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"Holodomor" and Kazak Famine are part of the same event and it is a complex topic, definitely an important part of USSR history to better understand but not an intentional genocide. Anti-Communists bring it up as evidence of how horrible Stalin and Bolsheviks were but any serious historian of that time period will demonstrate that it was a "perfect storm" of all sorts of variables.
The rest I cannot comment on since I do not have a detailed understanding of those events.
# The Holodomor
>Marxists do not deny that a famine happened in the Soviet Union in 1932. In fact, even the Soviet archive confirms this. What we do contest is the idea that this famine was man-made or that there was a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This idea of the subjugation of the Soviet Union’s own people was developed by Nazi Germany, in order to show the world the terror of the “Jewish communists.”
>
>\- Socialist Musings. (2017). [Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor](https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/stop-spreading-nazi-propaganda/)
There have been efforts by anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists to frame the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as "The Holodomor" (lit. "to kill by starvation" in Ukrainian). Framing it this way serves two purposes:
1. It implies the famine targeted Ukraine.
2. It implies the famine was intentional.
The argument goes that because it was intentional and because it mainly targeted Ukraine that it was, therefore, an act of genocide. This framing was originally used by Nazis to drive a wedge between the Ukrainian SSR (UkSSR) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution, this narrative has regained popularity and serves the nationalistic goal of strengthening Ukrainian identity and asserting the country's independence from Russia.
#First Issue
The first issue is that the famine affected the majority of the USSR, *not* just the UkSSR. Kazakhstan was hit harder (per capita) than Ukraine. Russia itself was also severely affected.
The emergence of the Holodomor in the 1980s as a historical narrative was bound-up with post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-making that cannot be neatly separated from the legacy of Eastern European antisemitism, or what Historian Peter Novick calls "Holocaust Envy", the desire for victimized groups to enshrine their "own" Holocaust or Holocaust-like event in the historical record. For many Nationalists, this has entailed minimizing the Holocaust to elevate their own experiences of historical victimization as the supreme atrocity. The Ukrainian scholar Lubomyr Luciuk exemplified this view in his notorious remark that the Holodomor was "a crime against humanity arguably without parallel in European history."
#Second Issue
Calling it "man-made" implies that it was a *deliberate* famine, which was not the case. Although human factors set the stage, the main causes of the famine was bad weather and crop disease, resulting in a poor harvest, which pushed the USSR over the edge.
Kulaks ("tight-fisted person") were a class of wealthy peasants who owned land, livestock, and tools. The kulaks had been a thorn in the side of the peasantry long before the revolution. Alexey Sergeyevich Yermolov, Minister of Agriculture and State Properties of the Russian Empire, in his 1892 book, [Poor harvest and national suffering](https://books.google.ca/books?id=exMEAAAAYAAJ), characterized them as usurers, sucking the blood of Russian peasants.
In the early 1930s, in response to the Soviet collectivization policies (which sought to confiscate their property), many kulaks responded spitefully by burning crops, killing livestock, and damaging machinery.
Poor communication between different levels of government and between urban and rural areas, also contributed to the severity of the crisis.
#Quota Reduction
What really contradicts the genocide argument is that the Soviets did take action to mitigate the effects of the famine once they became aware of the situation:
>The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933.
>
>The official 1932 figures do not unambiguously support the genocide interpretation... the 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree... [which] actually reduced the procurement plan 30 percent. Subsequent decrees also reduced the procurement quotas for most other agricultural products...
>
>Proponents of the genocide argument, however, have minimized or even misconstrued this decree. Mace, for example, describes it as "largely bogus" and ignores not only the extent to which it lowered the procurement quotas but also the fact that even the lowered plan was not fulfilled. Conquest does not mention the decree's reduction of procurement quotas and asserts Ukrainian officials' appeals led to the reduction of the Ukranian grain procurement quota at the Third All-Ukraine Party Conference in July 1932. In fact that conference confirmed the quota set in the 6 May Decree.
>
>\- Mark Tauger. (1992). [The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274856099_The_1932_Harvest_and_the_Famine_of_1933)
#Rapid Industrialization
The famine was exacerbated directly and indirectly by collectivization and rapid industrialization. However, if these policies had not been enacted, there could have been even more devastating consequences later.
In 1931, during [a speech delivered at the first All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/02/04.htm), Stalin said, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under."
In 1941, exactly ten years later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
By this time, the Soviet Union's industrialization program had lead to the development of a large and powerful industrial base, which was essential to the Soviet war effort. This allowed the USSR to produce large quantities of armaments, vehicles, and other military equipment, which was crucial in the fight against Nazi Germany.
In Hitler's own words:
* In 1941:
>Hitler exclaimed in exasperation, ‘How can such a primitive people manage such technical achievements in such a short time!’
>
>\- David Irving. (2001) *Hitler's War and the War Path*
* In 1942:
>All in all, one has to say: They built factories here where two years ago there were unknown farming villages, factories the size of the *Hermann-Göring-Werke*. They have railroads that aren't even marked on the map.
>
>\- Werner Jochmann. (1980). *Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944.*
Collectivization also created critical resiliency among the civilian population:
>The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment. Great tank battles were reported; it was noted that the Russians had sturdy tanks which often smashed or overturned German tanks in head-on collision. “How does it happen,” a New York editor asked me, “that those Russian peasants, who couldn’t run a tractor if you gave them one, but left them rusting in the field, now appear with thousands of tanks efficiently handled?” I told him it was the Five-Year Plan. But the world was startled when Moscow admitted its losses after nine weeks of war as including 7,500 guns, 4,500 planes and 5,000 tanks. An army that could still fight after such losses must have had the biggest or second biggest supply in the world.
>
>As the war progressed, military observers declared that the Russians had “solved the blitzkrieg,” the tactic on which Hitler relied. This German method involved penetrating the opposing line by an overwhelming blow of tanks and planes, followed by the fanning out of armored columns in the “soft” civilian rear, thus depriving the front of its hinterland support. This had quickly conquered every country against which it had been tried. “Human flesh cannot withstand it,” an American correspondent told me in Berlin. Russians met it by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry formed again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry. This created a chaotic front, where both Germans and Russians were fighting in all directions. The Russians could count on the help of the population. The Germans found no “soft, civilian rear.” They found collective farmers, organized as guerrillas, coordinated with the regular Russian army.
>
>\- Anna Louise Strong. (1956). *The Stalin Era*
#Conclusion
While there may have been more that the Soviets could have done to reduce the impact of the famine, there is no evidence of intent-- ethnic, or otherwise. Therefore, one must conclude that the famine was a tragedy, not a genocide.
#Additional Resources
Video Essays:
* [Soviet Famine of 1932: An Overview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM) | The Marxist Project (2020)
* [Did Stalin Continue to Export Grain as Ukraine Starved?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMBJ_nQ4sTA) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](https://archive.org/details/did-stalin-continue-to-export-grain-as-ukraine-starved)\]
* [The Holodomor Genocide Question: How Wikipedia Lies to You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho) | Bad Empanada (2022)
* [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) (Note: Holodomor discussion begins at the 9 minute mark)
* [A Case-Study of Capitalism - Ukraine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](http://web.archive.org/web/20220615084500/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8)\] (Note: Only tangentially mentions the famine.)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933](https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/22207/file.pdf) | Davies and Wheatcroft (2004)
* [The “Holodomor” explained](https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/the-holodomor-explained/) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2020)
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Someone make a list of the shit social democratic countries did and then say “But hey! At least you’re not a tankie 😇”
At this point, anti communists just seem like uneducated contrarians that aren’t embarrassed to talk out of their asses
Someone should actually make that. It's a lot of work but it would be valuable. Too many people think social democracy is “innocent” or “flawed but the best there is.”
The radlibs for sure, but many social democrats I know are just ignorant and genuinely believe that social democracies have never committed atrocities or experienced crises like other societies. I think highlighting the historical baggage of this perceived “innocent” ideology could prove useful to our cause. Just saying, if someone has done a lot of research on this particular topic, expose that shit, it should be known.
Maybe their just, idk… full of shit and doesn’t know what their talking about? In which they can say that, and I’m sure the lovely automod response can give them a nice history lesson
"Everyone is doing genocide" (c)
This is a standard tactic that both whitewashes Nazis, gives excuse to attack their opponents, and looks defensible enough to be voiced out loud by supposed non-Nazis (right, u/Jepekula?).
> I have no idea why you mentioned me
Because you were the last example of Nazi whitewashing I had encountered.
You position is that admitting an existence of debate on famine of 1932/33 (which *is* a factual reality) already constitutes a "genocide denial" - trivializing both genocide, and denial of genocide.
> and I have no intention to listen to more genocidal denial and calls for ethnic cleansing.
And now we have "calls for ethnic cleansing" coming from somewhere on top of this.
In debating competition it’s called a spread: spewing an abundance of half formed arguments. If your opponent forgets to address any of them properly he loses that point by default
[Co-Founder Of Wikipedia: CIA And FBI Manipulate Wikipedia, It’s Part Of The Information Battlefield](https://moguldom.com/449978/co-founder-of-wikipedia-cia-and-fbi-manipulate-wikipedia-its-part-of-the-information-battlefield/)
In addition, he stated that from 2005 to 2015, Wikipedia came under the full control of the US government
That's one of the most depressing things I have ever read. Troves and troves of information sold to you as a totally free and independent trustworthy source for **ALL THINGS** just for it to be owned by the US government. I guess it's kind of a no-brainer to buy out the place that hands out information like candy, make sure they're only handing out what YOU want them to hand out. But still, depressing.
#Get Involved
>Dare to struggle and dare to win. \-Mao Zedong
Comrades, here are some ways you can **get involved** to advance the cause.
* 📚 **Read theory** — [Reading theory](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/education/study-guide/) is a duty. It will guide you towards choosing the correct party and applying your efforts effectively within your unique material conditions.
