(Forgive me if this isn't the right community for this.)
So, yeah, my gf and I are presently having strained conversations with each other because we have differences of opinion over the Holodomor. I'm not denying the Ukrainian famine happened nor the number of deaths involved. We can set aside the historiography and the Kulak memes, but at the end of the day, I'm a monster because I'm somehow denying justice to the survivors because they call their experience a genocide and I'm more hesitant to do so. It's less about "who's right" or "what really happened" but more about the larger implications that come from genocide denial: she says if survivors say they experienced a genocide, it's important to acknowledge that. She's very uncomfortable that my sympathy to their suffering isn't enough. I'm somehow suggesting the survivors are bad faith actors or dupes (I don't think that's what I'm doing), and because the waters are so muddy on this issue (her words), I ought to consider the other side of the debate instead of reading the preface to Davies and Wheatcroft's The Years of Hunger (which she doesn't want to read).
I feel like even if I were to say "I admit there's a possibility the Holodomor was a genocide," I'd still find myself in the doghouse. This is an impasse we're going to have to navigate before our relationship can return to normal. While we're not big on labels, I'd say I lean more toward ML and she's more anarchist. Maybe that's part of our disagreement? No idea. I'm completely vexed and don't know how to move forward.
I can't imagine anyone's been in this exact position before, but maybe something similar? I wish I could compartmentalize it and move on, but I don't think she can. Any advice, comrades? How can I do justice to the famine survivors while not calling said famine a genocide?
I can’t imagine anyone’s been in this exact position before,
You underestimate the pitfalls of leftist4leftist dating
I feel like the debate always starts eventually cuz the struggle demands so much of our time, not like you can hide being a leftist, unless ur doing it for aesthetics
Honestly, this the obvious coward's way out, but let's be real here for a minute: do any of us really need to waste time taking a bullet for Stalin's honor seventy years after he died, thirty years after the country he once led literally ceased to exist? Does that help build socialism? Does that help socialist movements in the global south? Does that bolster the domestic antiwar movement?
Take the L on this one, and see if you can't balance it out with a bit of IRL organizing instead.
I suspect I'll take the L on this one, which is fine if it means brokering peace. You're right, I'm not looking take a bullet for Stalin's honor. I'm just not thrilled by the idea that if a survivor says X, that gets accepted without question. She and I joke about Gusanos all the time but this hits different for her because the survivors invoke the term genocide.
Relationships tend to require at least a little give and take, sometimes you need to let things go in situations like this or you'd just be fighting forever over unimportant shit that you slightly disagree on despite agreeing on the majority of stuff, just like leftist orgs.
The thing with gusanos is that the "horror" they describe is losing their property (as in they only had one place to live and/or workers gained control of businesses they worked at).
the survivors
Sorry I'm not really familiar with the Holodomer. Was it the consensus among the majority of survivors that it was a genocide?
Also from your post:
if I were to say “I admit there’s a possibility the Holodomor was a genocide”
This seems like a pretty reasonable line to draw, is not "suggesting the survivors are bad faith actors or dupes", and I think demonstrates that you're willing to "consider the other side of the debate". Why not just try it?
do any of us really need to waste time taking a bullet for Stalin’s honor seventy years after he died, thirty years after the country he once led literally ceased to exist? Does that help build socialism?
...yes? Absolutely yes. Whatever one's thoughts on Stalin's personal bigotries or excesses, his government led the USSR from the brink of collapse to a world superpower and saved Eurasia from a fascist takeover in the meantime. At its height, it was perhaps the most socially progressive society of the 20th century and led the way in the ongoing fight for the working class' liberation. We likely wouldn't have gotten the New Deal if it wasn't for Stalin.
Emphasizing this has to be a high rhetorical priority for any socialist in the imperial core. It has to be, because so much of our political culture is built around delegitimizing communism by pointing to SpOOkY sCArY StALiN and his gulags. We must push back against it if we ever want "The Left" in the imperial core to move past tepid socdem reformism.
Does that help build socialism? Does that help socialist movements in the global south? Does that bolster the domestic antiwar movement?
I wonder if the american's left failure to do any that has any connection to do with the rabid anti-communism and rejection of any level headed and nuanced analysis of successfull revolutionary communist strategies and projects behind the vail of anti-communism . And if combating that IS a major step towards doing these stuff and requires arguing and debunking the historical narratives and lies against communism and communist projects .
