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Unless, you know, it actually was a) artificially engineered and b) by 'the' Russians against 'the' Ukrainians (more precisely, of course, by Soviets - which weren't all ethnically Russian, of course) and c) with genocidal intent. Given as Soviets had actually perpetrated other acts of genocide on purpose, for political aims, and their ideology explicitly allowed and endorsed mass murder for political purposes, and their official position had been that any "nationalism" has to be completely eliminated (which they consistently did in all "national republics" - every single nationalist movement had been brutally repressed) - it looks like duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, so it's not a big stretch to argue it is a duck.
You can question it all you like, but as I noted above, there is very good evidence pointing to it. I am not saying questioning this evidence makes you literally Hitler, I am saying if you have equally strong opposite evidence, you are welcome to propose it. Or you are welcome to just say "I just don't believe it, whatever is the evidence", that's always an option. I know one thing - dismissing all that by just saying "oh, it's consensus-building, therefore you are wrong" is not an argument.
Frankly I find these claims increasingly baffling. The "Soviets had actually perpetrated other acts of genocide on purpose"? Other acts of genocide? Where? When? Their "ideology explicitly allowed and endorsed mass murder for political purposes". Fair enough, there were cases where this applied. But against entire ethnic groups? Which is what genocide is? Also, the elimination of nationalism necessarily entails genocide now?
My lived experience of actual Ukrainians is that they believe this narrative of the holodomor, whether or not you do, and discussion of it would be as welcome as bringing securesignals as a +1 to a bar mitzvah.
Well, duh. Of course they do. Decades of propaganda will do that to you. I'm also sure a great number of African Americans earnestly believe their ancestors built the pyramids.
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How ignorant are you in Soviet history? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Chechens_and_Ingush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Meskhetian_Turks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Kalmyks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_deportation and others.
Dude, Gulag. Purges. I mean, they didn't exactly hide it.
Not necessarily, but the way Stalin did it - it frequently did. I mean, I understand that if you're completely ignorant of history, you find historical claims "baffling". But maybe you should fill up on that before arguing about it?
I’m still baffled. Deportation – to be more precise, the involuntary resettlement of a people – does not equal genocide. The Gulag system was set up not with the aim of mass murder but for the purpose of extracting important natural resources through forced labor. The majority of the victims of political purges were imprisoned or deported, not killed. I have to assume that you’re also aware of all this.
The way Stalin did it, it does. The aim was specifically to destroy the group of people and their way of life. If it didn't include murdering every single one of them personally (though of course nobody was concerned at all if any of them died) - it certainly did intend to destroy them as people.
It included mass murder as one of the intended effects. I mean, if after decades of starvation, hard work and inhuman suffering you manage to survive, fine, but if you don't, it's as good. Especially if they could get some work out of you before you croak. Of course, soviets also did outright mass murder too if they thought a specific group is too dangerous, but they were practical enough to consider working someone to death as better way of execution.
Nope, Gulag was a punishment mechanism. The fact that it also produced some resources was secondary - like, if we need repress millions of people, we better make some use of them. Of course, it also had a theoretical basis - since the bourgeois are evil and the workers are good, it is clear that more you work, the better you become. So if you engage in wrongthink, it is clear that's because not enough work. Also, if you are stuck cutting trees in Siberia, you surely won't be able to spread your wrongthink to others. The fact that the trees themsevles are also useful is good, but there are many other ways to cut trees, this one in particular had been chosen because they needed Gulag as part of the terror machine, to control the society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
Scholars estimate the death toll of the Great Purge at 700,000 to 1.2 million.
That's only one episode of many. Really, where did you study history? Even Wokepedia is not trying to whitewash Stalin. Where do they teach that Soviet mass terror didn't happen?
As I was reading your argument I wasn't sure what it's reminding me of. Then it occurred to me: the Montana Meth Project memes.
This is not genocide. But under Stalin, it is.
This is not a tool of intended mass murder. But under Stalin, it is.
And so on. I mean...really?!