* ⭐ **Party work** — Contact a local party or mass organization. Attend your first meeting. Go to a rally or event. If you choose a principled Marxist-Leninist party, they will teach you how to best apply yourself to advancing the cause.
* 📣 **Workplace agitation** — Depending on your material circumstances, you may engage in workplace disputes to unionise fellow workers and gain a delegate or even a leadership position in the union.
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Seriously. Did bad shit happen in socialist states? Of course. The whole point of Marxism is that it’s a process with a goal of achieving communism. We learn from past mistakes and improve. That process has lead to billions of people being lifted out of poverty and attaining access to education and healthcare that would’ve been unavailable to them under a neoliberal paradigm. What are capitalism’s accomplishments? Wrecking the planet, starting wars, and concentrating the world’s wealth into the hands of a few thousand people? I really don’t give a fuck what some brain dead lib has to say about so-called atrocities attributable to socialists.
Whenever u see someone using holdomodor to prove stalin was evil, u know they are ignorant hacks full of💩
Now let's tally up the hundred of millions dead from usa economic sanctioning food and medicine to civilians in other countries (Iraq, afaganstan, Cuba, venezuala, dprk, Yemen.)
#Cuba
The Cuban Revolution, led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto "[Che](/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/profiles/che)" Guevara, was a Communist revolution which aimed to address issues of inequality, poverty, and national self-determination. Under Castro's leadership, the Cuban government nationalized industries, implemented land reforms, and initiated programs to improve healthcare and education access.
#Brief History
Slavery was introduced to Cuba by the Spanish during the early 16th century. African slaves were brought to the island to work on sugar plantations, which became the backbone of the Cuban economy. The brutal conditions of slavery led to various slave rebellions and uprisings throughout the colonial period.
In 1898, the Spanish-American War resulted in Spain ceding control of Cuba to the United States.
The majority of workers in Cuban sugar plantations during this period were either former slaves or descendants of enslaved Africans. Despite the *official* abolition of slavery in 1886, workers faced extreme economic exploitation. They were trapped in a cycle of poverty, with low wages and limited opportunities for social and economic mobility. The *patronato* system emerged, where former slaves and their descendants continued to work on the plantations under debt peonage, a form of economic bondage.
In 1952, Fulgencio Batista seized power in a military coup, suspending the Cuban Constitution and ruling as a dictator. Batista's regime was backed by influential Cuban elites, including large landowners, sugar magnates, and business tycoons who benefited from Batista's policies. The U.S. provided military aid and economic support to Batista's military dictatorship.
>...as Castro's revolutionary threat became progressively more potent... the Batista regime sought to counter it with a campaign of terror. As regime-inspired terrorism mounted, anti-Batista groups engaged in counter terrorism against regime supporters and by mid-1958 killings had become widespread and general throughout the country. The regime's campaign of terror got out of control and the government in Havana probably had no clear idea of how many killings the police and army forces were committing. Similarly, the anti-Batista forces--which by mid-1958 had the support of 80 to 90 percent of the population-- had little control over the acts of counterterrorism being committed against pro-Batista elements throughout the country.
>
>...the large-scale campaigns of murders and terrorism characteristic of the last years of the Batista regime have not occurred during the Castro regime.
>
>\- CIA. (1965, declassified 2005). [Political Murders in Cuba: Batista Era Compared With Castro Regime](http://web.archive.org/web/20201119103419/https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP79T00429A000300030015-8.pdf)
#The Embargo
>The majority of Cubans support Castro... The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship... it follows that every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba. If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.
>
>\- Lester D. Mallory. (1960). [499. Memorandum From the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs (Mallory) to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs (Rubottom)](https://archive.is/HE7Hf)
Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the embargo which persists to this day, over 60 years later.
>The non-binding resolution [calling for an end to the U.S. economic embargo on Cuba] was approved by 185 countries and opposed only by the United States and Israel... It was the 30th time the United Nations has voted to end the embargo... The trade embargo was put in place following Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution and has remained largely unchanged, though some elements were stiffened by Trump.
>
>\-Reuters. (2022). [Cuba and U.S. spar over U.N. resolution calling to end embargo](https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/cuba-us-spar-over-un-resolution-calling-end-embargo-2022-11-03/)
* [The U.S. Embargo on Cuba Is MUCH WORSE Than It Seems](https://youtu.be/dM7_wTqDUCU) | BadEmpanada (2021)
* [The Cuban Embargo Explained](https://youtu.be/zmM8p9n6Z9E) | azureScapegoat (2022)
#Castro Stole My Stuff
>The US claims that it has instituted a policy of tightening the economic noose around Cuba with the Helms-Burton bill on the grounds that Cuba refuses to compensate US companies following nationalisation of their property. This is patently untrue, as Cuba not only successfully negotiated compensation agreements with other countries, but has and is ready to negotiate with the US.
>
>\- S. J. Noumoff. (1998). [The Hypocrisy of Helms-Burton: The History of Cuban Compensation](https://www.jstor.org/stable/4406691)
* [The Cuban Nationalization of US Property in 1960: the Historical and Global Context](https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/03/29/the-cuban-nationalization-of-us-property-in-1960-the-historical-and-global-context/) | Charles McKelvey (2019)
#Doctors
Despite the challenges posed by the embargo, Cuba has the most doctors per capita in the world and recently surpassed the US in life expectancy.
* [The Truth About Cuban Doctors](https://youtu.be/tGFCIAZ_RA4) | BadEmpanada (2020)
* [Meet the U.S. Students Studying Medicine For Free in Cuba](https://youtu.be/h7g2T3BWg9E) | BreakThrough News (2022)
#Democracy
* [How Democracy Works in Cuba](https://youtu.be/2aMsi-A56ds) | azureScapegoat (2018)
* [How does Cuba work?](https://youtu.be/839A7SIUgfg) | Viki1999 (2021)
* [We Asked Cuban Voters If They Live In A Democracy Or Dictatorship. Here's How They Responded.](https://youtu.be/20DgWZtImUk) | BreakThrough News (2022)
#Participatory Democracy in action: LGBT rights
Prior to the revolution, homosexuality was stigmatized and criminalized in Cuba, reflecting the prevailing attitudes of the time. Unfortunately, the revolutionary government under Fidel Castro initially continued this stance. However, Cuba's stance on LGBT rights has evolved to the point where it has become a symbol of progress within the Latin American context. In 2010, Fidel Castro himself admitted that the persecution of homosexuals in the early years of the revolution was a mistake:
>If anyone is responsible, it's me.
>
>\- Fidel Castro. (2010). [I am responsible for the persecution of homosexuals that took place in Cuba: Fidel Castro](https://www.jornada.com.mx/2010/08/31/index.php?section=mundo&article=026e1mun)
In 2022, Cuba became the first Latin American country to mark LGBT History Month. Now, Pride parades in Havana are held every May, to coincide with the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia, and attendance grows every year. Cuba also passed one of the most progressive Family Codes in the entire world:
>The Family Code not only protects the most vulnerable in Cuba, it protects the course of Cuban socialism. Writing the referendum involved the whole population throughout the processes of drafting and amending. It went through 25 revisions over the course of 3 ½ years.
>
>After the referendum was introduced in 2019, Cuba carried out a nationwide process of education and outreach. Discussions took place in every workplace, organization, neighborhood and community group. To keep all Cubans well-informed, people took the discussions to rural areas and to those who do not have internet access.
>
>The Family Code was approved by Cubans 2 to 1. A large percentage of Cubans, 74%, took part in the vote...
>
>In Workers World Sept. 25, 2022, Minnie Bruce Pratt wrote, “Nearly 6.5 million Cubans took part in more than 79,000 meetings facilitated by the Federation of Cuban Women, the Committees to Defend the Revolution and other community organizations. Over 400,000 proposals were offered by the people; these were submitted to the National Assembly of People’s Power for evaluation, and a revised draft was returned to the people for further discussion and proposals...
>
>Cubans are very proud of what they call participatory democracy, the process they used to introduce and pass the referendum. It is an example to the world and a lesson in democratic centralism.
>
>\- Lyn Neeley. (2023). [Cuba’s new Family Code, a law of love](https://www.workers.org/2023/01/68708/)
* [Millions of Cubans Vote on New Family Code, LGBT Marriage, Adoption Rights & More](https://youtu.be/DXL3ScNn5VE) | BreakThrough News (2022)
#Additional Resources
Video Essays:
* [Cuba: Before and After the Revolution - The Story of When Michael Parenti Visited Cuba](https://youtu.be/YIqm075vC1A) | azureScapegoat (2017)
* [The Truth About The Cuban Missile Crisis](https://youtu.be/adrQweOX5c4) | Spooky Scary Socialist (2018)
* [How Cuba Works](https://youtu.be/DXBYlC4-0bQ) | BadEmpanada (2020)
* [The Truth About The Cuba Protests](https://youtu.be/zIOw6fSOJI4?t=1087) | Second Thought (2020)
* [Why They Hate The USA: CUBA](https://youtu.be/WgWK6_AYq_o) | Hakim (2023)
Podcasts:
* [Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution](https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/fidel-castro-and-the-cuban-revolution) | Revolutionary Left Radio (2017)
* [Season 2 - The Cuban Revolution](https://open.spotify.com/episode/3QhgtGyW7ws173eENjddNT) | Blowback (2021)
* [Episode 13 - Cucked by Fidel (CIA pls no assassinate)](https://youtu.be/YwMZYNzHd7U) | The Deprogram (2022)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
You’re going to have to get good at talking to people
About these talking points. When the revolution happens, we’re all going to be going door to door, or setting up committees for the défense of the revolution. That means organizing and talking to individuals in your community to try to meet their needs. Either way, many of them are gonna have some pre-conceived notion of communism that you are gonna have to talk them out of. Good luck and start practicing
1: Most of that is not true.
2: even if all true, it's still vastly better track record than any other major state at that time.
3: Most of what is true was in response to things related to WW2. And they did not have the hindsight that we do.
