Buh buh but the Holodomor was a genocide
Meanwhile I can't get any reliable numbers on the people killed during the Dust Bowl/Great Depression
Attempting to look this up yesterday and even looking up something like “deaths caused by Dust Bowl” yields unrelated results
Isn't it weird that we know everyone who even sneezed too strong during the Holodomor but we can't find a single Dust Bowl death? Odd! Odd odd odd.
There's very little evidence that the dust bowl, or the great depression generally caused significant excess death. To be sure, there was several thousand likely excess deaths, but the death rates did not fluctuate much compared to the 1920s or 1940s.
Here's a recent study on the mortality rates in American cities during the great depression. https://jech.bmj.com/content/66/5/410.abstract?sid=5c77edc9-6cfa-4154-be20-8272b1ca03b4
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/149yg8/how_many_americans_died_of_hunger_during_the/ The stats for deaths during the great depression are recorded all over various state archives.
Here's a study on death rates in the united states during the great depression, there's really not that many excess deaths. https://jech.bmj.com/content/66/5/410.abstract?sid=5c77edc9-6cfa-4154-be20-8272b1ca03b4
This is a gem though, basically using the same methods used to calculate the Holodomor and applying it to the Great Depression.
Yeah I've seen that, it's really bad scholarship and is not at all accurate. Like the population data is straight up wrong just using the 1930 and 1940 census and the comparison of the PWA to the gulag system is ludicrous. Like the population growth 1920-1930 was 13 percent. From 1930 to 1940 it was 7.5. This is basically all accountable in the immigration restrictions made in 1924, and the lower birth rate due to the great depression.
Don’t forget that lower birth rates are chucked into lots of anti-communist stats though.
But yeah I figured the scholarship on this was garbage.
the possibility of a Japanese socialist republic makes me sad, so many Japanese writers from the pre and post WW2 era opined the possibility of an equal humanist society as promised by the Soviet Union
even stalin's conservative form of socialism would have been a huge material improvement for Japanese proletarians and peasants than the fascistic dictatorship during the showa era
The Soviet Union did seize Sakhalin from the Japanese empire, which is part of the Japanese island chain (although it has more Ainu and Koreans than Yamato and so was probably hostile to the empire to begin with)
A great movie that illustrates the friendship between a red army soldier and an ainu man is Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala. Surprisingly heartwarming and low-key, although still dramatic and moving in its own way
Does anyone have any recommendations for books on this? I mean a material analysis of the Soviet Union at the end of Stalins life and onward, because just putting the blame on people doesn't feel like a very thorough analysis.
That list is really not very good. Some of it's okay like Nove but Webb's work is pretty universally regarded as not accurate, and neither is Pat Sloan's or Mick Costellos. If you want to know soviet history from the period, read modern works based on digging in the archives, like the work of Moishe Lewin or J Arch Getty,
Yeah too often old works from the 30s to the 80s by activists or real historians given bad data get recommended as soviet history and they're just not. They're not written with information from party archives or from statistical data as it was not made available to them. Or they're based on not totally accurate data. For example Webb's writing was originally based on statistics provided by the soviet embassy in London. We know from archive data that these stats were wrong.
Should also say regarding Getty that he's an exception to the pre archive opening work. His first book in 1985 was made possible due to the USSR giving him full access to the Stalin archives as by that time the soviet government really didn't care. His work post 1991 uses the general archives that were opened post collapse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbNy30GyxVU Here's a good talk on the development of the the early soviet union btw.
Reading 4chan posts is not history lol, read books please, like god damn that post is utterly innacurate lol. Read actual history based on archival work, like that of Moishe Lewin, J Arch Getty, etc.
I have The Soviet Century by Lewin, would you recommend it as a general overview?
Also, because I'm curious, what are the most obvious inaccuracies present? I'm assuming the downplaying of the Holodomor.
Also here's a good talk on the period https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbNy30GyxVU
Yeah the soviet century is a great overview. Yeah downplaying the Holodomor really does not jive with the internal party documents we have from the period, same with the purges. And the contextualization of Khrushchev's destalinization is like classic bs from the anti Khrushchev communist orgs in the UK in the 1950s, it's not informed by actual data or internal party documents.
So I'm probably not going to do any research into any of this and take it all as fact to use when 'debating' communism with ppl, its definitely all correct yeah?
