Ugh the author of the source using the words "private jets" when there were no jet airplanes in service in 1933. Basically any chud will see that and go "BAD SOURCE".
For anyone that wants to fully understand the links between grifter journalists fascists all the way to to the Hearst Press (ran by a fascist William Randolph Hearst who gave columns to Mussolini and Goering)
Should read Fraud, Famine and Fascism by Douglas Tottle
http://www.rationalrevolution.net/special/library/famine.htm
What that book proves is that "Thomas Walker" employed by one of Hearsts tabloid rags only visited the Soviet union for 2 weeks and stayed around Moscow whereas he claimed he was there for 2 years.
He was eventually found as a fraud for a numerous string of other things in a US court of law.
So ironically everyone knew this in the 1930s that there was a fraudulent journalists trying to spin the famine as a "holodomor"
They should also read Grover Furrs chapter in Blood lies (in fact they should read the book in full) which can be found here
http://www.readmarxeveryday.org/bloodlies/ch01.html
This reads like a joke but it's actually true, the Holodomor was widely understood to be false after his highly publicized trial, where he admitted it was. It didn't begin to pick up steam until after WWII, where you would eventually get situations of one author citing another citing another all the way down to Walker.
This isn't an entirely accurate representation: "Thomas Walker" also apparently was found guilty in 4 European countries as well. Fuck em, fam
btw, he found out:
After being banned from re-entering the Soviet Union, Jones was kidnapped and murdered in 1935 while investigating in Japanese-occupied Mongolia; his murder was likely by the Russian secret police, the NKVD.
Smh another 1000000000 victims of communism to add to the pile.
his murder was likely by the Russian secret police, the NKVD.
What I wonder is the source of this? Seems like they'd have better things to do in 1935 than kill a journalist in Manchuria but I guess they obviously wanted to keep an eye on the Japanese so they'd have been in the area anyway.
This is the source cited in the wiki:
The trip would prove his downfall, as he and his companion, a German journalist named Muller, were captured by bandits in remote countryside, after being turned away by Japanese forces.
Mr Carey said Jones's death had always been surrounded by controversy, as it was unclear whether the bandits were tipped off by the Japanese, or by the Russian secret police, the NKVD.
"Until now all that was known for certain was that Muller was released on a highly spurious pretext about having been freed on parole in order to raise the ransom, and two days later Gareth was shot for no conceivable reason," he said.
"Probably we'll never know for certain what happened. However our investigations have shown that the Chinese contact who loaned Jones and Muller a car to travel to Mongolia was definitely an NKVD agent, and there's strong evidence to suggest that Muller might also have been."I'd say the wiki is framing it a bit too overconfidently.
The Proles of the Round Table had an episode in collaboration with Rev Left Radio on debunking Stalin myths including the Holomodor. Controversial but useful listening to understand that fascists lie, not just to make themselves feel righteous but to rob you of hope that there is any corner of this world, a socialist country, or individual with any redeeming value.
There was a natural famine happening at the time and people were starting to starve in central Asia, particularly in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
Part of the problem was that for generations, a new class of peasants had begun to form who were able to buy and own land, gradually displacing the former feudal system where most of the land was used by peasants for distant landowners who weren't really interested in the region.
This new landlord class (kulaks) basically perpetuated the same feudal system, with other peasants continuing to work for them on the land they acquired. Naturally this exacerbated wealth inequality in the region and gave the landlord class relative privilege and control over the peasant workers.
When the famine hit and people started to starve, the landlord class was relatively insulated from the problem, even being able to hoard food and resources. As the workers became more desperate, they were willing to work for less food, which allowed the landlords to hoard more, which made the workers position more desperate, causing them to be willing to work for less, and so forth in a snowball effect.
All of this was pretty normal for the region. It was a problem, with the relatively wealthy hoarding wealth and the workers becoming increasingly desperate to work for them in the middle of a natural disaster, but it was a problem central Asia had been dealing with for hundreds of years, if not longer. The new landlordism wasn't particularly parasitic when compared to feudalism, but it was parasitic nonetheless.