On one hand, all of us should be persuading the people we know to move farther left. People generally give a shit about what their friends/families/SOs think, and that's the perfect situation for nudging people in the right direction one step at a time. And if we can't convince the people we know best to move farther left, who can we convince? Discussions about the USSR and other AES states are inevitable with this approach if only because they're the focus of so much anticommunist propaganda.
On the other hand, we should always bring the focus back to stuff that matters to people here and now, and we have to find ways of nudging people in the right direction without becoming That Guy Who Always Insists On Contentious Political Debates.
It is mainstream academic historical consensus that the "Holodomor" (more accurate called the 1932-33 famine) was not a deliberate genocide. The myth that it was, with an exaggerated death toll that is directly compared to the Holocaust is quite literally Nazi propaganda (though I must stress that certain overly dogmatic tendencies have a bad habit of going so far as to suggest the famine never happened and was itself Nazi propaganda). As a proportion of the population, the region that suffered most from the famine was Kazakhstan, primarily due to the nomadic population's greater dependence on their flocks of livestock, which were disproportionately slaughtered deliberately as a campaign of passive resistance to forced collectivization. Ukraine suffered second-worst not because Stalin wanted to kill as many Ukrainian as possible because he was racist, but because Ukraine was traditionally the breadbasket of the Russian Empire and as a result in times of severe famine the brute force of grain requisitions and the whip of labor discipline fell disproportionately on Ukraine in order to make for shortfalls in other regions of the Union.
Another primary point of the "Holodomor" narrative that is pushed to imply it was a deliberate genocide is blocking detachments and internal passports. In this period these were a general phenomenon, as desperate measures to prevent masses of peasants fleeing into the cities without authorization in search of food and work, which would have drastically exacerbated the famine and potentially fatally destabilized the Soviet government by inciting unrest in the urban centers that were the power base of the Communist Party. In effect, the Moscow center performed a triage, sacrificing the peasants to preserve the urban proletariat and the industrialization drive. Ruthless? Absolutely. Deliberate genocide? No. In fact, Stalin repeatedly released grain reserves for famine relief upon numerous appeals to the detriment of the annual plan targets.
The following excerpts are from the preface to the revised editions of The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-33, by RW Davies and Stephen G Wheatcroft
Since this book was completed, the Soviet famine of 1931-33 has become an international political issue. Following a number of preliminary declarations and a vigorous campaign among Ukrainians in Canada, in November 2006 a bill approved by the Ukrainian parliament...stated that the famine was 'an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people'. In the following year a three-day event commemorating the famine in Ukraine was held in its capital, Kiev, and at the same time Yushchenko, the president, called on the Ukrainian parliament to approve 'a new law criminalizing Holodomor denial' - so far without success. Then on May 28, 2008, the Canadian parliament passed a bill that recognized the Holodomor as a genocide and established a Ukrainian Famine and Genocide ('Holodomor') Memorial Day. Later in the year, on October 23, 2008, the European parliament, without committing itself to the view of the Ukrainian and Canadian parliament that the famine was an act of genocide, declared it was 'cynically and cruelly planned by Stalin's regime in order to force through the Soviet Union's policy of collectivization of agriculture'...
This campaign is reinforced by extremely high estimates of Ukrainian deaths from famine. On November 7, 2003, a statement to the United States General Assembly by 25 member-countries declared that 'the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine (Holodomor) took from 7 million to 10 million innocent lives'. According to Yushchenko, Ukraine 'lost about ten million people as a direct result of the Holodomor-genocide'...
In contrast, the Russian government has consistently objected to the Ukrainian view. On April 2, 2008, a statement was approved by the Russian State Duma declaring that there was no evidence that the 1933 famine was an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. The statement condemned the Soviet regime's 'disregard for the lives of people in the attainment of economic and political goals', but also declared that 'there is no historic evidence that the famine was organized on ethnic grounds'. The official view was endorsed by the Russian archives, and by Russian historians...In the preface the director of the Russian archives, VP Kozlov, criticizes the 'politicization' of the famine:
Not even one document has been found confirming the concept of a 'golodomor-genocide' in Ukraine, nor even a hint in the documents of ethnic motives for what happened, in Ukraine and elsewhere. Absolutely the whole mass of documents testify that the main enemy of Soviet power at that time was not an enemy based on ethnicity, but an enemy based on class.
