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.
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.