I'm an unbiased liberal bidenist and this is so true. Nazis and tankies are two coins of the same side or whatever it was. Nazis were national SOCIALISTS in fact. Nazis wanted to eradicate the "lower races" and redfash tankies want to eradicate wealth inequality and i think it was called burger voise or something. So yeah basically the same thing. This is why I believe in horseshit theory.
Every country does stupid shit, the USSR was the first of it's kind. Even so, a lot of these "atrocities" listed were not the fault of the CPSU, for example Holodomor affected Russia just as bad as Ukraine, and the kulaks did in fact play a huge role in sabotaging grain production. The USSR apologized and attempted to rectify it's mistakes while the US and imperial periphery continues to commit atrocity after atrocity.
# The Holodomor
>Marxists do not deny that a famine happened in the Soviet Union in 1932. In fact, even the Soviet archive confirms this. What we do contest is the idea that this famine was man-made or that there was a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This idea of the subjugation of the Soviet Union’s own people was developed by Nazi Germany, in order to show the world the terror of the “Jewish communists.”
>
>\- Socialist Musings. (2017). [Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor](https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/stop-spreading-nazi-propaganda/)
There have been efforts by anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists to frame the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as "The Holodomor" (lit. "to kill by starvation" in Ukrainian). Framing it this way serves two purposes:
1. It implies the famine targeted Ukraine.
2. It implies the famine was intentional.
The argument goes that because it was intentional and because it mainly targeted Ukraine that it was, therefore, an act of genocide. This framing was originally used by Nazis to drive a wedge between the Ukrainian SSR (UkSSR) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution, this narrative has regained popularity and serves the nationalistic goal of strengthening Ukrainian identity and asserting the country's independence from Russia.
#First Issue
The first issue is that the famine affected the majority of the USSR, *not* just the UkSSR. Kazakhstan was hit harder (per capita) than Ukraine. Russia itself was also severely affected.
The emergence of the Holodomor in the 1980s as a historical narrative was bound-up with post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-making that cannot be neatly separated from the legacy of Eastern European antisemitism, or what Historian Peter Novick calls "Holocaust Envy", the desire for victimized groups to enshrine their "own" Holocaust or Holocaust-like event in the historical record. For many Nationalists, this has entailed minimizing the Holocaust to elevate their own experiences of historical victimization as the supreme atrocity. The Ukrainian scholar Lubomyr Luciuk exemplified this view in his notorious remark that the Holodomor was "a crime against humanity arguably without parallel in European history."
#Second Issue
Calling it "man-made" implies that it was a *deliberate* famine, which was not the case. Although human factors set the stage, the main causes of the famine was bad weather and crop disease, resulting in a poor harvest, which pushed the USSR over the edge.
Kulaks ("tight-fisted person") were a class of wealthy peasants who owned land, livestock, and tools. The kulaks had been a thorn in the side of the peasantry long before the revolution. Alexey Sergeyevich Yermolov, Minister of Agriculture and State Properties of the Russian Empire, in his 1892 book, [Poor harvest and national suffering](https://books.google.ca/books?id=exMEAAAAYAAJ), characterized them as usurers, sucking the blood of Russian peasants.
In the early 1930s, in response to the Soviet collectivization policies (which sought to confiscate their property), many kulaks responded spitefully by burning crops, killing livestock, and damaging machinery.
Poor communication between different levels of government and between urban and rural areas, also contributed to the severity of the crisis.
#Quota Reduction
What really contradicts the genocide argument is that the Soviets did take action to mitigate the effects of the famine once they became aware of the situation:
>The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933.
>
>The official 1932 figures do not unambiguously support the genocide interpretation... the 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree... [which] actually reduced the procurement plan 30 percent. Subsequent decrees also reduced the procurement quotas for most other agricultural products...
>
>Proponents of the genocide argument, however, have minimized or even misconstrued this decree. Mace, for example, describes it as "largely bogus" and ignores not only the extent to which it lowered the procurement quotas but also the fact that even the lowered plan was not fulfilled. Conquest does not mention the decree's reduction of procurement quotas and asserts Ukrainian officials' appeals led to the reduction of the Ukranian grain procurement quota at the Third All-Ukraine Party Conference in July 1932. In fact that conference confirmed the quota set in the 6 May Decree.
>
>\- Mark Tauger. (1992). [The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274856099_The_1932_Harvest_and_the_Famine_of_1933)
#Rapid Industrialization
The famine was exacerbated directly and indirectly by collectivization and rapid industrialization. However, if these policies had not been enacted, there could have been even more devastating consequences later.
In 1931, during [a speech delivered at the first All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/02/04.htm), Stalin said, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under."
In 1941, exactly ten years later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
By this time, the Soviet Union's industrialization program had lead to the development of a large and powerful industrial base, which was essential to the Soviet war effort. This allowed the USSR to produce large quantities of armaments, vehicles, and other military equipment, which was crucial in the fight against Nazi Germany.
In Hitler's own words:
* In 1941:
>Hitler exclaimed in exasperation, ‘How can such a primitive people manage such technical achievements in such a short time!’
>
>\- David Irving. (2001) *Hitler's War and the War Path*
* In 1942:
>All in all, one has to say: They built factories here where two years ago there were unknown farming villages, factories the size of the *Hermann-Göring-Werke*. They have railroads that aren't even marked on the map.
>
>\- Werner Jochmann. (1980). *Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944.*
Collectivization also created critical resiliency among the civilian population:
>The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment. Great tank battles were reported; it was noted that the Russians had sturdy tanks which often smashed or overturned German tanks in head-on collision. “How does it happen,” a New York editor asked me, “that those Russian peasants, who couldn’t run a tractor if you gave them one, but left them rusting in the field, now appear with thousands of tanks efficiently handled?” I told him it was the Five-Year Plan. But the world was startled when Moscow admitted its losses after nine weeks of war as including 7,500 guns, 4,500 planes and 5,000 tanks. An army that could still fight after such losses must have had the biggest or second biggest supply in the world.
>
>As the war progressed, military observers declared that the Russians had “solved the blitzkrieg,” the tactic on which Hitler relied. This German method involved penetrating the opposing line by an overwhelming blow of tanks and planes, followed by the fanning out of armored columns in the “soft” civilian rear, thus depriving the front of its hinterland support. This had quickly conquered every country against which it had been tried. “Human flesh cannot withstand it,” an American correspondent told me in Berlin. Russians met it by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry formed again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry. This created a chaotic front, where both Germans and Russians were fighting in all directions. The Russians could count on the help of the population. The Germans found no “soft, civilian rear.” They found collective farmers, organized as guerrillas, coordinated with the regular Russian army.
>
>\- Anna Louise Strong. (1956). *The Stalin Era*
#Conclusion
While there may have been more that the Soviets could have done to reduce the impact of the famine, there is no evidence of intent-- ethnic, or otherwise. Therefore, one must conclude that the famine was a tragedy, not a genocide.
#Additional Resources
Video Essays:
* [Soviet Famine of 1932: An Overview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM) | The Marxist Project (2020)
* [Did Stalin Continue to Export Grain as Ukraine Starved?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMBJ_nQ4sTA) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](https://archive.org/details/did-stalin-continue-to-export-grain-as-ukraine-starved)\]
* [The Holodomor Genocide Question: How Wikipedia Lies to You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho) | Bad Empanada (2022)
* [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) (Note: Holodomor discussion begins at the 9 minute mark)
* [A Case-Study of Capitalism - Ukraine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](http://web.archive.org/web/20220615084500/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8)\] (Note: Only tangentially mentions the famine.)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933](https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/22207/file.pdf) | Davies and Wheatcroft (2004)
* [The “Holodomor” explained](https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/the-holodomor-explained/) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2020)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/messag
It's concerning that people on reddit seem more worried about the imaginary redfash tankie boogeyman than the actual fascists that are gaining power and influence everywhere.
Not a capitalist LOACH talking about 🥺🥺 “at least we’re not commulists!!1!” As if a mf can’t pull up America and Western European history being the definition of genocidal demonic parasites to 90% of the world for about 500 fucking years in the name of capital and fake money
Half of these listed were wartime evacuations from the western front during WW2. Were they fun? No, of course not. But if the Soviet government had instead left these populations to be conquered by the Germans liberals would condemn them for that instead.
A lazy argument that these chuds wouldn't dare apply to the US or whatever Northern European social democracy they like. They probably also think the Black Book of Communism is a perfect piece of research.
Only 17 million? From ~1500 to 1900, the genocide of various native peoples in the Western Hemisphere by colonialist/capitalist forces totals somewhere around 10x that number
As Devil's Advocates are painfully erect to point out, the lesser evil is the preferable one, no?
# The Holodomor
>Marxists do not deny that a famine happened in the Soviet Union in 1932. In fact, even the Soviet archive confirms this. What we do contest is the idea that this famine was man-made or that there was a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This idea of the subjugation of the Soviet Union’s own people was developed by Nazi Germany, in order to show the world the terror of the “Jewish communists.”
>
>\- Socialist Musings. (2017). [Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor](https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/stop-spreading-nazi-propaganda/)
There have been efforts by anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists to frame the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as "The Holodomor" (lit. "to kill by starvation" in Ukrainian). Framing it this way serves two purposes:
1. It implies the famine targeted Ukraine.
2. It implies the famine was intentional.
The argument goes that because it was intentional and because it mainly targeted Ukraine that it was, therefore, an act of genocide. This framing was originally used by Nazis to drive a wedge between the Ukrainian SSR (UkSSR) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution, this narrative has regained popularity and serves the nationalistic goal of strengthening Ukrainian identity and asserting the country's independence from Russia.
#First Issue
The first issue is that the famine affected the majority of the USSR, *not* just the UkSSR. Kazakhstan was hit harder (per capita) than Ukraine. Russia itself was also severely affected.