When people started starving to death the government stepped in and started organizing collective farms, redistributing land and hoarded resources to the peasants so that they could work for and feed themselves in a more efficient, equitable model for everyone.
The landowning class however, like capital controlling classes throughout history, weren't satisfied to work for themselves and allow the peasants to work for themselves alongside them.
Their response was to start sabotaging the collective farms, and to begin raiding and destroying depots where food was being distributed to starving people, as well as burning fields, grain silos, and slaughtering livestock, including breeding stock and egg and dairy producing stock.
Even anti-Communist propagandists like Robert Conquest (whose propaganda was cited extensively during the Cold War before most of it was debunked and he was forced to recant his claims over and over again) claim that the landowning class destroyed about 96 million head of cattle, and possibly twice as much tonnage of grain and other foodstock, completely wrecking the food production capacity of the region in the middle of the famine and exacerbating the problem beyond anything seen before.
The death toll is vastly overblown by those who want to make it out to be a genocide perpetrated the the Soviet government against her own people. The aforementioned Robert Conquest initially claimed a completely unrealistic 20-30 million deaths, before revising his claim by several million just years after his now infamous propaganda piece was published, and again as low as 13-15 million deaths decades later when his claims were immediately and categorically disproven by the opening of the Soviet archives.
As genuine investigative research continues to debunk claim after claim made by propagandists like him, the numbers continue to dwindle and the legacy of the self-proclaimed "Cold Warriors" is continuously eroded. To this day, the Ukrainian government claims ~4 million cases of starvation in the region during that period, completely disregarding blatantly false "research" conducted from a time before evidence was even available.
Eventually before his death, Conquest was forced to admit that there was no way the Soviets could have caused the famine, although he stubbornly refused to admit that they did anything to prevent it or that the land-owning capitalist class destroying 2-4 million tons of food for every starving person and wrecking the productive capacity of the region might have been responsible, despite this being the inevitable conclusion of his lifelong body of work, ironically vindicating the Soviets through desperate attempts to portray them as villains.
Decades of propaganda and its consequences are hard to undo however, and these indisputable, verifiable facts of recorded history are never welcomed in certain circles. The western public consciousness truly is a poisoned well, and facts alone aren't enough to undo that damage.
credit to /u/spookyjohnathan (of reddit, not sure if they made an account here)
I'd take your answer with a massive grain of salt, as it points out some anti-communist propaganda lies, but it also ignores any real arguments against it, i.e., Stalinist policies that actively squeezed the peasants and exacerbated the famine.
One specific error that I often see in lefty circles is a caricature and demonization of the kulaks, which misunderstands who they were. The historical term was quite vague and was loosely applied to many categories of better-off peasants - some of these were actual landlords, some were just rich enough to be able to hire landless peasants to help with the field work (which was how landless peasants earned a living since before the revolution), some were just the peasant with the nicest house and pair of boots in a village a hundred kilometers from the nearest city, and some got labeled kulaks when unsupervised officials were sent to said bumfuck, nowhere and given free reign.
Some grain-hoarding kulaks or just Fuck You, I Got Mine anti-Soviet kulaks existed, but they were a minor factor in history. Stalin led a campaign against the kulaks as a way to get the rest of the peasantry on his side. It didn't really work in terms of increasing the grain output and lots of people got abused for nothing, even if some of them were economic parasites.
Also - only Kazakhstan is in Central Asia. Ukraine and Southern Russia (North Caucasus, Volga region) are in Europe.