Your argument here seems to be "what you are saying is reminding me of a meme". I am not seeing it as a refutation of anything, sorry. By necessity, wide terms like "deportation" can encompass a myriad of scenarios, from enforcing immigration law to genocide. It is impossible and not meaningful to say "every deportation is genocide" or "none of the deportations are ever genocide". The case needs to be considered on specifics - who had been deported? Why? What was the goal of it? How the process were conducted? What was the result? If you consider all these, you will be able to see, that in case of Stalin's enthic cleansing deportations, the goal was mass removal of certain ethnicities from their traditional territories, in order to destroy their way of life and national identity and transform them into "soviet people of enthnic background", and the process had been conducted with maximal cruelty and resulted in massive casualties. An action like that, undertaken now by any Western power (the other powers of course get a pass because you can't blame the oppressed people for anything anytime) would be undoubtedly called a genocide.
I’m of the view that words have meaning and are, when possible, to be used accurately. Deportations are deportations, and genocides are genocides. There are multiple cases in history of groups of people getting transported before getting genocided, but that do not count as cases of deportation, because a deportation is a different act of the state with a different purpose. It’s also unfortunately true that ‘deportation’ is often the word used in the West for forced national resettlements under Stalin even though the Western definition of it is something entirely different (but also something unrelated to genocide).
They did the same thing to Russians as well, didn't they? The destruction of village communities and religious traditions, forced resettlement for the purpose of industrialization, collectivization, erasure of national heritage and the old culture - it was all done. (With the exceptions of funny Russian dresses, funny Russian music and traditional Russian dishes, of course.) We can't say that the Russians were doing this to the Ukrainians as a whole and other nationalities.
True, and some deportations are ways to execute genocide. Some are not. That's what I was trying to explain. You seem to focus on "well, akshually, you should use a different word" instead of focusing on the substance. The substance is that under Stalin, there were multiple cases there whole ethnic groups were rounded up and moved to remote areas, leading to the death of some of them and destruction of their traditional way of life for all of them, in the service of soviet national policy. Which specific words you use to describe it may be an entertaining academic exercise, but it doesn't change the substantial point. Which is - the soviet modus operandi included using mass casualty actions on entire ethnic groups to further their political goals.
That is a good point, that there is a way of defining Russian national identity which does not make the actions of soviets "Russian", and in fact, the Russian national identity, when defined in that way, suffered as much - maybe even more - than other national identities under soviet rule. For example, the White movement (not the skin-color Whites, but the Whites who were opposed to Blosheviks about 100 years ago, those Whites) would have a good claim on that identity, and some people are still keeping it. However, one must also realize this way of viewing Russian national identity is not only a minority view, but a tiny minority view, endorsed by no official institution and only by a tiny part of Russian population. For the official Russia, and for vast majority of it population, Russian Empire, USSR, and current RSFSR are largely the same, whether it concerns the culture, the official succession or the political goals. Average Russian is an imperial Russian, and he sees USSR national policy as a natural continuation of Russian Empire's national policy, and current Russia's policies as the natural continuation of those both. If for an average Lithuanian the soviet era was an era of occupation by foreign power, for average Russian - for almost every Russian, excluding a tiny minority I described above - the soviet era had been what "we" were doing, not what had been done "to us". It doesn't mean they would endorse everything that happened - surely, mistakes were made here and there - but it is still part of historical succession that most of Russians feel. For them, "the Soviets" doing something and "the Russians" doing something is virtually one and the same. The Westerners, in their common speech, follow the same pattern, USSR essentially had always been "the Russkies" - which could be attributed to ignorance, except that virtually nobody in Russia would object it either. For them, as for the Westerners, the Soviets are the Russkies. They assumed that identity and are completely comfortable with it - so there's no reason to deny them something that they believe to be true. Of course, as a logical consequence of it, that identity also includes shared responsibility for all the actions committed by the Soviets. You can't be proud of "our space program" without being also accountable for "our purges". Most normies, of course, are much more willing to talk about the former than the latter, but it comes as a package.
