So the Holodomor is bullshit right? My understanding is that it was capitalist propaganda from a Hearst funded propagandist who was subsequently debunked in the 1930's.
Anyone more familiar with it able to confirm this and if it's correct what's with the people who say that a famine happened but wasn't genocide.
Yeah essentially it was a mishandled famine that was widespread across the Soviet Union at the time. Stephen Kotkin's (conservative historian at Princeton) Stalin: Waiting For Hitler, 1929-1941 goes deep into this subject, and shows that it wasn't a genocide of Ukrainians by the USSR, that more people as a percentage of the population died in Kazakhstan than Ukraine yet nobody says the famine was a Kazakh genocide, and how Stalin and the Politburo at the time may have made some poor decisions but it wasn't like they set out to starve people or anything like that. This is a relatively mainstream view within historical scholarship of the time period.
...the famine was not intentional. It resulted from Stalin's policies of forced collectivization-dekulakization, as well as the pitiless and incompetent management of the sowing and procurement campaigns, all of which put the country on a knife-edge, highly susceptible to drought and sudden torrential rains. Stalin appears to have genuinely imagined that increasing the scale of farms, mechanization, and collective efficiency would boost agricultural output. He dismissed the loss of better-off peasants from villages, only belatedly recognized the crucial role of incentives, and wildly overestimated the influx of machines. He twice deluded himself - partly from false reporting by frightened statisticians, partly from his own magical thinking - that the country was on the verge of a recovery harvest.
“In the archives of Russia, in the archives of the republics of the former USSR, millions of documents have been preserved [of] the famine in the USSR at the beginning of the 1930s of the last century in various regions of the large country,” wrote V. P. Kozlov, the head of the Russian archival service, in the preface to a collection of declassified materials. “Not a single document has been found confirming the conception of a ‘Holodomor-genocide’ in Ukraine or even a hint in the documents about ethnic motives of what occurred, including in Ukraine.” Antipova, Golod v SSSR, 6–7 (the collection consists entirely of facsimiles of original documents). Klid and Motyl define the Holodomor (or Ukrainian Holocaust) as “the murder by hunger of millions in the 1932–33 famine in Soviet Ukraine and the Kuban region of the North Caucasus, where Ukrainians formed a large percentage of the population.” This becomes “genocide” when the authors include the executions of Ukrainian intellectuals, writers, poets, musicians, artists, church officials. They offer no evidence of intentional starvation or of ethnic targeting. They do not dwell on the ethnic Ukrainian agency in the alleged genocide against Ukrainians (in regions where lots of Russians lived and died). They do not include the Volga Valley, Kazakhstan, the Urals, Western Siberia, and other famine-wracked regions where Ukrainians did not form a large percentage of the population. Klid and Motyl, Holodomor Reader, xxix–xxx.
Davies and Wheatcroft persuasively refute Ellman’s assertions that Stalin intentionally starved peasants, concluding: “We regard the policy of rapid industrialisation as an underlying cause of the agricultural troubles of the early 1930s, and we do not believe that the Chinese or NEP versions of industrialisation were viable in Soviet national and international circumstances.” Davies and Wheatcroft, “Reply to Ellman,” 626. Robert Conquest wrote the principal book on the supposedly intentional famine—Harvest of Sorrow (1986)—but in a letter to Davies (Sept. 7, 2003), he acknowledged that Stalin did not intentionally cause the famine. Davies and Wheatcroft, Years of Hunger, 441n145. Kuromiya noted there was no evidence to support intentionality. “Stalin does not appear to have anticipated the deaths of millions of people,” he concluded. “The millions of deaths de-stabilised the country politically and generated political doubt about his leadership even within the party (most famously the Ryutin Platform).” Kuromiya, “The Soviet Famine of 1932–1933 Reconsidered,” 667.
Of course they are. Re-writing history is very important to the Capitalist movement right now that Capitalism is visibly failing even in the Imperial core.
So much of this always reads to me as "farm workers were kept in near-slavery, which worked, but then Stalin freed them from bondage, which """""removed their incentives""""", therefore reducing farm output, therefore Stalin did a genocide."
Not saying that that's the correct reading or anything like the truth---I have no idea---but it's also fully consistent with that excerpt.
I know Kotkin is an anti-communist; and I also know that the rollout of collectivisation was poorly implemented. However, it sounds like Kotkin is blaming something inherent in collectivisation which obviously is wrong given how the USSR didn't experience another famine once collectivisation got rolling. Mark Tauger thinks collectivisation actually mitigated this famine.
