I know this seems like an obvious attempt to start a struggle session, but I promise I’m asking in a good faith attempt to learn:) y’all are way smarter and better read than any group I’ve ever been a part of before tbh

I’m listening to the rev left Stalin episode and they’re discussing the holodomor. Clearly a lot of what I thought I knew is capitalist propaganda. However, there also seems to be a possible motivation here to gloss over some of the bad elements of the USSR? I also feel slight alarm bells going off at some parts but idk why really, probably bc it brings up feelings associated w Holocaust denial, even though I know they’re v different issues.

I’m kinda new to the left so I don’t feel like I have the knowledge or the critical thinking skills to tackle this issue on my own.

It seems to boil down to: did the holodomor happen? If yes, was it intentional? If no, was it avoidable?

I’m sure this discussion has happened before so feel free to just link me to stuff haha. Insight appreciated!

  • EthicalHumanMeat [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    The Kulaks (who, yes, were monsters and did engage in sabotage in the past) didn't actually have much to do with the famine in the 30s, as they had already been pretty much completely eliminated by that point. Conquest is citing the official statements of the USSR, who blamed the agricultural shortfall on the Kulaks, but the Soviet archives show that the cause was much more complex than that.

    Davies and Wheatcroft, in The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933, explain them. It's hard for me to summarize all of it and the relevant section is only like twenty pages, so please read "(E) CAUSES OF THE FAMINE".

    The gist is that planning had overestimated grain yields based on overly optimistic predictions of improvements on previous years' yields. Grain was exported under the assumption that the leftover surplus would be sufficient, but it wasn't. Drought during the growing season and heavy rainfall during the harvesting seasons resulted in low output and high spoilage, meaning much less grain was produced than expected.

    The reduction in livestock from 1928 was a product of diverting grain from feed in the countryside to urban population centers. In order to survive capitalist onslaught and develop out of Medieval poverty, the USSR needed to industrialize rapidly, which meant more food for the industrial workers. However, they took too much grain from the countryside to maintain their draught animals, which, coupled with the bad weather, resulted in much lower yields than planned.

    When it became clear that a famine was occurring, the USSR did everything in its power to minimize starvation, and Stalin personally pressed for more grain to be reallocated to the countryside. However, the rapidly industrializing urban centers were prioritized, for good reason.

    The people who starved were the farmers, mostly in Ukraine, but this wasn't an attempt at ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, the party used the Kulaks as a scapegoat, even though they didn't really exist at that point. And, honestly, I think that was the right call; they couldn't have just said, "hey, the weather was bad and also we kind of fucked up and that's why you're starving to death", and expected to still have the support of the people. The authors describe this overall response as "ruthless and brutal", an example of a "genuflection to orthodoxy" as Parenti puts it; even though they're in the process of dismantling the narrative of Stalin being a brutal, malicious dictator, they still aren't willing to fully break from it.

    • Burnbabylon [she/her]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Do you know why people starved mostly in Ukraine v other rural areas?

      • EthicalHumanMeat [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Inadequate use of crop rotation and particularly bad weather:

        Ukraine was affected particularly badly by the expansion of the sown area. It already had a much lower level of uncropped arable than in all other regions of the USSR, with the exception of the highly commercial Leningrad region. According to the planning documents, the Ukrainian level of fallow was equal to 27.7 per cent of the sown area in 1927/28, and was projected to fall to 18.1 per cent in 1932/33.137 The USSR average was 59.1 per cent, projected to fall to 41.7 per cent. An external factor considerably complicated the situation in Ukraine. Bad weather led to exceptionally large winter killings of the autumn sowings for both the 1928 and 1929 harvests, and, to compensate for these, spring sowing was considerably increased. By 1929, rational crop rotation had been seriously undermined; and the increase in the sown area in 1930 and 1931 squeezed the fallow land still further.

        Throughout the USSR, the reorganisation of the land, and the expansion of the sown area, disrupted the traditional arrangements for the cultivation of the soil, but for several years they were not replaced by an improved cropping system.

        It was not until the autumn of 1932 that the restoration of proper crop rotation received the strong support of the authorities (see pp. 231–4). Meanwhile, much damage had been done. Such a dramatic expansion of sown area and reduction of fallow, without improved crop rotation and the careful introduction of alternative means for rejuvenating the soil with fertilisers or manure, was bound to lead to the reduction of yields and an increased likelihood of crop diseases. By 1932, in many regions, and particularly in Ukraine, soil exhaustion and crop diseases were widespread.