From famine historian Mark Tauger's Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933:

Until recently both scholarly and popular discussions of the catastrophic famine in the Soviet Union in 1931-1933 invariably have described it as an artificial or "man-made" famine. ... While the intentionalist interpretations of the famine remain widely held, recent research has cast substantial doubt on them. Several studies and document collections have shown conclusively that the famine did not stop at Ukraine's borders, but affected rural and urban areas throughout the Soviet Union, and even the military. Studies based on this evidence, and on a reevaluation of published Soviet statistics, has shown that the grain harvests of 1931 and 1932 must have been much smaller than officially acknowledged. … The fact that a disastrous famine followed the 1932 procurements must have been at least in part the result of a smaller harvest.

Certainly, the harvest decline was not the only cause of the Soviet famine: the regime exported food during the crisis. The amount of grain exported during the peak of the famine in the first half of 1933, however, approximately 220,000 tons, was small, less than 1 percent of the lowest harvest estimates, and the regime was using virtually all the rest of the available harvest to feed people.

The Soviet government did have small reserves of grain, but continually drew these down to allocate food to the population. Since virtually the entire country experienced shortages of food, indicating that the procurement and distribution data are reasonably accurate, clearly the Soviet Union faced a severed shortage, and the most important cause of that shortage has to have been small harvests in 1931 and 1932.

Robert Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft argue that the 1931 and 1932 harvests were small due to drought and difficulties in labor and capital, especially the decline in draft animals. D'Ann Penner, in two studies of the famine in the North Caucasus and Don regions, rejects drought as an important factor in the region's small harvest in 1932 and instead attributes it to peasant resistance, specifically a strike against the Soviet regime. These studies thus represent two contrasting perspectives on the harvest, and therefore on the famine: one focusing on the old Russian agrarian problems of weather and poverty, exacerbated by collectivization and the economic crises of the five-year plan, the other focusing on familiar political aspects, the conflict between the rapacious Soviet regime and the resentful, resistant peasantry. Their studies work from different assumptions and employ different sources: Davies and Wheatcroft relied more on published sources and consider the country as a whole, Penner more on archival materials that focus on one region, albeit an important one.

In this essay I reexamine the harvest of 1931 and especially 1932 on the basis of newly available archival documents and published sources, including some that scholars have never utilized. I show that the environmental context of these famines deserves much greater emphasis that [sic] it has previously received: environmental disasters reduced the Soviet grain harvest in 1932 substantially and have to be considered among the primary causes of the famine. I argue that capital and labor were significant but were not as important as these environmental factors, and were in part a result of them. I also demonstrate that the Soviet leadership did not fully understand the crisis and out of ignorance acted inconsistently in reponse to it. I concluded that it is thus inaccurate to descrube the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as simply an artificial or man-made famine, or otherwise to reduce it to a single cause. Overall, the low harvest, and hence the famine, resulted from a complex of human and environmental factors, an interaction of man and nature, much as most previous famines in history.

...Our study of the famine has led us to very different conclusions from Dr Conquest’s. He holds that Stalin ‘wanted a famine’, that ‘the Soviets did not want the famine to be coped with successfully’, and that the Ukrainian famine was ‘deliberately inflicted for its own sake’. This leads him to the sweeping conclusion: ‘The main lesson seems to be that the Communist ideology provided the motivation for an unprecedented massacre of men, women and children.’

We do not at all absolve Stalin from responsibility for the famine. His policies towards the peasants were ruthless and brutal. But the story which has emerged in this book is of a Soviet leadership which was struggling with a famine crisis which had been caused partly by their wrongheaded policies, but was unexpected and undesirable. The background to the famine is not simply that Soviet agricultural policies were derived from Bolshevik ideology, though ideology played its part. They were also shaped by the Russian pre-revolutionary past, the experiences of the civil war, the international situation, the intransigeant circumstances of geography and the weather, and the modus operandi of the Soviet system as it was established under Stalin. They were formulated by men with little formal education and limited knowledge of agriculture. Above all, they were a consequence of the decision to industrialise this peasant country at breakneck speed.

Source: comrade /u/marxatemyacid over at /r/GenZedong, who sums it up as:

It was obviously not Stalin stopping the rain and eating 20 gajillion babies but I dont think saying he did literally nothing wrong is good. We must have a nuanced view of history because nothing is black and white. Was Stalin a comrade? Yes, was he some idol that we should try our hardest to emulate? Fuck no, even he decried idol worship, this is a struggle of the proletariat not of 'great men', may we learn from all parts of their experience, their mistakes and their successes.

Combination of natural causes and human error, nothing close to an intentional genocide. Could the Soviets have done better? Of course. But also the kulaks could’ve not burned their crops and slaughtered their animals rather than let it be collectivised.

The “holodomor was genocide” falsehood literally started as Ukrainian nazi propaganda btw

It's literally nazi propaganda. It was nazi propaganda originally spread to the West via the Hearst Press (ran by William Randolph Hearst an American fascist and friend of Hitler).

It was war propaganda which would be used to justify Operation Barbarosa (invasion of Soviet Union).

As we watch the film and see corpses piled in fields, bloated bodies sprawled in streets, pale skeletons grasping for bits of bread, we wonder: How can such a terrible story have been suppressed so long?

