932 when it had been in 1930 (https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1930/03/02.htm)? How was the centre able to secure its grain, by force if needed, yet apparently couldn't change its policy before the famine?

There's quite a few questions there that you're going to have to answer if you want anyone to believe that the Soviet state could not have prevented famine or changed/relaxed its policies even if it had wanted to.


In the long run, most peasants did benefit from collectiivzation, in fact this is what instilled such great loyalties during WWII among them. As revisionist historians will point out, much of the "hoopla" was NOT simply totalitarian propaganda - people were really amazed at how rapidly things improved for them. The cult of personality, for example, was purely a result of this 'second revolution' and the means by which the social gains were interpreted by the peasants. This is pure adulterated bollocks.

In the first place, peasants did not gain from collectivisation. At least not in Stalin's lifetime. Leaving aside the millions who died in the short-term (although I don't think they benefited much), collectivisation saw a collapse in peasant living standards. Consumption would not reach NEP levels until the later 1950s and manufactured goods remained scare. This shouldn't be a surprise: the state was taking a larger share of grain (via the kolkhozy) while overall production and production per head (in 1940) remained below 1913 levels. (Davies, Soviet Economic Development from Lenin to Khrushchev; Wheatcroft, Soviet Living Standards)

In addition to the grim economic news, the idea that the peasants simply welcomed the destruction of their own institutions and their herding onto collective farms is hard to credit. I don't even know where to start with this one. See Fitzpatrick's Stalin's Peasants and Viola's Peasant Rebels under Stalin for countless examples of the peasantry's sullen nature and passive resistance post-collectivisation. Plenty of Soviet peasants did welcome the Nazis, it took time for the peasantry to be mobilised against the invaders.

And the idea that the cult of personality was driven from below by the joyful peasant masses is just too absurd to waste time on. I'm going to shift the burden of proof on that one to you.

"In the long run" none of the above began to change until the post-Stalin reforms eased the state's burden on the peasantry. By this point the peasants had done what they could to avail of 'weapons of the weak', looking to subvert Soviet institutions from the ground up (a form of 'peasantisation' rather than 'modernisation'). But the collective farms remained a burden on the Soviet state until the end - never realising the initial hopes for them.


This thread is about the "holodomor,"...No it's not.


...his million and a half for Kazakhstan is speculative with a weak foundation. If you look at what he wrote in the book, you'd find it hard to claim otherwise.I would, actually. Kazakhstan lacks the robustness of the registered deaths that we have for Ukraine but then even these hardly inspire confidence. It requires an additional million or so unregistered deaths in Ukraine to bring them into line with census data. Let's not pretend that that's anything but what it is - a crude estimate but as good as we'll get.

The same 'gap' in the census suggests that the Kazakh population was 1-2m lower in 1939 than it should have been. What we don't know for sure is how many of these fled to China. While some have suggested approx 200k exiles (eg Tatimov), ultimately I see no reason why the number would be greater than those displaced internally within the USSR. That is, something in the hundreds of thousands but not more. There's no evidence for movement of 2m Kazakhs into China and Afghanistan.

And while we don't have registered death numbers to form a baseline in Kazakhstan, we do have plenty of reports (which Davies and Wheatcroft reference) that refer to the harshness of the famine and decrease in population. Given all this, I see no problem with a range of 1-1.5m.

[Invader Zim]

No, but it seems you are suggesting you lack basic elementary knowledge about how giant, centralized bureaucratic states function.

In that case, why don't you enlighten me?


The thing about bureaucracy, especially in the Soviet Union is that even if every single middle ranking functionary, as well as the regime's leadership had a general idea about how to prevent the famine, this would get so entangled and chaotic that they probably would not have been able to prevent it anyway. Such was the disorganization of the Soviet state.


There are two issues here worth exploration:

1. If this were the case, and it isn't, how, precisely was the regime capable of achieving anything of any major significance? And how, in the final analysis, was the regime, after February 1933, actually able to halt the famine at all? Clearly the regime, once it had finished burying its head in the sand, was entirely capable of cranking its vast bureaucracy into action in a long belated effort to mitigate the famine it had unleashed.

2. Your making claims about the capabilities and functionality of the bureaucracy does not make them so. Care to prove some detailed evidence regarding how this bureaucracy actually operated? Simply stating that it was vast and unwieldy is not evidence of anything. I would like you to provide some.



In hindsight, it may have been capable of "proper planning" and the construction of a "sensible" policy but that is a worthless observation: We know that's true because a famine such as the one that occurred in Ukrainje never occurred again in the Soviet Union. Ditto for post-GLF China. They learned from their mistakes.

The point which you lack appreciation for is the fact that collectivization of this sort had never occurred before in human history, this kind of consciously driven social transformation, in other words, had never occurred in history. In every "natural" destruction of old social bonds, and proletarianization - in western countries that is - there was always catastrophe, mass death by war, and famine, and in many the death tolls and level of catastrophe far exceed what happened in the Soviet Union. There is not one single exception. Yet historians will brush these off as "natural" and "inevitable" occurrences of life. What happened in the Soviet Union, given the circumstances, could not have been prevented.

Where to begin with this? Well, for a start you do not provide a single shred of evidence for any point that you have made here. You contend that the FFYP was unique, yet also suggest that it fruitfully be compared with other major upheavals which caused mass death. Which is it? Second, why should the FFYP be located on the pedestal upon which you have placed it? Third, historians do not, in fact, brush of war or famine as ‘inevitable’, in fact they do precisely the reverse. Indeed, the bloodiest, deadliest wars of the 20th Century, have involved vast swathes of literature dedicated to understanding who was at fault and what went wrong. The fact is that historians, by and large, do not take a deterministic attitude to the past.


You can talk about the leadership "ignoring warning signs", fine. But why did they ignore them? There were plenty of "warnings" about collectivization in general from the rightists, among which that it was a task that simply could not be done in the time frame that was necessary. They were wrong.

The warning signs did not come from the ‘rightists’, they came from the situation on the ground – which the regime’s elites well informed of. But, let’s see what kind of warning signs there actually were. Well, for a start between October 1931 and March 1932 there were some 616 food riots which included more than 55,000 demonstrators, meanwhile starving peasants raided grain stores across the effected regions, and as early as 1931 several regions had been thrown into full scale famine. There were also clear knock-on effects on industry, in early 1932 in Vichuga, for instance, a child’s daily bread ration plunged from an already meagre 100 grams to just 60 grams. Reports of mass starvation and unrest had already percolated up the ranks of the regime and had reached the highest echelons of the bureaucracy. For instance, to just take one example of a very great many, in March 1932, the perilous situation and unrest in Vichuga reached Stalin’s desk. Was anything done? Was anything even attempted? No and no.

You then proceed to note that nothing could be done. But this simply was not the case. How do we know this? The answer is perfectly simple, because, following the autumn of 1932 the regime did begin to rapidly shift its policy. The unrealistic procurement targets began to be relaxed from the second half of 1932. From January 1933 peasants were, once again, allowed to sell and livestock. But these were fairly minor shifts in policy. In March 1933, as literally millions were dying, Stalin, who rather than look to his own policies for the root cause of the problem, blamed the peasants for their laziness and, evoking Lenin, pronounced that ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat’. Yet, by this stage, even Stalin could not continue to ignore the evidence and around 20,000 workers were dispatched to the farms crush any opposition and get them running properly, introduced food relief, and provided grain, while slashing procurement targets. Combined with good a dose of good weather and conditions, the result was that the regime by shifting policy virtually on its axel was able to prevent another harvest failure and belatedly turn the corner. Contrary to your assertions, there is no reason why this complete change of policy could not have been introduced earlier. As Oleg V. Khlevnuik notes, “Stalinist policy was the main cause of the brutal famine”, and it is no coincidence that once those policies changed the famine began to recede.

So, now that we have established that something could have been done (and eventually was done) it begs the question, why did it take a full blown demographic collapse across entire regions, before the regime did do something? The answer is simple, because the regime did not want to do anything about it until that point. It was ideologically committed to the programme it had placed into motion. The peasantry was between the regimes ideological hammer and the anvil or economic reality.


Do you carve up my posts and respond to them before you even read the whole thing? Yes I addressed the point you made, and the reason it is a silly one is simple: You claim it was "just a tool to terrify the peasantry into submission" and yet not a real class category. Collectivization eliminated the peasantry as a class and destroyed old traditional bonds in the countryside. Stalin prided himself on calling it the second revolution, and for good reason - it was a revolution, both socially, culturally, ETC.

I agree that the term ‘peasant’ is not a precise term, which limits its usefulness, but at least it has some utility where the term ‘kulak’ does not. Indeed, its only utility is to describe those peasants actively victimised by the regime. Your second claim that collectivisation ‘eliminated’ the peasantry is, of course, contradictory with your previous statement. How could the regime ‘eliminate’ a class category which was not ‘real’? And therein lies one of many problems with the entire enterprise. Repression of agricultural communities in an effort to eliminate the ‘kulaks’ was one of several key driving factors in the economic collapse.



You see Zim, you always wave your dick around about being such a great professional or whatever

I’ve never described myself as a ‘great professional’, and note, you’re the one bringing it up – not I. As for what these terms ‘mean’, we aren’t talking about a Marxist understanding of them we are talking about your understanding them. You are not on authority on Marxism, Marx or Marxist thought and the best thing you can do is to drop this delusion that you are.


So "randomly rounding up peasants" means rounding up those who resisted the new social transformation and collectivization? That's random how?

Because opponents of the regime were not the only individuals rounded up – very far from it. As noted, 40% of the victims (sentenced to slave labour, imprisonment, deportation and shooting) were children. The object was mass repression, not the elimination of a particular class of the peasantry.


This is a formalist notion of class only Stalinists, and "analytical Marxists" think is scientific. It is alien to both Marx, Lenin and our tradition in general. Classes can be partisan categories in relation to emerging social-historical formations. One does not "observe" class as some neutral person, the very notion of class itself is "biased" because it implicitly assumes classes are not 'natural' but in fact historic provisionalities. Ironically, Stalinists were very threatened by this notion of class, because would have squarely placed them on the historic chopping block in the long term, as their only historic significance was the elimination of old traditional bonds and making way for capitalist relations:

Read Stalin's understanding of class, he basically says "any neutral, passive scientist who is so inclined can see the truth of Marxism"

This is alien to the Marxism of Lenin (and all Marxists proceeding him). Classes only refer to those in relation to the conditions of life itself, not simply 'the economy' but the whole mode of life. Production for Marx was not production for the egoist bourgeoisie - it referred to the production and reproduction of societies themselves. If it were any other way, then Popper would be 'right' in saying that historical materialism is unfalsifiable because it attributes positivie causality to one factor "among many others" with equal 'empirical' evidence to sustain them, such as "religion" or "technology", ETC.

None of this actually addresses the point I was making, which was a critique of the regime’s use of the label. I am not ‘formulating’ a notion of what ‘defines’ the ‘kulak’ class, I am noting why the regime’s attempt to target it based on factors, such as wealth, led to a completely imprecise policy.

And what, one might well ask is a ‘provisionality’? That isn’t even a word. It doesn’t mean anything.


Yes, I'm going to call bullshit on the notion that 40% of Kulaks sent to the gulag were kids. Attempting to find a source for this, I fail, but you can go ahead and give us yours.

My pleasure:

Michael Kaznelson, ‘Remembering the Soviet State: Kulak Children and Dekulakisation’, in Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 59, No. 7 (Nov., 2007), pp. 1163-1177.


Keep in mind what is wrought from common sense: IS IT POSSIBLE that those who were deported were in fact the orphaned children of the other 60% of kulaks who were deported? The idea that Soviet authorities were randomly taking people's kid away violates reason itself.

Which is NOT what I claimed, of course, children were primarily victimised because of their parents perceived status as opposed to their own. That isn’t the point; the point is that the policy was a form of collective punishment which made no allowance for an individual’s status or that of their dependents. The result was that the largest single group to fall victim to dekulakisation were children. But, of course, that was the point, dekulakisation was a campaign of terror, it against the peasantry as a whole, not individuals who failed to conform.


I know this because I am familiar with how the children of gulag parents were handled - if they were small enough, they were left to the care of their mothers in the camps, and when they got older they were removed. Not even the most slanderous lies have accused the Soviet state of sending kids to gulag camps to work. Please, it's so cute how such bourgeois sensitivities are so pathological. Even through basic Soviet ideological discourse, tehre is a soft-spot for children: Children, in Soviet ideology, were innocent at least at an official level, and were capable of being redeemed. This is a reoccuring theme in Soviet propaganda, and no, it was not cynical - it is an integral part of Stalinist discourse.

Where did I claim that young children were sent to the camps as labourers? As usual, you are addressing arguments that you have pulled out of your ass. And, as it happens, whether or not a child worked at one of the infamous camps, like Narym, is irrelevant. Damage to health and physical and emotional scarring remained profound, as were death rates.


K, where is the Chinese peasantry today? The marginalized Chinese rural workers, and petty bourgeoisie in 2015 are not peasants in any real sense of the term,

Ah, yes. Peasants into workers! The CPC say's so, therefore it must be true.

Yeah.

[Wyboth]

See section 1 of this post, comrade: reddit.com/r/communism/wiki/debunk

It debunks many of the things Stalin is accused of, and it links to actual sources, instead of merely speculating, or relying on anecdotes.

[Rafiq]

Resolve this contradiction for me. Your first paragraph argues that the Soviet state was such a bureaucratic mess that it could not have stopped a famine even if it had wanted and known how to. The second praises the state for learning its lesson and preventing further famines (and that it could in fact plan sensibly?).

There is no contradiction, unless we presuppose that the Soviet state had the necessary and adequate knowledge to deal with the famine that they gained following 1933, which is ridiculous. But moreover, what is PAINFULLY FUCKING STUPID about this argument is that collectivization had only occurred once, following the destruction of the peasantry as a class, it would have been impossible to repeat the mistakes of 1933 for the simple reason that the turbulence, structural and bureaucratic chaos that was brought by such a rapid transition was no longer there - what you fail to understand is that collectivization heralded not only a structural change in how Soviet society was administrated (it LITERALLY brought about new forms of the organization of life) but the ideological and cultural character of the Soviet state in general, it was through collectivization and following that produced "socialist realism", that ensured the formalization of Marxism and the dialectic, and - as noted by other theorists - which brought about institutional changes that were regressions into bourgeois civic values, such as the morality surrounding legality.

If you payed attention to my post, my point was that even if it was known, at the level of what we can call "structural knowledge", or autonomous structural-bureaucratic traditions derived from experience and experience alone, and the individual knowledge of concern. Formalists, of course, think that a totality is merely the sum-total of many different parts, when in reality, parts are the totality of their inter-relations. You simply do not understand the "bizarre", "incoherent" and "mystical-Hegelian gibberish" logic I was using: The point was that the necessary cohesion between the leadership, and all the middle-ranking functionaries at the level of actual structural processes did not proceed collectivization or the famine.

If you actually read the point, you would know that in context what constitutes hindsight is NOT SIMPLY having "a general idea about how to prevent the famine" but institutionally and structurally ingrained experience. To speak of "contradictions" needing resolution from not being able to distinguish a "general idea about how to prevent the famine" with specialized knowledge about how to, institutionally ingrained following the famine, is your problem, not mine.

Precisely what you fail to understand is that at the level of bureaucratic disorganization and chaos, having a "general idea" about how to do something is not enough. Furthermore, the argument so ironic considering the fact that - the Soviet leadership DID seek to prevent a famine and a social catastrophe. If this was not the case, then the famine would not have been relieved as "quickly" as it was.


What was special about the knowledge gained in 1933 that couldn't have been learnt from previous crises?

It literally surprises me that you would ask this. What were the CONDITIONS surrounding the 1933 famine that distinguished it from previous famines, Om? Intense grain requisitions? In this context that is nothing more than a fucking abstraction - under the backdrop of what events led to the mass requisition of grain? And it is simple: Collectivization. That you are equipped with the experience of famines wrought from entirely different circumstances is not going to give you the necessary experience to deal with a famine in the midst of a qualitative, over-reaching change in the relations to production. Again, prior to Soviet collectivization there had never been, at the level of consciously-driven social transformation anything on the scale to it, there had never been such a profound and rapid change as far as agricultural production was concerned as during Soviet collectivization. Collectivization was distinguished insofar as it IRREVERSIBLY revolutionized agricultural production (to conform to industrial demands), again, Stalin RIGHTFULLY called it the "second" revolution, it was.


Disorganisation made any response impossible but then who was responsible for the policies that actually caused this famine?

I love how you mention the 'relaxation' of 1930, because as it happened, following this relaxation of collectivization, the amount of peasants in the new agricultural collectives literally halved, they simply left. The decision made in 1930 led to a reversal of the Soviet state's gains vis a vis collectivization. Please just stop.

What is particularly stupid about this argument is the fact that the point of measuring the Soviet state's level of disorganization was the experience of collectivization - that the imperative or ability to carry it out with the level of organization they had was there sais nothing about the ability to prevent a famine that would consume some 3-7 million lives. The famine was a catastrophe, no doubt, but it did not destroy the country, so that already implies a level of organization in place. You fail to understand that even the smallest misstep in this circumstance could lead to total catastrophe. What would have been necessary in order to halt the famine would have required specialized consideration of what was necessary for grain production in relation to the needs of the Red Army, urban areas, and for export in relation to the technical demands of industrialization.

So at this level, we are already dealing with the inner-intricacies of over-reaching central planning, not 'planning in general'. You simply fail to understand the context of my argument: In other words, the RELATIVE nature of the bureaucratic disorganization. Relative to being able to exist and carry out a general plan, of course it was organized, but relative to be able to account for all of these factors at once, i.e. to carry out that general plan flawlessly, no, it was chaotic.

A fact which you are not appreciating is the fact that bureaucracies always entail a level of organization - the chaos emerges at the level of the intricacies of local considerations, i.e. "immediate" ones, whether of the community or of individuals. What you say is so silly, you may as well argue that the famine relief which followed is some enigma according to my argument.


How was the centre able to secure its grain, by force if needed, yet apparently couldn't change its policy before the famine?

The "centre's" ability to secure its grain and its inability to stop the famine were both conditions of each other. The former took priority over the latter, for the simple reason that 'preventing the famine' in that context could have led to the starvation of the cities and other areas. Those particular 3-7 million's lives could have been saved, perhaps, but at what expense? Again, I love getting to this argument, because this is where your cheap cynicism enters: the bureaucracy's desire to "hold power" or some other egoistic reason. This is pathetic - WHY did it want to retain power, what were the conditions of its power, for example?

If your argument boils down to: If the regime was competent enough to carry out collectivization in the first place, why was it too incompetent to prevent famine? Well fuck me, I don't know Om, why don't you - say - think about it? This argument is not about whether the state was capable of carrying out collectivization successfully but whether it was capable of doing it in the most competent, catastrophe-proof way. I argue only in hindsight was it capable of doing this, and again, that is a worthless observation as far as "accountability" is concerned.

You cannot approach the matter as anything more than a tragedy, it was not a crime. With the historic circumstances in place, there was simply no alternative.


In the first place, peasants did not gain from collectivisation. At least not in Stalin's lifetime. Leaving aside the millions who died in the short-term (although I don't think they benefited much), collectivisation saw a collapse in peasant living standards. Consumption would not reach NEP levels until the later 1950s and manufactured goods remained scare.

Yes, they did. You can measure living standards in terms of "consumption", but the majority of peasants measured it in terms of the education (and subsequently career opportunities), healthcare, elevation of their cultural level, among other things they would experience. Collectivization saw a collapse of "peasant living standards", well yes - the peasantry were destroyed as a class and subsequently the living conditions of the peasantry with them. However, new social formations emerged and the living standard were simply unarguably better.

From 1928-1940, the total state budget in millions of rubles, including persons employed in those sectors (meaning it was not simply a product of 'inflation') for education and health services almost twenty fold.

But nevermind that. The notion that per capita consumption fell is not without criticism in the very field you profess to be an expert in, as you should know - the calculations made by, say, Bergson, are questionable. This paper, for example, deals some the issues regarding how inflation was measured:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.120.871&rep=rep1&type=pdf

The modern theory of index numbers suggests a better procedure. Instead of using Paasche or Laspeyres indices, "superlative" index numbers would be a better choice (Diewert 1976, Allen and Diewert 1981). Examples include the Fisher Ideal index (the geometric average of the Paasche and Laspeyres), the Tornqvist-Divisia index, and many others. All of these indices use the spending shares from both years in calculating inflation. Calculating the rate of inflation between successive pairs of years with a superlative index like the Fisher Ideal and then chain linking them would allow the weights to follow the change in consumption patterns over time, would use more information in calculating inflation between successive dates, and would not arbitrarily privilege the spending pattern in one year as does Bergson's choice of the Paasche index or, indeed, as would a preference for the Laspeyres. Common sense, as well as modern
economic theory, supports the use of superlative indices like the Fisher Ideal: After all, if the Paasche and the Laspeyres indices differ widely, doesn't it make more sense to use an average of the two rather than to rely on one to the exclusion of the other? Table 2, first two columns, puts this theory into practice. Inflation is measured with a Fisher ideal price index. As a result, per capita consumption grows by 17%.

[...]

When consumer expenditure weights are used to aggregate the output of the consumer goods industries, per capita consumption grew by 27% in the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1937--2.7% per year, on average. When value added weights are used the cumulative increase is 30% for an average annual rate of 3.0%. Either weighting implies a substantial rate of growth. In fact, the figures imply an even higher growth rate when the most recent population estimates are used. Tables 1-5 use Bergson's population figures, which show a 9% increase from 1928 to 1937, as indicated. These figures, however, have been superceded by recent demographic reconstructions based on suppressed information discovered in the archives. The population history of Andreev, Darskii, and Kar'kova (1990, p. 41, 27 The constituent series are available 15 annually to compute all components of consumption except services. These components were, therefore, calculated by the same procedures previously described. Values for services are available for 1928, 1937, and 1940. Intermediate values were interpolated. I use the population estimates of Andreev, Darskii, and Kar'kova. 1994, p. 85) places the growth in population between 1928 and 1937 at 7%. Hence, the growth in per capita consumption between 1928 and 1937 was 32% (not 30%) and the annual growth rate was 3.2%. Using the population estimates of Andreev, Darskii, and Kar'kova would raise all of the 1937 per capita income indices in Tables 1-5 by two percentage points. To facilitate comparison with Bergson's work, the new population figures have not been introduced previously, but they will be used in subsequent calculations.

Of course, I am not an "expert" in these matters, so I provide this link to you NOT with the pretension that I am calling you out as full of shit - I am literally curious about what you make of this re-assessment of popular estimates of Soviet consumption patterns, ETC. But if anything, it shows that the matter is not as simple as you attempt to make it.


This shouldn't be a surprise: the state was taking a larger share of grain (via the kolkhozy) while overall production and production per head (in 1940) remained below 1913 levels.

What you fail to mention is that, for all your consumption-mongering, as it happens grain consumption actually increased in the period of 1937-38 compared to 1928 levels, despite "overall production per head" apparently remaining before 1913 levels. That is to say nothing about total dietary consumption compared to 1913 levels, which was undoubtedly far greater.

So what relevancy should we draw from this fact? That less grain was produced per head for other reasons, ones that simply in this instance do not relate to the conditions of life and standard of living.


In addition to the grim economic news, the idea that the peasants simply welcomed the destruction of their own institutions and their herding onto collective farms is hard to credit.

Eventually, say, by the late 30's it is safe to say that yes, they did. Of course initially this was not true. Again, the peasants interpreted the destruction of these institutions in a way that was as backward as their conditions of life (a return to serfdom, the end times, ETC.), which they could not think beyond.


Plenty of Soviet peasants did welcome the Nazis, it took time for the peasantry to be mobilised against the invaders.

