>The novelty of this particular famine, what made it so diabolical, is that it was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind As opposed to the Indian and

>The novelty of this particular famine, what made it so diabolical, is that it was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind As opposed to the Indian and Irish famines where strong state intervention would have saved the majority of the people but the sacrosanct ideas of free market capitalism did not allow that. The Ukrainian famine is neither unique nor that bad by world standards. The reason why it was shocking to the West is that it happened decades after most other major powers developed trade systems robust enough to deal with similar catastrophes in their own empires. Russia like always was lagging a decades behind the rest of the West. Much the same way the cultural revolution and great leap forward are shocking, they happened at the same time that men were circling the moon, but in a country which had much more in common with the England of the 1830's or the Russia of the 1910's than any other power then.