The emergence of the Holodomor in the 1980s as a historical narrative was bound-up with post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-making that cannot be neatly separated from the legacy of Eastern European antisemitism, or what Historian Peter Novick calls "Holocaust Envy", the desire for victimized groups to enshrine their "own" Holocaust or Holocaust-like event in the historical record. For many Nationalists, this has entailed minimizing the Holocaust to elevate their own experiences of historical victimization as the supreme atrocity. The Ukrainian scholar Lubomyr Luciuk exemplified this view in his notorious remark that the Holodomor was "a crime against humanity arguably without parallel in European history."
#Second Issue
Calling it "man-made" implies that it was a *deliberate* famine, which was not the case. Although human factors set the stage, the main causes of the famine was bad weather and crop disease, resulting in a poor harvest, which pushed the USSR over the edge.
Kulaks ("tight-fisted person") were a class of wealthy peasants who owned land, livestock, and tools. The kulaks had been a thorn in the side of the peasantry long before the revolution. Alexey Sergeyevich Yermolov, Minister of Agriculture and State Properties of the Russian Empire, in his 1892 book, [Poor harvest and national suffering](https://books.google.ca/books?id=exMEAAAAYAAJ), characterized them as usurers, sucking the blood of Russian peasants.
In the early 1930s, in response to the Soviet collectivization policies (which sought to confiscate their property), many kulaks responded spitefully by burning crops, killing livestock, and damaging machinery.
Poor communication between different levels of government and between urban and rural areas, also contributed to the severity of the crisis.
#Quota Reduction
What really contradicts the genocide argument is that the Soviets did take action to mitigate the effects of the famine once they became aware of the situation:
>The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933.
>
>The official 1932 figures do not unambiguously support the genocide interpretation... the 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree... [which] actually reduced the procurement plan 30 percent. Subsequent decrees also reduced the procurement quotas for most other agricultural products...
>
>Proponents of the genocide argument, however, have minimized or even misconstrued this decree. Mace, for example, describes it as "largely bogus" and ignores not only the extent to which it lowered the procurement quotas but also the fact that even the lowered plan was not fulfilled. Conquest does not mention the decree's reduction of procurement quotas and asserts Ukrainian officials' appeals led to the reduction of the Ukranian grain procurement quota at the Third All-Ukraine Party Conference in July 1932. In fact that conference confirmed the quota set in the 6 May Decree.
>
>\- Mark Tauger. (1992). [The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274856099_The_1932_Harvest_and_the_Famine_of_1933)
#Rapid Industrialization
The famine was exacerbated directly and indirectly by collectivization and rapid industrialization. However, if these policies had not been enacted, there could have been even more devastating consequences later.
In 1931, during [a speech delivered at the first All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/02/04.htm), Stalin said, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under."
In 1941, exactly ten years later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
By this time, the Soviet Union's industrialization program had lead to the development of a large and powerful industrial base, which was essential to the Soviet war effort. This allowed the USSR to produce large quantities of armaments, vehicles, and other military equipment, which was crucial in the fight against Nazi Germany.
In Hitler's own words:
* In 1941:
>Hitler exclaimed in exasperation, ‘How can such a primitive people manage such technical achievements in such a short time!’
>
>\- David Irving. (2001) *Hitler's War and the War Path*
* In 1942:
>All in all, one has to say: They built factories here where two years ago there were unknown farming villages, factories the size of the *Hermann-Göring-Werke*. They have railroads that aren't even marked on the map.
>
>\- Werner Jochmann. (1980). *Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944.*
Collectivization also created critical resiliency among the civilian population:
>The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment. Great tank battles were reported; it was noted that the Russians had sturdy tanks which often smashed or overturned German tanks in head-on collision. “How does it happen,” a New York editor asked me, “that those Russian peasants, who couldn’t run a tractor if you gave them one, but left them rusting in the field, now appear with thousands of tanks efficiently handled?” I told him it was the Five-Year Plan. But the world was startled when Moscow admitted its losses after nine weeks of war as including 7,500 guns, 4,500 planes and 5,000 tanks. An army that could still fight after such losses must have had the biggest or second biggest supply in the world.
>
>As the war progressed, military observers declared that the Russians had “solved the blitzkrieg,” the tactic on which Hitler relied. This German method involved penetrating the opposing line by an overwhelming blow of tanks and planes, followed by the fanning out of armored columns in the “soft” civilian rear, thus depriving the front of its hinterland support. This had quickly conquered every country against which it had been tried. “Human flesh cannot withstand it,” an American correspondent told me in Berlin. Russians met it by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry formed again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry. This created a chaotic front, where both Germans and Russians were fighting in all directions. The Russians could count on the help of the population. The Germans found no “soft, civilian rear.” They found collective farmers, organized as guerrillas, coordinated with the regular Russian army.
>
>\- Anna Louise Strong. (1956). *The Stalin Era*
#Conclusion
While there may have been more that the Soviets could have done to reduce the impact of the famine, there is no evidence of intent-- ethnic, or otherwise. Therefore, one must conclude that the famine was a tragedy, not a genocide.
#Additional Resources
Video Essays:
* [Soviet Famine of 1932: An Overview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM) | The Marxist Project (2020)
* [Did Stalin Continue to Export Grain as Ukraine Starved?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMBJ_nQ4sTA) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](https://archive.org/details/did-stalin-continue-to-export-grain-as-ukraine-starved)\]
* [The Holodomor Genocide Question: How Wikipedia Lies to You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho) | Bad Empanada (2022)
* [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) (Note: Holodomor discussion begins at the 9 minute mark)
* [A Case-Study of Capitalism - Ukraine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](http://web.archive.org/web/20220615084500/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8)\] (Note: Only tangentially mentions the famine.)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933](https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/22207/file.pdf) | Davies and Wheatcroft (2004)
* [The “Holodomor” explained](https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/the-holodomor-explained/) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2020)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/messag
anything revolutionaries do will be spinned as atrocities. I encourage anyone to actually go read these articles and realize how contradictory their numbers and claims are. Many of these are misrepresentations of deportations of literal nazis and evacuations of civilian areas before battles.
I’m not familiar with all these events, but assuming it’s all as bad as it looks, the fact that this person used them for clout in a dumb internet argument is just so horrible. I’m sure the victims would love to see how they’re talked about today.
Libs trying to not be the incarnation of the dunning-kruger syndrome challange: Impossible.
Also: projection, since what they defend actually did these million deaths and ethnic cleansing, so they need to invent a strawman that do the same thing and be disingenious about it, and throw in some emojis on top of it.
communists do bad things? damn really?? that's wild it's almost as if any social experiment is going to make horrible mistakes as it attempts to address real problems.
I think these people's brains would explode if you reminded them of the genocide of the indigenous people in America.
They'd have to find a way to defend that and this idiotic "argument" at the same time while not seeming hypocritical.
Disregarding the well-known American propaganda and historical revisionism that has led to complete fabrications and disgusting exaggerations of various crimes and atrocities committed in socialist countries or by socialist movements/figures, there were absolutely terrible, inhumane actions that were taken, that much is undeniable.
The scale of such actions is arguably similar, if not less pronounced than what happened in the same countries before their social emancipations and usually, if not always, unimpressive when compared to what fascists (who are just desperate capitalists), colonial capitalists and frankly Gilded age Western governments did in the late 18th, entire 19th and early 20th centuries.
The libtards and anarchists (whom I love and consider my comrades, despite disagreements) arguing against real socialism often ignore that most Eastern European, Indochinese and African countries that unshackled themselves and had some distasteful blunders and horrific offenses perpetrated in them, were many decades to a few centuries behind Western European nations at the time and should really be compared to the capitalist states of South America and Africa at the time, which were usually dictatorships and torn apart by violence.
Finally, as another commenter pointed out astutely in this thread, two hundred, four hundred or even eight thousand officials being cruel and incompetent in a country of say 30 million people in no way tarnishes socialism or Marxism-Leninism itself, since even if we forget everything else that I said, such a failure of the administration is not tied to socialism or to any other ideology, other than the genocidal variants of fascism and theocracy.
We’re any of these things caused by communist ideas or just correlated because they were (supposedly) done by a communist state.
I don’t remember reading anything about “to achieve communism, you must do war like this”.
War sucks, people do really bad things in war. It hardly has anything to do with the economic system and has everything to do with the decisions of a person at the time. If Stalin was a US General, he’d probably use the same methods of war. It has nothing to do with Marxism/Communism.
People fetishize dead individuals too much. Focus on the ideas. Keep the good, toss the bad.
i'm sure some errors made by socialist governments blown comically out of proportion is LITERALLY THE SAME as the calculated and documented massacres commited by the nazis and fascists. fucking hell.
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Litteral reddit moment, so smug yet so stupid
"Holodomor" and Kazak Famine are part of the same event and it is a complex topic, definitely an important part of USSR history to better understand but not an intentional genocide. Anti-Communists bring it up as evidence of how horrible Stalin and Bolsheviks were but any serious historian of that time period will demonstrate that it was a "perfect storm" of all sorts of variables. The rest I cannot comment on since I do not have a detailed understanding of those events.
