I just discovered that Radical Reviewer believes the western account of the 1932 Ukranian famine, and I could not be more disappointed.
I just discovered that Radical Reviewer believes the western account of the 1932 Ukranian famine, and I could not be more disappointed.
The overwhelming majority of people don't know that it is mainstream historical academic consensus today that the 32-33 famine, while certainly drastically exacerbated by government policy, was absolutely not a deliberate genocide.
Literally just read the preface to the revised edition of Davies and Wheatcroft's The Years of Hunger and it will give you the gist. It pretty emphatically denounces the narrative that it was a genocide. The entire rest of the book is nerd shit on agricultural yields and Soviet government policy.
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I'm not going to go into the myriad causes of the famine, but it was essentially a natural famine that was made considerably worse because forced collectivization severely disrupted traditional peasant agricultural practices and relentless state pressure on the farmers drove yields continuously downward over a three-year period.
The famine was most acute in Kazakhstan, but Ukraine gets the main focus of propaganda rhetoric because the "Holodomor" narrative was concocted by Ukrainian nationalists who later collaborated with the Nazis, and was pushed in Nazi propaganda. The real reason the famine was so bad in Ukraine was because Ukraine had always been the breadbasket of the Russian Empire, and therefore when other regions failed to make their quotas pressure from the Moscow center fell upon Ukraine to make up the difference, with the accompanying coercive measures.
For example, a pretty prominent aspect of the "Holodomor" narrative is the allegation that Stalin used troops and internal passports to forcibly prevent Ukrainians from fleeing their famine-stricken regions as a means of deliberately killing them through starvation. This is a malicious misinterpretation of the facts. In reality internal passports and coercive measures were issued across much of the Union to prevent a catastrophic rural exodus to the cities in search of food and employment, which would have exacerbated the famine from "catastrophic" to "biblical" and probably toppled the government to boot. The Moscow center prioritized feeding the cities over the rural regions because the cities were not only their power base but also because urban unrest was a legitimate threat to the stability of the state.
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there wasn't relentless pressure & grain requisitions were reduced multiple times
aid was increased many fold & all manner of healthcare and other outreach were mobilized immediately upon hearing of these issues
I don't think many serious communists actually say the famine never happened as it obviously did. This is kind of a strawml. I almost never see it. Hell I see more leftists say that it was a genocide despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I think its much more important to combat the people who say it was a genocide.
That requires tankies to care about the truth when they seem to so often live in their own fantasy world where they replace inconvenient facts with their own versions of events.
Most socialists of all types do exactly what you're saying. It's the kids who are only socialist to stick it to mommy and daddy that are arguing that it never happened (with the genuine loon here and there too).
Please stop using the word "tankie" unironically. Even if you think it's a useful label, it's already been adopted by liberals as their go-to pejorative for anyone to the left of Liz Warren. Nobody benefits from this.
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What does this actually mean though?
A big part was they stopped doing crop rotation, especially because of the immense pressure to push up yields
no, the collectivization had to take place
Tsarist "Stolypin reforms" gave preference to rich kulaks&nanny state capitalism propped up rich landowners above poor
"Stolypin reforms" gave undue market access & held back real class mobility
rich "khutors" & a form of nanny state capitalism artificially created a mass of poor & powerless farm hands who had to give their entire lives in order to stay a near serf basically
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EonoId_W4AAMHs-?format=png&name=medium
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EonoJX-W8AEq1ky?format=png&name=medium
the backwardness of their inefficient feudal style agricultural production guaranteed shortage
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Epg_HctW8AEK7so?format=jpg&name=medium
Stalin said "forced collectivization" wasn't the correct way, as he didn't have dictatorial control over the areas
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Epg_JNxW8AU9PHb?format=png&name=900x900
http://jstor.org/stable/4202829
Kulaks infiltrated collectives& ruined them as well as committing many other crimes
they were feudal era producers that could not feed the masses as was needed for these areas to progress, they had to be supplanted
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EqN4Yb4XEAA3cOp?format=jpg&name=medium
whole country was modernizing& mechanizing... there were no real tractors or modern technological agriculture in these areas at the time
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eo2uqDeXUAAIlr-?format=png&name=medium
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Epb_HP7XIAE0NmJ?format=jpg&name=medium
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Epb_IkvXYAAg0I7?format=png&name=medium
And yet despite this, the first successful year of collectivization implementation in 1930-31 literally more than tripled the amount harvested from Kulak style backward methods in just 2 years
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EpjmCsvW4AAkSzL?format=jpg&name=medium
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many different scholarly sources... one of them is listed there under the JSTOR link
which image would you like the scholarly resource link to specifically?
It wasn’t even really a logistics problem all that much. It was a Kulak sabotage problem
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Wish I could, but most people can't afford a $200 book.
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Success!
If anyone finds an epub let me know
Added a "history" folder to the new archive I'm managing with a pdf copy.
I got my paperback copy for like $20 but it seems the price has gone up since then
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Time is a flat fucking circle
Looks like that's only hardcover. I might scoop up a $40 used paperback.
Wheatcroft & Davies do get on the bandwagon of denouncing Stalin and blaming USSR "mismanagement", but it's more like standard issue Western Sovietology boiler plate stuff
In fact, some of their revelations from the archives about Stalin sending direct aid immediately & chastising those on the ground for not moving fast enough belies the anti-USSR conclusions that Wheatcroft and Davies make. And I honestly think they know that
I mean I might straight-up post the whole part of the preface I highlighted at some point. The Years of Hunger is that expensive especially in hardcover because it's pretty much literally a 90s-era Oxford textbook. I'm not kidding when I say "the majority of the book is nerd shit" ie tons and tons of agricultural statistics. If you're not into that pass it up.
Reading a pdf now I found on libgen. Definitely post the preface some more, it gets right to the heart of the politicization.
I'm going into a career in history, if I can force myself to read a book about diplomatic processions during the Congress of Vienna I can fuck with agricultural yields. Actually it's really rare to have that kind of hard data, very cool.
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It was drastically affected by Kulak reaction to government policy. No Kulaks, only collective farms, no famine.
i mean drastically exacerbating a famine i guess isnt a genocide, but its some sort of idk mass murder? its not a great defense for sure
It's the drastically exacerbated it part that the tankies refuse to admit to. Must less the other worse things he did.