Here is how: The story is a fraud. The starving girl, it turns out, wasn’t found in 1932 or 1933, nor in the Ukraine. Her picture was taken from a Red Cross bulletin on the 1921-22 Volga famine, for which no one claims genocide. Rather than an emblem of persecution, the photograph advances the most cyni­cal of swindles — a hoax played out from the White House and Congress through the halls of Harvard to the New York State Department of Education. Pressing every pedal, pulling all the strings, is a Ukrainian nationalist lobby straining to cloak its own history of Nazi collabora­tion. By revising their past, these émigrés help support a more ambitious revision­ism: a denial of Hitler’s holocaust against the Jews.

“There is no evidence it was intention­ally directed against Ukrainians,” said Al­exander Dallin of Stanford, the father of modern Sovietology. “That would be to­tally out of keeping with what we know — ­it makes no sense.”

“This is crap, rubbish,” said Moshe Lewin of the University of Pennsylvania, whose Russian Peasants and Soviet Pow­er broke new ground in social history. “I am an anti-Stalinist, but I don’t see how this [genocide] campaign adds to our knowledge. It’s adding horrors, adding horrors, until it becomes a pathology.”

“I absolutely reject it,” said Lynne Vio­la of SUNY-Binghamton, the first U.S. historian to examine Moscow’s Central State Archive on collectivization. “Why in god’s name would this paranoid gov­ernment consciously produce a famine when they were terrifed of war [with Germany]?”

These premier Sovietologists dismiss Conquest for what he is — an ideologue whose serious work is long behind him.

https://www.villagevoice.com/2020/11/21/in-search-of-a-soviet-holocaust/

Comrade Alaskball already recommended the book Fraud, Famine and Fascism but didn't link it. This needs to be read in full to understand how this went from fringe far right propaganda to the mainstream.

After Ww2 Soviet Union was hunting nazis all over Europe and mercifully ending their lives.

Canada welcomed Nazis into their country by the thousands. IF they had SS or nazi tattoos that was all the better (as it "proved" their anticommunism).

Speaking to a CBS “60 Minutes” programme in 1997, Canadian historian Irving Abella, who is currently Professor for Canadian Jewish history at York University, bluntly summed up the political climate of the time. “One way of getting into postwar Canada,” he said “was by showing the SS tattoo. This proved that you were an anti-Communist.”

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/07/29/cauk-j29.html

Once in Canada and safe from the reach of the Soviets executing justice they then regrouped and began tirelessly propagating this propaganda - first against the Soviet Union then against Russia.

The culmination of this has been quite successful and seen Nazis in power in Ukraine. The West has considered them a useful group - to propagandise against their geopolitical foe (Russia) and advance Western interest in Eastern Europe

Once in Canada they began erecting Nazi monuments to Ukrainian SS divisions

Canada police investigate vandalism of monument to Nazi troops as hate crime

During the Cold War, the Banderivtsi agitated for the declaration of a U.S.-led “holy war of liberation” against Soviet Russia – a World War Three – placing their faith in the United States government to free the Soviet “prison of nations” by force, and to do so without obliterating them in the process with nuclear weapons. Similary, during World War Two, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists led by Bandera (OUN-B) initially counted on Nazi Germany to “liberate” Soviet Ukraine, although Adolf Hitler had no intentions of doing so.

The LUC is the Canadian spearhead of the CCSU and an international coalition of NGOs affiliated with the decades-old, highly secretive cult of personality centered around Stepan Bandera. The League of Ukrainian Canadians plays a leading role in the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and the Ukrainian World Congress, the first vice president of which (from Australia) is the present-day leader of the OUN-B. “At the Forefront of Ukrainian Issues” is the LUC’s slogan.

Bandera’s OUN-B, an extremist “revolutionary” fascist organization, carried out numerous brutal pogroms against Jews throughout western Ukraine in 1941 before infiltrating Nazi auxiliary police units that served at the frontlines of the “Holocaust by Bullets.” Bandera aspired to be the Führer of a pro-Nazi Ukrainian dictatorship, but was rejected by Hitler and later the CIA. He was drifting into irrelevance when his 1959 assassination by the KGB in Munich turned him into a beloved ultra-nationalist martyr.

Through the so-called “Canadian Conference in Support of Ukraine” (CCSU), many of Canada’s leading Conservatives have befriended a historically criminal, fascist network of Ukrainian nationalists that has remained dedicated to pushing the West to the brink of war with Russia since before World War Two ended. Today, followers of the long dead Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera are vying with Ukraine’s neo-Nazis to lead another “revolution” – this time, against Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his moves to peace with Russia.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/26/canadian-conservative-party-bandera-canada/

Give "Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard" by Douglas Tottle a read.

It details how an American fascist with media backing from the fascists spun up this bullshit tale only to get judicially debunked as literal nazi propaganda by the U.S justice system. Also how later on the cold war warriors of the 80s, roughly, weaponized that bullshit lie to further drag the USSR's reputation through the mud through deliberately arranging for it to be verbally linked to the holocaust.

It also goes into the actual famine of the time and details the shit that happened then, why it happened, how did the respective groups of people responded to the famine, and how it was solved.

Good read.

deleted by creator

We need Holodomore.

Serious reply: Not genocide, mostly natural disaster, the response could have been better, but it was a weird time and the USSR was being blockaded so they could only sell grain, while they had to industrialize so as not to get flattened in the wake of the coming war.

The main argument about why it is a genocide is that Ukraine was anti ussr, anti Russia, nationalist and seperatist so stalin wanted to crush them down. Problem is West Ukraine was not affected highly by the famine even though they are the most seperatist and least pro ussr while regions with high support for ussr were no less affected by the famine

They were a problematic character in game of thrones.

While there's a lot of good information here, I don't see any comment about how the World Bank refused to trade with the Soviet Union in gold, and would only trade in grain.

seinfeld voice:

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