In our own work we, like VP Kozlov, have found no evidence that the Soviet authorities undertook a program of genocide against Ukraine. It is also certain that the statements by Ukrainian politicians and publicists about the deaths from famine in Ukraine are greatly exaggerated. A prominent Ukrainian historian, Stanislaus Kul'chitskii, estimated deaths from famine in Ukraine at 3-3.5 million; and Ukrainian demographers estimate that excess deaths in Ukraine in the whole period of 1926-39 (most of them during the famine) amounted to 3.5 million. Nevertheless, Ukrainian organizations continue, with some success, to urge Canadian schools to teach as a fact that excess deaths were 10 million during the 1932-33 famine. This does not mean that Ukraine did not suffer greatly during the famine. It is certainly the case that most of the famine deaths took place in Ukraine, and that the grain collection campaign was associated with the reversal of the previous policy of Ukrainization.
I'll stop the direct excerpts right there, since I've made my point. But the mainstream historical opinion is that the 1931-33 famine was a natural famine that was drastically exacerbated by the actions of the Communist Party and its campaigns of dekulakization and forced collectivization. To understand these events, one must understand that the revolutions of October 1917 were two parallel revolutions: the proletarian revolution in the cities, and the peasant revolution on the land. These parallel revolutions sat in uneasy tension with each other through the 1920s. When the simmering scissors crisis and a bad harvest in 1927 forced a re-evaluation of the New Economic Policy, coinciding with Stalin's final consolidation of power in the hands of himself and his surrounding clique, what followed was a radical reformation of agricultural and industrialization policy. It was, to be blunt, Stalin's declaration of war against the peasant revolution on the land - the destruction of entrenched peasant power in the village communes; the liquidation of kulaks (and "kulaks", after the actual kulaks were eradicated); and the reorganization of Soviet agriculture from backwards peasant commune-and-strip farming into collective and state farms. This forced collectivization drive coincided with a brutal program of crash industrialization meant to modernize Soviet industry to near-parity with the advanced capitalist world within ten years.
In effect, the drives of dekulakization, forced collectivization, and rapid industrialization were a massive continent-spanning program of primitive accumulation. The state became the primary accumulator and investor of capital, and distributor of commodities. And it took a bloody toll. This cannot be denied. But a deliberate genocide it absolutely was not.
How much do either of you base your identity around your belief in whether or not the Holodomor was a genocide? Because it should be pretty fucking close to zero. It sounds like you guys are having this argument as a proxy for a larger political/moral disagreement.
Close to zero. It's definitely a proxy for some moral disagreement. "An ethics of engagement" as she put it.
I just call it the 1932 famine, since even calling it the Holodomor is giving rhetorical ground to the Ukranian Nazi collaborators who named it that specifically to evoke comparisons to the Holocaust they'd just helped do.
A little correction to your timeline: The (capital H) Holocaust refers to the Nazi genocide that began in 1939 and only reached Ukraine in 1941.
Ukrainian Nationalist "Greens" and Pro-Tsarist "Whites" committed widespread murders and pogroms against Jews and suspected Communists, this was during the years of the Soviet revolution around 1919-1922, before the 1932 famine.Lol they literally could not even wait
I appreciate the info, I'm often prickly about being called out for being wrong but this is just too...well "funny" isn't the word, but you know.
Too late now, but sometimes carefully mentioning the Nayirah testimony and other situations in which the state lies and manipulates with tears, can help people question their sources. I’m still trying to figure this out when explaining the Uighur situation to some friends.
Even if every detail of Adrien Zens's account was true, it still wouldn't be as bad as what Capitalist countries have done to Muslims for the past several decades. Let me know when China's carpet bombing them by the thousands, let me know when China's blowing up Uigher schools and hospitals with civilians still inside.
it still wouldn’t be as bad as what Capitalist countries have done to Muslims
In my experience, you really have to follow this up with "this is how you know that the elected officials handwringing over this are full of shit; if they actually cared they'd stop the harm they control."
inspired those concentration camps (Jim Crow)
Another awful slice of American history:
Laughlin saw the need to create a "Model Law" which could withstand a test of constitutional scrutiny, clearing the way for future sterilization operations. Adolf Hitler closely modeled his Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring on Laughlin's "Model Law". The Third Reich held Laughlin in such regard that they arranged for him to receive an honorary doctorate from Heidelberg University in 1936. At the Subsequent Nuremberg trials after World War II, counsel for SS functionary Otto Hofmann explicitly cited Holmes's opinion in Buck v. Bell in his defense.
“actually we invaded germany and closed down their concentration camps, and that was a good thing, so we should do it to China”
Huh? Isn't this a circular argument? If invading countries to close down concentration camps is a good thing then who gets to invade the US and close Guantanamo and ICE camps? Doubt you'll get them to admit :xi-plz:
Anyway I wouldn't call that savvy lol.