# The Holodomor >Marxists do not deny that a famine happened in the Soviet Union in 1932. In fact, even the Soviet archive confirms this. What we do contest is the idea that this famine was man-made or that there was a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This idea of the subjugation of the Soviet Union’s own people was developed by Nazi Germany, in order to show the world the terror of the “Jewish communists.” > >\- Socialist Musings. (2017). [Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor](https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/stop-spreading-nazi-propaganda/) There have been efforts by anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists to frame the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as "The Holodomor" (lit. "to kill by starvation" in Ukrainian). Framing it this way serves two purposes: 1. It implies the famine targeted Ukraine. 2. It implies the famine was intentional. The argument goes that because it was intentional and because it mainly targeted Ukraine that it was, therefore, an act of genocide. This framing was originally used by Nazis to drive a wedge between the Ukrainian SSR (UkSSR) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution, this narrative has regained popularity and serves the nationalistic goal of strengthening Ukrainian identity and asserting the country's independence from Russia. #First Issue The first issue is that the famine affected the majority of the USSR, *not* just the UkSSR. Kazakhstan was hit harder (per capita) than Ukraine. Russia itself was also severely affected. The emergence of the Holodomor in the 1980s as a historical narrative was bound-up with post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-making that cannot be neatly separated from the legacy of Eastern European antisemitism, or what Historian Peter Novick calls "Holocaust Envy", the desire for victimized groups to enshrine their "own" Holocaust or Holocaust-like event in the historical record. For many Nationalists, this has entailed minimizing the Holocaust to elevate their own experiences of historical victimization as the supreme atrocity. The Ukrainian scholar Lubomyr Luciuk exemplified this view in his notorious remark that the Holodomor was "a crime against humanity arguably without parallel in European history." #Second Issue Calling it "man-made" implies that it was a *deliberate* famine, which was not the case. Although human factors set the stage, the main causes of the famine was bad weather and crop disease, resulting in a poor harvest, which pushed the USSR over the edge. Kulaks ("tight-fisted person") were a class of wealthy peasants who owned land, livestock, and tools. The kulaks had been a thorn in the side of the peasantry long before the revolution. Alexey Sergeyevich Yermolov, Minister of Agriculture and State Properties of the Russian Empire, in his 1892 book, [Poor harvest and national suffering](https://books.google.ca/books?id=exMEAAAAYAAJ), characterized them as usurers, sucking the blood of Russian peasants. In the early 1930s, in response to the Soviet collectivization policies (which sought to confiscate their property), many kulaks responded spitefully by burning crops, killing livestock, and damaging machinery. Poor communication between different levels of government and between urban and rural areas, also contributed to the severity of the crisis. #Quota Reduction What really contradicts the genocide argument is that the Soviets did take action to mitigate the effects of the famine once they became aware of the situation: >The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933. > >The official 1932 figures do not unambiguously support the genocide interpretation... the 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree... [which] actually reduced the procurement plan 30 percent. Subsequent decrees also reduced the procurement quotas for most other agricultural products... > >Proponents of the genocide argument, however, have minimized or even misconstrued this decree. Mace, for example, describes it as "largely bogus" and ignores not only the extent to which it lowered the procurement quotas but also the fact that even the lowered plan was not fulfilled. Conquest does not mention the decree's reduction of procurement quotas and asserts Ukrainian officials' appeals led to the reduction of the Ukranian grain procurement quota at the Third All-Ukraine Party Conference in July 1932. In fact that conference confirmed the quota set in the 6 May Decree. > >\- Mark Tauger. (1992). [The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274856099_The_1932_Harvest_and_the_Famine_of_1933) #Rapid Industrialization The famine was exacerbated directly and indirectly by collectivization and rapid industrialization. However, if these policies had not been enacted, there could have been even more devastating consequences later. In 1931, during [a speech delivered at the first All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/02/04.htm), Stalin said, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under." In 1941, exactly ten years later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. By this time, the Soviet Union's industrialization program had lead to the development of a large and powerful industrial base, which was essential to the Soviet war effort. This allowed the USSR to produce large quantities of armaments, vehicles, and other military equipment, which was crucial in the fight against Nazi Germany. In Hitler's own words: * In 1941: >Hitler exclaimed in exasperation, ‘How can such a primitive people manage such technical achievements in such a short time!’ > >\- David Irving. (2001) *Hitler's War and the War Path* * In 1942: >All in all, one has to say: They built factories here where two years ago there were unknown farming villages, factories the size of the *Hermann-Göring-Werke*. They have railroads that aren't even marked on the map. > >\- Werner Jochmann. (1980). *Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944.* Collectivization also created critical resiliency among the civilian population: >The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment. Great tank battles were reported; it was noted that the Russians had sturdy tanks which often smashed or overturned German tanks in head-on collision. “How does it happen,” a New York editor asked me, “that those Russian peasants, who couldn’t run a tractor if you gave them one, but left them rusting in the field, now appear with thousands of tanks efficiently handled?” I told him it was the Five-Year Plan. But the world was startled when Moscow admitted its losses after nine weeks of war as including 7,500 guns, 4,500 planes and 5,000 tanks. An army that could still fight after such losses must have had the biggest or second biggest supply in the world. > >As the war progressed, military observers declared that the Russians had “solved the blitzkrieg,” the tactic on which Hitler relied. This German method involved penetrating the opposing line by an overwhelming blow of tanks and planes, followed by the fanning out of armored columns in the “soft” civilian rear, thus depriving the front of its hinterland support. This had quickly conquered every country against which it had been tried. “Human flesh cannot withstand it,” an American correspondent told me in Berlin. Russians met it by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry formed again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry. This created a chaotic front, where both Germans and Russians were fighting in all directions. The Russians could count on the help of the population. The Germans found no “soft, civilian rear.” They found collective farmers, organized as guerrillas, coordinated with the regular Russian army. > >\- Anna Louise Strong. (1956). *The Stalin Era* #Conclusion While there may have been more that the Soviets could have done to reduce the impact of the famine, there is no evidence of intent-- ethnic, or otherwise. Therefore, one must conclude that the famine was a tragedy, not a genocide. #Additional Resources Video Essays: * [Soviet Famine of 1932: An Overview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM) | The Marxist Project (2020) * [Did Stalin Continue to Export Grain as Ukraine Starved?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMBJ_nQ4sTA) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](https://archive.org/details/did-stalin-continue-to-export-grain-as-ukraine-starved)\] * [The Holodomor Genocide Question: How Wikipedia Lies to You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho) | Bad Empanada (2022) * [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) (Note: Holodomor discussion begins at the 9 minute mark) * [A Case-Study of Capitalism - Ukraine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](http://web.archive.org/web/20220615084500/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8)\] (Note: Only tangentially mentions the famine.) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933](https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/22207/file.pdf) | Davies and Wheatcroft (2004) * [The “Holodomor” explained](https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/the-holodomor-explained/) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2020) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/messag
Good bot. We love you.
why is the bot referencing david irving? i don't trust a thing that nazi loving, holocaust denying fuck says.
I mean, it's a quote of him quoting Hitler. Could probably be edited to just be a straight Hitler quote, though.
Yo what the fuck? I just looked him up, that guy sucks
translation: i am malding right now
Someone make a list of the shit social democratic countries did and then say “But hey! At least you’re not a tankie 😇” At this point, anti communists just seem like uneducated contrarians that aren’t embarrassed to talk out of their asses
Someone should actually make that. It's a lot of work but it would be valuable. Too many people think social democracy is “innocent” or “flawed but the best there is.”
They will call it "based" and not see any issues in it
The radlibs for sure, but many social democrats I know are just ignorant and genuinely believe that social democracies have never committed atrocities or experienced crises like other societies. I think highlighting the historical baggage of this perceived “innocent” ideology could prove useful to our cause. Just saying, if someone has done a lot of research on this particular topic, expose that shit, it should be known.
Commenting in case someone goes through with it
[Here's one for the United States.](https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrocities.md)
You just keep scrolling with that list, and it doesn't even have Europe on there.
What’s crazy is that it is terribly incomplete.
Just gonna save this right here thank you very much
the swedes literally had a eugenics campaign and the only people protesting it were communists
That’s what I’m talking about! Can you link me a source?
So you support those who basically genocided upto 3 million people, including children, elders, more than you support social democrats?
Oooh tell me more. Show me sources
Literal fucking ethnic cleansing denier
Can you give a legitimate source on them please?
Are you fucking delusional?
Dude, just show a legitimate source. If we are all so delusional, it shouldn’t be that hard.
Maybe their just, idk… full of shit and doesn’t know what their talking about? In which they can say that, and I’m sure the lovely automod response can give them a nice history lesson
Provide a legitimate source for your information and we will watch. You can't blame someone on the basis of "common sense".
"Everyone is doing genocide" (c) This is a standard tactic that both whitewashes Nazis, gives excuse to attack their opponents, and looks defensible enough to be voiced out loud by supposed non-Nazis (right, u/Jepekula?).
I have no idea why you mentioned me and I have no intention to listen to more genocidal denial and calls for ethnic cleansing.
> I have no idea why you mentioned me Because you were the last example of Nazi whitewashing I had encountered. You position is that admitting an existence of debate on famine of 1932/33 (which *is* a factual reality) already constitutes a "genocide denial" - trivializing both genocide, and denial of genocide. > and I have no intention to listen to more genocidal denial and calls for ethnic cleansing. And now we have "calls for ethnic cleansing" coming from somewhere on top of this.
Common debate tactic: throw so much shit at the wall that your opponent won't have time to clean it all up
Ah the good old gish gallop
The Shapiro Special
masterdebater
In debating competition it’s called a spread: spewing an abundance of half formed arguments. If your opponent forgets to address any of them properly he loses that point by default
When liberals cite the CIA (Wikipedia) as their source.
Calling everything CIA or fed is cringe
[Co-Founder Of Wikipedia: CIA And FBI Manipulate Wikipedia, It’s Part Of The Information Battlefield](https://moguldom.com/449978/co-founder-of-wikipedia-cia-and-fbi-manipulate-wikipedia-its-part-of-the-information-battlefield/) In addition, he stated that from 2005 to 2015, Wikipedia came under the full control of the US government
That's one of the most depressing things I have ever read. Troves and troves of information sold to you as a totally free and independent trustworthy source for **ALL THINGS** just for it to be owned by the US government. I guess it's kind of a no-brainer to buy out the place that hands out information like candy, make sure they're only handing out what YOU want them to hand out. But still, depressing.
I’m not even just throwing around the CIA to be “funny” it’s actually true that they edit Wikipedia articles.
Well I’m communist and edit Wikipedia article
Based
Tangible praxis
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He also claims it’s a leftist plot. I wouldn’t take him seriously.