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The section on
Discrimination and persecution of Ukrainiansin the wikipedia link certainly doesn't provide strong evidence; it shows strongly contested disagreement. If you're referring to your first paragraph, that seems to boil down to 'the Soviets were open to genocide and didn't like countries with strong national identities, so obviously the famine in Ukraine was a deliberate genocide' which seems pretty circumstantial.If it were the only evidence, sure. But there's plenty of other evidence to the deliberate character of food confiscation, and to extreme hostility with which Soviets viewed the kulak class. Of course, to properly consider all that evidence, one would need to write a series of books - and there are many books on the subject, of course. I have neither ability nor desire to TLDR them all here, I am just saying this is a well-supported position, and dismissing it with a formula like "oh, that's consensus-building, therefore all that pile of evidence worth nothing" is not proper discussion of the subject.
I checked Wokepedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor and it says "Olga Andriewsky writes that scholars are in consensus that the cause of the famine was man-made.[46] The term "man-made" is, however, questioned by historians such as R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, according to whom those who use this term "underestimate the role of ... natural causes",[47] though they agree that the Holodomor was largely a result of Stalin's economic policies.". Now, I have very low opinion about the veracity of any Wokepedia claim on any politically charged subject, and again, seriously evaluating such claims would take much more than I am willing to give, but in short, virtually everybody agrees Stalin did it. Now, imagine - Stalin comes out and says "we will destroy kulaks, if necessary - we will kill them all". Stalin then does things. Kulaks are destroyed, many of them dead. Many other people are dead to. We can establish the causal link between Stalin's actions and the deaths. Now, you tell me that we should seriously consider maybe it all happened on accident? That somehow he only wanted to build communism, and accidentally took all food from them and accidentally they died because they had no food? I don't know, to me it doesn't pass the smell test.
The kulak class does not equal the Ukrainian people. Not all Ukrainians were kulaks and not all kulaks were Ukrainian. There was no case of either Stalin or any other Soviet official claiming otherwise.
Nobody is claiming that. Yes, everyone broadly agrees that "Stalin did it", "it" being involuntary agricultural collectivization, grain confiscation and the dissolution of the kulaks as a class, the key words being as a class. Stalin was also clearly intent on continuing these policies (although not without alterations) even when their unintended consequence, also due to drought and other factors, was famine. That much is true. But the three main related claims of Ukrainian nationalists, as we discussed in another thread, are a wholly different matter.
Both true of course, but it's not as big argument as you seem to think it is. A lot of Ukrainian food production relied on people who were classified as "kulaks", so with that destroyed not only kulak families themselves died, but everyone who relied on the food they produced did. And of course, the famine was not confined to Ukraine - it happened in other places too. In Ukraine these policies produced a particularly severe effects though.
No, it's not the key. It's not like they were "reclassified" and that's it. They had been stripped of their property, deported, and often murdered. And their capacity to produce food ruined. "As a class" here means on massive, society-wide scale - it's not that some particular kulak was an asshole and had to be repressed, it's that all the backbone of the food production had been forcefully removed, which of course, predictably, caused lack of food. That policy was systemic. That lack of food was not accidental, and it did not cause anybody to stop and reverse the policy. On the contrary, it was largely accepted as the desired effect, and the confiscation policies became more severe.
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If you’re saying the soviets were mass-murderers with a yen for collective guilt, I agree with you. Likewise I agree that the famines were broadly Stalin’s fault.
But how does the Soviet desire to kill wealthy landowning peasants, or the role of Soviet economics in the famine more generally, support the specific claim that the Soviets deliberately engineered famine specifically in Ukraine in a genocidal attempt to wipe out the Ukrainian national identity?
You say that loads of evidence for that specific claim exists but in the nicest possible way you haven’t actually provided any of it. My (very half-assed) investigation (the specific Section about Ukraine that I mentioned) seemed to indicate that it’s a controversial claim that’s being actively debated by academics.
EDIT: the links from your other post re: deportations are to some extent the kind of thing that I was looking for. At the very least the Soviet Union regularly conducted mass operations to dissolve certain nationalities and ethnicities within the broader USSR, often resulting in mass casualties. I’m not sure that the famine in Ukraine was part of that - the deportations have a much more specific and direct character - and I would generally incline to the view that the famine resulted from a combination of the Soviet hatred of successful farmers + total disdain for learning how farming actually works + total lack of concern about whether the Ukrainians (or anyone else) lived or died. But I’m much more open to the possibility.