"Plenty"? The majority of them were of the newly annexed western Ukrainian territories, so no, not "plenty" of them. Most of the defectors to the Nazis were in fact red army soldiers who were too cowardly to accept death. The grand majority of Soviet peasants were loyal to the state, that is not a matter of debate, and again, part of this was because of the loyalty instilled into them through collectivization. I even recall reading about how many red army soldiers interpreted the Great purges, and losing their parents as the workings of a few bad apples who were dealt with by the regime, the Soviet population was DEEPLY loyal to the Soviet state.

Of course it's worth mentioning that some German soldiers had similar views: The war, and their problems were owed to some bad apples in the upper circle, not Hitler himself who was a 'good old' guy. How we should interpret this, again, is strictly a theoretical matter.


And the idea that the cult of personality was driven from below by the joyful peasant masses is just too absurd to waste time on.

That is a straw man. The point is that the cult of personality was conceived during and after collectivization, and peasants did play an active role in its facilitation, but no one is saying that it was strictly a grassroots phenomena. It was the result of interactions and encounters wtih an 'imposing' state, so of course it was more complex than that - the point was that not only they, but active ideologues swept up in such transformations interpreted these encounters by bringing the CoP to its greatest heights. Again, you have no notion of class - nothing about the individual experiences of any neo-classical painter had to make them bourgeois in nature. Their paintings were reflections of real conditions of life in general.

I don't know what kind of "proof" you need because this is true for EVERY OTHER case in Stalinism, vis a vis the peasantry - it was true for China, it was true for Albania, it was true for Korea and it goes on. Any rudimentary understanding of how the cult of presonality grew in the Soviet Union could not seriously neglegate the role of actual peasants themselves in reproducing it.

The cult of personality is the hallmark of any bourgeois romantic revolution, or "bonapartist" leader. No, it is not some cynical "totalitarian" construct. And we know this for the simple reason that hero-worship was very common among the peasants as far as figures like Peter the Great, Alexander Nevsky, ETC. were concerned. Please.


"In the long run" none of the above began to change until the post-Stalin reforms eased the state's burden on the peasantry. By this point the peasants had done what they could to avail of 'weapons of the weak', looking to subvert Soviet institutions from the ground up (a form of 'peasantisation' rather than 'modernisation').

That is a grossly naive understanding of the events. There was no "peasantisation', the institutional conformity to peasant sensitivities was not some 'ground up' process necessarily but the result of the 'second' soviet revoluton, that is, the romantic bourgeois revolution.

Many of the issues here were dealt with vis a vis ComradeOm, so 'forgive' me if I omit them:


2. Your making claims about the capabilities and functionality of the bureaucracy does not make them so. Care to prove some detailed evidence regarding how this bureaucracy actually operated? Simply stating that it was vast and unwieldy is not evidence of anything. I would like you to provide some.

You know this is an impossible claim, frankly, there is not one shiny "source", radiating with an aura of legitimacy, which is going to conform to the context of this discussion because we are looking at what is a very general statement abut something which is very complex. How the bureaucracy operated in the context of how I am describing them is pretty much common knowledge to anyone who has ever approached the topic, because it encapsulates something very general about bureaucracies in general. What kind of "source" are you looking for? For example, for a historian to simply claim "the bureaucracy was vast and disorganized" is a very, very general claim.

This is what is hilarious about anglo-saxon philistines, they demand empirical evidence to compensate for their own inability to think: They demand empirical evidence where they know full well that it is either inappropriate or impossible. Firstly, factionalism and political disunity constituted the bureaucracy and the general leadership. Some sections of the state were more loyal to some political factions in general, even if they had no formal basis of existence. Again, none of the claims I am making are controversial. To add, the bureaucracy was horribly disorganized for the simple reason that it was wrought from chaos: Many of the new bureaucrats as a result of collectivization were new, fresh functionaries, and the state was very distrustful of them. Put it this way: To be a "skilled" administrator and bureaucrat was not really measurable before hand for the simple reason that these were newer social formations emerging at both an institutional and social level. Bureaucracy manifests itself through the dissonance between holistic and particular needs. Nothing encapsulated the nature of the tragedy more appropriately than this dissonance.

For one, the reason I am reluctant to give you 'sources' is because for some historian to say something so general is literally meaningless. Where did THEY get it from? These are not matters reducible to numbers, but any rudimentary assessment of how the Soviet system functioned would lead you to the conclusion that it was horribly disorganized and inefficient. This is why totalitarian narratives are laughable: Revisionist historians will point out that every outburst of brutality and violence was not some result of the state flexing its 'totalitarian' muscles but pure weakness and impotence.

To be a devil, the notion that no scholarly analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy or how it functioned has been conducted is obviously wrong. So, you being an 'expert' in this field, I would like you to provide a single scholarly assessment of the Soviet bureaucracy, in either specific or general terms, that does not affirm my assertion. Go ahead. I'll cut off my balls and eat them if you can.


You contend that the FFYP was unique, yet also suggest that it fruitfully be compared with other major upheavals which caused mass death. Which is it? [...] third, historians do not, in fact, brush of war or famine as ‘inevitable’, in fact they do precisely the reverse.

Well, that's a stupid question, now isn't it? The FFYP was unique, but it was not unique insofar as it encapsulated the destruction of old social bonds and the modernization of the country (on "western-European' lines, that is, and no - I am not some postmodern anti-eurocentrist, I fully recognize this is the only legitimate meaning of modernization, in case you do not).

More specifically, as pointed out by Bordiga, the FFYP was similar insofar as it constituted a capitalist revolution in agriculture. For Bordiga, all capitalism owes itself to a revolution in agriculture, and for him, in Russia's case, this was Stalinism.

But nevermind this. Basic logic would allow you to come to the conclusion that - that the FFYP was unique does not make it unique insofar as "historical crimes" go. It is literally that simple - yes it was unique, but this uniqueness does not elevate it to the status of being some special crime. In fact the opposite conclusion is true: The famine was nowhere near as deadly or catastrophic as those that pervaded other transitions from pre-modern forms of agriculture or the political predispositions to them (i.e. via the English civil war).

In fact my whole point here is that historians, despite presenting wars or famines at the surface level as not being inevitable, do regard them as inevitable in juxtaposition to the "man made" famines of the Soviet Union and China. Do not, literally, do not fucking test me here - notions such as forcing society against what it is naturally capable of to "social engineering", all thoroughly ecological arguments, that "nature always comes back", with nature in this case being 'human nature' or whatever you want.

When Dikotter was accused of brushing over the famines of the 1930's in China, he replied by saying that these famines were "natural" while Mao's was "man made". Again, this is a logic that most bourgeois historians use. Whether or not they will say famines are "inevitable" or not is another thing, but certainly, in juxtaposition to the "man made" famines they do think so. The point is simple: Historians and people in general are infinitely more terrified by collectivization than the long bloody period of capitalist modernization in the west, for them the latter is a tragedy that happened in the past, while the former constitutes a horrible crime against god and nature. "autonomous" processes are irreducible to conscious actors, but something that is 'engineered' is literally revolting to them. The same arguments are used in matters of ecology - most environmentalist-ideologues (NOT simply activists, but - for example - intellectuals) are reactionary insofar as they interpret the events as "man fucking up nature/Earth". We went over this before.


Was anything done? Was anything even attempted? No and no.

How does this information constitute a clear cut warning sign, without the necessary hindsight, for the famine of 1932/3? What, in other words, COULD have been done? A reversal of the policy of collectivization? Again, we are talking about a situation where this had already been implemented, one could not whimsically reverse or "ease it up" when hunger in the cities and for the army was a very real and imminent threat. The Soviet population as a whole had to be fed. Of course, the state was fully aware of the instability of collectivization - BUT AGAIN, this meant nothing as far as the necessity of collectivization was concerned. So tell me, what should they have done, in your mind, with ONLY this information? With that information, how would policies be implemented that would have prevented famine while at the same time allowing the Soviet Union to be ready for a war, which Stalin acknowledged was necessary in merely 10 years, 10 years exactly before Operation Barbarossa.

What should have been attempted? Grain production was not totally, whimsically controlled by the Soviet authorities by 1931 as you mention it, everything was abiding by a very thin line. Collectivization had to be implemented in a very short time, and no matter how long the Soviet state decided to prolong it, it would come back to haunt them very fast. Say they would have "relaxed" their policies in 1931. THEN WHAT? Things were not going to take their course slowly. There is no indication whatsoever that giving everything more time would have prevented a famine later on. The process of collectivization had to be rapid, like lightening, it had to displace the peasants quickly and forcefully. Keep in mind this is under the backdrop of industrialization, too.

The problem of course is that what constitutes relaxing policies would not implicitly account for the necessary hindsight to prevent the famine. Let me put it more "clearly" for you: Saying they should have 'relaxed' their policies is just as worthless as saying they should have abandoned collectivization all-together and opted for an extension of the NEP. That is really how general the statement is. The famine could have perhaps been prevented with the necessary hindsight, while at the same time fulfilling the needs of the Soviet state, but again that is a worthless observation. Most anti-Stalinist historians will criticize collectivization IN JUXTAPOSITION to an extension of the NEP. I am saying that their "criticism" here is purely pathological and, at the level of conscious thought, mindless.

You then proceed to note that nothing could be done. But this simply was not the case. How do we know this? The answer is perfectly simple, because, following the autumn of 1932 the regime did begin to rapidly shift its policy. The unrealistic procurement targets began to be relaxed from the second half of 1932. From January 1933 peasants were, once again, allowed to sell and livestock. But these were fairly minor shifts in policy. In March 1933, as literally millions were dying, Stalin, who rather than look to his own policies for the root cause of the problem, blamed the peasants for their laziness and, evoking Lenin, pronounced that ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat’. Yet, by this stage, even Stalin could not continue to ignore the evidence and around 20,000 workers were dispatched to the farms crush any opposition and get them running properly, introduced food relief, and provided grain, while slashing procurement targets. Combined with good a dose of good weather and conditions, the result was that the regime by shifting policy virtually on its axel was able to prevent another harvest failure and belatedly turn the corner.


Contrary to your assertions, there is no reason why this complete change of policy could not have been introduced earlier.

No, because what you say again has no consideration whatsoever for the justification of the heavy procurements before 1933 and why they were suddenly able to be slashed. Again, you claim I have no evidence in asserting that the 'complete change of policy" couldn't have been introduced earlier: I am telling you, you have no evidence to assert that the change in policy was merely decided whimsically by Stalin who 'finally came to his senses'.

To ask: Why did the Soviet leadership decide to slash targets and institute famine relief at the time they did? You claim that "by shifting policy virtually on its axel" the state was able to prevent another harvest failure. There is no reason to think that this shift in policy could have occurred:

1. Before widespread knowledge of the famine was even acknowledged, privately even,

2. Without consideration for the causal basis of the heavy procurements in the first place .

And again, one should also note the incredible nativity of the state. There was nothing cynical about it - even at a private level, officials often times simply did not believe the reports. To put it shortly, things were horribly disorganized and the response to the famine was just as mismanaged and chaotic as the factors which led to it in the first place. But nevermind that, to play the devil's advocate, even if the Soviet leadership intentionally decided to prolong famine relief, that is not what this argument about: This argument concerns whether in hindsight policies could have been constructed in the first place to prevent the famine. It is empathetically wrong to think so, not in consideration of the immediate developmental needs of industry and production in general.


As Oleg V. Khlevnuik notes, “Stalinist policy was the main cause of the brutal famine”, and it is no coincidence that once those policies changed the famine began to recede.

This is not a controversy here. Stalinist policy was the main cause of the brutal famine. But as opposed to what other policies? This is my point. The policies they changed were the result of learned experience. Before the famine, the same policies used to prevent future famines had no authority over other proposed policies at the time, no one "knew" that a famine was going to happen or what exactly caused it before it actually happened.


It was ideologically committed to the programme it had placed into motion.

And what exactly did those "ideological commitments" entail, what were they owed to exactly? "Ideological commitments" you say - ideological commitments underlying a practical policy aimed at industrialization. Anyone, ideological commitments otherwise, who was committed to rapid and quick industrialization would have had to adopt a similar programme under the circumstances. It is really that simple.

It's so silly how anglo-saxon philistines use the word 'ideology'. You do not know what that word means. Ideology does not mean "too stuck in ur lala land to face reality". Ideology is precisely being over immersed in reality. "Blinded by ideology", god, if there was ever anything so cringe-worthy these philistines say. Had only the Stalinists been liberals, they would have valued human life. On the contrary they probably would have interpreted an even worse catastrophe in terms of some natural inevitability. Given the track record, it does not take much to assume that without collectivization, any attempt at the transition to modern forms of agriculture would have been even more catastrophic for the peasant masses.

Famine relief was prolonged by six months? The Irish famine lasted 7 years. The Bengal famine didn't even receive any concentrated effort for relief, private or state led otherwise. This is discounting other major famines in India as well as 'natural' starvation deaths around the globe, not to mention Africa in the late 19th century. The difference in the SU vis a vis western europe is that huge social and political revolutions which consumed far more people especially vis a vis their own populations occurred centuries before industrialization. In the Soviet Union the necessary social revolution and industrialization were synonymous. The SU did not have various overseas colonies to drain the blood of.


I agree that the term ‘peasant’ is not a precise term, which limits its usefulness, but at least it has some utility where the term ‘kulak’ does not. Indeed, its only utility is to describe those peasants actively victimised by the regime. Your second claim that collectivisation ‘eliminated’ the peasantry is, of course, contradictory with your previous statement. How could the regime ‘eliminate’ a class category which was not ‘real’?

I think you misinterpreted my claim? My point is that term peasant IS a 'precise' term as far as the context of this discussion goes, the peasantry WERE a real class that pervaded the countryside. I don't know where you get, in my posts, the notion that the peasantry did not constitute a real class category. They did. My point simply means that the peasantry were eliminated as a class by the Soviet state, and the term "Kulak" was nothing more than representative of those elements of the peasantry that resisted it.

The official notion of a "kulak" IS flimsy, and inconsistent, but my whole point acknowledged that: One cannot approach the matter cynically. A Kulak was a pathological figure in the Soviet imagination. It was not imaginary. It DID refer to those peasants who actively resisted collectivization, the element essential to peasant life that would not budge. That has been my whole point.

In fact, upon making my first reply, I was going to mention how peasants were practically indistinguishable in their resistance to collectivization.

My first post opened with:

Things were not exactly so simple. "Kulaks" (who were merely 'rich peasants', often times just non-subsistence peasants, not feudal bureaucrats), resisted, yes, but so did a massive portion - if not a majority - of the peasantry.

Why would I point this out, if not to discredit the notion that the class struggle among the peasantry was as simple as officially presented in Soviet discourse? The point is that still, the term "Kulak" is a relevant class category, because not all peasants resisted collectivization, it was not an inevitable condition of their life to.


You are not on authority on Marxism, Marx or Marxist thought and the best thing you can do is to drop this delusion that you are.

You see Zim as a Marxist, I don't play such silly games where I wave my dick around with shiny, special credentials that give me special access to knowledge or whatever. I am asserting that the understanding of history as employed by Hegel, and later Marx, is not the same as employed conventionally.

And Rafiq, the 'fanatic', or whatever you want, is a Marxist, or at least calls himself one. So when he uses terms like "historic" in a 'funny' way, you should KNOW what he means.


The object was mass repression, not the elimination of a particular class of the peasantry.

The object was mass repression? That was a goal sufficent unto itself?

Please stop. Mass repression was incidental of the wider goal of the modernization of agriculture and the elimination of the peasantry as a class.


None of this actually addresses the point I was making, which was a critique of the regime’s use of the label. I am not ‘formulating’ a notion of what ‘defines’ the ‘kulak’ class, I am noting why the regime’s attempt to target it based on factors, such as wealth, led to a completely imprecise policy.

Well I agree, it was an imprecise policy based on the state's qualifications - many peasants were target who by their standards were not in fact 'kulaks'. I claim it is still a worthwhile category, however, and it is not a matter of controversy that those wealthier peasants definitely had more to lose than your average poor peasant as far as collectivization was concerned. Thus there were elements among the peasantry that resisted collectivization and encouraged its resistance. That was the point: Some peasants had a lot to lose, some had nothing to lose, but both actively resisted collectivization by merit of the latter's - basically ignorance.


And what, one might well ask is a ‘provisionality’? That isn’t even a word. It doesn’t mean anything.

When I use the word "provisionality", I mean its existence is totally arbitrary: there is no underlying 'meaning' behind them beyond the meanings men and women make. Classes are provisionalities insofar as they are temporary, i.e. you can critically approach them as contingencies, you can say "I am conscious of social processes and this consciousness can, with effort, lead to the negation of class itself". Any and every class analysis is 'biased' in that it assumes classes do not have to exist. That's all I mean.

The word is in the dictionary, by the way.


Michael Kaznelson, ‘Remembering the Soviet State: Kulak Children and Dekulakisation’, in Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 59, No. 7 (Nov., 2007), pp. 1163-1177.

Please, Zim. Do I pull something out of my ass now? Give me something I can work with. Quote the damn book if you only have a physical copy, I won't assume you are lying (you're not a liar, for all you are, I can infer).


But, of course, that was the point, dekulakisation was a campaign of terror, it against the peasantry as a whole, not individuals who failed to conform.

No, the state made it very clear that it would prefer the peasantry's cooperation. the peasantry were not monolithic in this instance - so yes, it did refer to sections which did not conform. I agree they were too significant to be mere "individual" anomalies but I never insinuated that anyway.


And, as it happens, whether or not a child worked at one of the infamous camps, like Narym, is irrelevant. Damage to health and physical and emotional scarring remained profound, as were death rates.

Was it actually a form of punishment, however, as in, were children sentenced as criminals? Again, I inferred that these were the children of the other 60%.

If that is true, it is misleading to say 40% of victims were kids. That assumes the state is arbitrarily sending kids away ALONGSIDE adults as though they were considered just as guilty legally, when in reality what is more likely is that they were sent away as orphans. Again, feel free to correct me if my inference is wrong.


Ah, yes. Peasants into workers! The CPC say's so, therefore it must be true.

Do you even know what a peasant means? The hundreds of millions of marginalized agrarians in china are by no means traditional industrial proletarians, they are something new - something, however, hardly unique to china. They are not however peasants, one could make the case for them as China's precariat. That is another story.

[Invader Zim]

You know this is an impossible claim

if you believe that the claim, which is yours for the record, is 'impossible', why did you make it?

There is no evidence that the sheer weight of the bureaucracy made it incapable of changing tack. Indeed, it regularly did, just as it did in 1933. The point is that with the evidence available to the elite of that bureaucracy this change of tack should have occurred in 1931. The failure to do so is testimony not to the impossibility of the situation but the incompetence, prejudice, folly, and callous nature of that elite. The fact is that they, and not least Stalin, were perfectly willing to let thousands perish 'for the greater' good, blame the victims for ideological intransigence, laziness, and hyperbole, for the failures of the programme, until 1933. At that point, the sheer magnitude of the crisis which they had been brushing under the rug, had reached such destructive proportions that they were staring down wholesale economic collapse. Where the previous position had been to stare down the crisis and to punish the peasantry, the new response was privately (never publically) admit their own culpability and to reverse policy. The fault was not to pay heed the abundance of facts from the ground which had been pouring in since 1931 and press on regardless.

Your argument, that there was nothing to be done, that famine was inevitable because of the structural flaws at the heart of the bureaucracy, is just not supported by the evidence. You seem to view the bureaucracy as a giant monolith, which once set into motion was so vast, that it was inevitably hostage to its own inertia and that a change of course or momentum was impossible. That isn't so. As Om and I have both noted, and you provide no satisfactory answer to, there is abundant evidence that the regime was capable of changing tack precisely as it did in 1933.


there is not one shiny "source", radiating with an aura of legitimacy

And here you highlight a failure to grasp what it is that those 'analytical philistine' historians actually do. I'm not asking you to provide 'one shiny "source"' (why the word 'source' is placed into inverted commas, as if evidence and fact are to be treated with sarcasm, is a mystery to me), I'm asking you to construct an argument. We already have your hypothesis -- so, it is hardly unreasonable to expect you to outline the facts and evidence which lead you to assert the veracity of that hypothesis. This need not be one 'source', but rather a series of sources or fact which all point towards and support your conclusion. In short, I want you to produce an argument; to show me why you believe your conclusion to be the best explanation of the events of 1931-33 and to convince me that I am mistaken.


which is going to conform to the context of this discussion because we are looking at what is a very general statement abut something which is very complex.

You're right that your argument is simplistic and general. But that does not necessarily preclude it from being a good top-down explanation of the events, even if it is incapable of the nuance required for understanding the causes of the famine from closer perspectives. The fact is that it is not a good explanation is that, as a working theory, it does not explain even the most basic facts to any satisfactory degree (as noted). Therefore, it should be jettisoned. That you refuse to countenance such a possibility, and instead wail about my being an 'Anglo-Saxon philistine' rather than even attempt to construct a serious rebuttal tells us that you are well aware of the problems with your position but lack the intellectual honestly to hold your hands up and simply say: "Sorry, I was wrong, and I didn't know that." There is no shame in that Rafiq.


This is what is hilarious about anglo-saxon philistines, they demand empirical evidence to compensate for their own inability to think: They demand empirical evidence where they know full well that it is either inappropriate or impossible. Firstly, factionalism and political disunity constituted the bureaucracy and the general leadership. Some sections of the state were more loyal to some political factions in general, even if they had no formal basis of existence. Again, none of the claims I am making are controversial. To add, the bureaucracy was horribly disorganized for the simple reason that it was wrought from chaos: Many of the new bureaucrats as a result of collectivization were new, fresh functionaries, and the state was very distrustful of them. Put it this way: To be a "skilled" administrator and bureaucrat was not really measurable before hand for the simple reason that these were newer social formations emerging at both an institutional and social level. Bureaucracy manifests itself through the dissonance between holistic and particular needs. Nothing encapsulated the nature of the tragedy more appropriately than this dissonance.


I asked you for evidence, what you have provided is just insult followed by further un-sourced and un-evidenced claims -- which again, tell us nothing and explain nothing. Not a single fact is presented. Not a single scrap of evidence, just a series of generalised assumptions about how you believe bureaucracies operate, and none of them specific to the Soviet bureaucracy of the early 1930s.

More problematic still is that you seem to believe that it is objectionable that evidence, fact and argument are even necessary to building understanding. Instead you see such requests as a mechanism to "compensate for [my] own inability to think"? There are two issues here: 1. The fact that you think it impossible to provide evidence actually highlights a really concerning misunderstanding of epistemology -- for you collecting evidence is "inappropriate or impossible". It reveals that your view of the famine is baseless -- in that it literally has no foundation in fact, that it is purely assumption. In short, you haven't read anything. 2. Remember, it is your hypothesis that because the bureaucracy was so vast and lethargic it could not react to the famine. I didn't make that claim, you did. Now, you're right that you cannot provide evidence to support this assertion, because it isn't true. In fact, the evidence directly points to a very different conclusion.


Again, none of the claims I am making are controversial.

Sorry, but the claim that the Soviet Union's bureaucracy was so weighed down by its own magnitude, that it was entirely unable to respond to the famine and that this made the famine inevitable, is not merely controversial it is flat out wrong. And the entire point of asking you to provide evidence, to think about where this idea of yours has come from, is to try to get you to engage with your own ideas. To think about how you have reached this conclusion and think critically -- which, ironically enough, you regularly claim everybody else other than yourself fails to do.


For one, the reason I am reluctant to give you 'sources' is because for some historian to say something so general is literally meaningless.

Rafiq, YOU said it. It is YOUR hypothesis. I'm asking you to put YOUR money where YOUR mouth is. Evidently, you cannot.