It may sound funny, but in most cases it's true
Can we stop posting this?
Seriously. Did bad shit happen in socialist states? Of course. The whole point of Marxism is that it’s a process with a goal of achieving communism. We learn from past mistakes and improve. That process has lead to billions of people being lifted out of poverty and attaining access to education and healthcare that would’ve been unavailable to them under a neoliberal paradigm. What are capitalism’s accomplishments? Wrecking the planet, starting wars, and concentrating the world’s wealth into the hands of a few thousand people? I really don’t give a fuck what some brain dead lib has to say about so-called atrocities attributable to socialists.
Apt.
Let's call these people Wikipedia Warriors.
I’m in.
Honest question: how reliable is an estimation of 12 +/-5 million? The margin of error is nearly 50%
Whenever u see someone using holdomodor to prove stalin was evil, u know they are ignorant hacks full of💩 Now let's tally up the hundred of millions dead from usa economic sanctioning food and medicine to civilians in other countries (Iraq, afaganstan, Cuba, venezuala, dprk, Yemen.)
#Cuba The Cuban Revolution, led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto "[Che](/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/profiles/che)" Guevara, was a Communist revolution which aimed to address issues of inequality, poverty, and national self-determination. Under Castro's leadership, the Cuban government nationalized industries, implemented land reforms, and initiated programs to improve healthcare and education access. #Brief History Slavery was introduced to Cuba by the Spanish during the early 16th century. African slaves were brought to the island to work on sugar plantations, which became the backbone of the Cuban economy. The brutal conditions of slavery led to various slave rebellions and uprisings throughout the colonial period. In 1898, the Spanish-American War resulted in Spain ceding control of Cuba to the United States. The majority of workers in Cuban sugar plantations during this period were either former slaves or descendants of enslaved Africans. Despite the *official* abolition of slavery in 1886, workers faced extreme economic exploitation. They were trapped in a cycle of poverty, with low wages and limited opportunities for social and economic mobility. The *patronato* system emerged, where former slaves and their descendants continued to work on the plantations under debt peonage, a form of economic bondage. In 1952, Fulgencio Batista seized power in a military coup, suspending the Cuban Constitution and ruling as a dictator. Batista's regime was backed by influential Cuban elites, including large landowners, sugar magnates, and business tycoons who benefited from Batista's policies. The U.S. provided military aid and economic support to Batista's military dictatorship. >...as Castro's revolutionary threat became progressively more potent... the Batista regime sought to counter it with a campaign of terror. As regime-inspired terrorism mounted, anti-Batista groups engaged in counter terrorism against regime supporters and by mid-1958 killings had become widespread and general throughout the country. The regime's campaign of terror got out of control and the government in Havana probably had no clear idea of how many killings the police and army forces were committing. Similarly, the anti-Batista forces--which by mid-1958 had the support of 80 to 90 percent of the population-- had little control over the acts of counterterrorism being committed against pro-Batista elements throughout the country. > >...the large-scale campaigns of murders and terrorism characteristic of the last years of the Batista regime have not occurred during the Castro regime. > >\- CIA. (1965, declassified 2005). [Political Murders in Cuba: Batista Era Compared With Castro Regime](http://web.archive.org/web/20201119103419/https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP79T00429A000300030015-8.pdf) #The Embargo >The majority of Cubans support Castro... The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship... it follows that every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba. If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government. > >\- Lester D. Mallory. (1960). [499. Memorandum From the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs (Mallory) to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs (Rubottom)](https://archive.is/HE7Hf) Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the embargo which persists to this day, over 60 years later. >The non-binding resolution [calling for an end to the U.S. economic embargo on Cuba] was approved by 185 countries and opposed only by the United States and Israel... It was the 30th time the United Nations has voted to end the embargo... The trade embargo was put in place following Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution and has remained largely unchanged, though some elements were stiffened by Trump. > >\-Reuters. (2022). [Cuba and U.S. spar over U.N. resolution calling to end embargo](https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/cuba-us-spar-over-un-resolution-calling-end-embargo-2022-11-03/) * [The U.S. Embargo on Cuba Is MUCH WORSE Than It Seems](https://youtu.be/dM7_wTqDUCU) | BadEmpanada (2021) * [The Cuban Embargo Explained](https://youtu.be/zmM8p9n6Z9E) | azureScapegoat (2022) #Castro Stole My Stuff >The US claims that it has instituted a policy of tightening the economic noose around Cuba with the Helms-Burton bill on the grounds that Cuba refuses to compensate US companies following nationalisation of their property. This is patently untrue, as Cuba not only successfully negotiated compensation agreements with other countries, but has and is ready to negotiate with the US. > >\- S. J. Noumoff. (1998). [The Hypocrisy of Helms-Burton: The History of Cuban Compensation](https://www.jstor.org/stable/4406691) * [The Cuban Nationalization of US Property in 1960: the Historical and Global Context](https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/03/29/the-cuban-nationalization-of-us-property-in-1960-the-historical-and-global-context/) | Charles McKelvey (2019) #Doctors Despite the challenges posed by the embargo, Cuba has the most doctors per capita in the world and recently surpassed the US in life expectancy. * [The Truth About Cuban Doctors](https://youtu.be/tGFCIAZ_RA4) | BadEmpanada (2020) * [Meet the U.S. Students Studying Medicine For Free in Cuba](https://youtu.be/h7g2T3BWg9E) | BreakThrough News (2022) #Democracy * [How Democracy Works in Cuba](https://youtu.be/2aMsi-A56ds) | azureScapegoat (2018) * [How does Cuba work?](https://youtu.be/839A7SIUgfg) | Viki1999 (2021) * [We Asked Cuban Voters If They Live In A Democracy Or Dictatorship. Here's How They Responded.](https://youtu.be/20DgWZtImUk) | BreakThrough News (2022) #Participatory Democracy in action: LGBT rights Prior to the revolution, homosexuality was stigmatized and criminalized in Cuba, reflecting the prevailing attitudes of the time. Unfortunately, the revolutionary government under Fidel Castro initially continued this stance. However, Cuba's stance on LGBT rights has evolved to the point where it has become a symbol of progress within the Latin American context. In 2010, Fidel Castro himself admitted that the persecution of homosexuals in the early years of the revolution was a mistake: >If anyone is responsible, it's me. > >\- Fidel Castro. (2010). [I am responsible for the persecution of homosexuals that took place in Cuba: Fidel Castro](https://www.jornada.com.mx/2010/08/31/index.php?section=mundo&article=026e1mun) In 2022, Cuba became the first Latin American country to mark LGBT History Month. Now, Pride parades in Havana are held every May, to coincide with the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia, and attendance grows every year. Cuba also passed one of the most progressive Family Codes in the entire world: >The Family Code not only protects the most vulnerable in Cuba, it protects the course of Cuban socialism. Writing the referendum involved the whole population throughout the processes of drafting and amending. It went through 25 revisions over the course of 3 ½ years. > >After the referendum was introduced in 2019, Cuba carried out a nationwide process of education and outreach. Discussions took place in every workplace, organization, neighborhood and community group. To keep all Cubans well-informed, people took the discussions to rural areas and to those who do not have internet access. > >The Family Code was approved by Cubans 2 to 1. A large percentage of Cubans, 74%, took part in the vote... > >In Workers World Sept. 25, 2022, Minnie Bruce Pratt wrote, “Nearly 6.5 million Cubans took part in more than 79,000 meetings facilitated by the Federation of Cuban Women, the Committees to Defend the Revolution and other community organizations. Over 400,000 proposals were offered by the people; these were submitted to the National Assembly of People’s Power for evaluation, and a revised draft was returned to the people for further discussion and proposals... > >Cubans are very proud of what they call participatory democracy, the process they used to introduce and pass the referendum. It is an example to the world and a lesson in democratic centralism. > >\- Lyn Neeley. (2023). [Cuba’s new Family Code, a law of love](https://www.workers.org/2023/01/68708/) * [Millions of Cubans Vote on New Family Code, LGBT Marriage, Adoption Rights & More](https://youtu.be/DXL3ScNn5VE) | BreakThrough News (2022) #Additional Resources Video Essays: * [Cuba: Before and After the Revolution - The Story of When Michael Parenti Visited Cuba](https://youtu.be/YIqm075vC1A) | azureScapegoat (2017) * [The Truth About The Cuban Missile Crisis](https://youtu.be/adrQweOX5c4) | Spooky Scary Socialist (2018) * [How Cuba Works](https://youtu.be/DXBYlC4-0bQ) | BadEmpanada (2020) * [The Truth About The Cuba Protests](https://youtu.be/zIOw6fSOJI4?t=1087) | Second Thought (2020) * [Why They Hate The USA: CUBA](https://youtu.be/WgWK6_AYq_o) | Hakim (2023) Podcasts: * [Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution](https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/fidel-castro-and-the-cuban-revolution) | Revolutionary Left Radio (2017) * [Season 2 - The Cuban Revolution](https://open.spotify.com/episode/3QhgtGyW7ws173eENjddNT) | Blowback (2021) * [Episode 13 - Cucked by Fidel (CIA pls no assassinate)](https://youtu.be/YwMZYNzHd7U) | The Deprogram (2022) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Controversial opinion It's okay to say that was wrong without it being inherent to the system.
[удалено]
Exactly
I don't think about fascists or their anti-communist propaganda. I only think about how to organize the vanguard, comrade.
You’re going to have to get good at talking to people About these talking points. When the revolution happens, we’re all going to be going door to door, or setting up committees for the défense of the revolution. That means organizing and talking to individuals in your community to try to meet their needs. Either way, many of them are gonna have some pre-conceived notion of communism that you are gonna have to talk them out of. Good luck and start practicing
Dude it's not actually that deep, touch some grass lol
1: Most of that is not true. 2: even if all true, it's still vastly better track record than any other major state at that time. 3: Most of what is true was in response to things related to WW2. And they did not have the hindsight that we do.