Anarchists, liberals, and right wingers often lie about the famine calling it unquestionably genocide, even though there is NO consensus even among super mainstream (liberal) scholars
Kotkin, the foremost mainstream Western Stalin scholar today doesn't think it was on purpose:
Just between February and July 1933, he signed or countenanced nearly three dozen small allocations of food aid to the countryside, primarily to the North Caucasus and Ukraine, as well as the Kazakh lands (which necessitated sharp reductions in the bread rations for city dwellers, many of whom were put on the brink of starvation). All of these actions were woefully insufficient for avoiding the mass starvation in the countryside caused by his policies, in the face of challenging natural conditions. Still, these actions do not indicate that he was trying to exterminate peasants or ethnic Ukrainians. In the Kazakh autonomous republic, probably between 35 and 40 percent of the titular nation—as compared with 8 to 9 percent of Slavs there—perished from starvation or disease, not because the regime targeted Kazakhs by ethnicity, but because regime policy there consisted of forced denomadization. Similarly, there was no “Ukrainian” famine; the famine was Soviet.
- Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 by Stephen Kotkin
One of the first and most famous Western historians to propagate the genocide narrative is Robert Conquest, who literally worked for British intelligence "propaganda counter-offensive"...
This explains it pretty good I believe.
Conclusions:
The famine was not deliberate or man-made. It was caused by difficult weather conditions and the general backwardness left by tsarism in the country. As there exists no evidence of deliberate genocide, and the case relies entirely on the false assumption that the USSR kept exporting more and more food grain, completely disregarding the famine, I can confidently say that the holodomor has been debunked as a myth and a fabrication.
It is revealing to look at who the people spreading this myth are. In the 1930s they were the Nazi press & their American collaborators. In the modern era their work was carried out by cold-war anti-communists and far-right Ukrainian emigres. The myth is still widely propagated those elements, together with Ukrainian neo-nazis. The Holodomor myth is the work of Goebbels.Quick summary: 1932-1933 there is a natural bad harvest at the same time that Stalin is pushing collectivization and squeezing the peasants. People start to starve. Government thinks peasants are withholding grain on purpose, continues squeezing. People continue starving. Government finally catches on, relaxes the squeeze and sends relief, but something like 7 million are already dead - especially in the grain-producing regions of Ukraine (<4m), Southern Russia (~3m), and Kazakhstan (<1m).
First the Nazis, then the US in the Cold War, then modern Ukrainian nationalists paint this as a genocide of Ukrainians, ignoring the dead Russians and Kazakhs and the non-existence of ANY documents or statements were the Soviet authorities demonstrate hatred of Ukrainians or intentions to starve any people. "Holodomor" is Ukrainian for "starving to death", a term possibly chosen for sounding like "Holocaust." They also inflate the number of dead to like 10-20 million. (Even honest historians' estimates vary because they're mostly based on comparisons with expected population growth, not actual dead bodies.)
Background: For the Soviet government, not squeezing the peasants wasn't an option. It was industrialize or charge invading tanks with cossacks on horseback. Industrialization to prepare the USSR for the coming WWII required exporting grain to purchase machinery, required peasants to migrate to the cities to work in factories and construction.
Why didn't the peasants cooperate with the government willingly? Some peasants were rich or reactionary, but most had continued the tradition of resisting greater state control as they had done for literally centuries - they didn't trust any government to have their interests at heart. (The Bolsheviks didn't really identify with the peasants the way Mao did, which hurt trust.)
The famine was partly natural - it had been a regular occurrence prior to mechanized agriculture. But grain continued to be exported at the same time - similar to the Irish famine and the Indian famines under the British. The Soviet authorities weren't trying to starve people, they just happened to be trying to maximize grain production and fight peasant resistance precisely when the peasants were hit by a natural disaster.
But the answers like that of /u/emizeko that entirely acquit the Stalinist government of all complicity ... are too partisan and miss real history. We have letters written to Stalin in 1932 by patriotic communists detailing the brutal abuse of regular peasants by officials and the famine conditions. We have records of policies that dealt out draconian punishments for peasant non-compliance. The infamous "Law of the Spikelets" punished peasants for gleaning - collecting leftover grains missed on an already harvested (collectivized) field that would just be left to rot otherwise. It was meant to incentivize people to join collective farms for food security, but it ended up punishing those trying to survive starvation in a famine.
"huehuhe commies killed 987 billion people." But for reals, they blame the famine on Stalin and attribute it to the failures of communism.