Where did THEY get it from? These are not matters reducible to numbers, but any rudimentary assessment of how the Soviet system functioned would lead you to the conclusion that it was horribly disorganized and inefficient. This is why totalitarian narratives are laughable: Revisionist historians will point out that every outburst of brutality and violence was not some result of the state flexing its 'totalitarian' muscles but pure weakness and impotence.

But you didn't merely claim that the bureaucracy was 'horribly disorganized and inefficient', you argued that it was entirely paralysed and that once events had been set in motion it was impossible for the outcome to be anything other than that which occurred. I want to see why you have come to this conclusion.


And, it is, of course, possible to make compelling, evidenced based conclusions about the causes of the famine. But it requires serious work -- work you lack the rigor, industriousness and intellect to perform.


To be a devil, the notion that no scholarly analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy or how it functioned has been conducted is obviously wrong. So, you being an 'expert' in this field, I would like you to provide a single scholarly assessment of the Soviet bureaucracy, in either specific or general terms, that does not affirm my assertion. Go ahead. I'll cut off my balls and eat them if you can.


What? Where did I claim that no serious scholarly study has been made of the Stalinist bureaucracy? You are literally just making this shit up as you go along. And, of course, back in reality, the actual studies of that bureaucracy and the famine draw entirely different conclusions to you. They do not argue that the weight of Soviet bureaucracy made the famine inevitable. Rather they all say the precise reverse; that the famine was preventable, that the regime could have and should have prevented it. Indeed, as you demand just such an analysis. Oleg Khlevniuk – author of the now standard text on the highest organ of that bureaucracy, argues that the famine wasn’t merely preventable, but that the failure of the regime NOT to do anything about it until 1933 despite the vast array of evidence pouring in, is a sign not merely of culpability and responsibility but of ‘criminality’:

“The devastating crisis that became increasingly evident from 1931 proved the criminality of Stalin’s Great Leap policy. Terrible famine, which hit its peak in the winter of 1932-1933, the collapse of agriculture, the failure of forced industrialization, and growing social tensions raised serious questions about the soundness of the regime and Stalin’s own political viability. The response to the growing crisis offered by Stalin and his comrades-in-arms was intensified repression and terror to the point where state violence threatened the very foundations of the system. And while repression and coercion remained the cornerstones of Stalin’s chosen course, occasionally, under the weight of circumstances, the country’s leadership opted for certain concessions in the interest of preserving fundamental policies.”

Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Master of the House: Stalin and his Inner Circle (Yale University Press, 2009), p. 39.

You owe me your balls.

[PhoenixAsh]

Two points:

1). Talking about "Stalin's crimes" means we simply accept the fact that policies and politics are made by one individual. This absolves the entirety of the system of any form of responsibility. This in turns leads to a one sided analysis which seems nice bit doesn't actually offer structural solutions.

2). The crimes of the USSR are in fact no different from the indifference and inaction of any other government in any other crisis acting (or not) on economic, political or religious motives etc. The inaction of western democracies to act on the international crisis that lead to economic recessions and the stubborn refusal to reexamine the capitalist dogma is of the same order. This is both an argument that should wake up those who still protect the USSR as well as a valid argument against these objections being raised to defame communism.

[Burzhuin]

Stalin's crimes: the disastrous misleadership of the Chinese revolution, the "third period," the popular front, the murder of Leon Trotsky.
For the last one his "crime" I would forgive all his other "crimes".

[Invader Zim]

For the last one his "crime" I would forgive all his other "crimes".

One life is worth seven to ten million is it?

[Burzhuin]

One life is worth seven to ten million is it?
If to believe Russian Liberals the amount of Stalin's "victims" constantly rising. Last time I heard about 40 millions. But I allow myself to ask only one question: how would you understand proletarian dictatorship?

[Invader Zim]

If to believe Russian Liberals the amount of Stalin's "victims" constantly rising. Last time I heard about 40 millions. But I allow myself to ask only one question: how would you understand proletarian dictatorship?

Your abject ignorance of human cost of the regime is to you to resolve; but I would advice against broadcasting it here. Nobody who knows anything about the regime has made any such vast estimation since historians began to gain archive access in the 80s/90s. Oh, and you have an amount of a commodity, you have a number of victims.

As for your question, it is irrelevant because the regime manifestly was not a dictatorship of the proletariat.

[Burzhuin]

Your abject ignorance of human cost of the regime is to you to resolve; but I would advice against broadcasting it here. Nobody who knows anything about the regime has made any such vast estimation since historians began to gain archive access in the 80s/90s. Oh, and you have an amount of a commodity, you have a number of victims.

As for your question, it is irrelevant because the regime manifestly was not a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Strange, the fact that in quarter of century of Capitalism in former Soviet Republics already outnumbered the number of Stalin's "victims" somehow does attract attention of so call leftists. No, they prefer to blame Stalin.

For me situation was simple: those of former "Life Masters" fought in different form against Soviet Government (one of the form of Proletariat Dictatorship). What do you expect Stalin to do? Actually the whole experience of Soviet Union is one proof of correctness Stalin's prediction about increasing class struggle during Socialism development.

[Armchair Partisan]

For the last one his "crime" I would forgive all his other "crimes".

Quick question: why do you think Trotsky deserved to die?

[Burzhuin]

Quick question: why do you think Trotsky deserved to die?
Why? He all his life fought against Bolshevism (read: Communism). Actually he deserved to die for defeat of Spanish Republic in Spanish Civil War.

[Invader Zim]

Strange, the fact that in quarter of century of Capitalism in former Soviet Republics already outnumbered the number of Stalin's "victims" somehow does attract attention of so call leftists. No, they prefer to blame Stalin.

And where have you arrived at that statistic? Which must have been tricky given you have already implicitly confessed to ignorance of the death toll of the Stalinist regime.


For me situation was simple: those of former "Life Masters" fought in different form against Soviet Government (one of the form of Proletariat Dictatorship). What do you expect Stalin to do? Actually the whole experience of Soviet Union is one proof of correctness Stalin's prediction about increasing class struggle during Socialism development.What a load of fourth grade drivel.

[Invader Zim]

Why? He all his life fought against Bolshevism (read: Communism). Actually he deserved to die for defeat of Spanish Republic in Spanish Civil War.

I almost dread to ask, given that the answer will likely be so stupid it will cause braid damage to all who read it, but how was Trotsky responsible for the defeat of the Spanish Republic?

[PhoenixAsh]

While I totally and utterly agree. I am going to remind everybody this is the learning forum...and we have a zero tolerance policy .

So consider this a general warning to keep debates clean

[Invader Zim]

While I totally and utterly agree. I am going to remind everybody this is the learning forum...and we have a zero tolerance policy .

So consider this a general warning to keep debates clean

Like Stalin, my method of teaching is through negative reinforcement.

But point taken.

[Burzhuin]

And where have you arrived at that statistic? Which must have been tricky given you have already implicitly confessed to ignorance of the death toll of the Stalinist regime.
Just to compare demographical development in Soviet Union during Stalin's 10 years (1931-1941) with the same area for 1992-2002.

[Burzhuin]

I almost dread to ask, given that the answer will likely be so stupid it will cause braid damage to all who read it, but how was Trotsky responsible for the defeat of the Spanish Republic?
How much do you know about Spanish Civil War? If you think Trotskyist position helped war effort, I would recommend professional help. I know this from my grandfather's tales.

[A.J.]

I almost dread to ask, given that the answer will likely be so stupid it will cause braid damage to all who read it, but how was Trotsky responsible for the defeat of the Spanish Republic?

Your always claiming people you disagree with are either of below average intelligence or have mental health issues.

I think, however, you should look closer to home before throwing such accusations about.

Specifically, you must be either delusional or incredibly dim to think that your fooling anyone into thinking that you are quite the great intellect you seek to self-promote yourself as being on these forums.

[Burzhuin]

What a load of fourth grade drivel.
According to your college "grade" Russian capitalists enjoyed the fact that property was taken away from him. If you believe in this crap, keep believing. I cannot help.

Actually think about simplicity in class struggle: there are two classes proletariat and bourgeoisie. If you are not for proletariat you are for bourgeoisie.

[PhoenixAsh]

Ok. I just gave a general warning. Now I am issuing a formal warning. The next personal attack, the next violation of the zero tolerance rule in this learning thread will be infracted regardless.

[Invader Zim]

How much do you know about Spanish Civil War? If you think Trotskyist position helped war effort, I would recommend professional help. I know this from my grandfather's tales.

You are not addressing my question: How was Trotsky responsible for the defeat of the Spanish Republic? I never suggested anything about Trotsky's contribution to the Spanish Civil War. You did. This is your claim not mine.

[Invader Zim]

Your always claiming people you disagree with are either of below average intelligence or have mental health issues.

I think, however, you should look closer to home before throwing such accusations about.

Specifically, you must be either delusional or incredibly dim to think that your fooling anyone into thinking that you are quite the great intellect you seek to self-promote yourself as being on these forums.

Given that half the time you spend on this board, when you deign to return to it that is, is to troll me it is clear that you're obsessed. I'm not sure that my ego can handle such adoration and inflation. Either that or you are still upset that I gave you a schooling last time you offered your apologism for Stalin. Get over it, Son. Move on.

[Invader Zim]

Just to compare demographical development in Soviet Union during Stalin's 10 years (1931-1941) with the same area for 1992-2002.

Dude... So, what you're saying is that if there is a reduction to the birth rate it must be because of genocide? Is that you're point? Palm. Face.

[Burzhuin]

You are not addressing my question: How was Trotsky responsible for the defeat of the Spanish Republic? I never suggested anything about Trotsky's contribution to the Spanish Civil War. You did. This is your claim not mine.
If to follow your logic, Stalin is not responsible for Big Purging. He did not kill anybody. His, I mean Trotsky, contribution to Spanish Civil War (SCW) is with negative sign. Unfortunately the source about SCW I have is in Russian. When I find it in English I will place it here.

[Burzhuin]

Dude... So, what you're saying is that if there is a reduction to the birth rate it must be because of genocide? Is that you're point? Palm. Face.
Strange, that the result is not important to you. Or not strange, if you are opportunist for whom a goal is nothing and a process is everything.

[Aslan]

Ok seems like this conversation has turned more into collectivization rather than just a conversation about what Stalin's crimes were. My point is that Stalin war power-hungry. He constantly fought in a system that itself was non-democratic. A degenerated workers state is exactly what to call it! There is documented proof that he killed millions. He was corrupted by his position of power, just like any politician here in the US. But he did somethings that were positive. He turned the USSR in one decade, from a Medieval kingdom to an industrial superpower.

[Invader Zim]

If to follow your logic, Stalin is not responsible for Big Purging. He did not kill anybody. His, I mean Trotsky, contribution to Spanish Civil War (SCW) is with negative sign. Unfortunately the source about SCW I have is in Russian. When I find it in English I will place it here.

No. You misunderstand me. I am perfectly capable of accepting that an individual, via their influence, might be responsible for actions which they, personally, did not commit. What I'm asking for is that you explain why you believe that Trotsky was responsible for the Republican defeat in the Spanish Civil War.


Strange, that the result is not important to you. Or not strange, if you are opportunist for whom a goal is nothing and a process is everything.

This, literally, says nothing. Yes or no, are you suggesting that a decline in birth rates is a genocide?

[Burzhuin]

Ok seems like this conversation has turned more into collectivization rather than just a conversation about what Stalin's crimes were. My point is that Stalin war power-hungry. He constantly fought in a system that itself was non-democratic. A degenerated workers state is exactly what to call it! There is documented proof that he killed millions. He was corrupted by his position of power, just like any politician here in the US. But he did somethings that were positive. He turned the USSR in one decade, from a Medieval kingdom to an industrial superpower.
Can you imagine what would happened with USSR without mentioned by you decade?

I know the guy with PhD in History. So he tried to create models of Historical Development under leadership of any other member of Politburo VKP(b). Actually I was very skeptical about his research since he is not communist or not socialist. But he was bewildered by his own result since Stalin was the least evil. The worst case scenario was Trotsky. The rest is placed between those two. I hope he is going to publish his research. If it happens I will translate it to English.

[Invader Zim]

I know the guy with PhD in History. So he tried to create models of Historical Development under leadership of any other member of Politburo VKP(b). Actually I was very skeptical about his research since he is not communist or not socialist. But he was bewildered by his own result since Stalin was the least evil. The worst case scenario was Trotsky. The rest is placed between those two. I hope he is going to publish his research. If it happens I will translate it to English.

Umm. That kind of project would never pass a PhD viva, because it is purely counter-factual. The project wouldn't involve any actual research. Are you suggesting that a PhD student undertook a prosopographical study of members of the Politburo? And who is this individual? Where can I read their thesis?

[Burzhuin]

This, literally, says nothing. Yes or no, are you suggesting that a decline in birth rates is a genocide?
I am talking about all tendencies. Birth rate is just one of them. Life expectancy is another. State of health care, social care, etc. is another. The policy of so called national governments to encourage or in some cases to enforce emigration is also one more.

BTW even under Stalin the percent of prisoners to state population was lower than in Russia XXI century.

[Burzhuin]

Umm. That kind of project would never pass a PhD viva, because it is purely counter-factual. The project wouldn't involve any actual research. Are you suggesting that a PhD student undertook a prosopographical study of members of the Politburo? And who is this individual? Where can I read their thesis?
He has PhD in History already 20 or so years. So he is creating some kind of mathematical models in History.

[Invader Zim]

He has PhD in History already 20 or so years. So he is creating some kind of mathematical models in History.

So who is it?

[Communist Mutant From Outer Space]

Using the "debunk - communism" reddit and the evidence cited by both sides of this debate on the issues of Collectivisation and Dekulalisation, the conclusion I have been able to come to regarding any so-called crimes committed or directly linked to Stalin is that he is at least responsible, either through mistake or through overly aggressive policy and repression, for quite a few million deaths (with many of those deaths likely being indirectly linked). Seeing as the death tolls are quite high with whichever estimate is put fourth, I'd say it's frankly absurb to continue debating which number is correct based on what I asked (though feel free to continue off on your own tangent - I tend to start threads like this that will spark attention in order to observe and learn) because either way it appears that poor policy making and some level of purposeful repression took place in the case of the Kulaks, even if they were loosely and arbitrarily defined, lead to many deaths which could've been prevented. I'm not sure whether the fact that these deaths occurred is a sign of simply poor management, a testament to the dreadful objective conditions of the Soviet Union (which lead to such pragmatism) or conversely if it was due to Stalinism as a political ideology, but what I can be sure of is that it is meaningless to bicker pedantically about what the exact cause of the deaths was and who or what could be most closely linked with them - I think my question in hindsight was just naive, in that I never addressed whether or not Stalin's actions which may have exacerbated already bad catastrophes were due to the terrible state that the Soviet Union was in and the poor policy (some of which appears to have been continued indirectly from Lenin?).

[Burzhuin]

So who is it?
He showed me the preliminary result of his research as old friend. Actually I met him when he was docent of Leningrad State University. He wrote me he retired now (made me so envious!!!) and he is working on the dream of his life. But my research about economical mistakes of early Soviet Government he criticized, that forced me to redo my work.

[Invader Zim]

He showed me the preliminary result of his research as old friend. Actually I met him when he was docent of Leningrad State University. He wrote me he retired now (made me so envious!!!) and he is working on the dream of his life. But my research about economical mistakes of early Soviet Government he criticized, that forced me to redo my work.

Ok, but who is this individual? Have they published their work? If so, where can I read it? Is it in English?

[Emmett Till]

Dude... So, what you're saying is that if there is a reduction to the birth rate it must be because of genocide? Is that you're point? Palm. Face.

I think the point that Burzhuin was trying to make was that the number of people who died in the ex-USSR during Yeltsin's "not-quite-forcible decollectivization" was greater than the number of people who died in the Ukrainian famine of the '30s (birth rates declined in both periods, so that's beside the point).

Which is quite true, as can be seen from the figures of one of the world's best and most thoroughly anti-Stalinist, anti-Soviet and anti-communist demographers, Steven Rosenfielde. According to his figures, there were 3.4 million "premature deaths" in Russia alone. He restricted his study to Russia, but in most of the rest of the USSR, indeed basically everywhere except in the Baltic Republics and Belarus, things were worse than in Russia.

(Rosenfielde, “Premature Deaths: Russia's Radical Economic Transition,” Europe-Asia Studies 53 no. 8, 2001, 1159-76)

In neither case is the term "genocide" quite appropriate, I'm sure Yeltsin had as little personal desire for the death of millions as Stalin, unlike say Churchill, Roosevelt and Truman during WWII, with their terrorist bombing and even nuking of cities and Churchill's vindictive deliberate and utterly unnecessary starvation of India. Results were about the same however for the victims.

[Emmett Till]

Can you imagine what would happened with USSR without mentioned by you decade?

I know the guy with PhD in History. So he tried to create models of Historical Development under leadership of any other member of Politburo VKP(b). Actually I was very skeptical about his research since he is not communist or not socialist. But he was bewildered by his own result since Stalin was the least evil. The worst case scenario was Trotsky. The rest is placed between those two. I hope he is going to publish his research. If it happens I will translate it to English.

A Ph.D. is no barrier to professional foolery. These models remind me of an old slogan among computer programmers, "garbage in garbage out."

No matter how clever and sophisticated his mathematical models may be, the results obtained could only be as good as the data input, which in the case of something as subjective as differing political programs, are impossible to mathematise.

In general, the attempt to mathematise history at this stage of knowledge can only lead to things like bourgeois "econometrics," which led to ex-Marxists Fogel and Engerman's notorious claims that slavery in America really wasn't so bad after all.

The fellow had previously tried to prove that the railroad boom of the 19th century was unnecessary for the industrialization of America by all sorts of statistical manipulations, that canals would have been better. He forgot that it would have been rather difficult to build a transcontinental canal.

[Rafiq]

Before Zim reads this post, his knee-jerk response: WHERE ARE ALL THE SHINY SOURCES, DATES AND CREDENTIALS SO I KNOW TO TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY? WHERE! OH MY GOD I'M A FUCKING IDIOT INCAPABLE OF ACTUALLY READING!.

To add, for someone whose attacks generally are mostly attacks on my "writing" and "posting" style, you sure format your posts in literally the most insufferable way imaginable: you do not need to quote me twice - you can, as it happens, respond in various ways to a single quote. Literally, in your head, you're probably thinking "Oh I'll show him how wrong he is, look, I can attack him in a thousand different ways!" No, it's not cute.

Oh, and thank you dearly for responding to only one out of the other substantive points at hand, I will assume that you concede to me the others. Thank you for admitting defeat, Zim, a good sport if there ever was one. It's so cute how he talks to others saying "oh, I made the mistake of responding to Rafiq". Like why do you do it then disgusting philistine? Are you doing me a favor by forcing me to humiliate you like this?




if you believe that the claim, which is yours for the record, is 'impossible', why did you make it

You know what Zim, I was completely wrong about one of my points. Something I said was so unforgivably wrong that it makes me question my whole approach to you in the first place. I said:

(you're not a liar, for all you are, I can infer)

You are not only intellectually dishonest, you are a COWARD in the truest sense of the word, fucking scoundrel and intellectual snake. Look at this, everyone! You responded to me not only as though I made various arbitrarily wrought statements with no bearing to each other, but you took what I said so far out of fucking context so as to support the most juvenile mode of argument yo uare familair with: And that is regarding matters if empirical significance. My whole fucking point has not been that "I don't need evidence to back up my assertion", or that I am pulling things out of my ass - no, I COULD provide evidence for the nature of the Soviet beaurocracy, but I won't because THIS MATTER IS NOT CONTROVERSIAL AT ALL. It is a TRUISM. There is no reason t to dick around with sources, as you do, just to compensate for the most banal, cliche'd arguments with some kind of sesne of authority and legitimacy. No one here is claiming empirical facts are unimportant for matters that are controversial - if I, for exmaple, spoke of how efficient and organized the beaurocracy was, that would indeed warrant empirical facts to back up the claim, whether that amounts to a scholarly assessment of how the bureaucracy functioned in the early 30's, and the list goes on.

My whole point was that this was unwarranted, and why? Because none of the lcaims I was making were controversial: NAMELY, that in the early 1930's the Soviet state was incapable of efficiently and flawlessly carrying out collectivization. This is not a controversial claim, this is not a claim which demands speical empirical evidence because again anyone with a RUDIMENTARY understanding of ANY work that deals iwth the subject would allow one to come to hte conclusion. So confident am I in this, from my own encounters with such works, that again, my offer stands: I will cut off my balls if you could provide an assessment of the Soviet bureaucracy in the early 1930's which contradicts my claims. But you don't do that, isntead, you give us the truism and banality that most scholars agree the famine could have been prevented. Well yes, it could have been prevented, but the argument of scholars was either a full reversial of collectivization, or "relaxing it". Again, there is no doubt that doing this could have prevented the famine of 1932/3, but again, my point was that with the prerogative to quickly industrialize the country and destroy hte peasantry as a class, the BUREAUCRACY WAS INCAPABLE OF DOING THIS.

For all this worthless dick-waving, let's go back to my initial point: Even if the bureaucracy had a general idea of how to prevent the famine (while still fulfilling the developmental needs of the state), this would have been impossible by merit of its chaotic disorganization. What did I mean here? My point was to illustrate something about the nature of the Soviet bureaucracy itself: Bureaucracies are not reducible to their constituent parts, they are, as you will find in Kafka, almost theological institutions. Secondly, carrying out a 'general idea' in the Soviet bureaucracy would not have been possible for something that would have required such specific consideration and care. That was all I was trying to say - yes historians will point to how either relaxations or a reversal of policy could have prevented the famine, but upon these policies did was the precocity of the country's survival hinged up - Soviet agriculture was primarily from Ukraine, as far as domestic purposes went. I merely attempted to illustrate that this process was not in fact relegated to sheer whim but indeed was something that required special care, consideration and detail. Again, this isn't controversial for anyone who has researched the subject, how the quotas were enforced across regions, ETC.

My point was that to carry out a "general idea" of how to prevent the famine would be impossible if the specialized, detailed consideration of how to do it (without superstitiously faltering on the policy all together) was lacking. Again, you can CORRECT me not only if works contradict me, but if you can't draw the same conclusion from them. But you won't, because you know I'm fucking right - you cannot have it both ways.


There is no evidence that the sheer weight of the bureaucracy made it incapable of changing tack. Indeed, it regularly did, just as it did in 1933. The point is that with the evidence available to the elite of that bureaucracy this change of tack should have occurred in 1931.

It is NOT a matter of the "sheer weight" of the bureaucracy (which referred to carrying out a general idea of how to PREVENT a famine in the first place, not efficiently carrying out famine relief) but a matter of appreciating the circumstances at hand, namely, the fact that the bureaucracy refused to even acknowledge at a private level the famine's significance and scope until, as you pointed out, the latter part of 1932, as well as differences in the productive and industrial demands earlier on. You have completely ignored and brushed these off, assuming that Stalin finally decided to 'come to his senses' completely whimsically. Again, what reason do we have for believing that? In fact, the Soviet state had already begun to reverse some of its policies, as you pointed out, in later part of 1932, when signs of famine were available. Why did it do this? Again, perhaps because they were under the impression that the policies implemented during the latter part of 1932 would have been enough, which they clearly weren't.

So this is the point - in order to relieve the famine, THERE WAS NO CLEAR CUT ANSWER OR SOLUTION, as far as what was minimally possible while meeting what were ALREADY set productive, industrial and developmental quotas. This is ALL I MEAN when I refer to the chaos of the bureaucracy, NOTHING about what I say here is controversial. Of course, following 1931 they could have reversed their polices and "relaxed" them just like they did in 1930, but this ended catastrophically and it resulted in a reversal of the gains made prior in collectivization - peasants would simply leave their new collectives. No one has side-brushed the coercive nature of collectivization: The point was that from the perspective of the bureaucracy, and from anyone's perspective for that matter, COLLECTIVIZATION HAD TO BE CARRIED OUT as QUICKLY, SWIFTLY as possible so as to not even give the peasants time to think about it - it had to be done so fast and so 'traumatically' that it would be completely irreversible.

