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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

> Yea, the commies accidentally created famines

I'd actually argue the stalinists created famines not by accident but at least partially by intent. Their economic modelling and planning were terrible, yes -- in part because of ideological blindness you mention. But the existence of the NEP for a short period of time in the 20s shows that at least some of the Bolsheviks were able to demonstrate more flexible thinking.

But they were also legitimately terrible, damaged, malevolent people who were the products of a nasty civil war. Starving their perceived enemies and brutalizing whole populations to do so was part of their MO.

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I would say they were also a cause, not just a product of a nasty civil war.

Not the Tsarist monsters who sent waves of young men to be butchered in WWI?

Every country in WWI did that, no?

Anf while didn't say they were the only cause, they certainly didn't try to minimise casualties.

My point is that the first act the Bolsheviks did was to end Russian involvement in WWI and end that slaughter. (At the cost of massive loss of territory and reprisal from western powers.)

It ain't black and white.

That's a good point. I thought the Russian civil war was already happening at that time, so it enabled everyone in Russia to focus on that one alone. Is that incorrect?

Civil war happened a bit later, but I guess it's blurry because it was also mixed up with the foreign invasion / punishments that came out of the Soviet withdrawal from the war and Brest-Litovsk. The allies were enraged by the withdrawal from the war, but of course also extremely interested in destroying the new Bolshevik regime. So right away after 1918 they were thrown into a conflict setting.

I'd have to defer to an actual historian here for the full details, but my understanding of the history is that the "whites" that the Bolsheviks fought in the civil war were funded and aided by foreign powers (Britain, etc.), and that that funding and intervention began the moment Brest-Litovsk was signed, but then later transitioned into the full civil war scenario.

Of course it all depends on how you draw definitional lines around civil war vs revolution, etc.

Good points all around! The same general problem of recovering from a brutal civil war seems core to Maoists as well!

Ideology and gunpowder make for a terrible brew.

The first half of the 20th century was a cruel time and engineered cruel people, of all ideological stripes. 50 years of living with the consequences of WWI.

Stalinists were trying to create economies of scale by centralizing agriculture to large conglomerates but weren't smart enough to avoid supply disruption that together with dry years, optimistic communication/lies and foreign export led to massive famines throughout the whole USSR.

One can see the same pattern in large corps where the front falls suddenly off.

But it was also bound up with ideological and ethnic campaigns against e.g. Ukrainian nationalists and the Ukrainian peasantry generally. Stalin was a big fan of collective punishment, repopulation, depopulation, etc. Sociopath. Resistance of aspects of the peasantry to collectivization, etc. became an excuse for brutal policies, independent of any theoretical "socialist" policy.

Remember Marx (and even Lenin) wrote nothing about e.g. agricultural policy or even what socialization of industry would look like in practice. So these people (Stalin and his apparatus) were making it up as they went along, and they were awful people.

e.g. Stalin came to power against Trotsky and the Left Opposition by insisting on maintaining the NEP and taking a more gradual and pragmatic approach and then turned around, exterminated his opponents, and did the precisely the opposite and forced mass collectivization (leading to mass starvation.)

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