The great Ukranian famine happened but it wasn't a deliberate genocide against the Ukranian people, it was a fuckup of the state, it is Nazi apologia to use the term "Holodomor" and equivocate a lethal administrative failure to a deliberate, explicit state effort to destroy the Jewish people.
It also is soft famine denialism because it prioritises the Ukrainian famine victims and it completely whitewashes the other famine victims across the region including the territories of Povolzhe, Central Black Earth Region, Northern Caucasus, Ural, Crimea, Western Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus where millions are estimated to have died.
(It's a bit like how discourse on Nazi concentration camps tends to completely overlook the imprisonment and extermination of queer people, socialists, Sinti and Roma people, Jehovah's Witnesses, Polish people, Czechs and Belorussians.)
On them matter of the famine, here's celebrated economist Keynes speaking about the state of Soviet agriculture in his 1919 book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, where he writes about his findings as the British delegate to the Treaty of Versailles:
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the soil of Europe will not yet have recovered its former productivity. If trade is not resumed with Russia, wheat in 1920-21 (unless the seasons are specially bountiful) must be scarce and very dear. The blockade of Russia, lately proclaimed by the Allies, is therefore a foolish and short-sighted proceeding; we are blockading not so much Russia as ourselves.
The process of reviving the Russian export trade is bound in any case to be a slow one. The present productivity of the Russian peasant is not believed to be sufficient to yield an exportable surplus on the pre-war scale. The reasons for this are obviously many, but amongst them are included the insufficiency of agricultural implements and accessories and the absence of incentive to production caused by the lack of commodities in the towns which the peasants can purchase in exchange for their produce. Finally, there is the decay of the transport system, which hinders or renders impossible the collection of local surpluses in the big centers of distribution.
I see no possible means of repairing this loss of productivity within any reasonable period of time except through the agency of German enterprise and organization. It is impossible geographically and for many other reasons for Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Americans to undertake it;—we have neither the incentive nor the means for doing the work on a sufficient scale. Germany, on the other hand, has the experience, the incentive, and to a large extent the materials for furnishing the Russian peasant with the goods of which he has been starved for the past five years, for reorganizing the business of transport and collection, and so for bringing into the world's pool, for the common advantage, the supplies from which we are now so disastrously cut off. It is in our interest to hasten the day when German agents and organizers will be in a position to set in train in every Russian village the impulses of ordinary economic motive. This is a process quite independent of the governing authority in Russia
While this is not predicting a famine per se, all of the conditions for a disastrous famine, when considering the effects of the drought which came, are described by Keynes aptly.
It also is soft famine denialism because it prioritises the Ukrainian famine victims and it completely whitewashes the other famine victims across the region including the territories of Povolzhe, Central Black Earth Region, Northern Caucasus, Ural, Crimea, Western Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus where millions are estimated to have died.
(It's a bit like how discourse on Nazi concentration camps tends to completely overlook the imprisonment and extermination of queer people, socialists, Sinti and Roma people, Jehovah's Witnesses, Polish people, Czechs and Belorussians.)
On them matter of the famine, here's celebrated economist Keynes speaking about the state of Soviet agriculture in his 1919 book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, where he writes about his findings as the British delegate to the Treaty of Versailles:
While this is not predicting a famine per se, all of the conditions for a disastrous famine, when considering the effects of the drought which came, are described by Keynes aptly.