Debating is probably going to make it worse. See if you can find a way to unite against your common enemy, the kulaks, who actually deliberately starved people by destroying storage. But since they were Ukrainians themselves it makes more sense to call it classicide.
Okay I don't think anyone has asked what I think would be the obvious question here so I'll bite.
Does she have any kind of genuine connection to people who would claim to be survivors or "personally affected" by this?
If so, we may be grossly underestimating the level of propaganda or maybe just outright lies have been told to her as a generations long anti-communist push could be taking place.
So just to double check, shes not like. From Ukraine, none of her family is from there, and she has no real personal connection to this place right?
Because sometimes unfortunately arguments can largely stem from places from emotion rather than rationality so she may just be upset that you aren't considering her feelings in this situation (even though clearly you are to a point or you wouldn't have asked a message board about it)
She is not Ukrainian and has no connections to Ukraine. (I'm also not Ukrainian nor do I have ties to Ukraine (or Russia).)
It's additionally vexing as we'll dunk on the Victims of Communism propaganda all the time but this is a shade too far, it seems.
All I can think of would be potential parallels to the Canadian residential school system. There are survivors who call their experience a genocide, and rightly so, but the famine and the schools are apples and oranges.
Ukraine is currently fascist, not neoliberal fascist, not "they're a bit mean" fascist, they are nazi fascists. The opinions of Ukrainians are useless on whether it was or was not a genocide because:
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None of them were alive during the event.
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We already know for a fact that it was not. We have the archives.
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Ukraine is literally a country that has been captured by fascists since Maidan and fascist propaganda is RAMPANT from Ukrainians right now.
If you can educate a person on the fascist issue in Ukraine, it may change the lens they use to view information they get from Ukrainians.
If a person continues to have doubts, point out that even the fucking BBC were warning that the country was heading for fascist takeover after the Maidan revolution. Things have moved on since then, the country is captured, so captured that they now put fascist slogans on their football kit.
The Ukrainians she is speaking to are probably fascists.
Oh yeah btw the US government is happily working with the fascists too, not just the ones in government but the fascist militias too .
You can not discuss any topics in good faith with anyone from Ukraine anymore.
Some of them are still alive they’re just old as fuck. And a lot of people remember their grandparents telling them about it. I include myself in that latter category. It was horrible and how much of it was avoidable or the least worst option is unclear. Ultimately I think it was on par or better than anything a capitalist or feudalist government would have done in that situation given the state of things in Russia at that time.
That’s a smaller point to Ukraine currently being overrun but ultra-right nationalist politics. The “facts” of the Holodomor are entirely dictated by anti-communist rhetoric, where any retrospective look is only viewed in the harshest light.
@MarxDidNothingWrong, this is maybe not a good example to pose, but think about the more recent “genocide” of white farmers in Southern Africa. Many lost their stolen land and cried foul, and I believe some were in fact killed for various reasons. But no one is arguing on their side without ulterior imperial and/or racial motives.
Perhaps there is a better example you can think of to make this point.
Some of them are still alive they’re just old as fuck.
Sure, they're not chatting shit about it online though which is fairly critical. The people that are have a fascist agenda behind it or have been led astray on the topic by the fascists. Those that have mostly been led astray don't actually care enough to be actively engaging in discourse about the topic online though, there's better shit to do.
That leaves three groups that discuss it - communists, fascists, and imperialists who find it useful for anti-communism.
My main point is that understanding the current situation in Ukraine is incredibly critical to viewing discourse with the correct lens. Most people in Europe and the US right now are completely uninformed about it. Most are under the impression it is a country not actually very dissimilar to the rest of Europe. They are quite wrong and in a very wrong mindset for any kind of correct analysis. Understanding the conditions changes everything.
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I've had to navigate similar issues with regards to the xinjiang situation with some friends. I don't really have any good advice except to say that all the would-be survivors of the Holodomor are probably long dead by now.
im experiencing white genocide in america boris johnson please help us
The question of genocide is intent and targeting, they didn’t set out to make a famine or target specific ethnicity, there were significant issues with communication in 30s (imagine), so the problem was not obvious till late summer-autumn to the party, which is why their actions seem more callous than usual, they thought it was same shit as before, but it wasn’t (requisitions of grain and selling, in autumn they dropped like a stone and they started moving reserves and importing grain later).
it was not even worst famine, volga in 20s was :shrug-outta-hecks:
Sure, ukrainians can be mad about it, that part is perfectly reasonable, some are, some aren’t (or weren’t until crimea shit)
