For a communist Stalin was a notorious bowl hog. That's part of the 30% that Mao criticized him for.

I am definitely going to use this bit IRL and I'm probably going to pretend I thought of it myself.

Afterwards he got the munchies and ate all the wheat in Ukraine with his comically oversized spoon

It's the best heuristic.

No, you don't understand! Removing statuses is just what a Nazi would do! This means Communism is the Real Fascism.

Loldomor

:kelly:

We're still netting a gain of Banderas and a loss of Lenins I think. :ussr-cry:

Real chad move would be to replace the monument with a closed-down Pizza Hut

Removed by mod

In addition to being a famine that was, at most, mismanaged, the term itself is amplified because it sounds a bit like holocaust. In those senses, the discourse that treats it like a genocide is also dabbling in Holocaust denial.

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.

deleted by creator

Alternate history time.

After the American Civil War, the North freed the slaves, turned over control of the plantations to them, and told them to govern the plantations collectively. The former plantation masters obviously didn't like this, so some of them sabotaged whatever they could on the way out, and most refused to lend their expertise in farm management. Between this, the general devastation of the war, and a drought, the South faced famine. The freed slaves reported this back to Washington and asked for food aid and reduced export quotas. The government considered this, decided that this was historically very profitable land, and that these recently-freed slaves, being uneducated and black, didn't know what they were talking about, so they refused, and many people starved.

Also the South made mostly food instead of cotton and tobacco in this alternate history.

So the Holodomor is bullshit right?

It's complicated. It's really complicated. The idea that the Holodomor was a deliberate attempt to kill as many Ukrainians as possible is almost certainly anti-capitalist :brainworms:. There's simply no evidence that anyone in the Soviet administration was trying to accomplish this, and there are big, obvious problems with the theory. The simplest problem is; The people on the ground actually enforcing agricultural policies, grain requisition policies, quotas, distribution of aid and supplies, and so forth were mostly Ukrainians themselves. The Holodomor narrative asks you to believe, essentially, that Stalin ordered Ukrainians to genocide themselves and the Ukrainians went along with it. This is part of a wider trend in right-wing Ukrainian Nationalism of pretending that somehow all Ukrainians were oppressed freedom fighters and no Ukrainians were actually part of the Soviet government or the communist party. If that sounds ridiculous to you, it is.

Anti-Communists also use the Holodomor, including the name, to essentially steal valor from the Holocaust in order to frame the Soviets as equivalent to (if not worse than) the Nazis. It's an important component of the "Double Holocaust" narrative that is both used to exaggerate the crimes and violence of the Soviet Union, while also diminishing or outright denying the Holocaust.

There's also the ideological factor - The Soviets were purging kulaks, expropriating property, and collectivizing property. Capitalists being capitalists purging the kulaks was bad, but expropriating property is pure evil. They don't care much about mass murder, or theft, or human experimentation, or really any other violence against humans but boy howdy do they get upset if you interfere with the sacred private property.

As to what actually happened - There was a huge, probably criminal, amount of mismanagement and bureaucratic fuck up occuring at all levels of government. Stalin and the Moscow administration were too far away from the problem. Communication was slow. Record keeping was spotty and records were often falsified, which lead to situations where the grain quotas were far higher than a given village could afford. When the Soviet administration finally grasped the size of the problem relief was delivered unevenly. It was bad enough that one can reasonably say that the Soviet administration's failure to alleviate the famine was probably criminal, equivalent to manslaughter on a vast scale. They weren't trying to kill anyone, but they could reasonably be held responsible for the deaths that occurred.

Other factors include a very serious drought that probably (numbers are in contention) seriously lowered the grain yields from those years, a problem which was compounded because grain quotas were not correctly adjusted to reflect the new yields.

There were serious logistical infrastructure problems. Limited transport capability, poor logistical record keeping.

The sum up, though, is that the Soviet Administration could have and should have done better, to the point where the results can reasonably be considered criminal, but the crime is manslaughter rather than genocide. There's no real evidence that the famine was intentional and the "intentional genocide" narrative has a number of very serious problems ranging from lack of evidence to asking you to believe that the Ukrainians voluntarily genocided themselves.

here is a good book on the subject

Fucking figures. So much of what is no widely presented by Ukrainian Nationalists as the "True" history has only relatively recently become mainstream after decades of culture war.

Libs have a hivemind