That's a consistent thing. "Communism is when no food!" but during the history of the Soviet Union there were three famines - the 1920 (22?) famine where there was a bad drought on top of years of WWI and the Russian Civil War, the 1932 famine which happened in the middle of collectivization and a bad drought, and the 1946-47 famine which happened after the Nazis murdered like 20 million people and, if I recall this right, there was a drought.
Same thing in China - There was a famine during collectivization, but after that there haven't been any famines. Cuba and the DPRK had serious food problems in the years right after the USSR fell, but like duh they're relatively small, poor countries with very limited agricultural land and their massive trade partner disintegrated.
I think that's kind of the point though. Like even this book, written by a historian that clearly has a personal bias against Stalin and has a fuck ton of anti-communist brainworms, still reports that there was no genocide called the Holodomor. Even this conservative historian couldn't bring himself to just straight up fabricate that level of lie against a guy he clearly hates.
I was reading about this the other day and even the people who call it a genocide tend to use a much, much more expansive definition of the term. Apparently it was the original definition, and under the original definition you didn't have to try to kill all of an ethnic group, just some part of it. The more widely accepted definition is that genocide is when you're attempting to kill or otherwise destroy an entire ethnicity root and branch. Several scholars pointed out that if you used the more expansive definition of genocide you'd have to include many other mass killings, including notably the nuclear bombings of Japan and a bunch of other things I can't remember, with the point being that the expansive meaning of genocide becomes vague enough to have no real purpose.
In addition to being a famine that was, at most, mismanaged, the term itself is amplified because it sounds a bit like holocaust. In those senses, the discourse that treats it like a genocide is also dabbling in Holocaust denial.
There was one recently where he had to blur half the video, otherwise it wouldn't let him monetize it. Of course what needed to be blurred was just pictures/paintings of various atrocities the US has done over the years. And of course the classic example where JT (Second Thought) did a video on things the CIA has done, only including stuff they've admitted to, and youtube put a block on it to require physical age verification before watching it. Physical as in sending them a picture of your ID. And then he also got a visit from DHS over it
After the American Civil War, the North freed the slaves, turned over control of the plantations to them, and told them to govern the plantations collectively. The former plantation masters obviously didn't like this, so some of them sabotaged whatever they could on the way out, and most refused to lend their expertise in farm management. Between this, the general devastation of the war, and a drought, the South faced famine. The freed slaves reported this back to Washington and asked for food aid and reduced export quotas. The government considered this, decided that this was historically very profitable land, and that these recently-freed slaves, being uneducated and black, didn't know what they were talking about, so they refused, and many people starved.
Also the South made mostly food instead of cotton and tobacco in this alternate history.
It's complicated. It's really complicated. The idea that the Holodomor was a deliberate attempt to kill as many Ukrainians as possible is almost certainly anti-capitalist :brainworms:. There's simply no evidence that anyone in the Soviet administration was trying to accomplish this, and there are big, obvious problems with the theory. The simplest problem is; The people on the ground actually enforcing agricultural policies, grain requisition policies, quotas, distribution of aid and supplies, and so forth were mostly Ukrainians themselves. The Holodomor narrative asks you to believe, essentially, that Stalin ordered Ukrainians to genocide themselves and the Ukrainians went along with it. This is part of a wider trend in right-wing Ukrainian Nationalism of pretending that somehow all Ukrainians were oppressed freedom fighters and no Ukrainians were actually part of the Soviet government or the communist party. If that sounds ridiculous to you, it is.
Anti-Communists also use the Holodomor, including the name, to essentially steal valor from the Holocaust in order to frame the Soviets as equivalent to (if not worse than) the Nazis. It's an important component of the "Double Holocaust" narrative that is both used to exaggerate the crimes and violence of the Soviet Union, while also diminishing or outright denying the Holocaust.
There's also the ideological factor - The Soviets were purging kulaks, expropriating property, and collectivizing property. Capitalists being capitalists purging the kulaks was bad, but expropriating property is pure evil. They don't care much about mass murder, or theft, or human experimentation, or really any other violence against humans but boy howdy do they get upset if you interfere with the sacred private property.