Again, historians will not disagree - no one will falter on recognizing the 'brutality' of collectiivzation, which is why every single source you have provided concluded that the catastrophe could ahve been prevented had only the authorities reversed their policies and either put a halt to collectiivzation (And why, to save the catastrophe for later?) or completely reversed it and instituted an extension of the NEP. Again, I have thoroughly gone over why these would have been completely unrealistic: Historians, for all their specialization with empirical facts, will NEVER have the necessary empirical facts to understand the class/social aspect of this at a historic level, which is not a matter of empirical facts alone but also theoretical insight that could only be wrought from the tradition of Marxism. Of course, we have already gone over your garbage positivist epistemology and how the notion that truth is reducible to mere empirical facts is not only wrong, it is impossible to consistently maintain. That does not mean they are unimportant or unnecessary. Much of what I say IS contingent upon recognizing certain empirical facts, but NO empirical fact I am designating is controversial here, not even for blatantly anti-Communist historians.

But nevermind that. The whole point was that the industrial and developmental needs of the Soviet Union WERE SIMPLY NOT POSSIBLE without collectivization, and collectivization clearly was not going to be instituted voluntarily - the bureaucracy was probably well aware of this, so it interpreted the events of 1931 as simply the inevitable strife that would follow such a traumatic and rapid process. And why? That is for the simple reason that 1931 was comparatively A SUCCESSFUL HARVEST, and was comparatively successful in general, despite all of the "warning signs". There was no reason for the bureaucracy to think that things would escalate to the catastrophic levels that they did later on.

1931 was just as inevitable as what would happen later on - collectivization was a swift, and very transformative process, certain sensitivities were bound to be exposed without the necessary detail and consideration that it would appear the Soviet authorities DID NOT have time for.


Your argument, that there was nothing to be done, that famine was inevitable because of the structural flaws at the heart of the bureaucracy, is just not supported by the evidence.

Virtually EVERY bourgeois historian acknowledges the inevitability of the famine so long as the state decided to go along with its collectivization campaign. Virtually every bourgeois historian recognizes, outlines and will never falter in pointing out the structural flaws, disorganization and mismanagement of the bureaucracy during the events - was this intentional? No, it was not - the disorganization of the bureaucracy was NOT a matter of whim. This is NOT a point of controversy. Again, I would like you to show me a SINGLE assessment of the events that not only contradicts this statement, but fails to AFFIRM it. I will cut my balls off, as I promised, if you can do this.

To add, what you also fail to understand was that there was dissonance in the state's ability to feed urban areas, during the famine, and the peasants themselves. Is this controversial? Do you even DISAGREE that the two prerogatives were by 1932 INVERSELY PROPORTIONAL? What was at stake was the starvation of not only the cities, but the Red Army. Any rudimentary analysis of the events would allow one to understand this - the Soviet state was only able to institute famine relief at the time it did when famine in the cities, the red army and of course the bureaucracy itself - which constituted a giant proportion of the Soviet population itself, was no longer as much of an imminent threat. But again, even that is besides the point for the simple reason that my argument did not precisely pertain to famine relief but the famine itself: The famine could not have been prevented because despite the alleged on the ground reports (which remain outsourced, but I will take your word for it as I have read it before as well), the authorities were not immediately aware of the catastrophe the moment it actually happened, and this is discounting the fact that there were several vast and complex communication problems throughout the bureaucracy in adequately reporting information.

To be more simple, even if the state was willing to allow some sacrifices and strife to occur, it did not expect and had no way of actually predicting that things would go as far as they were. The grain quotas were entangled in necessities of subsistence for the cities and the red army, the country's industrial and developmental needs, as well as the necessity of carrying out the social transformation in general. It was through the intircacies of all of these that the famine was able to occur at hte scale that it did, for the entanglement of all of these processes had no implicit regard for the possibility of a famine. THAT is simply how beaurocracy works, and it only takes reason to undersatnd this. Of course, I can provide you many, many sources to deal with just how inter-reltaed the seizing of grain was with a billion different processes, but what DIFFERENCE would that make? This is already a truism- especially for someone as yourself who claims to be such a great expert familair with teh specifialities of empirical facts at hand.

There is not a single piece of empirical evidence, or even a scholarly analysis you have linked which contradicts my claims. You give us 'evidence' that the state and bureaucracy was responsible. Okay, I have never said otherwise - but even this is fucking stupid because it assumes we are supposed to uncritically approach this standard of morality. But nevermind that, I will not even criticize it on that basis. You don't need an 'expert' to come to the conclusion that the famine was not the result of 'natural' factors for the simple reason that - as you already pointed out - there is NO SUCH THING as a natural famine, every single significant famine to ever exist in the modern epoch was man made one way or another.


In short, I want you to produce an argument; to show me why you believe your conclusion to be the best explanation of the events of 1931-33 and to convince me that I am mistaken.

This requires nothing more than, you know, USING YOUR HEAD, using ACTUAL reason, the problem with you is that I am not making a claim which warrants empirical evidence - we are, or should all be on the same page here as far as the empirical claims I have made thus far are concerned. You are so used to thinking with your ass that you DEMAND to be "persuaded" by something which signifies thought-legitimacy, and I am intentionally refraining from giving any 'sources' (which I can do, easily) for the simple reason that I am not going to let the framework of this debate be conceded to you, I am going to teach you that "source-mongering" IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR AN ENGAGED AND CRITICAL ARGUMENT - no, this is going to require on your part CRITICAL THOUGHT, you're going to have to put your "evidence-mongering' aside. You have not asked me to provide sources for any specific claim I have made, you have, just as in the past, threw up your arms and said ":WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE, WHERE IS THE SEAL OF APPROVAL SO I KNOW TO TAKE YOU SERIOUSLY?" You have asked me to provide EMPIRICAL evidence for arguments that do not make empirically controversial claims. That is all there is to it.

For all the accusations that I cannot construct an argument, that I cannot "properly" persuade or convince you, it's so hilarious that your qualification literally amount to other people thinking for you. Like you do not even have the confidence to, in your own head, work out all of these arguments and problems consistently and coherently - you NEED some kind of big other to simply nod tehir head and say yes - this has NOTHING TO DO with actual empirical evidence, you simply need hte seal of approval of experts. I am not saying anything which is controversial. You're not actually asking for empirical evidence, you're asking that I link you professionals who agree with my conclusions - yet, the position that collectivization was a necessity while at the same time acknowledging that it was a catastrophe IS A RARE ONE for the simple reason that, like their disgusting bourgeois sensitivities about violating "natural" life, my position is a partisan one, and no amount of empirical evidence is going to make it 'superior' to the inherently PARTISAN position that there should have been no collectivization in the first place. This is a fact which you amply do not understand.

For someone who loves to speak of evidence, do you actually know what evidence is? Evidence is nothing more than what is empirically verifiable in a collective, trans-partisan space of reason, empirical evidence is nothing more than what is observably true. How one articulates and uses that evidence is not a matter of being some 'expert' or a 'professional'. of course, 'professionals' have their place, collecting data, and so on, but this data is not going to do much as far as the objective positions they will take on the matter. For instance, it is not a controversy that collectivization was severely mismanaged, instituted in a very chaotic manner and rife with bureaucratic disorganization.

Leon Trotsky, for one who supposedly had inside sources, would describe the Soviet Union in the exact same manner. And the reason most "professional" historians might de-emphasize the chaotic nature of the Soviet bureaucracy during collectivization (though to my knowledge, I am not even familiar with professionals who are unaware of this fact), is because a prevailing ideological and pathological narrative of the Soviet state, under "totalitarian" models was that it was an giant leviathan capable of complete and total control of all things that related to people's lives. Even under models that are not necessarily "totalitarian", this pathological conception of the events is deeply embedded in bourgeois historiography regarding the Soviet Union.


rather than even attempt to construct a serious rebuttal tells us that you are well aware of the problems with your position but lack the intellectual honestly to hold your hands up and simply say: "Sorry, I was wrong, and I didn't know that." There is no shame in that Rafiq.

But what exactly did I not know? You have not made a single positive claim which is "new" information or which contradicts my claims for me to not have "known" about. Instead, you accuse me of making claims without a shred of evidence to support them. I have repeatedly asked you: WHAT WOULD QUALIFY AS APPROPRIATE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE for such a claim, and why (that is, WHY is this demand justified?). And no, saying "Cuz u need facts to support ur arguments cuz scientific method". No, do not play with abstractions - WHY do my SPECIFIC claims warrant empirical evidence that is not already readily available to anyone who so desires to google scholarly assessments of the matter?

Again, you accuse me of being incapable of constructing an argument when the reality is that you have no notion of being ENGAGED in an argument - instead, an "argument" for you amounts to mindless dick-waving of shiny credentials to see who comes out as more legitimate. There is no a shred of critical thought in any of the arguments you have provided us, there is only "WHERE ARE DA EXPERTS?"

Sorry, but no, I'm going to force you to act and think like one of those experts, I'm going to force you to ACTUALLY THINK THROUGH how they come to the conclusions that they do about the events, with the empirical evidence that we have. In this context, you clearly are incapable of doing that.

You demand I provide evidence for the "outrageous" claim that the bureaucracy was incapable of constructing 'sensible policies' that would have prevented the famine. There would have been no way of knowing what a "sensible policy" is before you actually had the experience of knowing what a disastrous one is, by the standards of the structural knowledge of the bureaucracy. Sure, if they were posessed with some kind of rabid imperative to avoid a famine at all costs, including sacrificing the develompental needs of the state and the goals they had set forth, sure, they could have prevented the famine - but in the context of what was necessary for the survival of the Soviet state in the long run, THIS WAS NOT A FEASIBLE GOAL. Again, voluntary collectivization failed. Again, relaxation of policies in 1930 led to the collectives being halved by merit of the peasants simply fucking leaving. This was a social transformation that had to be like lightening, to speak of patience in this context was not possible, there was no "natural" bridge between the conditions of the Soviet peasant before collectivization and the necessary agricultural and productive modernization as understood by the Soviet state. Collectiivzation was absolutely necessary FROM THE STANDPOINT of the Soviet Union's survival. Now, whether the Soviet Union's survival is something that is worth it is a partisan matter, one that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.


I asked you for evidence, what you have provided is just insult followed by further un-sourced and un-evidenced claims

See, Zim, maybe in your piss-for-brains "scholarly institutions" this kind of cheap shit talk actually gets to people, but I promsie you, prattling of "un-sourced, un-evdienced" claims INTIMIDATES NO ONE. You do not speak with authority here, you do not cast down lightening bolts against anyone here, you do not bust my balls as you think you do. It is literally meaningless what you say - NOT A SINGLE CLAIM I HAVE MADE is so controversial that it requires "sourcing", and I will explain, yet again:

I can source all the evidence you want, but EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE ALONE is not going to support my conclusion, the empirical evidence alone can support a number of conclusions, all of which are theoretical, ideological and partisan controversies - this is a conclusion that was wrought from actually critically thinking about the empirical evidence at hand IN A STRICTLY THEORETICAL MATTER. I am not saying the bureaucracy was made up of magical unicorns and whatever you want. I am not making a claim which is controversial at the level of empirical matters - no, the controversy is a THEORETICAL one.

For example, saying the "bureaucracy was too disorganized to efficiently carry out collectivization" is not controversial, what is controversial is recognizing this UNDER THE BACKDROP of the NECESSITY of collectivization in relation to the Soviet Union's industrialization and modernization. Because most historians have no notion of historic PROCESSES, of matters that relate to the social dimension, of course they would blindly come to the conclusion that the NEP would have allowed the Soviet Union to industrialize "like any other country". It takes a vigorous Marxist assessment of the events to recognize that the peasants were not organized in a manner that which their private initiatives would have been able to culminate in industrialization.

Now, had the Soviet Union been at a technical or industrial level to offer sufficient incentives for peasants to leave their collectives, had the Soviet Union had more time, had the Soviet Union not been an actual state that has to be concerned with matters of geopolitics and defense, sure, we can come up with all sorts of possibilities, but GIVEN the circumstances, namely, that industrialization was necessarily taken under the back of the peasants, both in their collectives and - for a huge, enormous portion of them, as labor power for actual industries. There are numerous, numerous factors which make the situation infinitely more complex than you are attempting to put it: Namely, the fact that other crops were necessary for growing as well.

The only real evidence we need to know just how full of shit you are is the fact that the harvests during collectivization were so painfully mismanaged: Many available crops were not even harvested, many were put to waste, and so on. Now, had the bureaucracy taken the imitative, AS THEY WOULD LATER ON to efficiently collect harvest and actually create a functional agricultural system, sure, they might have been able to do this in 1932, but this is again a WORTHLESS observation. The gross inefficiency at even MANAGING these new collectives was NOT because of the whims of the bureaucracy, even if steps would later be taken to make them more efficient - it is simple a matter of time and circumstance. No one wants famine. No one wants mismanagement. But these were realities that could not be whimsically reversed.


More problematic still is that you seem to believe that it is objectionable that evidence, fact and argument are even necessary to building understanding.

No, please shut the fuck up, Zim, I am not going to follow your silly rituals OUT OF CUSTOM OR CONVENTION. "You don't know how to construct an argument" - you need to JUSTIFY your qualificaitons for what constitutes an arguemtn IN THIS CONTEXt and explain why it is not. Simply saying "well, you didn't fulfill one of the conditions of what I was formally taught is an argument" is NOTHING in this context - you need to actually use REASON and critical thought to justify why 'empirical evidence' is necessary here and why the claims that I am making which concern empirical facts are necessarily controversial. You have not done this. Instead, you have whined, and cired out "Waaaa Rafiq doesn't care about facts".

No, on the contrary, you simply don't know how to fucking use facts and empirical evidence in a correct manner, when you encounter a blind alley and you're incapable of actually arguing on terms that require real thought, your knee-jerk reaction is to demand evidence, and why? Because you're used to believing things solely because it has a place in a hierarchy of legitimate thought. When you are told something which is NOT conventionally understood, or 'legitimate', you demand 'evidence'. Anglo-Saxon philistines do this all the time - they don't understand that there are a billion different assumptions that underlie their approach to "empirical evidence" insofar as they interpret and draw conclusions from them. We, I, am dealing with those assumptions here. So for you to demand "empirical evdience" for something which is not empirically, but THEORETICALLY controversial is literally so fucking pathetic, it's literally like you're caught with your pants down and you're suffocating in your own ignorance. You're like an infant baby, wailing after being thrown into a land which you are not even slightly familiar with, you are naked, and you want the same clothing, the same crutches from which you imbibe a sense of confidence to get you through these uncharted lands.

No, Zim, you will not have it. You will either approach this as an adult, or you will keep embarrassing yourself.


1. The fact that you think it impossible to provide evidence actually highlights a really concerning misunderstanding of epistemology -- for you collecting evidence is "inappropriate or impossible". It reveals that your view of the famine is baseless -- in that it literally has no foundation in fact, that it is purely assumption. In short, you haven't read anything

No, evidence is not "inappropriate or impossible". If I, for example, made the claim that only 2 million died from the famine, or that the bureaucracy was engaging in cannibalism, or that the bureaucracy was more than efficient enough to carry out its objectives without resulting in a catastrohpe, I would be burdened with the responsibility of collecting evidence to support that conclusion and providing it to you. But again, there is not a single claim I am making that requires "new" evidence, again, show me ONE assessment of the events that contradicts the claims - that the famine was owed to severe mismanagement and chaos, disorganization and inefficiency, not simply "being blinded by da ideology" or whimsically ignoring the death of millions (which, no matter what stage it would reach, the bureaucracy will ALWAYS be hurt from). The whole point of this controversy began when I made the opint that: EVen if every single member of the bureaucracy wanted to prevent the famine, or had a general idea of how to, it would get so entangled in chaos that it probably wouldn't be able to prevent it anyway. I did not specify that the conditions of this "general idea" as necessarily having to still meet the productive needs of soviet industry and so on. This is what you amply do not udnerstand: HAD MY POINT BEEN THAT THE BEAUROCRACY COULD HAVE PREVENTED THE FAMINE IN GENERAL I MERELY COULD HAVE STATED:

The bureaucracy could just decide to not institute collectivization in the first place, or wait several years.

But I did NOT say this, for the simple reason that my point was - even if the bureaucracy had a general idea of how to prevent the famine, this imperative would get so entangled in other sectors of the economy and of the country in general that it would probably fail in doing this as well. Again, this point was to illustrate the nature of bureaucracy: If bureaucracies were so organized that they could seamlessly carry out goals efficiently and in a very organized manner, THEY WOULD NOT BE bureaucracies. I did not say the level of organization to carry out collectivization was lacking, I said the level of organization to carry it out EFFICIENTLY and in a way that would have the hindsight to prevent the famine was lacking. There is a very big fucking difference and if you can't see it - well, go fuck yourself.


Sorry, but the claim that the Soviet Union's bureaucracy was so weighed down by its own magnitude, that it was entirely unable to respond to the famine and that this made the famine inevitable, is not merely controversial it is flat out wrong.

What would the CONDITIONS be of being able to "respond" to this famine? All things and factors which were lacking, namely, complete and total control over the distribution of grain and food across not only the countryside but the cities and the red army, as well as confidence that the magnitude of this famine demands attention. Again, the Soviet beaurocracy was not stupid - they did not go all-out in responding to the famine until they had to for the simple reason that before 1933 they were confident that things would not escalate to the level that it did. They had no reason to believe it would, and it is plainly that fucking simple. In hindisght it was a catastrophic mistake, but LISTEN To your STUPID fucking logic:

You claim that the bureaucracy "ignored" reports of mass devastation and famine in 1932, and it finally capitulated in 1933 and took the necessary steps to relieve the famine. Are you insinuating that the bureaucracy INTENTIONALLY planned to relieve the famine later, that they FORESAW that things would get as chaotic and disastrous as they did many months later? Can you not see how UNREASONABLE that claim is? If the bureaucracy had no reason to believe that the famine would reach the heights that it did, that thing would get as catastrophic and chaotic as they did and that the famine was at a scale that required their appreciation, then saying "they should have known" is a WORTHLESS observation because it makes pretenses to what they should have done ONLY IN HINDSIGHT. Yes it was a mistake, but given the circumstances, I fail to see how this mistake could have been avoided in consideration of the fact that BEFORE IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED there was no REAL WAY of knowing one course of action would be better than another. HOW COULD THERE? Again, 1931, for all the problems, was comparatively a better harvest, had conditions stayed as they did in 1931, despite the strife, there would have been no holodomor: The point is that things severely escalated and reached a level that was far beyond the predictive grasp of the bureaucracy.


Rafiq, YOU said it. It is YOUR hypothesis. I'm asking you to put YOUR money where YOUR mouth is. Evidently, you cannot.

Listen, Zim, IF YOU ACTUALLY FUCKING READ WHAT I SAID WITH A SEMBLANCE OF AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE CONTEXT:

For one, the reason I am reluctant to give you 'sources' is because for some historian to say something so general is literally meaningless.

You would know that I DID NOT say that saying it is meaningless. I said that BRINGING a historian in to the picture would be a MEANINGLESS act, because iti s such a general statement, there is nothing about some expert nodding his fucking head which is going to actually make the difference. Now if there is a SPECIFIC claim that you think needs sourcing, by all means, ask for it. If you want merely a SPECIFIC EXAMPLE of Soviet beaurocratic inefficiency in the early 1930's I would be glad to provide you with a "source". But again, this is not a matter of controversy - it is a CONCLUSION drawn from the SAME empirical evidence and facts from which other conclusions are drawn.

You are so fucking stupid, so worthless, your head is so far up your ass that in your mind that having a historian say something is meaningless must necessarily mean that the statement in general is meaningless. If I say that "For some plumber to say it is literally meaningless", IT IS THE SAME THING, THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE, you're literally just a fucking philistine, you're literally just so intellectually lazy that you want others to think for you: "Oh, that guy knows what he's talking about".

THAT IS NOT GOING TO FUCKING CUT IT HERE, DEAR ELDER. So get at the level of this discussion, or go back to grading fucking papers, professor.


But you didn't merely claim that the bureaucracy was 'horribly disorganized and inefficient', you argued that it was entirely paralysed and that once events had been set in motion it was impossible for the outcome to be anything other than that which occurred

No, you idiot, it wasn't "paralyzed", I NEVER used that word. The bureaucracy was NOT at a standstill at any moment, but that's precisely the fucking point - it was entangled in a billion other fucking processes. This is not a controversial point: Was the bureaucracy SOLELY concerned with collectivization at that time, or was it also focused on other imperatives, like DISTRIBUTING what was actually harvested, engaging in a massive campaign of social transformation, as well as fulfilling the industrial and developmental needs of the Soviet Union? Not hat all of these things are no manageable, but the bureaucracy was formed LITERALLY without any fucking time to even think about it - the Russian civil war decimated all real infrastructure, later on bureaucrats during collectivization would have no administrative experience or way of measuring their skills. The whole thing was fucking chaotic. Rather than a matter of being "paralyzed", they were entangled in a giant clusterfuck. I have never said anything more, and no historian will disagree with this.


But it requires serious work -- work you lack the rigor, industriousness and intellect to perform.

Yes, work that a fucking monkey can do, sorry that this discussion requires a bit more thinking that mindless shiny "source" mongering. Nothing is more fucking insufferable - for anglo-saxon philistines, for pop-analytical 'philosophy' there is no critical examination of how facts are used and in what appropriate context they are needed in, it is PURELY ideological, it is a ritual - unlike Marxism, it is purely a formality, it is purely a matter of conforming to conventional rules about "how" to do something rather than questioning the underlying epistemological, theoretical assumptions behind them.

And by all means, in many instances it works perfectly fine as far as gathering data and coherently explaining it, but for those instances where the ugly demon rears its fucking head, that is, when these philistines are pushed into a blind alley, - NOTHING is more insufferable than worthless fact-mongering. Do NOT fucking sti here and pretend like there isn't a culture of "fact-mongering" in the contemporary world, even when they are unnecessary, THERE IS. When I criticized disillusionist and told him his "sources" were bullshit and that the evidence does not support the conclusions given, he fucking demanded I PROVIDE peer-reviewed journals! FOR NO FUCKING REASON other than to be impressed or intimidated into believing me! It's fucking PATHETIC!

And of course, these philistines will interpret this criticism of "fact-mongering" as some kind of call to being able to say anything you fucking want without any empirical evidence whatsoever to support it. No, empirical evidence and facts are very well appreciated and understood as important, the point is that they must be used in appropriate context. If you FUCKING demand Guy Debord to provide "evidence" for Society of the Spectacle, that would be a case of philistine fact-mongering with no regard for actual critical thought. Bourgeois epistemology despises critical thought. People are literally clueless - they don't know what to believe, so they must believe what is conventionally accepted by a hierarchy of legitimized thought. EVEN IF experts are 100% correct, it is NOT enough to simply say "that guy knows what he's talking about". One must rigorously and critically approach WHY they came to the conclusions they do and how. The more our society dis encourages this, the more mysticism, superstition and darkness becomes popularized.


What? Where did I claim that no serious scholarly study has been made of the Stalinist bureaucracy?

So here's the fucking point: If scholarly studies are actually made of the Stalinist bureaucracy, than studies of its efficiency, level of organization and how it operated at the level of command should be readily available to you. I am asking you to provide ONE EXAMPLE of one of those which does not affirm the points I have made. You demanded "evidence" for a claim that was "unsourced". I am telling you: There are plenty of scholarly assessments of how the Stalinist bureaucracy functioned, this is not "uncharted" territory relative to the claims made.

