How Joseph Stalin Starved Millions in the Ukrainian Famine | Hacker News Reader

How Joseph Stalin Starved Millions in the Ukrainian Famine

history.com

69 pointsthrowkeep24 comments

Well, the article misses just a couple of things: 1) First and foremost, the famine was USSR-wide and hit both RSFSR and Kazakhstan, the latter one had even worse population consequences. 2) When it became apparent that there is not enough grain, USSR started rapidly importing it and giving out - still in a brutal city-favouring way, but it was not a deliberate politics of starvation. 3) The whole story started due to western nations banning gold trade with the USSR, forcing it to gamble on grain yields to buy equipment for industrialisation

The famine still was a terrible mistake, but trying to paint it as deliberate killing is unfair -- it is more akin to great depression (typical forced move to the city and machine agriculture). Except it didn't last 10 years and they tried to fix it as soon as it happened.

Well, the article also fails to mention that the Soviet Union exported food products during this famine. People starved because of confiscation of goods and mandatory food contingents.

Ukraine has one of the most fertile soil on the planet and has had developed agrarian culture. Creating a famine in such place requires malice.

Those points are not true 1. People in Ukraine were literally eating each other. Where in Russia was it happening? In Moscow? No. St Petersburg? No. Novgorod? No. 2. Not a starvation politic you say? Everyone knew about the famine, soldiers were expropriating grain from weak and hungry people, the communists saw it with their own eyes, and still proceeded. It was an explicit punishment for not fully supporting Soviet Government. 3. The grain was in fact exported during the famine, this fact is undisputable as there are records in the countries that were buying that grain. There are no records of BUYING grain by the USSR at that period.

And the last point you make is completely ridiculous: "well, it wasn't happening for 10 years, so it's just an innocent mistake" - it was happening for 2 years and 3.5 million people died in Ukraine. How about that for a mistake? If 1000 died and they stopped it, I would agree. Or maybe 10000. Ok, 100,000 hungry deaths you cannot ignore, but 3.5 million people?! It was intentional and it was a genocide of Ukrainians.

1. Volga? 2. I can agree with that, which I pointed out by mentioning that cities (with industrial population) were favored. 3. It is true, but the exports were curtailed in an attempt to combat the famine. I made the mistake before freshening up on soviet foreign trade, which basically consisted of grain only. I can see why they exported it even during the famine -- without selling grain there would be no fuel, no spare parts, the whole economy would halt.

I didn't say that was an 'innocent mistake' -- mistakes can still be brutal and criminal, yet if it was a deliberate genocide of Ukrainians, tell me, why did 2 to 3 millions of Russians and the same amount of Kasakhs died?

And the point about comparison with the great depression is not about time, but about damage control -- in the case of great depression they did none, due to ideological reasons, while in the soviet case they did, although limited it.

It was more of a bureaucracy/management problem combined with Stalin's disregard of life: administration was trying to get the ridicilous KPIs (while manufacturing illicit statistics) at the cost of the people at hand.

Recently I've been reading Vasily Grossman's A Writer At War, which is a collection of his journals from the Eastern Front, and the depths of Stalin's brutality are staggering. In the Battle of Stalingrad he forbade that any citizens flee the city since he thought it would motivate the troops, and special battalions were set up behind the front line to shoot any who retreated. In the battle itself Soviet snipers targeted the German water carriers, and so the Germans bribed children with food to fetch water for them, who were promptly shot since any collaboration with the enemy was punished with death.

Odd. None of those details were included in the Enemy at the Gates movie, and it specifically focused on snipers.

Enemy at the gates shows the Russians shooting their own retreating soldiers.

See 2:30 of following clip https://youtu.be/L8fWp-i-BGA

I was referring more to barring civilians from leaving the city, and shooting at children.

There's a long and terrible tradition of western media refusing to expose Stalin's crimes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty

??????

There's a long and terrible tradition of western media regarding Stalin as literally worse than Hitler.

FYI:

"For example, there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that, when a Hitler comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever made the comparison loses whatever debate is in progress.[8] This principle is itself frequently referred to as Godwin's law."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

Unsubstantiated claim. He is used as a negative advertisement of Soviet era.

If you read carefull the trial in Nuernberg, Germany was not punished at all and they were worse.

For me he showd disrespect for his comrades. The battle of Kursk had much more casualties that it needed to be. The same happens for the war in total. He was completely incapable to be a leader. Useless and he did not care for his country. He also demonized communism and was in reality a dictator that pulled the right strings to become leader of a party (exactly what happens with leaders usually). He was also a racist and mass exterminated people. If he was different may the bloodshed of WWII would be prevented.

But the same was Pinochet and the western media covered all his crimes.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, the crimes of Stalin are probably over exposed in Western media, if anything. There's no shortage of people eager to inform you that Stalin killed people, even if it's completely off topic!

Would you say the same thing about the crimes of Hitler?

Why do you think they are "over exposed"? What do you claim is the "correct" level of exposure?

I think that was part of his order 227. Which is basically death to anyone who retreats as well as punishment to their family back home.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_No._227

Stalin also sent the NKVD to the Spanish Civil War to mostly root out “trotskyites and anarchists” from the Republican side(!) rather than against the Falange.

This is what disillusioned leftists who saw it first hand (like George Orwell) with the USSR

They were determined to not surrender. This is not brutal. The enemy was killing kids and babies just because. It was a very right decision and should be thanked by all free people for their sacrifice.

If anyone is interested in learning more about this, I’d recommend the book “The Bloodlands”. It talks about the atrocities Stalin and Hitler did leading up to WW2.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6572270-bloodlands

Seconded. This is a great, if very depressing, book.

I had no idea the forced Ukrainian Famines killed more than the holocaust...