As to what actually happened - There was a huge, probably criminal, amount of mismanagement and bureaucratic fuck up occuring at all levels of government. Stalin and the Moscow administration were too far away from the problem. Communication was slow. Record keeping was spotty and records were often falsified, which lead to situations where the grain quotas were far higher than a given village could afford. When the Soviet administration finally grasped the size of the problem relief was delivered unevenly. It was bad enough that one can reasonably say that the Soviet administration's failure to alleviate the famine was probably criminal, equivalent to manslaughter on a vast scale. They weren't trying to kill anyone, but they could reasonably be held responsible for the deaths that occurred.
Other factors include a very serious drought that probably (numbers are in contention) seriously lowered the grain yields from those years, a problem which was compounded because grain quotas were not correctly adjusted to reflect the new yields.
There were serious logistical infrastructure problems. Limited transport capability, poor logistical record keeping.
The sum up, though, is that the Soviet Administration could have and should have done better, to the point where the results can reasonably be considered criminal, but the crime is manslaughter rather than genocide. There's no real evidence that the famine was intentional and the "intentional genocide" narrative has a number of very serious problems ranging from lack of evidence to asking you to believe that the Ukrainians voluntarily genocided themselves.
So the Holodomor is bullshit right? My understanding is that it was capitalist propaganda from a Hearst funded propagandist who was subsequently debunked in the 1930's.
Anyone more familiar with it able to confirm this and if it's correct what's with the people who say that a famine happened but wasn't genocide.
Yeah essentially it was a mishandled famine that was widespread across the Soviet Union at the time. Stephen Kotkin's (conservative historian at Princeton) Stalin: Waiting For Hitler, 1929-1941 goes deep into this subject, and shows that it wasn't a genocide of Ukrainians by the USSR, that more people as a percentage of the population died in Kazakhstan than Ukraine yet nobody says the famine was a Kazakh genocide, and how Stalin and the Politburo at the time may have made some poor decisions but it wasn't like they set out to starve people or anything like that. This is a relatively mainstream view within historical scholarship of the time period.
modern Kazakh NGO libs are trying to paint it as intentional genocide
Please no more brainworms
please
Of course they are. Re-writing history is very important to the Capitalist movement right now that Capitalism is visibly failing even in the Imperial core.
So much of this always reads to me as "farm workers were kept in near-slavery, which worked, but then Stalin freed them from bondage, which """""removed their incentives""""", therefore reducing farm output, therefore Stalin did a genocide."
Not saying that that's the correct reading or anything like the truth---I have no idea---but it's also fully consistent with that excerpt.
Real "the dictator Castro forced my father to grow up literate" vibes
I know Kotkin is an anti-communist; and I also know that the rollout of collectivisation was poorly implemented. However, it sounds like Kotkin is blaming something inherent in collectivisation which obviously is wrong given how the USSR didn't experience another famine once collectivisation got rolling. Mark Tauger thinks collectivisation actually mitigated this famine.
That's a consistent thing. "Communism is when no food!" but during the history of the Soviet Union there were three famines - the 1920 (22?) famine where there was a bad drought on top of years of WWI and the Russian Civil War, the 1932 famine which happened in the middle of collectivization and a bad drought, and the 1946-47 famine which happened after the Nazis murdered like 20 million people and, if I recall this right, there was a drought.
Same thing in China - There was a famine during collectivization, but after that there haven't been any famines. Cuba and the DPRK had serious food problems in the years right after the USSR fell, but like duh they're relatively small, poor countries with very limited agricultural land and their massive trade partner disintegrated.
L book https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44154410
I think that's kind of the point though. Like even this book, written by a historian that clearly has a personal bias against Stalin and has a fuck ton of anti-communist brainworms, still reports that there was no genocide called the Holodomor. Even this conservative historian couldn't bring himself to just straight up fabricate that level of lie against a guy he clearly hates.
Yeah for sure. I get it, just had to get in my hatred of the book whenever it's mentioned.
I was reading about this the other day and even the people who call it a genocide tend to use a much, much more expansive definition of the term. Apparently it was the original definition, and under the original definition you didn't have to try to kill all of an ethnic group, just some part of it. The more widely accepted definition is that genocide is when you're attempting to kill or otherwise destroy an entire ethnicity root and branch. Several scholars pointed out that if you used the more expansive definition of genocide you'd have to include many other mass killings, including notably the nuclear bombings of Japan and a bunch of other things I can't remember, with the point being that the expansive meaning of genocide becomes vague enough to have no real purpose.
In addition to being a famine that was, at most, mismanaged, the term itself is amplified because it sounds a bit like holocaust. In those senses, the discourse that treats it like a genocide is also dabbling in Holocaust denial.