In other words, it's not like we're fucking agnostics here and that we really don't know. We do. We do have a general idea at least of its level of inefficiency and incompetency which supports the conclusion that it was incapable of carrying out collectivization as efficiently as was necessary to prevent tragedies one way or another. Collectivization ITSELF was a violent act - famine or no famine.


the actual studies of that bureaucracy and the famine draw entirely different conclusions to you

NO, they fucking don't, they draw the conclusion that the famine was preventable under the condition that collectivization was either abandoned, prolonged, or the "softened". I have demonstrated that in the context of the Soviet Union's survival and the necessity of it, THIS WAS NOT POSSIBLE. There could have been no "softening" of policies for the simple reason that the peasants had to be violently coerced into the new social formation. You cannot "softly" push someone over a cliff they resist, you have to do it quickly, brutally, and irreversibly.


The response to the growing crisis offered by Stalin and his comrades-in-arms was intensified repression and terror to the point where state violence threatened the very foundations of the system. And while repression and coercion remained the cornerstones of Stalin’s chosen course, occasionally, under the weight of circumstances, the country’s leadership opted for certain concessions in the interest of preserving fundamental policies

And yet this literally sais nothing about whether the famine was preventable or not given the circumstances, it simply states things which are uncontroversial. OF COURSE, what it might fail to take into account is that which is beyond mere 'empirical evidence': WHAT CONDITIONS were necessary for these concessions to be made? That is to say, IS IT NOT TRUE, is it NOT SAFE TO INFER that the violent repressions, terror and coercion traumatized and brutalized the peasantry into submission? Without this pre-requisite, it is doubtful that the Soviet bureaucracy could have made "concessions".

It's like fucking saying that the Great purges were preventable because they were relaxed years later. No, that's fucking stupid, they were only relaxed after certain structural goals were met, namely, the complete political subordination of the Soviet state form the NKVD to the army to the central leadership.

[Rafiq]

Can't wait for Zim to zero in on a single phrase taken out of context and smugly reply, smiling, as though he's fucking ACTUALLY seeing his argument through: "Hmph", he will say, "I don't need to go through all that, I'm just going to respond to what I see fit".

My god the level of passive fucking aggressiveness is unbelievable with these types. It is literally less offensive to just scream "FUCK YOURSELF YOU WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT, KILL YOURSELF"

[Invader Zim]

This is a pretty appalling argument. For a start you are comparing the demographic collapse in the 1930s from a very different base line to that of the alleged demographic collapse under Yeltsin. First the time spans are very different -- far less under Stalin and excludes the 1937-39 period. Second, the famine did not simply strike in the Ukraine, and the death toll across the Soviet Union was, as we have already established in this thread, was between 5-7 million. Thus, in two years, the number of premature deaths was vastly higher than in the 1990s. Meanwhile, where those who died between 1931 and 1933 perished as a result of the famine, the picture painted by Rosefielde is rather different -- it is one of general long term economic decline with its knock-on effects on healthcare, standards of living, etc. It is no coincidence that the poorer people are the shorter their life expectancy becomes.

[Rafiq]

Given that half the time you spend on this board, when you deign to return to it that is, is to troll me

Sais the motherfucker who opened up a thread 4 years ago because he thought he would embarrass me. Like WHAT was going through your head really? I don't think about you unless I'm wiping my ass with you, but apparently Rafiq crosses your mind every aching moment of your time here.

[Rafiq]

the picture painted by Rosefielde is rather different -- it is one of general long term economic decline with its knock-on effects on healthcare, standards of living, etc. It is no coincidence that the poorer people are the shorter their life expectancy becomes.

So in 1932/3 we have a crime against god and nature, a "man made" famine which was "entirely the regimes fault", but the demographic crisis and the deaths following hte collapse of hte Soviet Union were - and these are his words - "long term economic [My god, 'economic', how legitmate!] with its knock-on effects on healthcare, standards of living, etc."

That is quite the terminology there. Legitimate sectors of a society, "healthcare, standards of living" and the 'economy' underwent a long term decline, natural fluctuations just like the boom and bust cycle.

The deaths which resulted from this - it's so fucking memorizing how with a few cheap buzzwords something can be sold off as a "Great crime against humanity" to a "Oh, the economy just ain't putin' out as it should".

[Emmett Till]

....
I would, actually. Kazakhstan lacks the robustness of the registered deaths that we have for Ukraine but then even these hardly inspire confidence. It requires an additional million or so unregistered deaths in Ukraine to bring them into line with census data. Let's not pretend that that's anything but what it is - a crude estimate but as good as we'll get.

This is not the case, and is something of an insult to Wheatcroft, who did not merely take Soviet census figures and crudely subtract. Ukraine unlike Kazakhstan had excellent records which at this point have been thoroughly analyzed.


The same 'gap' in the census suggests that the Kazakh population was 1-2m lower in 1939 than it should have been. What we don't know for sure is how many of these fled to China. While some have suggested approx 200k exiles (eg Tatimov), ultimately I see no reason why the number would be greater than those displaced internally within the USSR. That is, something in the hundreds of thousands but not more. There's no evidence for movement of 2m Kazakhs into China and Afghanistan.

And while we don't have registered death numbers to form a baseline in Kazakhstan, we do have plenty of reports (which Davies and Wheatcroft reference) that refer to the harshness of the famine and decrease in population. Given all this, I see no problem with a range of 1-1.5m.

It could be right, it could be wrong, hell, it could be an underestimate. But being that there were no census figures at all, it's perfectly possible that the vague guesstimates of the Kazakh population *before* the forced decollectivization were off by millions in either direction.

And this is not further helped by the numerical skullduggery as to population figures practiced by the current Kazakh nationalist regime, whose attitudes to accuracy when it interferes with their political purposes are if anything worse than Stalin's.

So though unquestionably something awful happened in Kazakhstan, those numbers ought not to simply be added without comment to the death figures from the "holodomor" and the similar, smaller scale but worse, events in the neighboring Cossack areas when trying to judge Stalin's guilt on a merely numerical scale. Which is the wrong way to determine "Stalin's crimes" anyway.

Especially since, after all, Stalin unlike in Ukraine took action to put an end to that pretty much as soon as he heard about it. Granted, this was closing the barn door after the horse of the apocalypse had already escaped, but this is still something very different from Ukraine.

PS: I don't want to wade into your polemic with Rafiq, once his logorrhea gets hold of him there is no stopping him. But I will note that in fact, once those collective farms were finally tractorized, you did indeed have a gigantic increase in Soviet food production despite all problems. As is ridiculously easy to prove.

Before collectivization, 90% of the Soviet population were peasants. Afterwards, you had a huge move from the countryside to the cities, with a majority urban population rather quickly.

So on balance, despite all the human victims, collectivization was successful. Without it, an urbanized Soviet Union would have starved to death immediately.

There's a new book about this that's just been published making the rounds, which is transforming "Western" views about Soviet agriculture. Jenny Smith, Works in Progress, Plans and Realities on Soviet Farms, 1930-1963. Yale 2014. Soviet agriculture was not the disaster that it's traditionally been painted, though it certainly had its problems. Turns out that even Lysenkoism, though disastrous for grain growing, actually played a useful role in animal husbandry, leading Soviets to take better care of cows and pigs than on Western factory farms, which is why meat consumption could be so high under Khrushchev and Brezhnev.

[Invader Zim]

Am I supposed to respond to this? Is it even possible to respond?


YOU ARE A DOG! Mother FUCKER! How DARE you ask the Rafiq for facts!? Only an analytical philistine cares one jot for FACTS. Facts and dates don't matter at all in history. PIECE OF SHIT. You DO NOT understand BEAUROCRACY [sic]! You are FUCKING pathetic. ETC. Fucker. Do you have no grasp of actual reasoning at all! FUCK PROFESSOR! Knowledge is bad! Historians don't know anything! FUUUUCKKKKK. fuck.

Expand this to 7,000 words, and you have Rafiq's reply.

Though I was mildly amused by this which jumped out at me:

"When I criticized disillusionist and told him his "sources" were bullshit and that the evidence does not support the conclusions given, he fucking demanded I PROVIDE peer-reviewed journals! FOR NO FUCKING REASON other than to be impressed or intimidated into believing me! It's fucking PATHETIC! [...]

If you FUCKING demand Guy Debord to provide "evidence" for Society of the Spectacle, that would be a case of philistine fact-mongering with no regard for actual critical thought. Bourgeois epistemology despises critical thought. People are literally clueless - they don't know what to believe, so they must believe what is conventionally accepted by a hierarchy of legitimized thought. EVEN IF experts are 100% correct"

But, I'm not. I'm asking you to back up your claims. And no, nothing you have said about the soviet bureaucracy is remotely axiomatic. Nobody claims that the famine was inevitable as you do. You're just making it all up and popping a vein when someone points that out to you.

You're a boy in a world of your own, ranting at the sky for being blue. You're like a man with a fork in a world of soup. And you think you've embarrassed me? Guess again. There is only one person here who should look back at that atrocity above and cringe, and it sure isn't me.

[Rafiq]

Literally not a word of that is true. The boy is in a world of his own.

Not a word of it is true you fucking idiot? Is your memory as piss poor as your ability to critically assess arguments?

Life is too short for that, but Zim has to explain to everyone how he is willingly refusing to resond, rather than just go about his day. That's how immersed this professor is in dealing with the "boy" Rafiq, that's how ENGAGED he is, that's how much I get under his skin.

Of course, these mean nothing. In every other encounter you claim you're "above" responding and then you end up doing it anyway because it gets to you so much. For someone who is so confident that Rafiq is just a "boy" lost in his own world, you sure come off as someone very threatened by him.

[ComradeOm]

Dammit Zim, you beat me to it. Not cool.


Sais the motherfucker who opened up a thread 4 years ago because he thought he would embarrass me. Like WHAT was going through your head really?I saw the funny side. I mean, who isn't amused by the Great Rafiq (pbuh)?

Less funny is the amount of nonsense that the Great Rafiq (pbuh) fills His posts with. It's pretty apparent below that the Great Rafiq (pbuh) isn't particularly well read on either the social or economic histories of the 1930s. Which is fine, not many people are or need to be. But it does mean that He is making very vehement statements with nothing to back them up. I'm not talking sources (although it's ironic seeing you berate Zim for this when they are largely absent from the Great Rafiq's own posts) but just the general morass of words and unstructured paragraphs. I'd suggest that this was a self-concious move to hide the Great Rafiq's (pbuh) ignorance but I now suspect that it's just reflex verbal diarrhoea.

But let me deal with your post to Zim in language that you might understand:

LISTEN YOU LITTLE SHITE, YOU INFERIOR BEING WHO IS NOT COMPARABLE TO I, THE GREAT GOD OM. There is not a shred of academic analysis that suggests that the Soviet state of the 1930s was incapable of stopping the famine. The DIFFERENCE - do you get this you fucking Anglo-Saxon philistine! - is that none of them are close-minded enough to assume that there was only one avenue of action open to Stalin. How can your TINY LITTLE BRAIN not grasp that the latter could have chosen different policies and the state would have carried them out. Not perfectly (YOU THINK THIS IS PLATO, HE WASN'T EVEN FRENCH!) but no one denies the ability of the Soviet leadership to determine and enact policy.

So look at little Rafiq (so stupid when compared to the sexy and smart and really, really popular Great God Om) struggling with his outdated empiricism and other terms that I don't really know the meaning of (like, do you even know what historical will is?). He talks about sources, SHINY SOURCES!, and can't provide any himself because his position is so fucking stupid that no actual historian would credit it.

Ugh. I can't go on. I'd need to write another few thousand words of that nonsense to approach the Great Rafiq's (pbuh) standards. Let's just get on with the pretence that we're engaged in some sort of debate here.


But moreover, what is PAINFULLY FUCKING STUPID about this argument is that collectivization had only occurred once, following the destruction of the peasantry as a class, it would have been impossible to repeat the mistakes of 1933 for the simple reason that the turbulence, structural and bureaucratic chaos that was brought by such a rapid transition was no longer there - what you fail to understand is that collectivization heralded not only a structural change in how Soviet society was administrated (it LITERALLY brought about new forms of the organization of life) but the ideological and cultural character of the Soviet state in general, it was through collectivization and following that produced "socialist realism", that ensured the formalization of Marxism and the dialectic, and - as noted by other theorists - which brought about institutional changes that were regressions into bourgeois civic values, such as the morality surrounding legality.Sigh. A barrage of words to try and hide the fact that you have no idea what you're talking about. Seriously, I don't think you know what half of those actually mean. It's like you skimmed through Fitzpatrick once, picked up a few of the keywords and are determined to shoehorn them in wherever you can.

So let's return to your original statement that, "even if every single middle ranking functionary, as well as the regime's leadership, had a general idea how to prevent the famine, this would get get entangled and chaotic that they probably would not have been able to prevent it anyway."

Now the meaning of this statement is quite clear: the state could not have done anything differently even if it had wanted to. The 'disorganisation' was such that even if Stalin wanted to change course, the bureaucratic machine could not be trusted to carry out its orders.

You've tried to qualify this with talk of "the inability to carry out the general plan flawlessly" but this is something that no one has argued. That the Soviet state apparatus was a crude machine is not in doubt - there is a whole genre describing the limitations of the 'limping behemoth'. Yet to argue that the centre was unable to make its policies felt is absurd.

Let's start with the previous example I gave, the one that flew straight over your head: 1930. This stands as an obvious example of Stalin's decision to change policy/direction having an immediate effect. The impact of Dizzy, a significant if temporary U-turn, was prompt and, as you note, impressive. This essentially threw the collectivisation movement into reverse, a pause mandated from above. It's also worth noting that this intervention came in the midst of period of utmost rural chaos. Yet the centre was still able to change direction and see this realised 'on the ground'.

(Seriously, what did you think I was referring to Dizzy for? You think I linked to it for fun?)

But the most obvious example of the state's ability to exert its will is collectivisation itself. The state was able to abolish traditional peasant institutions, assign millions of peasants to collective farms, seize and 'socialise' livestock and wealth, deport millions of peasants, establish new rural institutions and send out detachments to seize grain. The entire collectivisation process was an unparalleled intrusion of state power into the world of Russian peasants.

This continues directly into the famine itself. The collapse in quality of the sowing and practice of crop rotation was a direct result of pressure from above for an increase in sown area. Similarly, Moscow had little practical difficulties in sealing the borders, requisitioning grain or allocating seed loans during the actual famine. As Zim points out, the change in policy in 1933, was itself a demonstration that the state could change direction when needed. The plans and decrees emitted from Moscow, and translated by the local party/state apparatus, unquestionably did have an effect.

The Stalinist leadership could not guarantee that its orders would be followed precisely or competently but nor was the state paralysed by chaos. It could, and did, enforce its will on the localities. Had the leadership wanted to adopt a different course of action in 1932 or before then the capacity of the party/state bureaucracy would not have been a stumbling block.


If you actually read the point, you would know that in context what constitutes hindsight is NOT SIMPLY having "a general idea about how to prevent the famine" but institutionally and structurally ingrained experience. To speak of "contradictions" needing resolution from not being able to distinguish a "general idea about how to prevent the famine" with specialized knowledge about how to, institutionally ingrained following the famine, is your problem, not mine.Yeah, this is just silly. In the first place, the idea that something much be experienced to be known is, well, absurd. I'm not going to dwell on that fallacy. Safe to say that it was the job of economists, agronomists and policy makers to understand the impact of their policies and forecast the results.

(Can anyone imagine Zhukov standing before Stalin in 1942, explaining that actually those millions of Red Army casualties were actually necessary so that "institutionally and structurally ingrained experience" could be gained?)

More to the point, as I noted above, there was extensive experience of famine and grain requisitioning in the Soviet government. Admittedly, much of this had been silenced by 1932 - statistical agencies disbanded, economic journals silenced and no open criticism of policy allowed. But that can be hardly taken as an excuse for ignorance; not when the Soviet state was guilty of blinding itself.

However, even those who remained had experience of the Civil War famines and the repeated grain crises of the 1920s. The concept of famine was certainly not alien to this elite. This is one reason that the Politburo itself, right from its establishment, spent so much time obsessing over the minutiae of sowing schedules and the harvests. All were aware of the risks of famine. Local and security agencies too: reports of hardship and, as Zim has noted, starvation were rife long before the Politburo accepted that it was dealing with famine.

So there was broad experience of famine within the Soviet state, far more than could be claimed by most other governments at the time. The problems of grain procurement were well known and the collectivisation programme had been underway for 3-4 years at this point. When the famine did strike, the state, first at local and then Moscow level, was able to provide some assistance - the mechanisms of quota management, stock management, seed loans, etc were well understood.

So whatever about the broader picture of collectivisation, the Soviet state absolutely did possess 'the specialised knowledge about how to prevent a famine'. We can see that in 1936-37, which I'll return to below, where the measures adopted did not differ greatly from those proposed in 1932-33.

1936-37 provides a useful contrast. The failure of the harvest in that year was due to similar conditions as 1932-33. That it didn't result in mass starvation not because the bureaucracy now possessed some sort of experience that can only be gained from the death of millions. Rather it was decisions made at the top - specifically the decision to build up and use central grain stocks (contrary to the earlier experience) - that prevented disaster. Conditions were the same, the state's capabilities were the same, but a different policy approach led to a different outcome.

Funny that. It's almost as if looking at what policies the state actually adopted is useful in understanding how the famine situation developed. But wait, wait, the 'second revolution', 'socialist realism', drool...


...the Soviet leadership DID seek to prevent a famine and a social catastrophe. If this was not the case, then the famine would not have been relieved as "quickly" as it was.The Soviet leadership ignored all evidence of the impending disaster - not just from critics of collectivisation but from within the party and security apparatus. Far from working to prevent a famine, it refused to acknowledge the reality of one until it was far too late.

The 1931 harvest had been bad and regional party satraps had clashed with the centre on the targets set. That is, even before the 1932 sowing season many of the key factors behind the later famine were clear - eg disarray caused by collectivisation, decline in draught power and failure of the collective farms to meet expectations. During the 1932 sowing it was abundantly clear, and was reported as such, that the campaign was in difficulty - progress was behind plan, the quality was poor and there were shortages of seeds. Stalin was personally informed by Voroshilov as to the poor state of the crop in July 1932.

We know much of this because, contrary to your suggestions above, the state was well informed as to progress. Local grain bodies filed weekly reports as to progress against the harvest plan. By August Politburo members were being informed directly by party personnel that the harvest was in great difficulty; the metrics showed that progress lagged well behind that of the 1931 campaign. The Politburo's response? To insist that the harvest was 'satisfactory' and publish the most optimistic set of figures available. Calculations as to the harvest yield by statisticians were disregarded as politically unacceptable when they proved too similar to the grim picture provided by local bodies.

So by mid-1932, at the latest, it was abundantly clear that the harvest was in trouble. Yet the collection plan adopted in May 1932 was some 15% higher than the (unrealised) 1931 plan. When the regions resisted the centre typically rode roughshod over their 'demobiliser' concerns. This dynamic persisted for the rest of the year. For example, when the Ukrainian SSR decided, in Nov 1932, to ease the burden on collective farms (by ruling that their seed funds should not be requisitioned) it was overruled by Moscow, which continued to insist that kulaks withholding grain were responsible for the troubles.

Despite plenty of information the leadership refused to acknowledge the poor state of the 1931 collections and it refused to acknowledge the looming 1932 crisis. Instead it deployed repression against imagined enemies... unsurprisingly no number of arrests and draconian laws could summon forth grain that was not there. As late as Dec 1932 the Politburo was decreeing that:


In a considerable number of districts in Ukraine and the North Caucasus counter-revolutionary elements – kulaks, former officers, Petlyurians, supporters of the Kuban’ Rada and others – were able to penetrate into the kolkhozy as chairmen or influential members of the board, or as bookkeepers and storekeepers, and as brigade leaders at the threshers, and were able to penetrate into the village soviets, land agencies and cooperatives. They attempt to direct the work of these organisations against the interests of the proletarian state and the policy of the party; they try to organise a counter-revolutionary movement, the sabotage of the grain collections and the sabotage of the village. (Davies & Wheatcroft)

This was wilful delusion. Yet it was not until Feb 1933, with the famine was in full swing, that the Politburo decided that there might be a more serious problem. Any relief efforts of note did not commence until April/May that year; direct food relief was often callously tied to the spring sowing campaign.

The Soviet state ignored all the warning signs and plunged the country into its worst famine since 1891. And this comparison, with a much lower death toll than Stalin's famines, reveals the full perversity of your claim that the latter were resolved "quickly".


With the historic circumstances in place, there was simply no alternative.There was no alternative. The last refuge of the apologist.

Through its gross mismanagement of the agricultural sector, the Stalinist state created the conditions in which millions died. Its grand transformation of agriculture was ill-prepared, thought up on the hoof and botched in execution. There were plenty who disagreed with all or some of this delusional programme - from the critics of collectivisation through to the party bosses whose regions were starving - but the political centre ignored the naysayers and plunged ahead. There only appeared one possible line (Stalin's) because those who advocated alternatives (from a programmatic level down to minor, practical details of the collection) were silenced.

And here you stand with your determinism, insisting that there was no alternative. What you really mean is that you are so invested in Stalinism - not modernisation or even collectivisation but Stalinism as it actually played out - that you cannot even imagine alternatives. More than that, the above should show the degree to which you are actively excusing the Soviet state's catastrophic agricultural policies.

Millions died as a result but the Stalinist state could apparently kill as many as it wished and still be 'historically progressive'.

-----

On living conditions, you're right: you're not an expert. If you were then you might have known that Allen, while making a number of good points, is flawed. The most obvious issue, as Wheatcroft notes in Soviet Living Standards, is that Allen gets his numbers wrong. His choice of index is fairly arbitrary/dubious but, more importantly, he's comparing adjusted to unadjusted data, which overstates Soviet consumption growth.

I like a lot about Farm to Factory but this argument is weak. And obviously so - it contradicts a host of other indicators and all qualitative accounts of the period. For example. it suggests that all those starving peasants in 1933 were in fact eating as well as in 1913 (just silly) and that peasant consumption in 1937 (a famine year) was significantly higher than in 1928 (when Stalin was railing against 'kulak hoarding').

Living standards did slowly improve during the 1930s but only from the hole left by the collapse at the beginning of the decade. Allen is a nice example of how modelling can produce any answer you want, if not sufficiently grounded.


What you fail to mention is that, for all your consumption-mongering, as it happens grain consumption actually increased in the period of 1937-38 compared to 1928 levels, despite "overall production per head" apparently remaining before 1913 levels. That is to say nothing about total dietary consumption compared to 1913 levels, which was undoubtedly far greater.Oh dear. According to Wheatcroft, grain consumption had just about reached 1928 levels by the end of the 1930s. As far as I'm aware, Allen has presented the only real challenge to this view and I've dealt with that above. The idea that peasants were eating better in 1937, given the failure of the 1936 harvest, is just a non-starter.

And I'm curious as to where you're getting this improved "total dietary consumption" from? According to Davies et al (Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union) by 1939 production of both 'vegetables & potatoes' and livestock produce were well below 1928 levels. Even Allen is in agreement, accepting, with the exception of potatoes, that plant and animal foods fell during the 1930s. This should not be a surprise given the collapse in livestock numbers during the famine years.

So yeah, I suppose that statistics is a challenge for someone who rejects 'empiricism' as an 'Anglo-Saxon limitation'.


That is a grossly naive understanding of the events. There was no "peasantisation', the institutional conformity to peasant sensitivities was not some 'ground up' process necessarily but the result of the 'second' soviet revoluton, that is, the romantic bourgeois revolution.Oh go away and actually read a book on the topic. You constantly trot out the 'second revolution' but are ignorant of most actual revisionist work on the topic. Read Lewin, Fitzpatrick, Viola, Filtzer and even Kotkin for a view on how peasants and workers sought to accommodate Soviet institutions to their own circumstances. Lewin's work is particularly important on how the peasant changed the state as the state attempted to reshape the peasant.

