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!
I'm going to talk around this in the context of revolution vs reform.
Revolution isn't pretty but sometimes it's critical for achieving a particular set of goals. For a revolution to be successful, you need to maintain control of the cities and be able to leverage the output of such cities to control the broader nation.
During China's great leap forward which also is similar in characteristic to what people call the holodomor, in order to support the newly large populations moving to cities, they had to completely rebuild their entire food supply chains in a very short period of time. This resulted in taking food from former substance farmers to the point of starvation in order to support the broader country. The collapse of a supply chain is never not massively destructive and always results in problems that take a very long time to recover from (it's a big reason why countries bail out companies during a recession).
If they acted slower than they did, the country might have been taken down sooner, a reformist approach is to not touch the existing supply chains and slowly figure out what works and doesn't.
Another example of something similar to this would be to compare land reform in both south africa and zimbabwe. Zimbabwe did it rapidly but people starved, in South Africa it's been a slow going process that hasn't actually resulted in as much transfer of land as people wanted.
The Great Leap Forward was a program of attempting to add basic industrial production to already established rural communes based on the apparent successes of some communes at doing just that, for a wide variety of material reasons ranging from wanting to decentralize their industry and move it inland from the comparatively vulnerable coasts to wanting to build the productive capital needed to mechanize rural agriculture and logistics infrastructure. This caused a serious agricultural labor shortage in some regions (and most of China's less savory policies resulted from the need to maintain a strict balance between rural agriculture and urban industry in order to avoid famine) which resulted in massive shortfalls in production which were then misreported by local officials, resulting in the expropriation of unsustainable amounts of grain from famine struck regions until the central leadership discovered how horribly the logistics and feedback mechanisms had failed and moved to correct the problems and alleviate the famine.
I appreciate you taking the time to comment. Im a little confused tbh if you don’t mind clarifying a few things:)
Correct me if I’m wrong I thought at the time like 90% of the people in the Soviet Union were still rural/peasantry...why would so much food need to be taken to the point of risking starvation in order to provide for the much smaller pop In the cities?
Had the conditions at the time lowered production that much?