Yeah, "Double Genocide" theory is Holocaust denial, full stop.
deleted by creator
Hakim did a couple of videos on it too that can be hard to find, since he had to unlist them:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx-ISZcZZoL1546DbyM9M5-4y3uixA8xq
:freeze-peach:
There was one recently where he had to blur half the video, otherwise it wouldn't let him monetize it. Of course what needed to be blurred was just pictures/paintings of various atrocities the US has done over the years. And of course the classic example where JT (Second Thought) did a video on things the CIA has done, only including stuff they've admitted to, and youtube put a block on it to require physical age verification before watching it. Physical as in sending them a picture of your ID. And then he also got a visit from DHS over it
I think JT's visit from DHS was over another video on police brutality, but your point stands
I think you're right, I've heard him tell the story like three times at this point, but I just remember the story itself lol
Secret hakim videos? I have found nirvana
Yeah I was excited when I found them myself lol
https://www.youtube.com/c/BadEmpanada/videos
it's one of these but I'm too lazy to look it up rn
Alternate history time.
After the American Civil War, the North freed the slaves, turned over control of the plantations to them, and told them to govern the plantations collectively. The former plantation masters obviously didn't like this, so some of them sabotaged whatever they could on the way out, and most refused to lend their expertise in farm management. Between this, the general devastation of the war, and a drought, the South faced famine. The freed slaves reported this back to Washington and asked for food aid and reduced export quotas. The government considered this, decided that this was historically very profitable land, and that these recently-freed slaves, being uneducated and black, didn't know what they were talking about, so they refused, and many people starved.
Also the South made mostly food instead of cotton and tobacco in this alternate history.
It's complicated. It's really complicated. The idea that the Holodomor was a deliberate attempt to kill as many Ukrainians as possible is almost certainly anti-capitalist :brainworms:. There's simply no evidence that anyone in the Soviet administration was trying to accomplish this, and there are big, obvious problems with the theory. The simplest problem is; The people on the ground actually enforcing agricultural policies, grain requisition policies, quotas, distribution of aid and supplies, and so forth were mostly Ukrainians themselves. The Holodomor narrative asks you to believe, essentially, that Stalin ordered Ukrainians to genocide themselves and the Ukrainians went along with it. This is part of a wider trend in right-wing Ukrainian Nationalism of pretending that somehow all Ukrainians were oppressed freedom fighters and no Ukrainians were actually part of the Soviet government or the communist party. If that sounds ridiculous to you, it is.
Anti-Communists also use the Holodomor, including the name, to essentially steal valor from the Holocaust in order to frame the Soviets as equivalent to (if not worse than) the Nazis. It's an important component of the "Double Holocaust" narrative that is both used to exaggerate the crimes and violence of the Soviet Union, while also diminishing or outright denying the Holocaust.
There's also the ideological factor - The Soviets were purging kulaks, expropriating property, and collectivizing property. Capitalists being capitalists purging the kulaks was bad, but expropriating property is pure evil. They don't care much about mass murder, or theft, or human experimentation, or really any other violence against humans but boy howdy do they get upset if you interfere with the sacred private property.
As to what actually happened - There was a huge, probably criminal, amount of mismanagement and bureaucratic fuck up occuring at all levels of government. Stalin and the Moscow administration were too far away from the problem. Communication was slow. Record keeping was spotty and records were often falsified, which lead to situations where the grain quotas were far higher than a given village could afford. When the Soviet administration finally grasped the size of the problem relief was delivered unevenly. It was bad enough that one can reasonably say that the Soviet administration's failure to alleviate the famine was probably criminal, equivalent to manslaughter on a vast scale. They weren't trying to kill anyone, but they could reasonably be held responsible for the deaths that occurred.
Other factors include a very serious drought that probably (numbers are in contention) seriously lowered the grain yields from those years, a problem which was compounded because grain quotas were not correctly adjusted to reflect the new yields.
There were serious logistical infrastructure problems. Limited transport capability, poor logistical record keeping.
The sum up, though, is that the Soviet Administration could have and should have done better, to the point where the results can reasonably be considered criminal, but the crime is manslaughter rather than genocide. There's no real evidence that the famine was intentional and the "intentional genocide" narrative has a number of very serious problems ranging from lack of evidence to asking you to believe that the Ukrainians voluntarily genocided themselves.
here is a good book on the subject