Of course none of the above authors would characterise this process as a "romantic bourgeois revolution". That, I'm afraid, is all in your head.

[Emmett Till]

This is a pretty appalling argument. For a start you are comparing the demographic collapse in the 1930s from a very different base line to that of the alleged demographic collapse under Yeltsin. First the time spans are very different -- far less under Stalin and excludes the 1937-39 period. Second, the famine did not simply strike in the Ukraine, and the death toll across the Soviet Union was, as we have already established in this thread, was between 5-7 million. Thus, in two years, the number of premature deaths was vastly higher than in the 1990s. Meanwhile, where those who died between 1931 and 1933 perished as a result of the famine, the picture painted by Rosefielde is rather different -- it is one of general long term economic decline with its knock-on effects on healthcare, standards of living, etc. It is no coincidence that the poorer people are the shorter their life expectancy becomes.

Ah, so Rosenfield did come up! Maybe in one of Rafiq's interminable and unreadable postings?

That 5-7 million figure is indeed subject to question, take out the mysteries of Kazakhstan and you are down to about the same number for the whole USSR as Russia alone according to Rosenfielde! And the "premature deaths" Rosenfield came up with were from *all* causes, most certainly including any knock-on effect you can think of. More long drawn out than forced collectivization? Yes, because forcible decollectivization was over a longer timespan than forcible collectivization.

And, be it noted, it wasn't really until the second decade of the 21st century that the average Russian lifespan returned to something more normal. And in Ukraine and many of the more obscure Soviet ex-Republics without oil, I suspect the death toll continues. In Ukraine now it is of course mounting.

For the '30s, you really can get to 7 million pretty much only by including the Great Terror, with its well established death toll of a little over a million and a half.

And of course all of this pales before the Soviet victims of Hitler's war, current estimates being 26-27 million. And then there's the horrors resulting from Clinton and Susan Rice releasing her client Kagame, the Tutsi dictator of Rwanda, on the Congo, usual death toll guesstimate being 6 million, which sounds suspiciously like, "um, it was about as bad as the Holocaust." And on and on and on...

[Rafiq]

LOL, he literally JUST modified his post because he realized he was full of shit in claiming "not a word of that was true". Before, he said:

Literally not a word of that is true. The boy is in a world of his own.

Now it's:

What is any of this about? What does some other discussion have to do with anything? The boy is in a world of his own, ranting at the sky. You're like a man with a fork in a world of soup.

He had to retract his initial statement because he knew he was wrong, but I also love how he adds "The boy is in a world of his own, ranting at the sky". And then he goes on about forks and soup. Lol, just shut the fuck up professor, please.

For someone who seems to be so above me, you sure do take so much time "perfecting" how you express you don't care about me so much.

Oh and for the record, mentioning that was simply to illustrate how people commonly abuse demands for "evidence" when it is inappropriate in the context of discussions. But I went over that, thoroughly.

So come on Zim, let's continue, shall we? We all know how desperately you want to defend your ego. So let's drop these games of "Oh, no one has time for that". Clearly you do, as you told Om:

Stupidly, I've just spent a couple of hours writing a lengthy reply to Rafiq -- foolish I know -- when I've got a mass of marking to do for tomorrow. Oops.

Like holy shit. I know for a fact I get to you.

[Spectre of Spartacism]

LOL, he literally JUST modified his post because he realized he was full of shit in claiming "not a word of that was true". Before, he said:

Literally not a word of that is true. The boy is in a world of his own.

Now it's:

What is any of this about? What does some other discussion have to do with anything? The boy is in a world of his own, ranting at the sky. You're like a man with a fork in a world of soup.

He had to retract his initial statement because he knew he was wrong, but I also love how he adds "The boy is in a world of his own, ranting at the sky". And then he goes on about forks and soup. Lol, just shut the fuck up professor, please.

For someone who seems to be so above me, you sure do take so much time "perfecting" how you express you don't care about me so much.

Oh and for the record, mentioning that was simply to illustrate how people commonly abuse demands for "evidence" when it is inappropriate in the context of discussions. But I went over that, thoroughly.

So come on Zim, let's continue, shall we? We all know how desperately you want to defend your ego. So let's drop these games of "Oh, no one has time for that". Clearly you do, as you told Om:

Stupidly, I've just spent a couple of hours writing a lengthy reply to Rafiq -- foolish I know -- when I've got a mass of marking to do for tomorrow. Oops.

Like holy shit. I know for a fact I get to you.

Do you have any sources to support your contentions about the famine? The way the Soviet bureaucracy functioned? Anything?

When you gloat, "I know for a fact I get to you," I don't think you realize how immature you appear. Or maybe you do, and that's part of the act?

[Invader Zim]

So in 1932/3 we have a crime against god and nature, a "man made" famine which was "entirely the regimes fault", but the demographic crisis and the deaths following hte collapse of hte Soviet Union were - and these are his words - "long term economic [My god, 'economic', how legitmate!] with its knock-on effects on healthcare, standards of living, etc."

That is quite the terminology there. Legitimate sectors of a society, "healthcare, standards of living" and the 'economy' underwent a long term decline, natural fluctuations just like the boom and bust cycle.

The deaths which resulted from this - it's so fucking memorizing how with a few cheap buzzwords something can be sold off as a "Great crime against humanity" to a "Oh, the economy just ain't putin' out as it should".



Do I really need to explain the difference between demographical collapse as a result of famine and demographic decline as a result of decreased birth rates matched with decreased life expectancy?


Head. Desk. Bang. Bang. Bang.

[Invader Zim]

Ah, so Rosenfield did come up! Maybe in one of Rafiq's interminable and unreadable postings?

That 5-7 million figure is indeed subject to question, take out the mysteries of Kazakhstan and you are down to about the same number for the whole USSR as Russia alone according to Rosenfielde! And the "premature deaths" Rosenfield came up with were from *all* causes, most certainly including any knock-on effect you can think of. More long drawn out than forced collectivization? Yes, because forcible decollectivization was over a longer timespan than forcible collectivization.

And, be it noted, it wasn't really until the second decade of the 21st century that the average Russian lifespan returned to something more normal. And in Ukraine and many of the more obscure Soviet ex-Republics without oil, I suspect the death toll continues. In Ukraine now it is of course mounting.

For the '30s, you really can get to 7 million pretty much only by including the Great Terror, with its well established death toll of a little over a million and a half.

And of course all of this pales before the Soviet victims of Hitler's war, current estimates being 26-27 million. And then there's the horrors resulting from Clinton and Susan Rice releasing her client Kagame, the Tutsi dictator of Rwanda, on the Congo, usual death toll guesstimate being 6 million, which sounds suspiciously like, "um, it was about as bad as the Holocaust." And on and on and on...

Haha, no. I was responding to you. Rafiq hasn't read Rosefielde. The very idea that Rafiq has read anything about the Soviet Union in the Stalin years is absurd. I'll get round to the rest of this later, I've got to go to bed.

[ComradeOm]

PS: I don't want to wade into your polemic with Rafiq, once his logorrhea gets hold of him there is no stopping him. But I will note that in fact, once those collective farms were finally tractorized, you did indeed have a gigantic increase in Soviet food production despite all problems. As is ridiculously easy to prove.

Before collectivization, 90% of the Soviet population were peasants. Afterwards, you had a huge move from the countryside to the cities, with a majority urban population rather quickly.

So on balance, despite all the human victims, collectivization was successful. Without it, an urbanized Soviet Union would have starved to death immediately.That's a bit like saying, "Apart from the need to amputate your legs, your appendectomy was a success!". Somewhat necessary but still bungled and with massive costs.

Nobody questions the need for Soviet agriculture to modernise, that was a baseline acceptance of all from the 1920s onwards. There's more controversy over whether the NEP could have been a suitable vehicle for this but the end goal was always large-scale modern farming. The economic criticisms of collectivisation are that it was badly managed (being charitable), absorbed more investment than intended, led to a lost decade and proved not to be sustainable in the long-run (eg the grain imports). And that's not going into the millions dead and the mass immiseration.

If, like Rafiq, we assume that there was one and only one route to modern agriculture then we might say that collectivisation was a success. But by accepting this binary option we're implicitly accepting the assumptions and arguments of the Stalinist state. Which, as Rafiq demonstrates, has obvious pitfalls, not least assuming a dangerous inevitably about affairs.

But thanks for the book recommendation. I'll be sure to check it out.

[Rafiq]

Om, Zim beat you to it not only as far as responding to me but also getting demolished. Be assured that I respect your aching desire for seconds, dear elder. Being that most of this shit was ALREADY fucking covered, however, I'll try to keep it as short as possible.


There is not a shred of academic analysis that suggests that the Soviet state of the 1930s was incapable of stopping the famine. The DIFFERENCE - do you get this you fucking Anglo-Saxon philistine! - is that none of them are close-minded enough to assume that there was only one avenue of action open to Stalin.


Now the meaning of this statement is quite clear: the state could not have done anything differently even if it had wanted to. The 'disorganisation' was such that even if Stalin wanted to change course, the bureaucratic machine could not be trusted to carry out its orders.

ComradeOm, let me be very blunt with you: You might be used to preying on the ignorant, you might derive a sense of self-confidence from setting them straight, but you have reached a blind alley. That much is certain - that you have "lowered" yourself to my level alone demonstrates this. But nevermind that, let's actually look at the controversy at hand:

Was the Soviet state capable of "stopping the famine"? YES, but under conditions which I have demonstrated WERE NOT FEASIBLE as far as the industrial and developmental needs of the Soviet state were concerned, with respect to the necessary time period of it. So to make things clear, I want to actually focus on the real controversy at hand: Are you claiming that Soviet industrialization was possible without collectivization, none the less in the 10 years that it was undertaken? This point I have made remains uncontested, as we will see, instead, we have nothing more than sentimental "HOW CAN IT BE PROGRESS IF MILLIONS DIED" which is totally bellow the standards of someone who pretends to be a "neutral" historical observer. As it happens, the cost of life as far as the industrialization and modernization of ANY COUNTRY, at least before globalization (and this is very contestable, even) is tremendously high, but that does not negate the fact that it was still "progressive" insofar as it shaped the modern world as we know it today. Nevermind that however, we can get to that later.

Under the pre-condition of halting, prolonging or "relaxing" collectivization, it is indeed possible that the famine could have been prevented all-together. This, however, was not my argument - my argument was that if we presuppose collectivization as a structural necessity in the Soviet Union, as far as the state's survival was concerned, then all evidence points towards the conclusion that the Soviet bureaucracy was incapable of carrying out collectivization in a matter that would have prevented catastrophe while at the same time still fulfilling the industrial and developmental needs of the country as a whole. This has been my argument, so please, stop twisting and playing with words when you know FULL WELL WHAT I FUCKING MEAN. In fact, as I already pointed out with Zim:

The whole point of this controversy began when I made the opint that: EVen if every single member of the bureaucracy wanted to prevent the famine, or had a general idea of how to, it would get so entangled in chaos that it probably wouldn't be able to prevent it anyway. I did not specify that the conditions of this "general idea" as necessarily having to still meet the productive needs of soviet industry and so on. This is what you amply do not udnerstand: HAD MY POINT BEEN THAT THE BEAUROCRACY COULD HAVE PREVENTED THE FAMINE IN GENERAL I MERELY COULD HAVE STATED:

The bureaucracy could just decide to not institute collectivization in the first place, or wait several years.

But I did NOT say this, for the simple reason that my point was - even if the bureaucracy had a general idea of how to prevent the famine, this imperative would get so entangled in other sectors of the economy and of the country in general that it would probably fail in doing this as well. Again, this point was to illustrate the nature of bureaucracy: If bureaucracies were so organized that they could seamlessly carry out goals efficiently and in a very organized manner, THEY WOULD NOT BE bureaucracies. I did not say the level of organization to carry out collectivization was lacking, I said the level of organization to carry it out EFFICIENTLY and in a way that would have the hindsight to prevent the famine was lacking. There is a very big fucking difference and if you can't see it - well, go fuck yourself.

So no, you plainly do not understand the argument: It is not that the bureaucratic machine could not be "trusted", it's that under the backdrop of this social transformation which had never been carried out before, not in civil war, not ever, no one would have actually known how to go about doing this properly. Again, we will get to that in more detail later: Collectivization was a process that had to be pushed through as fast and as brutally as possible, there was no room for "relaxation', the Soviet state could have prolonged it and their developmental needs would have suffered from it, but as far as lacking the necessary hindsight and experience goes, a catastrophe was virtually unavoidable.


Yet to argue that the centre was unable to make its policies felt is absurd.

No, this is not what I argued - the centre was MORE THAN CAPABLE of carrying out its policies, the point is that the specifications of those policies could not be implemented in an efficient manner, they were carried out - but the matter that which this was done was horribly mismanaged. Again, one could not decree "proper management and organization", as these were deeply structural problems: For the bureaucracy it was already an axiom that they wanted to prevent deaths, and that they wanted to manage the problem efficiently.


Let's start with the previous example I gave, the one that flew straight over your head: 1930. This stands as an obvious example of Stalin's decision to change policy/direction having an immediate effect. The impact of Dizzy, a significant if temporary U-turn, was prompt and, as you note, impressive

Ladies and Gentlemen, in Om's mind, this is what constitutes "flying straight over" your head:

I love how you mention the 'relaxation' of 1930, because as it happened, following this relaxation of collectivization, the amount of peasants in the new agricultural collectives literally halved, they simply left. The decision made in 1930 led to a reversal of the Soviet state's gains vis a vis collectivization. Please just stop.

If it wasn't abundantly clear then, let me make it abundantly clear now: What happened in 1930 was NOT the successful implementation of collectivization, while at the same time successfully avoiding famine and catastrophe. What happened was that policies were relaxed and as a result of the gains of collectivization were reversed - the collectives were abandoned and the whole thing was fucked up. So really, what are you getting at here? Again, this argument is not about whether collectivization could have been reversed, prolonged or abandoned. No, no, it could have, BUT AT WHAT COST? That is the point: An extension of the NEP was clearly not going to fulfill the industrial and developmental needs of the soviet state in the time period that was necessary - but that isn't the only point: The peasants were not organized in a manner that would have allowed for modernization of agriculture to be the logical conclusion of the NEP, peasants had no incentive to modernize agriculture, which is why: Despite the fact that the NEP set the Soviet state back on its feet in many ways, its logical conclusion was not agricultural modernization: There was simply, amply, no signs that the NEP was leading the country toward industrialization. And why?

For the simple reason that the social structures and relationships to productions in societies at a global scale are not inherently organized in a way that leads them to the conclusion of WESTERN industrialization. Soviet collectivization was nothing more than a consciously led structural transformation to modernize Soviet agriculture on 'western' lines. I emphasize this because the predispositions to modernization and industrialization were NEVER present in Russia - industrialization in Russia took the form, as Trotsky notes, of "combined and uneven" development, it did nothing to challenge the landowners and the autocracy despite producing a militant working class, and to add, even if the autocracy was abolished a land reform which still retained the institution of private property was established, this would not have modernized agricultural practices, it would not have fulfilled the industiral needs of the Soviet Union. To put it very, very simplistically: The "natural" (a word bourgeois historians are fond of using) historical trajectory path of Russia did not lead it to the conclusion of being able to industrialize so as to catch up with Western Europe and the United States.


(Seriously, what did you think I was referring to Dizzy for? You think I linked to it for fun?)

You linked it in an attempt to show that the Soviet state was able to reverse or 'relax' its policies so as to prevent a catastrophe. Very well, catastrophe prevented, but this does nothing about the REAL impending crisis, which was the issue of modernizing agriculture. This was prolonged in 1930. The reason "dizzy" was virtually abandoned was because it was a FAILURE - the intention was to relax policies while at the same time retaining the gains of collectivization. This failed utterly. So why would the bureaucracy, from the standpoint of the necessity of collectivization, repeat the same mistake, at least before it was AMPLY CLEAR that they HAD to, i.e. that the catastrophe reached proportions that they could not ignore. But again, clearly, they did not think things would reach the levels of chaos and death that they did, and they really had no reason to. you can point to all the "warning" signs all you want, but there were also other warning signs that would have led and amounted to nothing. in other words, before it actually happened, warnings about this or that were no better than warnings that it is all together an impossible task. The latter 'warning' was proven wrong.


The entire collectivisation process was an unparalleled intrusion of state power into the world of Russian peasants.

Again, AS I ARGUED:

What is particularly stupid about this argument is the fact that the point of measuring the Soviet state's level of disorganization was the experience of collectivization - that the imperative or ability to carry it out with the level of organization they had was there sais nothing about the ability to prevent a famine that would consume some 3-7 million lives. The famine was a catastrophe, no doubt, but it did not destroy the country, so that already implies a level of organization in place. You fail to understand that even the smallest misstep in this circumstance could lead to total catastrophe. What would have been necessary in order to halt the famine would have required specialized consideration of what was necessary for grain production in relation to the needs of the Red Army, urban areas, and for export in relation to the technical demands of industrialization.

So at this level, we are already dealing with the inner-intricacies of over-reaching central planning, not 'planning in general'. You simply fail to understand the context of my argument: In other words, the RELATIVE nature of the bureaucratic disorganization. Relative to being able to exist and carry out a general plan, of course it was organized, but relative to be able to account for all of these factors at once, i.e. to carry out that general plan flawlessly, no, it was chaotic.

A fact which you are not appreciating is the fact that bureaucracies always entail a level of organization - the chaos emerges at the level of the intricacies of local considerations, i.e. "immediate" ones, whether of the community or of individuals. What you say is so silly, you may as well argue that the famine relief which followed is some enigma according to my argument.

Your argument is fucking worthless. If you later on will attempt to fault me, go ahead, but you shouldn't have made this argument when it was WELL WITHIN YOUR GRASP that I already said: THAT THE SOVIET STATE was organized enough to carry out collectivization DOES NOT MEAN it was organized enough or 'powerful' enough to do this with the necessary hindsight that would prevent catastrophe and various missteps. Here I'm NOT EVEN a determinist: I am merely saying that matters can be relegated to chance, maybe by chance the whole thing could have been avoided, but that is not what happened - the smallest misstep could have led to chaos.


Similarly, Moscow had little practical difficulties in sealing the borders, requisitioning grain or allocating seed loans during the actual famine.

Yet the matter that which they did requisite harvested grain, and so on, was horribly inefficient and mismanaged. What do you hope to prove here?


As Zim points out, the change in policy in 1933, was itself a demonstration that the state could change direction when needed. The plans and decrees emitted from Moscow, and translated by the local party/state apparatus, unquestionably did have an effect.

Again,

Again, the Soviet beaurocracy was not stupid - they did not go all-out in responding to the famine until they had to for the simple reason that before 1933 they were confident that things would not escalate to the level that it did. They had no reason to believe it would, and it is plainly that fucking simple. In hindisght it was a catastrophic mistake, but LISTEN To your STUPID fucking logic:

You claim that the bureaucracy "ignored" reports of mass devastation and famine in 1932, and it finally capitulated in 1933 and took the necessary steps to relieve the famine. Are you insinuating that the bureaucracy INTENTIONALLY planned to relieve the famine later, that they FORESAW that things would get as chaotic and disastrous as they did many months later? Can you not see how UNREASONABLE that claim is? If the bureaucracy had no reason to believe that the famine would reach the heights that it did, that thing would get as catastrophic and chaotic as they did and that the famine was at a scale that required their appreciation, then saying "they should have known" is a WORTHLESS observation because it makes pretenses to what they should have done ONLY IN HINDSIGHT. Yes it was a mistake, but given the circumstances, I fail to see how this mistake could have been avoided in consideration of the fact that BEFORE IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED there was no REAL WAY of knowing one course of action would be better than another. HOW COULD THERE? Again, 1931, for all the problems, was comparatively a better harvest, had conditions stayed as they did in 1931, despite the strife, there would have been no holodomor: The point is that things severely escalated and reached a level that was far beyond the predictive grasp of the bureaucracy.

What you fail to understand as well as that the change in policy in 1933 was only carried out after the mass repressions and state terror brutalized the peasantry into submission. The change in policy in 1933 sais nothing about whether this would have been feasible in 1932.


The Stalinist leadership could not guarantee that its orders would be followed precisely or competently but nor was the state paralysed by chaos. It could, and did, enforce its will on the localities.

No, you idiot, it wasn't "paralyzed", I NEVER used that word. The bureaucracy was NOT at a standstill at any moment, but that's precisely the fucking point - it was entangled in a billion other fucking processes. This is not a controversial point: Was the bureaucracy SOLELY concerned with collectivization at that time, or was it also focused on other imperatives, like DISTRIBUTING what was actually harvested, engaging in a massive campaign of social transformation, as well as fulfilling the industrial and developmental needs of the Soviet Union? Not hat all of these things are no manageable, but the bureaucracy was formed LITERALLY without any fucking time to even think about it - the Russian civil war decimated all real infrastructure, later on bureaucrats during collectivization would have no administrative experience or way of measuring their skills. The whole thing was fucking chaotic. Rather than a matter of being "paralyzed", they were entangled in a giant clusterfuck. I have never said anything more, and no historian will disagree with this.


I'm not going to dwell on that fallacy. Safe to say that it was the job of economists, agronomists and policy makers to understand the impact of their policies and forecast the results.

And they did this improperly. How should they have known to do it properly, WITHOUT hindsight? This is what you fail to explain. Was it simply intentional, was it a genocide after all engineered to crush Ukrainian hopes for independence? Please.


More to the point, as I noted above, there was extensive experience of famine and grain requisitioning in the Soviet government.


However, even those who remained had experience of the Civil War famines and the repeated grain crises of the 1920s. The concept of famine was certainly not alien to this elite.

What apparently flew over your head:

What were the CONDITIONS surrounding the 1933 famine that distinguished it from previous famines, Om? Intense grain requisitions? In this context that is nothing more than a fucking abstraction - under the backdrop of what events led to the mass requisition of grain? And it is simple: Collectivization. That you are equipped with the experience of famines wrought from entirely different circumstances is not going to give you the necessary experience to deal with a famine in the midst of a qualitative, over-reaching change in the relations to production. Again, prior to Soviet collectivization there had never been, at the level of consciously-driven social transformation anything on the scale to it, there had never been such a profound and rapid change as far as agricultural production was concerned as during Soviet collectivization. Collectivization was distinguished insofar as it IRREVERSIBLY revolutionized agricultural production (to conform to industrial demands), again, Stalin RIGHTFULLY called it the "second" revolution, it was.

The difference is that previous famines, as well as methods of grain requisition, were not done under the backdrop of the 'second revolution', that is to say, the social transformation that was collectivization, so no matter what experience they had, it wouldn't do for them SHIT because unlike before, these methods of requisition were entirely under the backdrop of a new mode of life and a new mode of agricultural production. Collectivization was not war Communism. The two situations are in this context incomparable: What was also lacking vis a vis collectivization was the ability to recognize the degree of resistance by the peasants in general that the state would experience - there is no reason to think they weren't so naive as to think that their assessment of the social antagonism in the countryside was as simple as they thought it was. Again, the peasants had no way of articulating the events in a way that appreciated their long-term effects - they articulated the events in a backward, superstitious manner.


So whatever about the broader picture of collectivisation, the Soviet state absolutely did possess 'the specialised knowledge about how to prevent a famine'. We can see that in 1936-37, which I'll return to below, where the measures adopted did not differ greatly from those proposed in 1932-33.

For the LAST FUCKING TIME: that was NOT my argument, my argument was that THEY DID NOT POSSES THE SPECIALIZED KNOWLEDGE ABOUT HOW TO PREVENT A FAMINE insofar as it existed within the context of the entirely qualitatively new social order of life, and the transformation leading to it - THAT'S IT!