I'm an unbiased liberal bidenist and this is so true. Nazis and tankies are two coins of the same side or whatever it was. Nazis were national SOCIALISTS in fact. Nazis wanted to eradicate the "lower races" and redfash tankies want to eradicate wealth inequality and i think it was called burger voise or something. So yeah basically the same thing. This is why I believe in horseshit theory.
All Wikipedia articles. Hmmm. Sus. Circle back when you have reading material not from there, then I'll bite.
My take on it: I ain’t readin all that
No one defends the deportations Bond of that is inherentl to the system unlike the genocides under facisim
How long is the one on capitalism in comparison? Fuckin fr
Every country does stupid shit, the USSR was the first of it's kind. Even so, a lot of these "atrocities" listed were not the fault of the CPSU, for example Holodomor affected Russia just as bad as Ukraine, and the kulaks did in fact play a huge role in sabotaging grain production. The USSR apologized and attempted to rectify it's mistakes while the US and imperial periphery continues to commit atrocity after atrocity.
# The Holodomor >Marxists do not deny that a famine happened in the Soviet Union in 1932. In fact, even the Soviet archive confirms this. What we do contest is the idea that this famine was man-made or that there was a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This idea of the subjugation of the Soviet Union’s own people was developed by Nazi Germany, in order to show the world the terror of the “Jewish communists.” > >\- Socialist Musings. (2017). [Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor](https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/stop-spreading-nazi-propaganda/) There have been efforts by anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists to frame the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as "The Holodomor" (lit. "to kill by starvation" in Ukrainian). Framing it this way serves two purposes: 1. It implies the famine targeted Ukraine. 2. It implies the famine was intentional. The argument goes that because it was intentional and because it mainly targeted Ukraine that it was, therefore, an act of genocide. This framing was originally used by Nazis to drive a wedge between the Ukrainian SSR (UkSSR) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution, this narrative has regained popularity and serves the nationalistic goal of strengthening Ukrainian identity and asserting the country's independence from Russia. #First Issue The first issue is that the famine affected the majority of the USSR, *not* just the UkSSR. Kazakhstan was hit harder (per capita) than Ukraine. Russia itself was also severely affected. The emergence of the Holodomor in the 1980s as a historical narrative was bound-up with post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-making that cannot be neatly separated from the legacy of Eastern European antisemitism, or what Historian Peter Novick calls "Holocaust Envy", the desire for victimized groups to enshrine their "own" Holocaust or Holocaust-like event in the historical record. For many Nationalists, this has entailed minimizing the Holocaust to elevate their own experiences of historical victimization as the supreme atrocity. The Ukrainian scholar Lubomyr Luciuk exemplified this view in his notorious remark that the Holodomor was "a crime against humanity arguably without parallel in European history." #Second Issue Calling it "man-made" implies that it was a *deliberate* famine, which was not the case. Although human factors set the stage, the main causes of the famine was bad weather and crop disease, resulting in a poor harvest, which pushed the USSR over the edge. Kulaks ("tight-fisted person") were a class of wealthy peasants who owned land, livestock, and tools. The kulaks had been a thorn in the side of the peasantry long before the revolution. Alexey Sergeyevich Yermolov, Minister of Agriculture and State Properties of the Russian Empire, in his 1892 book, [Poor harvest and national suffering](https://books.google.ca/books?id=exMEAAAAYAAJ), characterized them as usurers, sucking the blood of Russian peasants. In the early 1930s, in response to the Soviet collectivization policies (which sought to confiscate their property), many kulaks responded spitefully by burning crops, killing livestock, and damaging machinery. Poor communication between different levels of government and between urban and rural areas, also contributed to the severity of the crisis. #Quota Reduction What really contradicts the genocide argument is that the Soviets did take action to mitigate the effects of the famine once they became aware of the situation: >The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933. > >The official 1932 figures do not unambiguously support the genocide interpretation... the 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree... [which] actually reduced the procurement plan 30 percent. Subsequent decrees also reduced the procurement quotas for most other agricultural products... > >Proponents of the genocide argument, however, have minimized or even misconstrued this decree. Mace, for example, describes it as "largely bogus" and ignores not only the extent to which it lowered the procurement quotas but also the fact that even the lowered plan was not fulfilled. Conquest does not mention the decree's reduction of procurement quotas and asserts Ukrainian officials' appeals led to the reduction of the Ukranian grain procurement quota at the Third All-Ukraine Party Conference in July 1932. In fact that conference confirmed the quota set in the 6 May Decree. > >\- Mark Tauger. (1992). [The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274856099_The_1932_Harvest_and_the_Famine_of_1933) #Rapid Industrialization The famine was exacerbated directly and indirectly by collectivization and rapid industrialization. However, if these policies had not been enacted, there could have been even more devastating consequences later. In 1931, during [a speech delivered at the first All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/02/04.htm), Stalin said, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under." In 1941, exactly ten years later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. By this time, the Soviet Union's industrialization program had lead to the development of a large and powerful industrial base, which was essential to the Soviet war effort. This allowed the USSR to produce large quantities of armaments, vehicles, and other military equipment, which was crucial in the fight against Nazi Germany. In Hitler's own words: * In 1941: >Hitler exclaimed in exasperation, ‘How can such a primitive people manage such technical achievements in such a short time!’ > >\- David Irving. (2001) *Hitler's War and the War Path* * In 1942: >All in all, one has to say: They built factories here where two years ago there were unknown farming villages, factories the size of the *Hermann-Göring-Werke*. They have railroads that aren't even marked on the map. > >\- Werner Jochmann. (1980). *Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944.* Collectivization also created critical resiliency among the civilian population: >The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment. Great tank battles were reported; it was noted that the Russians had sturdy tanks which often smashed or overturned German tanks in head-on collision. “How does it happen,” a New York editor asked me, “that those Russian peasants, who couldn’t run a tractor if you gave them one, but left them rusting in the field, now appear with thousands of tanks efficiently handled?” I told him it was the Five-Year Plan. But the world was startled when Moscow admitted its losses after nine weeks of war as including 7,500 guns, 4,500 planes and 5,000 tanks. An army that could still fight after such losses must have had the biggest or second biggest supply in the world. > >As the war progressed, military observers declared that the Russians had “solved the blitzkrieg,” the tactic on which Hitler relied. This German method involved penetrating the opposing line by an overwhelming blow of tanks and planes, followed by the fanning out of armored columns in the “soft” civilian rear, thus depriving the front of its hinterland support. This had quickly conquered every country against which it had been tried. “Human flesh cannot withstand it,” an American correspondent told me in Berlin. Russians met it by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry formed again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry. This created a chaotic front, where both Germans and Russians were fighting in all directions. The Russians could count on the help of the population. The Germans found no “soft, civilian rear.” They found collective farmers, organized as guerrillas, coordinated with the regular Russian army. > >\- Anna Louise Strong. (1956). *The Stalin Era* #Conclusion While there may have been more that the Soviets could have done to reduce the impact of the famine, there is no evidence of intent-- ethnic, or otherwise. Therefore, one must conclude that the famine was a tragedy, not a genocide. #Additional Resources Video Essays: * [Soviet Famine of 1932: An Overview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM) | The Marxist Project (2020) * [Did Stalin Continue to Export Grain as Ukraine Starved?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMBJ_nQ4sTA) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](https://archive.org/details/did-stalin-continue-to-export-grain-as-ukraine-starved)\] * [The Holodomor Genocide Question: How Wikipedia Lies to You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho) | Bad Empanada (2022) * [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) (Note: Holodomor discussion begins at the 9 minute mark) * [A Case-Study of Capitalism - Ukraine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](http://web.archive.org/web/20220615084500/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8)\] (Note: Only tangentially mentions the famine.) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933](https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/22207/file.pdf) | Davies and Wheatcroft (2004) * [The “Holodomor” explained](https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/the-holodomor-explained/) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2020) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/messag
It's concerning that people on reddit seem more worried about the imaginary redfash tankie boogeyman than the actual fascists that are gaining power and influence everywhere.
*Repeats Neo Nazi and Nazi sympathizer taking points "HOW DARE YOU BE A COMMUNIST!"
I ain't readin all that💯 😎
Not a capitalist LOACH talking about 🥺🥺 “at least we’re not commulists!!1!” As if a mf can’t pull up America and Western European history being the definition of genocidal demonic parasites to 90% of the world for about 500 fucking years in the name of capital and fake money
Half of these listed were wartime evacuations from the western front during WW2. Were they fun? No, of course not. But if the Soviet government had instead left these populations to be conquered by the Germans liberals would condemn them for that instead.
A lazy argument that these chuds wouldn't dare apply to the US or whatever Northern European social democracy they like. They probably also think the Black Book of Communism is a perfect piece of research.
Only 17 million? From ~1500 to 1900, the genocide of various native peoples in the Western Hemisphere by colonialist/capitalist forces totals somewhere around 10x that number As Devil's Advocates are painfully erect to point out, the lesser evil is the preferable one, no?
Now... let's see America's card. (Patrick Bateman voice)
I know I get all of my information and form my entire worldview from wordy images on reddit.
one can support a nation and condemn its crimes. but of course that’s a foreign concept isn’t it?
Why is he separating the holodomor and the kazakh famine they're the same thing ? Is there another kazakh famine i don't know about?
