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Should not be surprising, since this is already a widely acknowledged historical fact. I recommend Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust, an autobiographica

Should not be surprising, since this is already a widely acknowledged historical fact. I recommend Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust, an autobiographical account of this time, and how it hit common society. Adults hung themselves dressed up in their best clothing besides the recently deceased bodies of their children. A whole population, cities and countryside, condemned to death.

Avshalom 3y ago
Yeah, not to be flippant but I gotta wonder what that other 8% mean when they say it wasn't.
- philwelch 3y ago
  If you want to get into the semantics without outright denying the atrocities of Stalinism, I don’t know if the Holodomor was specifically motivated by any specific animus towards the Ukrainian people. Maybe it was! But my understanding is that the causes were more around attempting to exert control over the agricultural economy, punish the “kulaks” (who tended to be the most productive farmers) and ship more and more grain into the rapidly industrializing cities even though there wouldn’t be enough left to feed the people who grew it in the first place.
  - passedandfuture 3y ago
    Local Russian officials seized grain and other foodstuffs from farmers, including the last reserves of food from people's pantries and cupboards. It certainly seemed they wanted the people starved.
    - Avshalom 3y ago
      They made it illegal to glean, which certainly goes beyond farmers (farmers traditionally being the word for the people who owned the land not so much the people that worked it)
    - philwelch 3y ago
      They also did this to farmers in parts of Russia and IIRC Kazakhstan though. What I’m saying is that it wasn’t, to my knowledge, motivated by any particular nationalistic hatred for Ukrainians in particular. Everybody in the Soviet system knew they would end up in gulag or killed if they didn’t go along with whatever Stalin demanded, and what he demanded was unreasonable grain quotas and the liquidation of “kulaks” (interpreted to mean, any farmer who didn’t deliver the quota must be a reactionary sabotaging the great communist revolution). This is what happened as a consequence. It was horrible and it is one of the reasons I am one of the most anticommunist people you will ever meet. But was it motivated by ethnic hatred? Not that I am aware of, but I’d be open to learning any evidence that it was.
iavael 3y ago
It's indeed the fact that Ukrainians suffered from man-made famine, but it's incorrect statement that they were targeted as ethnicity or that they were only victims. Red kommisars didn't care too much about ethnicity, their conducted class war and their battlefield of food expropriations by food squads was whole south of USSR with fertile lands where peasants produced main volume of crops in country: that's Ukraine, Russia south of Moscow (e.g. Kuban), north-west of Kazahstan and some regions of Caucasus - so called Black Earth region. It should be called genocide too, but communists pushed UN to exclude class as criteria from official genocide definition (because oppressing "bad" classes was core soviet doctrine during it's whole existence). So "officially" it was not genocide because it was not ethnically motivated or targeted, but practically it was. It's important to remember what real socialism/communism is about (world revolution and class war), and not be deceived by talks about "wrong communists" who targeted ethnicities instead of "right communists" who don't do that.

Avshalom 3y ago

Yeah, not to be flippant but I gotta wonder what that other 8% mean when they say it wasn't.

philwelch 3y ago
If you want to get into the semantics without outright denying the atrocities of Stalinism, I don’t know if the Holodomor was specifically motivated by any specific animus towards the Ukrainian people. Maybe it was! But my understanding is that the causes were more around attempting to exert control over the agricultural economy, punish the “kulaks” (who tended to be the most productive farmers) and ship more and more grain into the rapidly industrializing cities even though there wouldn’t be enough left to feed the people who grew it in the first place.
- passedandfuture 3y ago
  Local Russian officials seized grain and other foodstuffs from farmers, including the last reserves of food from people's pantries and cupboards. It certainly seemed they wanted the people starved.
  - Avshalom 3y ago
    They made it illegal to glean, which certainly goes beyond farmers (farmers traditionally being the word for the people who owned the land not so much the people that worked it)
  - philwelch 3y ago
    They also did this to farmers in parts of Russia and IIRC Kazakhstan though. What I’m saying is that it wasn’t, to my knowledge, motivated by any particular nationalistic hatred for Ukrainians in particular. Everybody in the Soviet system knew they would end up in gulag or killed if they didn’t go along with whatever Stalin demanded, and what he demanded was unreasonable grain quotas and the liquidation of “kulaks” (interpreted to mean, any farmer who didn’t deliver the quota must be a reactionary sabotaging the great communist revolution). This is what happened as a consequence. It was horrible and it is one of the reasons I am one of the most anticommunist people you will ever meet. But was it motivated by ethnic hatred? Not that I am aware of, but I’d be open to learning any evidence that it was.

iavael 3y ago

It's indeed the fact that Ukrainians suffered from man-made famine, but it's incorrect statement that they were targeted as ethnicity or that they were only victims. Red kommisars didn't care too much about ethnicity, their conducted class war and their battlefield of food expropriations by food squads was whole south of USSR with fertile lands where peasants produced main volume of crops in country: that's Ukraine, Russia south of Moscow (e.g. Kuban), north-west of Kazahstan and some regions of Caucasus - so called Black Earth region. It should be called genocide too, but communists pushed UN to exclude class as criteria from official genocide definition (because oppressing "bad" classes was core soviet doctrine during it's whole existence). So "officially" it was not genocide because it was not ethnically motivated or targeted, but practically it was. It's important to remember what real socialism/communism is about (world revolution and class war), and not be deceived by talks about "wrong communists" who targeted ethnicities instead of "right communists" who don't do that.