They did not engineer famine only in Ukraine. The famine had been widespread. But in Ukraine, both the food production and the opposition to soviet takeover had been based on wealthy landowning peasants. So destroying them as a power was a necessity, which inevitably led to more severe and comprehensive famine than in other parts. The soviets were not intending to let the kulak class survive, and if it meant millions of Ukrainians would not survive either, so be it. Wiping out national identity had been the official policy everywhere - everywhere any sense of national identity beyond funny ethnic dresses and composing odes to Stalin in national language had been brutally repressed. Not everywhere it had been done by the means of famine - it's just the conditions in Ukraine specifically made it a convenient way to go: soviets needed food, soviets needed to destroy the kulaks, soviets needed to get rid of any nationalism-inclined groups - in Ukraine, destroying the wealthy landowning peasants achieved all of those. I do not claim if there were a way to achieve the same without the famine and the way to achieve that with famine the soviets would insist "no, we want the famine, it's famine or no go" - maybe if they found the other way, they'd use that. I am just saying that was the way they actually used.
Everything is a controversial claim debated by academics. That's what they do their whole life, they debate. If you want evidence, just read that debate and you'd get plenty. I am paid for doing other things, so redoing the work of the academics to reproduce it here would be a prohibitive cost for me with zero gain. I mean, just following the links in Wokepedia in the Holodomor article would get you plenty of evidence.
Partially. In the case of Ukraine, deportations did happen, but it was not feasible, as it was with, say, Crimean Tatars, to just round up most of the Ukrainians and send them to Siberia. Ukraine is too big and there are too many of them. However, you could subjugate them by ruining their economic basis - the same wealthy landowning peasants. Then their alternative would be submit to the soviets or die horribly. After millions died horribly, the rest submitted.
Plus the exotic food and drinks. You forgot about that part. But yeah, it's perverse! Surely we'll never see democratic, enlightened Western nations display such a callous attitude towards cultural minorities. That'd be a scandal!
Not sure what you mean here, maybe speaking your point plainly would help.
As the linked OP correctly states, Western governments are happily on board with multiculturalism and cultural diversity, as long as that cultural otherness is only expressed in the form of funny clothes and exotic foods. It seems that in this they are not that different from Stalin.
I don't think that's true at all. If anything, the Western governments (at least as Europe and blue part of the US is concerned) are going to another extreme, treating any request for outside cultures to adapt their mores and behavior to the standards of Western culture as racist, and giving massive amount of deference to the foreign cultural standards. It's everywhere - from demands in schools for everybody avoiding pork in school lunches to not offend Muslims (while asking Muslims to stay away from any foods to avoid offending Westerners would be unthinkable) to criminals coming from outside cultures given massively more lenient treatment than native ones, because they are "unfamiliar" with local customs and thus should be considered exempt from the local laws. Anybody who had been reading news must be aware of it.
Note however that the case of Western governments and Stalin are radically different in one very important regard. In the case of Western government, the representatives of "diverse" culture come to the West, with their hands out for handouts, asking for help. Once admitted, they demand preferential treatment and deference to their culture - the same one that they just fled and claimed that it created conditions which require emergency rescue - and they get the full measure of that deference. Stalin, however, came to those cultures - where they lived, without being asked or invited - conquered their lands and set out to replace their culture and identity with that of "Soviet people".
If we were comparing this to, say, British conquest of Burma or similar events, then the comparison might be more appropriate - though even at the peak of their colonial pursuits, the Brits were much more adoptive of the local culture and willing to blend with it rather than eradicate it. But at least the ideological vibe had been the same. That vibe not only has long gone, it had been declared the ultimate sin of the West, for which it must be atoning forever, and this guilt is the main driver enabling the sorry state of affairs we are witnessing now on the West. Thus, your conclusion is diametrically opposite of what is actually happening.
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The forced resettlement of so-called traitor nations was done as an act of collective punishment after they were declared to be German collaborators, not as a genocidal measure to dissolve their nationality. Had they been deported on an individual basis and scattered all over the country and not as a nation as a whole, that would be the case, but this is not what happened. Had the regime intended to genocide them, the simple truth is that they would not exist today.
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