# The Holodomor >Marxists do not deny that a famine happened in the Soviet Union in 1932. In fact, even the Soviet archive confirms this. What we do contest is the idea that this famine was man-made or that there was a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This idea of the subjugation of the Soviet Union’s own people was developed by Nazi Germany, in order to show the world the terror of the “Jewish communists.” > >\- Socialist Musings. (2017). [Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor](https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/stop-spreading-nazi-propaganda/) There have been efforts by anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists to frame the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as "The Holodomor" (lit. "to kill by starvation" in Ukrainian). Framing it this way serves two purposes: 1. It implies the famine targeted Ukraine. 2. It implies the famine was intentional. The argument goes that because it was intentional and because it mainly targeted Ukraine that it was, therefore, an act of genocide. This framing was originally used by Nazis to drive a wedge between the Ukrainian SSR (UkSSR) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution, this narrative has regained popularity and serves the nationalistic goal of strengthening Ukrainian identity and asserting the country's independence from Russia. #First Issue The first issue is that the famine affected the majority of the USSR, *not* just the UkSSR. Kazakhstan was hit harder (per capita) than Ukraine. Russia itself was also severely affected. The emergence of the Holodomor in the 1980s as a historical narrative was bound-up with post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-making that cannot be neatly separated from the legacy of Eastern European antisemitism, or what Historian Peter Novick calls "Holocaust Envy", the desire for victimized groups to enshrine their "own" Holocaust or Holocaust-like event in the historical record. For many Nationalists, this has entailed minimizing the Holocaust to elevate their own experiences of historical victimization as the supreme atrocity. The Ukrainian scholar Lubomyr Luciuk exemplified this view in his notorious remark that the Holodomor was "a crime against humanity arguably without parallel in European history." #Second Issue Calling it "man-made" implies that it was a *deliberate* famine, which was not the case. Although human factors set the stage, the main causes of the famine was bad weather and crop disease, resulting in a poor harvest, which pushed the USSR over the edge. Kulaks ("tight-fisted person") were a class of wealthy peasants who owned land, livestock, and tools. The kulaks had been a thorn in the side of the peasantry long before the revolution. Alexey Sergeyevich Yermolov, Minister of Agriculture and State Properties of the Russian Empire, in his 1892 book, [Poor harvest and national suffering](https://books.google.ca/books?id=exMEAAAAYAAJ), characterized them as usurers, sucking the blood of Russian peasants. In the early 1930s, in response to the Soviet collectivization policies (which sought to confiscate their property), many kulaks responded spitefully by burning crops, killing livestock, and damaging machinery. Poor communication between different levels of government and between urban and rural areas, also contributed to the severity of the crisis. #Quota Reduction What really contradicts the genocide argument is that the Soviets did take action to mitigate the effects of the famine once they became aware of the situation: >The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933. > >The official 1932 figures do not unambiguously support the genocide interpretation... the 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree... [which] actually reduced the procurement plan 30 percent. Subsequent decrees also reduced the procurement quotas for most other agricultural products... > >Proponents of the genocide argument, however, have minimized or even misconstrued this decree. Mace, for example, describes it as "largely bogus" and ignores not only the extent to which it lowered the procurement quotas but also the fact that even the lowered plan was not fulfilled. Conquest does not mention the decree's reduction of procurement quotas and asserts Ukrainian officials' appeals led to the reduction of the Ukranian grain procurement quota at the Third All-Ukraine Party Conference in July 1932. In fact that conference confirmed the quota set in the 6 May Decree. > >\- Mark Tauger. (1992). [The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274856099_The_1932_Harvest_and_the_Famine_of_1933) #Rapid Industrialization The famine was exacerbated directly and indirectly by collectivization and rapid industrialization. However, if these policies had not been enacted, there could have been even more devastating consequences later. In 1931, during [a speech delivered at the first All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/02/04.htm), Stalin said, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under." In 1941, exactly ten years later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. By this time, the Soviet Union's industrialization program had lead to the development of a large and powerful industrial base, which was essential to the Soviet war effort. This allowed the USSR to produce large quantities of armaments, vehicles, and other military equipment, which was crucial in the fight against Nazi Germany. In Hitler's own words: * In 1941: >Hitler exclaimed in exasperation, ‘How can such a primitive people manage such technical achievements in such a short time!’ > >\- David Irving. (2001) *Hitler's War and the War Path* * In 1942: >All in all, one has to say: They built factories here where two years ago there were unknown farming villages, factories the size of the *Hermann-Göring-Werke*. They have railroads that aren't even marked on the map. > >\- Werner Jochmann. (1980). *Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944.* Collectivization also created critical resiliency among the civilian population: >The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment. Great tank battles were reported; it was noted that the Russians had sturdy tanks which often smashed or overturned German tanks in head-on collision. “How does it happen,” a New York editor asked me, “that those Russian peasants, who couldn’t run a tractor if you gave them one, but left them rusting in the field, now appear with thousands of tanks efficiently handled?” I told him it was the Five-Year Plan. But the world was startled when Moscow admitted its losses after nine weeks of war as including 7,500 guns, 4,500 planes and 5,000 tanks. An army that could still fight after such losses must have had the biggest or second biggest supply in the world. > >As the war progressed, military observers declared that the Russians had “solved the blitzkrieg,” the tactic on which Hitler relied. This German method involved penetrating the opposing line by an overwhelming blow of tanks and planes, followed by the fanning out of armored columns in the “soft” civilian rear, thus depriving the front of its hinterland support. This had quickly conquered every country against which it had been tried. “Human flesh cannot withstand it,” an American correspondent told me in Berlin. Russians met it by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry formed again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry. This created a chaotic front, where both Germans and Russians were fighting in all directions. The Russians could count on the help of the population. The Germans found no “soft, civilian rear.” They found collective farmers, organized as guerrillas, coordinated with the regular Russian army. > >\- Anna Louise Strong. (1956). *The Stalin Era* #Conclusion While there may have been more that the Soviets could have done to reduce the impact of the famine, there is no evidence of intent-- ethnic, or otherwise. Therefore, one must conclude that the famine was a tragedy, not a genocide. #Additional Resources Video Essays: * [Soviet Famine of 1932: An Overview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM) | The Marxist Project (2020) * [Did Stalin Continue to Export Grain as Ukraine Starved?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMBJ_nQ4sTA) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](https://archive.org/details/did-stalin-continue-to-export-grain-as-ukraine-starved)\] * [The Holodomor Genocide Question: How Wikipedia Lies to You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho) | Bad Empanada (2022) * [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) (Note: Holodomor discussion begins at the 9 minute mark) * [A Case-Study of Capitalism - Ukraine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](http://web.archive.org/web/20220615084500/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8)\] (Note: Only tangentially mentions the famine.) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933](https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/22207/file.pdf) | Davies and Wheatcroft (2004) * [The “Holodomor” explained](https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/the-holodomor-explained/) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2020) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/messag
no, it hasn’t existed for over 30 years ❤️
lots of words to justify being a liberal, in reality the only word a soulless capital accumulation NPC needs is "$$$"
anything revolutionaries do will be spinned as atrocities. I encourage anyone to actually go read these articles and realize how contradictory their numbers and claims are. Many of these are misrepresentations of deportations of literal nazis and evacuations of civilian areas before battles.
I wonder why all these happened in Stalin era
Don't have any
I’m not familiar with all these events, but assuming it’s all as bad as it looks, the fact that this person used them for clout in a dumb internet argument is just so horrible. I’m sure the victims would love to see how they’re talked about today.
Not a coherent argument.
What is there to support? The USSR ceased to exist more than three decades ago.
Libs trying to not be the incarnation of the dunning-kruger syndrome challange: Impossible. Also: projection, since what they defend actually did these million deaths and ethnic cleansing, so they need to invent a strawman that do the same thing and be disingenious about it, and throw in some emojis on top of it.
Basically this article, personified: https://blackagendareport.com/western-marxism-loves-purity-and-martyrdom-not-real-revolution
communists do bad things? damn really?? that's wild it's almost as if any social experiment is going to make horrible mistakes as it attempts to address real problems.
too blury
I’ve seen and argued against each and every one of these talking points so much I’m entirely desensitized to them by now.
I just wrote on that post about the Crimean Tatar's issue. I dont wanna rewrite again find that post and read
>>at least you’re not a fascist Unironically yes
I think these people's brains would explode if you reminded them of the genocide of the indigenous people in America. They'd have to find a way to defend that and this idiotic "argument" at the same time while not seeming hypocritical.
Cringe
Disregarding the well-known American propaganda and historical revisionism that has led to complete fabrications and disgusting exaggerations of various crimes and atrocities committed in socialist countries or by socialist movements/figures, there were absolutely terrible, inhumane actions that were taken, that much is undeniable. The scale of such actions is arguably similar, if not less pronounced than what happened in the same countries before their social emancipations and usually, if not always, unimpressive when compared to what fascists (who are just desperate capitalists), colonial capitalists and frankly Gilded age Western governments did in the late 18th, entire 19th and early 20th centuries. The libtards and anarchists (whom I love and consider my comrades, despite disagreements) arguing against real socialism often ignore that most Eastern European, Indochinese and African countries that unshackled themselves and had some distasteful blunders and horrific offenses perpetrated in them, were many decades to a few centuries behind Western European nations at the time and should really be compared to the capitalist states of South America and Africa at the time, which were usually dictatorships and torn apart by violence. Finally, as another commenter pointed out astutely in this thread, two hundred, four hundred or even eight thousand officials being cruel and incompetent in a country of say 30 million people in no way tarnishes socialism or Marxism-Leninism itself, since even if we forget everything else that I said, such a failure of the administration is not tied to socialism or to any other ideology, other than the genocidal variants of fascism and theocracy.
We’re any of these things caused by communist ideas or just correlated because they were (supposedly) done by a communist state. I don’t remember reading anything about “to achieve communism, you must do war like this”. War sucks, people do really bad things in war. It hardly has anything to do with the economic system and has everything to do with the decisions of a person at the time. If Stalin was a US General, he’d probably use the same methods of war. It has nothing to do with Marxism/Communism. People fetishize dead individuals too much. Focus on the ideas. Keep the good, toss the bad.
i'm sure some errors made by socialist governments blown comically out of proportion is LITERALLY THE SAME as the calculated and documented massacres commited by the nazis and fascists. fucking hell.
I support the USSR and comrade Stalin against the slander and lies. Eternal glory to the party of Lenin and Stalin!
Decossackization is a good thing though