1936-37 provides a useful contrast. The failure of the harvest in that year was due to similar conditions as 1932-33. That it didn't result in mass starvation not because the bureaucracy now possessed some sort of experience that can only be gained from the death of millions. Rather it was decisions made at the top - specifically the decision to build up and use central grain stocks (contrary to the earlier experience) - that prevented disaster. Conditions were the same, the state's capabilities were the same, but a different policy approach led to a different outcome.

This actually made me laugh. Are you fucking stupid? Do you mean to tell me that the decisions made in 1936/7 had nothing to do with the experience derived from the famine half a decade earlier? Are you actually fucking stupid? Look what a fucking CLOWN you've made yourself just to put Rafiq back in his place. I mean, if anything your point only CONFIRMS mine: WHY THE FUCK did they pursue a different policy and a different approach to the situation, vis a vis 1932? Becuase they whimsically just decided it would be a better idea, without any experience of past, disastrous policies factoring into their decision? You ACTUALLY FUCKING MEAN TO CONVINCE ME OF THIS? You GREAT fucking professional, you 'expert'? Fuck you. And you're fucking wrong, amply and plainly fucking wrong too:

by 1936/7, MOST PEASANTS WERE ALREADY ORGANIZED, or at least FAR MORE than in 1932/3 into the new conditions of life and production. No, CONDITIONS WERE NOT the same, I mean, by 1936 NINETY PERCENT of peasants were organized into collectives, and had already expereinced the social transformation - in 1932, that number was closer to half of them. In fact, the turmoil of 1932/3 WAS under the backdrop of an intense, violently coerced socially trans formative campaign. Have you forgotten? That you can say the conditions in 1936/7 were entirely the same, DENYING THE HINDSIGHT GAINED FROM EXPERIENCE AT THAT, when 90% of peasants were organized into collectives, is literally so fucking stupid you've just lost all credibility on this forum just for saying that.


But wait, wait, the 'second revolution', 'socialist realism', drool...

Ladies and gentlemen, here we have profound insight into how the mind of a philsitine actually operates - pure, righteous fucking ignorance. Drool all you want you fucking worthless philistine.


Far from working to prevent a famine, it refused to acknowledge the reality of one until it was far too late.

So which one was it? Was the Soviet state well aware of the famine but did nothing about it, or did it deny its existence by refusing to acknowledge it, even privately? And frankly, if the latter is true: WHY DID THEY NOT acknowledge it and why did they ignore reports? Did they say "Oh, let's just wait until next year until we get to the brink of collapse". No, they CLEARLY made the mistake of thinking things would not reach the heights that they did. Case fucking closed, end of story.


The 1931 harvest had been bad and regional party satraps had clashed with the centre on the targets set. That is, even before the 1932 sowing season many of the key factors behind the later famine were clear - eg disarray caused by collectivisation, decline in draught power and failure of the collective farms to meet expectations. During the 1932 sowing it was abundantly clear, and was reported as such, that the campaign was in difficulty - progress was behind plan, the quality was poor and there were shortages of seeds. Stalin was personally informed by Voroshilov as to the poor state of the crop in July 1932.

And the KEY FUCKING FACTOR here you're ignoring, was that this was not simply some neutral process of properly collecting harvest - there was, under the backdrop of this, a real social revolution occurring, albeit a violently coerced one. This transformation had to be PUSHED THROUGH as quickly and efficiently as possible, no matter bad harvests or whatnot. The INITIAL goal of collectivization was not even the IMMEDIATE bolstering of production, but the dismantlement of peasant institutions so that the predispositions to what would later become an objectively better agricultural output would be possible to sustain industrialization. OF course, do not mis-interpret me: Production levels were FAR BELLOW what was expected, but again, the primary goal was destroying the old social bonds - if the state was so naive to think that this could occur while at the same time procuring the predicted, unrealistic harvests, it was proven wrong. Again, this was absolutely necessary from the perspective of industrialization the country. You speak of other alternatives - given the circumstances, LIKE WHAT?

NEP? No.

Voluntary collectivzation? Don't make me laugh.

WHAT ALTERNATIVES were there? SHOW ME! You think I'm a "stalinist'? No, there was AMPLY no alternative. It's that simple.


For example, when the Ukrainian SSR decided, in Nov 1932, to ease the burden on collective farms (by ruling that their seed funds should not be requisitioned) it was overruled by Moscow, which continued to insist that kulaks withholding grain were responsible for the troubles.

Well will you deny there was peasant resistance, and that some of this resistance contributed to the crisis? Only a fool would. Of course, this was not exclusively of a "kulak" nature, but this is beyond the point - mass repression and brutalization, to stomp this resistance, underlied collectivization at this period. Do you deny this? But again, none of this emanates the idea that the state was well aware that disaster would occur and reach the proportions that it did. if it had hindsight, it would have changed its policies - BUT IT DID NOT. Again, you don't fucking understand logic: In a bureaucracy, there are PLENTY of warnings, there are PLENTY of signs, there are PLENTY of suggestions, knowing which one to take is not simply a matter of "reason", the state was entering uncharted territories and made some naive and outright wrong assumptions about both its level of efficiency in harvesting grain and the propensity for peasants to cooperate with them.


Despite plenty of information the leadership refused to acknowledge the poor state of the 1931

As I told Zim, had the conditions of 1931 endured rather than exponentially increase, there would not have been a catastrophe at the level of the famine that occurred. The state did not think 1931 would get worse, and it had no reason to - the strife and problems of 1931 were not enough for the state to reverse its policies. It is literally that simple.

I love how you keep trying to juggle two entirely contradictory points, namely, that the state was both horribly incompetent and rife with mismanagement and at the same time had the power to do whatever the fuck it wanted to whimsically and simply decided to fuck things up because they're evil or whatever.


The Soviet state ignored all the warning signs and plunged the country into its worst famine since 1891. And this comparison, with a much lower death toll than Stalin's famines, reveals the full perversity of your claim that the latter were resolved "quickly".

LOOK at how you contradict yourself! First, the state was able to solve the problem by mere whim, quickly and efficiently, and then, it did not do this quickly but in fact did this in a horribly inefficient manner. Which one is it? It was resolved quickly, by 1933 the state was clearly doing all it could to stop the famine. Why did they, at this specific time? Again.


There only appeared one possible line (Stalin's) because those who advocated alternatives (from a programmatic level down to minor, practical details of the collection) were silenced.

You're literally so full of shit. What amounted to this rich, abundancy of alternatives? An extension of the NEP? What other alternatives were there besides an extension of the NEP and collectivization? Your logic is literally hilarious - "oh, there were alternatives, but they are all buried deep under the rubble of Stalinism", which is why we can't find them. And of course, even if people did propose more efficient measn of carrying it out, these proposals were not rejected because the bureaucracy valued inefficiency, but because they failed to convince them.


And here you stand with your determinism, insisting that there was no alternative. What you really mean is that you are so invested in Stalinism - not modernisation or even collectivisation but Stalinism as it actually played out - that you cannot even imagine alternatives.

No, don't mistaken me, there were alternatives to Stalinism: the full collapse of the Soviet state and further civil war and catastrophe. Alternatively, perhaps only before the 1930's, you could have had a military coup that would have led the Soviet Union on the path of exporting the revolution via invasion. Who knows how that would have turned out. But again, that didn't happen. is it a crime that it did not happen? Maybe, but it was not Stalin's crime. That you think there were alternatives to Stalinism, given the circumstances, is so horribly fucking naive - one had to go, either the Soviet state or the proletarian dictatorship and the Soviet state. Both could not exist together, give nteh circumstances. Just fucking THINK: WHAT WAS Stalinism in juxtaposition to the Bolshevism of the 20's?

I mention the 'second revolution' and socialist realism to outline these differences. It is not simply a matter of 'brutality'. It was simple: Stalinism was a means of solving THE crisis of the Soviet state, lacking a proletarian demographic to sustain it while at the same time politically isolated and far beyond countries it perceived as threats. There was no longer a proletarian dictatorship for the proletariat were decimated in the civil war, not to mention the NEP which developed infrastructures outside of it. Please keep your fucking sentiments at church, this is not a debate about whether the events were a tragedy but whether it was a crime. It was not.

I am no foolish determinist, I am a Hegelian. THERE WERE ALTERNATIVES. But the Hegelian point: once Stalinism came into fruition, it THEN became inevitable, retrospectively. You find the same logic in quantum physics, i.e. with Schrodinger's cat. What does it mean? It means that there are multiple possibilities, but insofar as events come into fruition and shape the world as it is in the here and now, in 2015 where we can retrospectively look back upon it, IT BECOMES HISTORICALLY INEVITABLE. Insofar as Socialism in one country was concerned, there was no alternative to Stalinism, Stalinism was nothing more than the conforming of the October revolution to the necessary bourgeois romantic, MODERN revolution in agriculture that was necessary to sustain the state's existence.



Millions died as a result but the Stalinist state could apparently kill as many as it wished and still be 'historically progressive'.

The Stalinist state was whimsically killing people, of course.

Please, nobody fucking buys your crocodile tears. As it happens, "progressive" is not a moral category in this context, it refers to modernization. Modernization was done under the backdrop of millions upon millions of deaths, famines rapes and murder, horrors infinitely worse than Stalinism. Was British, American, or in general European industrialization progressive in your mind, historically? For Marx, they were. I am no more of a monster than Marx. Plain and simple.

Collectivization was historically progressive. It was brutal, catastrophic and horrifying. That does not mean a thing as far as the term is concerned - it destroyed older traditional bonds and modernized the Soviet Union, laid the foundations for the proletarianization of the country (post-1991). China perfected this, of course, as even tdoay there are still lingering deformities. Stalinism's imperfection vis a vis Maoism was the fact that the former was built off the carcass of an actual proletarian revolution while the latter was a bourgeois-romantic revolution at the onset of its existence.


On living conditions, you're right: you're not an expert. If you were then you might have known that Allen, while making a number of good points, is flawed. The most obvious issue, as Wheatcroft notes in Soviet Living Standards, is that Allen gets his numbers wrong. His choice of index is fairly arbitrary/dubious but, more importantly, he's comparing adjusted to unadjusted data, which overstates Soviet consumption growth.

He justifies his use of price indexes, actually. Care to address his justification? They are certainly not "arbitrary", for he outlines why the older price indexes were in his mind flawed.

You claim his comparison between unadjusted data and adjusted data overstates Soviet consumption growth. Care to elaborate? How is the manner in which he compares them flawed, in other words? At any rate, the notion that living standards declined, Allen's "overstatements" or otherwise, appears to be contested. You claimed that living standards were, for the average peasant, superior in 1928 and 1937. I contest this notion, by merit of the fact that you have not properly supported it (See, in some contexts empirical facts do no matter - because this is a specific empirically controversial claim) as well as the fact that consumption aside, the expenditure on socio-cultural infrastructure comparing both periods is ignored in this premise.


I like a lot about Farm to Factory but this argument is weak. And obviously so - it contradicts a host of other indicators and all qualitative accounts of the period. For example. it suggests that all those starving peasants in 1933 were in fact eating as well as in 1913 (just silly) and that peasant consumption in 1937 (a famine year) was significantly higher than in 1928 (when Stalin was railing against 'kulak hoarding').

Again, care to elaborate? Why was it silly?


Oh dear. According to Wheatcroft, grain consumption had just about reached 1928 levels by the end of the 1930s.

How does this contradict my claim? That on average, grain consumption was higher for peasants in 1937 than in 1928.


And I'm curious as to where you're getting this improved "total dietary consumption" from?

You are going to tell me that the average peasant was eating more in 1937 than in 1913, despite the fact that they were clearly consuming more grain in 1937 than in 1928? Use fucking logic, if grain was consumed more in 1928 than in 1913, livestock aside (as this refers to peasants living standards), and in 1937 it was higher than in 1928, how was grain consumption per head in 1913 greater than in 1937?


So yeah, I suppose that statistics is a challenge for someone who rejects 'empiricism' as an 'Anglo-Saxon limitation'.

RE: Allen, you fucking pompous, arrogant piece of shit, I was not even making an offensive argument, I was ASKING FOR YOUR insight on the matter, I wanted to see what you made of it. Evidently, you just are saying shit - which may be true or might not, you have not given us why you come to the conclusions you do. And stop talking out of your ass. "Empiricism" and respecting the importance of empirical facts are not the same fucking thing.


Of course none of the above authors would characterise this process as a "romantic bourgeois revolution". That, I'm afraid, is all in your head.

That is because none of them read Bordgia (why would they?). To add, none of them make pretenses to being great theoreticians, they are humble historians searching for empirical truths.

Like holy shit - why the FUCK would those historians characterize it as a romantic bourgeois revolution? Why would they go into detail about Stalinist civic values and how they were a regression into bourgeois humanism, as noted by Althusser and later Zizek? Because this (The historic (in the Hegelian sense)/philosophical dimension)is not their field, and they are humble enough to acknowledge that, probably unlike you. They wouldn't call it a bourgeois romantic revolution becuase this requires a method of analysis and theoretical assumptions that are thoroughly beyond the confines of positivism. For example, that the Soviet Union and Mao's China were prolonged jacobin, POLITICAL phases that were only prolonged for as long as they were because of processes of negation. This conclusion far exceeds the "empirical evidence", it requires an understanding of - for example - the dialectic and historical processes of change. No one expects these of the revisionist historians.

Stalin's second revolution, on top of WWII, prolonged the Soviet Union's existence far beyond what the October revolution would have led it (given the failure of the international revolution).

[Rafiq]

Love how these fuckers talk about how "Rafiq hasn't read anything".

Do you actually think that? Of cousre, why even bother with this? There is no way one can prove they have read anything. You can't prove Zim or Om have read anything either on an internet forum.

So fuck you right back at you: Om and Zim have never read anything. How does that feel?

It's so funny because I have not argued against, or attempted to fuck with ANY of the sources they have provided. I have not contradicted them. I have merely stated that the sources provided do not support the conclusions made in THIS argument. That's it. Again, most bourgeois historians recognize the famine was preventable, yes, but under the pre-condition of collectivization's abandonment or "relaxation". I have not argued otherwise, I have merely pointed out how this was not feasible as far as the Soviet Union's survival was concerned.

I really love how I destroyed Om's facade of "Oh I'm so much better than this forum, I need to come back and remind everyone how worthless they are and then disappear every 3 months". It's almost like my posts are live bait. I'm going to keep you here for as long as it takes, Om. Be assured.

[Emmett Till]

That's a bit like saying, "Apart from the need to amputate your legs, your appendectomy was a success!". Somewhat necessary but still bungled and with massive costs.

Nobody questions the need for Soviet agriculture to modernise, that was a baseline acceptance of all from the 1920s onwards. There's more controversy over whether the NEP could have been a suitable vehicle for this but the end goal was always large-scale modern farming. The economic criticisms of collectivisation are that it was badly managed (being charitable), absorbed more investment than intended, led to a lost decade and proved not to be sustainable in the long-run (eg the grain imports). And that's not going into the millions dead and the mass immiseration.

If, like Rafiq, we assume that there was one and only one route to modern agriculture then we might say that collectivisation was a success. But by accepting this binary option we're implicitly accepting the assumptions and arguments of the Stalinist state. Which, as Rafiq demonstrates, has obvious pitfalls, not least assuming a dangerous inevitably about affairs.

But thanks for the book recommendation. I'll be sure to check it out.

*Forced* collectivization *before* building tractor factories was remarkably foolish. But collectivization in and of itself was the way to go, if you didn't want to go back to capitalism. Large scale capitalist tractorized agriculture on the American model would indeed have led directly to all Stalin's paranoid fantasies actually coming to life. Even Bukharin finally realised that, his capitulation to Stalin wasn't only due to lack of character. The kulaks would have become an undeniable Soviet reality, indeed would have overthrown an urban party in a 90% peasant land rather quickly.

But given the fairly collective Russian agricultural tradition, crank out tractors and offer them as prizes to farmers willing to merge their tiny little plots into collective affairs with plowing done by tractors instead of peasants dragging ploughs with their horses or maybe just their own arms and legs, and peasants would have flocked into collective farms. Especially if they got to actually run them.

Of course, not as easily said as done, an industrialization drive run in a sensible fashion instead of Stalin style would have taken much longer and would still have required working class sacrifices, though not to the extreme degree of the Stalinist industrial revolution. Those tractors could not be magically summoned from the air.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Nobody questions the need for Soviet agriculture to modernise, that was a baseline acceptance of all from the 1920s onwards. There's more controversy over whether the NEP could have been a suitable vehicle for this but the end goal was always large-scale modern farming.

I was under the impression that the introduction of policies like the Ural-Siberian method demonstrated practically the failures of the NEP, or at least "actually existing" NEP as it was managed by the Stalinist bureaucracy (where no measures were taken to weaken and eliminate the peasantry and the urban petite bourgeoisie), particularly since the Ural-Siberian Method represented a massive about-face by the bureaucracy.

[Invader Zim]

So fuck you right back at you: Om and Zim have never read anything. How does that feel?

It doesn't feel like anything -- because neither of us are making ludicrous claims about Soviet economic and agricultural policy, the state bureaucracy, which fly in the face of the historiography and the increasing number of studies which have been committed to this subject. It is also worth noting that in both of your interminable, graceless and illiterate (both historically and linguistically) rants you abjectly fail to justify your perspective or even produce an argument which we can talk about.

There isn't a great deal to say. You declare 'victory', claim that you have destroyed and humbled your opponents, when the reality is nothing of the sort. You haven't made an argument, you haven't justified any of your claims, and you haven't demonstrated any knowledge of the period. But, of course, this is actually my fault. I knew precisely that you never brook any discussion or criticism and that to offer some would set you off like this. But now it has gone too far and its reaching the stage that we are bullying you. So, I'm sorry for doing that to you. It was pretty immature of me.

[Ricemilk]

But given the fairly collective Russian agricultural tradition, crank out tractors and offer them as prizes to farmers willing to merge their tiny little plots into collective affairs with plowing done by tractors instead of peasants dragging ploughs with their horses or maybe just their own arms and legs, and peasants would have flocked into collective farms. Especially if they got to actually run them.Bolding mine.

IOW, while Stalin made numerous tactical mistakes in implementation, his crime as such was to put the principle of central authority above the long-term welfare of the peasantry and the proletariat. (Of course, we can't assume Lenin would have reverted to libertarianism on that issue and in that time and place given the chance.)

Which is not to vindicate nationalist slanders (which we haven't discussed in detail in this thread), but rather to separate the criminal from the negligent for the purposes of the OP, given that the poster has accepted 'basically some millions' as the relevant part of the quantitative analysis.

[Emmett Till]

Bolding mine.

IOW, while Stalin made numerous tactical mistakes in implementation, his crime as such was to put the principle of central authority above the long-term welfare of the peasantry and the proletariat. (Of course, we can't assume Lenin would have reverted to libertarianism on that issue and in that time and place given the chance.)

Which is not to vindicate nationalist slanders (which we haven't discussed in detail in this thread), but rather to separate the criminal from the negligent for the purposes of the OP, given that the poster has accepted 'basically some millions' as the relevant part of the quantitative analysis.

Did Stalin put central authority over everything? Well yes, he was a Stalinist after all.

But there was a strong differential attitude with respect to the proletariat as opposed to the peasantry. As I've stated previously, letting peasants not workers starve to death when the food ran out, due of course to Stalinist stupidity, is a sign of the ultimate class nature of the Soviet state.

[Invader Zim]

Did Stalin put central authority over everything? Well yes, he was a Stalinist after all.

But there was a strong differential attitude with respect to the proletariat as opposed to the peasantry. As I've stated previously, letting peasants not workers starve to death when the food ran out, due of course to Stalinist stupidity, is a sign of the ultimate class nature of the Soviet state.

And, of course, contrary to certain binary deterministic views bounded around, there is absolutely no reason why either had to starve.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

I think people have failed to mention one policy of Stalin that was particularly destructive, which was the collective punishment of ethnic groups blamed for Nazi collaboration during WWII. Tatars and Chechens were particularly notable examples. Hundreds of thousands of people were smeared by the actions of some, and punished as a group for these acts of treason. In the process of exile, many died and others were moved far from home to places where they had never been, against their will. Collective punishment, especially on ethnic, religious or regional lines, is in principle unacceptable.


On the debate Rafiq was having with others on collectivization earlier - I just don't buy this argument that the famine was a historical necessity for the Soviet Union to industrialize. The fact is that food was taken from peasants to the point that the peasants had nothing left to eat. We can attribute that to the bureaucracy's slowness and inertia only so far - it would indicate an utter lack of foresight to demand peasants turn over 100 bushels of grain when they only have 80. You'd need to be purposefully stupid to not consider that a possibility.

Moreover, if you know that a bureaucracy is still being built and is not really that effective, why rush collectivization instead of rolling it out more slowly and methodically?

One point Rafiq made which I am sympathetic with is the silly bourgeois notion that Britain and Tsarist Russia were somehow less responsible for famines in Ireland and India. Of course, the imperial bourgeoisie was just as exploitative and brutal. However, that doesn't leave Stalin's government off the hook. We should question any Communist Party whose standard for success is being at least as concerned with the fate of the peasantry than the Indian Raj or 19th century Anglo-Irish landlords. An important goal of a socialist revolution should be that we use modern means of production to ensure that these forms of disaster don't happen (or at least do our best to prevent them), not to exacerbate these forms of disaster for the sake of speeding up the development of modern industry. Even from a strictly pragmatic point of view, it makes no sense to starve the very labor you need to maximize agricultural production.

[Ricemilk]

Treating ~90% of a socioeconomically stratified population as an oppressor class because they're further away from your office is a characteristic nonsense, that's for sure.

[Rafiq]

Why can't people just read? Like no, Ricemilk, you don't know what you're talking about, no one has spoken of an oppressor class.

SCM, I didn't say what the bureaucracy should do at the expense of all practical conditions. Operation Barbarossa began in 1941. Exactly ten years earlier, Stalin claimed that they had ten years to get their shit together, or they will be consumed. He didn't predict exactly what would happen, but it didn't take a genius to understand another world war was coming - every idiot understood that WWI was unresolved, and every idiot understood that the Soviet Union's existence was a threat to various western nations, and that its existence would not be indefinitely tolerated - not even in the short term.

The privilege of rolling collectivization out "more slowly and methodically" was simply not there, and I am skeptical it would have been there even if they had the time. There were no internal predispositions among the peasantry to modernise agriculture, even if they would benefit from it, they had no real way of articulating this. The level of backwardness did not permit it. A mass education campaign, introducing superior technologies to give them an incentive, already presupposes the ability for the state to build infrastructure, schools, etc. for which's existence, industrialization and modernized agriculture was a precondition.

But let's be frank here: Disregarding world revolution, even if, say Germany was a part of a socialist federation that included the Soviet Union, wrought from the success of the 1919 revolution (or Communists taking power in the mid 20's), then modernizing agriculture could have avoided catastrophe. Germany's industrial economic base would have been able to be utilized towards this end, and as other users mentioned, i.e. how different the introduction of merely tractors would have been, peasant could have been given the incentive towards social transformations in a way that derived from their very conditions of life and the contradictions those entail. This would have been entirely possible. But one can't pull this nice scenario out of one's ass.

[Emmett Till]

And, of course, contrary to certain binary deterministic views bounded around, there is absolutely no reason why either had to starve.

By the spring or at very latest fall of 1932, that was, unfortunately, not true. Not enough food to go around in terms of sheer quantity for everyone to survive. That's not determinism, that is simple arithmetic. I can assure you, nobody at the height of the Great Depression was going to be giving huge scale food aid to the USSR, even if Stalin had got down on hands and knees and begged. Well, maybe if he promised to restore capitalism. And shoot all the communists who wouldn't go along (a thing which he did do later, come to think of it).

Certainly a change in course *earlier* could have avoided this tragic situation, but that's another matter.

[Emmett Till]

Why can't people just read? Like no, Ricemilk, you don't know what you're talking about, no one has spoken of an oppressor class.

SCM, I didn't say what the bureaucracy should do at the expense of all practical conditions. Operation Barbarossa began in 1941. Exactly ten years earlier, Stalin claimed that they had ten years to get their shit together, or they will be consumed. He didn't predict exactly what would happen, but it didn't take a genius to understand another world war was coming - every idiot understood that WWI was unresolved, and every idiot understood that the Soviet Union's existence was a threat to various western nations, and that its existence would not be indefinitely tolerated - not even in the short term.

The privilege of rolling collectivization out "more slowly and methodically" was simply not there, and I am skeptical it would have been there even if they had the time. There were no internal predispositions among the peasantry to modernise agriculture, even if they would benefit from it, they had no real way of articulating this. The level of backwardness did not permit it. A mass education campaign, introducing superior technologies to give them an incentive, already presupposes the ability for the state to build infrastructure, schools, etc. for which's existence, industrialization and modernized agriculture was a precondition.

But let's be frank here: Disregarding world revolution, even if, say Germany was a part of a socialist federation that included the Soviet Union, wrought from the success of the 1919 revolution (or Communists taking power in the mid 20's), then modernizing agriculture could have avoided catastrophe. Germany's industrial economic base would have been able to be utilized towards this end, and as other users mentioned, i.e. how different the introduction of merely tractors would have been, peasant could have been given the incentive towards social transformations in a way that derived from their very conditions of life and the contradictions those entail. This would have been entirely possible. But one can't pull this nice scenario out of one's ass.

Rafiq, first of all thanks for writing posts short enough to actually read and reply to. Please try to keep it up!

Your point on Germany is quite correct, being as Germany was the great industrial power of the continent, even a German-Soviet socialist federation would have made everything vastly easier. Trotsky wrote a bunch of articles advocating exactly that before Hitler's power seizure. In fact, a socialist revolution in Germany would have spread quite quickly to most of the rest of eastern and western Europe, though maybe not France right away. And colonial revolt would have gone unstoppable....

And you are quite right that a slow, methodical collectivization campaign, though much better than what was done, was no panacea. Building those tractor factories would have been a lot trickier without using the methods Stalin used, for a whole variety of reason I will not go into to avoid writing one of your type of posts.

All of which basically just goes to show that you can't build socialism in one country, even with a correct policy instead of the extremely dangerous ultraleft policy with huge cost in human lives Stalin followed. The key is international revolution, and maintaining the delicate balance act of building socialism to the best of one's abilities and keeping the revolution going until the revolution spreads. Without that, final defeat is inevitable one way or another.
As was demonstrated in the year 1991.

Be it noted that without the hideous blunder of the Hitler-Stalin pact, Operation Barbarossa would never have gotten off the ground.

[Invader Zim]

By the spring or at very latest fall of 1932, that was, unfortunately, not true. Not enough food to go around in terms of sheer quantity for everyone to survive. That's not determinism, that is simple arithmetic. I can assure you, nobody at the height of the Great Depression was going to be giving huge scale food aid to the USSR, even if Stalin had got down on hands and knees and begged. Well, maybe if he promised to restore capitalism. And shoot all the communists who wouldn't go along (a thing which he did do later, come to think of it).

Certainly a change in course *earlier* could have avoided this tragic situation, but that's another matter.


The final point is actually the central matter. The evidence of failure was abundent, but rather than admit the fault lay with the policies they took the decision to blame the peasantry for indolence and/or subversion. That only changed after it was far too late.

But you miss the other central point about the famine which certainly had the potential to substancially reduce the impact of the tragedy which was forced onto the peasantry by an ignorant, stupid, and repressive regime, and that not to cover it up. As Davies and Wheatcroft make clear, the regime shuttered and bolted the windows in an effort to hide from the world the travesty they had unleashed. Thus there was no possibility for external relief to reduce the grain yeild deficits the regime had created via its folly.

[Emmett Till]

The final point is actually the central matter. The evidence of failure was abundent, but rather than admit the fault lay with the policies they took the decision to blame the peasantry for indolence and/or subversion. That only changed after it was far too late.

But you miss the other central point about the famine which certainly had the potential to substancially reduce the impact of the tragedy which was forced onto the peasantry by an ignorant, stupid, and repressive regime, and that not to cover it up. As Davies and Wheatcroft make clear, the regime shuttered and bolted the windows in an effort to hide from the world the travesty they had unleashed. Thus there was no possibility for external relief to reduce the grain yeild deficits the regime had created via its folly.

That famine was about to happen first became obvious spring '32, at which point, as Wheatcroft & Davies documented, grain exports were slashed to the bare legal minimum, while indeed denying to everyone most certainly including themselves that a famine was about to happen.

But the idea that at the height of the Great Depression any capitalist country would have given any food aid to the Soviet Union is simply delusional. As Tauger documented, when the Soviets tried to cancel already contracted grain exports to England, the England government responded with thinly veiled threats of war.

Was Stalin responsible for the famine? Certainly. But ultimately this was ultraleft stupidity, not a malicious desire to murder Ukrainian peasants. As Tauger put it, arguing anything else is actually giving Stalin too much credit. In the early '30s, a lot of your "leftcoms," much more of a force back then, were denouncing Stalin for capitulating to the kulaks, the proof in their eyes that Russia was capitalist.

[Invader Zim]

That famine was about to happen first became obvious spring '32, at which point, as Wheatcroft & Davies documented, grain exports were slashed to the bare legal minimum, while indeed denying to everyone most certainly including themselves that a famine was about to happen.

But the idea that at the height of the Great Depression any capitalist country would have given any food aid to the Soviet Union is simply delusional. As Tauger documented, when the Soviets tried to cancel already contracted grain exports to England, the England government responded with thinly veiled threats of war.

Was Stalin responsible for the famine? Certainly. But ultimately this was ultraleft stupidity, not a malicious desire to murder Ukrainian peasants. As Tauger put it, arguing anything else is actually giving Stalin too much credit. In the early '30s, a lot of your "leftcoms," much more of a force back then, were denouncing Stalin for capitulating to the kulaks, the proof in their eyes that Russia was capitalist.

I have not argued that Stalin deliberately engineered the famine. My point is that his, and those of the other elites within the regime created it through their folly and then, when they had ample opportunity and ability to do something about it elected not to do so and buried their heads in the sand, after that they chose instead to blame the peasantry while making only perfunctory changes to policy, only after disaster had already set in did they step in to resolve the situation.

As for not being able to import grain, that view is entirely unsustainable because it is entirely counter-factual. We do not know how receptive the international community would have been to exporting food to the Soviet Union -- and it was certainly not unwilling to trade with the SU -- because Stalin and his coterie deliberately closed down that route in an effort to save the Soviet Union from embarrassment. They elected instead to allow millions to starve to death than to publicly admit, in front of the international community, that they had made a complete mess of the situation through incompetence, stupidity, ignorance, prejudice, callous disregard for the lives of their own citizens, and brutally ridged adherence to bankrupt agricultural policies. All of which would have been laid naked before the international community had they come clean in the midst of the winter of 32/33.

It is also worth noting that this does not necessarily mean aid, just as the SU had been bought and paid for tractors on the international market prior to 1931 and the contraction of that market in the wake of the great depression which caused a slow down in western industrial exports, so to it could have bought and paid for food. Just as, in fact, "England" (as you put it), a net food importer, had been buying and paying for Soviet grain.

[Lacrimi de Chiciură]

No mention in this thread of the ethnic cleansing and racism which were part of the Stalinist regime? Soviet revolutionary cultural and political organizations and collectivized agricultural units were suppressed and liquidated and people were deported en masse, all on the basis of the nationality and ethnic background of their members. An entire Soviet Republic was liquidated because of the cultural and ancestral character of its inhabitants. All in the name of "patriotism" and the "fight against cosmopolitanism".

For those interested, here are some older threads on the topic:
German Soviet Republic? (http://www.revleft.com/vb/german-soviet-republici-t115835/index.html)

All-Russian Romani Union (1925-1931) (http://www.revleft.com/vb/all-russian-romani-t160638/index.html)

[Comrade Jacob]

No mention in this thread of the ethnic cleansing and racism which were part of the Stalinist regime? Soviet revolutionary cultural and political organizations and collectivized agricultural units were suppressed and liquidated and people were deported en masse, all on the basis of the nationality and ethnic background of their members. An entire Soviet Republic was liquidated because of the cultural and ancestral character of its inhabitants. All in the name of "patriotism" and the "fight against cosmopolitanism".

For those interested, here are some older threads on the topic:
German Soviet Republic? (http://www.revleft.com/vb/german-soviet-republici-t115835/index.html)

All-Russian Romani Union (1925-1931) (http://www.revleft.com/vb/all-russian-romani-t160638/index.html)
aye right pal

[Emmett Till]

No mention in this thread of the ethnic cleansing and racism which were part of the Stalinist regime? Soviet revolutionary cultural and political organizations and collectivized agricultural units were suppressed and liquidated and people were deported en masse, all on the basis of the nationality and ethnic background of their members. An entire Soviet Republic was liquidated because of the cultural and ancestral character of its inhabitants. All in the name of "patriotism" and the "fight against cosmopolitanism".

For those interested, here are some older threads on the topic:
German Soviet Republic? (http://www.revleft.com/vb/german-soviet-republici-t115835/index.html)

All-Russian Romani Union (1925-1931) (http://www.revleft.com/vb/all-russian-romani-t160638/index.html)

Don't mix up apples and oranges.

The German Soviet Republic was liquidated in the context of WWII and the runup to WWII, on the theory that all Germans were Nazis at heart. Rather like the internment of the Japanese by Roosevelt. Not in the name of "patriotism" but in the name of the "great anti-fascist popular front" and "ditto ditto blah blah war." Still disgusting, but get it right.

As for the Romani, that's interesting. Not that many Romani in the USSR. The country which still had the most Romani in the Soviet bloc after the Holocaust was Romania. The Ceausescu regime didn't treat the Romani very well, but it treated them *vastly* better than the Eastern European capitalist regimes that arose after the fall of the Berlin War. In fact vicious abuse of Romani is Europe wide lately, West and East.

The stuff about "rootless cosmopolitanism" is a horse of yet another color, the outburst of Stalinist anti-Semitism after Israel, to Stalin's surprise, sided with the USA in the Cold War despite all the weaponry the Soviets had shipped to "socialist" Israel to beat those allegedly "pro-Hitler fascist" Palestinians and other Arabs in '48. Something, amusingly, the USA did not do, the State Department then was mostly pro-Arab since they had the oil, unlike that notorious anti-Semite Harry Truman.

To this day, latterday Stalinists in the ex-USSR are usually anti-Semitic to one degree or another, tending to see Russian or Ukrainian Jews as all American agents and wannabe capitalists, like Stalin did after he got senile. Doesn't help that there are a lot of rich Jewish oligarchs now, and many are indeed quite pro-American, New York after all being the real Jewish homeland.

[Lacrimi de Chiciură]

Don't mix up apples and oranges.

The German Soviet Republic was liquidated in the context of WWII and the runup to WWII, on the theory that all Germans were Nazis at heart. Rather like the internment of the Japanese by Roosevelt. Not in the name of "patriotism" but in the name of the "great anti-fascist popular front" and "ditto ditto blah blah war." Still disgusting, but get it right.

Hmm, well, Molotov first introduced the term "Great Patriotic War" in a radio address on 23 June 1941 following the Nazi invasion, as an allusion to the "Patriotic War of 1812", fought by the Russian empire under Tsar Alexander I. Apparently he even included a reminder that (https://books.google.ro/books?id=kUl3Od-xWn8C&pg=PA159&lpg=PA159&dq=%22This+war+is+thrust+upon+us+not+by+the+German +people,+not+by+the+German+workers,+peasants,+and+ intelligentsia,+whose+suffering+we+well+understand ,+but+by+a+bloodthirsty+clique+of+German+rulers%22&source=bl&ots=EJJUBDylIm&sig=Q805qV20uOSA2LuuutZi6B5cs_k&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjO5Ivv9cbJAhWH1hoKHerWDqwQ6AEIHTAA#v=on epage&q=%22This%20war%20is%20thrust%20upon%20us%20not%20 by%20the%20German%20people%2C%20not%20by%20the%20G erman%20workers%2C%20peasants%2C%20and%20intellige ntsia%2C%20whose%20suffering%20we%20well%20underst and%2C%20but%20by%20a%20bloodthirsty%20clique%20of %20German%20rulers%22&f=false), "This war is thrust upon us not by the German people, not by the German workers, peasants, and intelligentsia, whose suffering we well understand, but by a bloodthirsty clique of German rulers." Empty words however, since Stalin's Decree of Banishment required punitive measures for the entire Soviet German population (http://www.norka-russland.net/deportation-1941.html), including Communist Party officials and heroes of the Bolshevik Revolution.

As far as the fight against "rootless cosmopolitans", yes, that was another episode, so to speak, but overall illustrative of the same general trend--the eclipse of Soviet internationalism by Russocentric national chauvinism.

[Exterminatus]

What about betraying greek revolutionaries who waged civil war against the government? And this isn't the only instance where Stalin and his party put national interests before international.

[Emmett Till]

Hmm, well, Molotov first introduced the term "Great Patriotic War" in a radio address on 23 June 1941 following the Nazi invasion, as an allusion to the "Patriotic War of 1812", fought by the Russian empire under Tsar Alexander I. Apparently he even included a reminder that (https://books.google.ro/books?id=kUl3Od-xWn8C&pg=PA159&lpg=PA159&dq=%22This+war+is+thrust+upon+us+not+by+the+German +people,+not+by+the+German+workers,+peasants,+and+ intelligentsia,+whose+suffering+we+well+understand ,+but+by+a+bloodthirsty+clique+of+German+rulers%22&source=bl&ots=EJJUBDylIm&sig=Q805qV20uOSA2LuuutZi6B5cs_k&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjO5Ivv9cbJAhWH1hoKHerWDqwQ6AEIHTAA#v=on epage&q=%22This%20war%20is%20thrust%20upon%20us%20not%20 by%20the%20German%20people%2C%20not%20by%20the%20G erman%20workers%2C%20peasants%2C%20and%20intellige ntsia%2C%20whose%20suffering%20we%20well%20underst and%2C%20but%20by%20a%20bloodthirsty%20clique%20of %20German%20rulers%22&f=false), "This war is thrust upon us not by the German people, not by the German workers, peasants, and intelligentsia, whose suffering we well understand, but by a bloodthirsty clique of German rulers." Empty words however, since Stalin's Decree of Banishment required punitive measures for the entire Soviet German population (http://www.norka-russland.net/deportation-1941.html), including Communist Party officials and heroes of the Bolshevik Revolution.

As far as the fight against "rootless cosmopolitans", yes, that was another episode, so to speak, but overall illustrative of the same general trend--the eclipse of Soviet internationalism by Russocentric national chauvinism.

Oh, thought the German Soviet Republic was liquidated in '37-'38 as part of the Great Terror, before the Molotovs started talking about "patriotism."

If it really survived until Barbarossa, I'm a bit surprised, given the purges of communists and others from Axis nationalities during the Great Terror, one of its ugliest features.

[Emmett Till]

What about betraying greek revolutionaries who waged civil war against the government? And this isn't the only instance where Stalin and his party put national interests before international.

Indeed. The logic of "socialism in one country," which has plenty of defenders here on Revleft.

[bluemangroup]

What is the impartial take on actions attributed to Joseph Stalin and crimes put against him? What would be the realistic figure of the deaths he caused and what would be the realistic take on how authoritarian his regime was? I am not asking because I necessarily believe this, but I'd need to see sufficient evidence to convince me either way and I have none. MLs and MLMs defend his accusations as false or grossly overblown but what is the realistic amount from an ML or from a non-ML?

To answer the OP, my impartial take on Joseph Stalin and his actions is that, as authoritarian as Stalin's grip over the Party and the USSR was, his strong leadership and harsh policies were wholly necessary; all the more so after the June 22 1941 Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union.

Was there another more patient, gradual approach to industrialization in the cities and socialization in the countryside?

Yes a la Bukharin (as the historian Stephen F. Cohen persuasively argues in Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War), but venturing how the USSR would have looked under Bukharin and whether or not it would be able to resist the Nazi German invasion in 1941 goes into the realm of alternate history.

IMHO a USSR under Bukharin would be more hard pressed to resist the might of the German forces than the real-life USSR under Stalin.

Again, as Stalin (in)famously said (to paraphrase him), "we are behind the advanced capitalist nations by 10 years and must catch up to their level as quickly as humanly possible in less that time."

As for the overall death toll from Stalin's actions, historians are of course deeply divided on just how many people actually died either through torture, starvation, hard labor, etc.

As for the misnamed "Great Terror" or "Great Purge":

I'd highly recommend Robert W. Thurston's article (available on JSTOR) Fear and Belief in the USSR's "Great Terror": Response to Arrest, 1935-1939 for a good revisionist (albeit non-Marxist - which isn't a bad thing BTW) look at the so called "Great Terror" or "Great Purge" of 1935-1939.

The purges were less far sweeping than portrayed in U.S. and West European "Cold Warrior" scholarship.

The historiography is greatly biased, similar in tone to equally biased "Cold Warrior" interpretations that the famine in Ukraine was "genocide" carried out under Stalin (the so-called "Holodomor," which mainly took hold with the collapse of the USSR and the creation of an independent Ukrainian state - now a fascistic state to boot!).

I don't buy into those "Cold Warrior" interpretations, especially as revisionist historiography continues to grow since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the West and will only grow further with each passing year IMHO.

Than there's the notion that Stalin tried to democratize the USSR's electoral system - for that I'd recommend Grover Furr's controversial two-part Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform. I'd also recommend State and Society under Stalin by J. Arch Getty along with Ellen Wimberg's Socialism, Democratism, and Criticism: The Soviet Press and the National Discussion of the 1936 Draft Constitution (Furr's two-part analysis is available for free online, while the latter two are both available on JSTOR).

Did he succeed? The short answer is no.

He was so hellbent on arresting "enemies of the people" that the resultant elections held in 1937 to ultimately elect deputies to the national Supreme Soviet were both noncompetitive and blighted by repression carried out by the political police.

That being said, it wouldn't be until Gorbachev that a serious attempt at democratization would take place.

However, unlike modern China which would keep the Communist Party of China in firm control over society while cautiously democratizing the Soviet Union under Gorbachev collapsed as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's leading role was done away with.

Socialism was defeated in East Germany for the same reason after the Socialist Unity Party of Germany's leading role had been deleted from the 1989-1990 constitution.

I consider myself a Marxist-Leninist personally, and I don't have any love for Uncle Joe or Mao Zedong for that matter.

[Invader Zim]

Yes a la Bukharin (as the historian Stephen F. Cohen persuasively argues in Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War), but venturing how the USSR would have looked under Bukharin and whether or not it would be able to resist the Nazi German invasion in 1941 goes into the realm of alternate history.

Counterfactual or 'what if...' history is a load of ahistorical bullshit.



The historiography is greatly biased, similar in tone to equally biased "Cold Warrior" interpretations that the famine in Ukraine was "genocide" carried out under Stalin (the so-called "Holodomor," which mainly took hold with the collapse of the USSR and the creation of an independent Ukrainian state - now a fascistic state to boot!).

yet it is from this historiography that we learn that historiography is "biased". It is also from that historiography that the profound debunking of the Holodomor as genocide myth emerged.

[bluemangroup]

Counterfactual or 'what if...' history is a load of ahistorical bullshit.

Do you mean "what if history" is ahistorical bullshit or history itself?

If the former, I wouldn't call alternate history bullshit but rather a fun exercise in imagining what might have occurred if a pivotal point in history occurred differently or not at all.

Obviously, its absolutely impossible to "predict" just how a USSR under Bukharin would have looked - to think otherwise is a fool's errand.


yet it is from this historiography that we learn that historiography is "biased". It is also from that historiography that the profound debunking of the Holodomor as genocide myth emerged.

Are you suggesting that I haven't taken the time to read history books that don't mesh with my political views?
.
I'm not one to stick my head in the sand and go on about how Stalin (or even Lenin) was a great guy and that those "Cold Warriors" have it all wrong.

I've read both the Cold Warrior Louis Fischer's as well as the revisionist historian Lars Lih's separate takes on Lenin.

I've also read Orlando Figes's (a kinda sorta "Cold Warrior") as well as the revisionist historiographer's Alexander Rabinowitch's differing accounts of the October (Bolshevik) Revolution of 1917.

I could go on and on and on ...

So no, although I'm a proud member of the Communist Party of America I don't exclusively read the Party daily People's World as if it were wholly writ or exclusively read certain types of historians.

I plan to go on to grad school, so its good to look at what each and every historian has to say on a certain matter before making a conclusion.

[Invader Zim]

Do you mean "what if history" is ahistorical bullshit or history itself?

I mean the former.


I wouldn't call alternate history bullshit but rather a fun exercise in imagining what might have occurred if a pivotal point in history occurred differently or not at all.

But it is, as you note, not knowable and cannot be based on actual source work. There are a very few limited questions which it can be useful for to better understand what actually happened. Thus, we can better understand why Nazi grand military strategy failed by looking at potential alternatives, but really even that is whimsy.


Are you suggesting that I haven't taken the time to read history books that don't mesh with my political views?

No, I'm pointing out that your point is a fairly moot one. So, yes, in the Cold War, when historians had little to no access to the Soviet Archives, the idea that the famine was a genocide was plausible because outwardly it well explained the evidence available. But once that evidence was massively expanded particularly after glasnost, the genocide thesis was swiftly shown to be unsustainable as the likes of Conquest, who had proffered the most comprehensive outline of the thesis in the first place, came to accept.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but thinking about historiography as being 'biased' is a fairly simplistic label to level at what historians do. All historical scholarship, by its very nature, is 'biased' and a construct of the period and culture in which it was produced. The way which we think about problems and the solutions we generate for them are usually limited by the intellectual climate in which we live.

If you want to PM me about postgrad work in history then please do so, I have some experience of such work.

[bluemangroup]

But it is, as you note, not knowable and cannot be based on actual source work. There are a very few limited questions which it can be useful for to better understand what actually happened. Thus, we can better understand why Nazi grand military strategy failed by looking at potential alternatives, but really even that is whimsy.

I strongly agree with you. I do have a timeline over on the alternate history forum positing a world in which the Red Army seized Warsaw during the Polish-Soviet War, but I'm well aware while I've been doing historical research that its impossible to know what would happen years down the line.

The fictional Second All-German Congress of Soviets of Workers', Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies is based off of Rosa Luxemburg's writings and Lenin's view that Germany (and Hungary) could achieve a multiparty form of socialism (According to the revisionist historian Lars Lih)

I do it on my free time when I'm not writing history papers. Its just for fun, that's all.


No, I'm pointing out that your point is a fairly moot one. So, yes, in the Cold War, when historians had little to no access to the Soviet Archives, the idea that the famine was a genocide was plausible because outwardly it well explained the evidence available. But once that evidence was massively expanded particularly after glasnost, the genocide thesis was swiftly shown to be unsustainable as the likes of Conquest, who had proffered the most comprehensive outline of the thesis in the first place, came to accept.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but thinking about historiography as being 'biased' is a fairly simplistic label to level at what historians do. All historical scholarship, by its very nature, is 'biased' and a construct of the period and culture in which it was produced. The way which we think about problems and the solutions we generate for them are usually limited by the intellectual climate in which we live.

I also agree. Sorry if I wasn't clear enough.

I have read "biased" historians extensively, and I recognize that each new generation of historians builds upon the work of earlier historians (Such as R.W. Davies, who knew E.H. Carr and collaborated with him on a few projects just before the latter's death. He would go on to write revisionist history books on the 1928-1930 rapid industrialization and collectivization movements)


If you want to PM me about postgrad work in history then please do so, I have some experience of such work.

I will definitely PM you.:)