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Tankies believe modern liberals are responsible for colonialism. Later defend imperialism.
(sh.itjust.works)
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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Thanks for posting in here. It's extremely rare for a tankie to actually venture to be challenged.
So first, the grain quotas were impossible to meet, and Ukraine specifically was targeted. Ukrainian villages were blacklisted, with food seizures, trade bans and other sorts of blockades. Once starvation began, Ukraine's borders were forcefully closed to stop peasants from fleeing, that's not something you do in a legitimate famine. This was also all during the time of suppressing Ukraine's culture. The fact that the policies were not applied uniformly across the USSR is what makes it a genocide.
They also didn't reverse course, they knew the starvation was occurring and continued it anyway, even continuing grain requisitions despite the famine. Literally stealing from the starving.
When it comes to genocide, we usually refer to the UN Genocide Convention, which is what we do for Palestine. Stalin saw the Ukranian nationalism as a threat and used the famine as a means of subjugation. The combined starvation, border closures, and ongoing dismantling of Ukrainian culture all indicate that it was a destructive intent towards Ukrainians as a national group. Either way, it's still an atrocity, and the USSR's response was morally wrong and led to many deaths.
It's also wild that you're holding Ukrainian peasants accountable as SS veterans when the Ukrainian émigrés were contesting famine conditionsin the 1930s, before WW2. Starvation and famine aren't something that just magically happens, it's gradual. And even if there were exiles, you don't starve peasants who have been on the land for generations.
Regardless, millions died, the state seized grain during starvation, restricted movement and trapped starving peasants and oppressed Ukrainian culture. Ukraine considers it to be a genocide, and so do many other nations.
Why do you doubt this?
No problem! Actually, I'm not specifically one of the "tankies" you're contending with. I only recently registered on this site and was not previously aware of the beef between lemmy.ml and lemmy.world (I myself coming by way of lemmy.ca), though you can consider me to be aligned with the former ideologically.
The idea that the famine constituted a genocide is not a settled matter among serious historians - it isn't just Grover Furr (author of Blood Lies: The Evidence That Every Accusation Against Joseph Stalin And The Soviet Union In Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands Is False and Khrushchev Lied: The Evidence that Every "revelation" of Stalin's (and Beria's) "crimes" in Nikita Khrushchev's Infamous "secret Speech" to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, is Provably False) that contests it. I would argue that (aside from the aforementioned Grover Furr and presumably some Russian historians) the "constitutes genocide" side is the more heavily politicized.
A lot of scholarship regarding the Soviet famine as a genocide has come out of the University of Alberta's Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), which makes sense given that Alberta has Canada's highest concentration of Ukrainian-Canadians. What was often overlooked until recently is that the U of A chancellor from 1982 to 1986 and co-founder of the CIUS, Peter Savaryn, was an SS veteran, having volunteered for the 14th Waffen SS Division 'Galizien', and that a lot of scholarship coming out of the U of A has served to whitewash the 14th SS and paint it as a group of Ukrainian freedom fighters. In actuality, the 14th SS spent most of its time on anti-partisan actions, including the suppression of the Slovak National Uprising. The Galician division would not have experienced the famine, as Galicia was controlled by Poland before the war.
You're probably balking at the mention of Nazis point since Putin poisoned the well on this discussion by invading Ukraine under the pretext of "denazification", but this is real history. The Ukrainian-Canadian community's particular problem stems from the importation of Waffen SS veterans, particularly the 14th SS, after the war. The reason we did this comes down to cold war politics - the Ukrainian-Canadian community before and during the war was very left wing, operating Ukrainian Labour Temples across the country, with the Ukrainian Labour Hall in Winnipeg was being during the general strike of 1919 as a meeting place and printing house for the strikers. The government imported the nationalists as a locus reliable anticommunists after the war in order to effect a hostile takeover of the Ukrainian-Canadian community, and suppress the left more broadly. Following the war, imported Ukrainian nationalists attacked Ukrainian Labour Temples and disrupted meetings, culminating in the 1950 bombing of the Ukrainian Labour Temple in Toronto during a Thanksgiving concert. The operators of the labour temple, the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians (AUUC), blamed imported SS veterans for the bombing, while the competing nationalist organization, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) claimed that the AUUC bombed themselves as a false-flag.
Long story short, the plan was successful. The UCC became the leading Ukrainian-Canadian organization, while the AUUC declined amidst cold war suppression of anyone associated with communism. The Ukrainian-Canadian community became reliably nationalist and anticommunist, and SS veterans like Savaryn became leading figures. It is in this milieu that the idea that the famine was a "terror famine" developed.
There was an inquiry into the importation of SS veterans in 1985 - the conclusion was that the 14th SS was cleared of all wrongdoing, and contravening the decision of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the Galician division was not a criminal organization. The rest of the report was sealed, and the government has to this day refused to unseal it. Why would they refuse to release the full report if the SS veterans were so innocent? Because it would reveal that they imported SS veterans on purpose to suppress the left, and that many leading figures in the Ukrainian-Canadian community were Nazi war criminals. Aside from the embarrassment this would cause the government, it would have also undermined anticommunist propaganda efforts.
Back to the famine itself, Stalin and his government don't come out squeaky-clean of course. They were extremely paranoid about kulaks hoarding grain and resisting collectivization, and in that air of paranoia and oppression, nobody enforcing the grain quotas was going to disobey orders. People starved and died needlessly, but once the famine ended, it ended. This doesn't constitute genocide, let alone an equivalent to the Holocaust. The idea that it was equivalent to the Holocaust, the "double genocide theory", is used by various eastern European nationalists to whitewash their participation in the Holocaust - the most extreme end of it has Lithuanian nationalists claiming that they were only retaliating against the "Judeo-Bolshevists" when they killed 95% of Lithuania's Jewish population, a rate unsurpassed in any other country.
Stalin made a lot of mistakes, but the crimes of his opponents, not only the Nazis themselves but the imperialist powers, were so much worse and numerous that Stalin's crimes pale in comparison. All in, Joe Steel did more good than bad.
Before I bother to reply, I must check, just to set some ground here.
Do you agree that Stalin's soviet leadership was aware by 1932 of the mass starvation conditions occurring in Ukraine and other regions?
Yes, you may proceed.
Do you agree that the grain requisitions and movement restrictions of starving peasants continued even though the leadership was aware of the conditions?
It's hard to say definitively - one of the issues in the Stalinist USSR was information feedback. There were strong incentives to exaggerating production numbers, and strong disincentives to reporting shortfalls. Basically, everyone in a position of power was terrified and covering their ass at all times.
What it ultimately comes down to, I think, is crash-industrialization. Stalin believed that the USSR needed to industrialize as soon as possible, with all other concerns (i.e. lives) being secondary. To his credit, this ended up being a spot-on assessment. Supposing they had a kinder leader rather than Stalin with his heart of steel, and they industrialized more slowly, collectivized agriculture more slowly and voluntarily, how would they have fared in WW2? It's possible that the USSR would have been unprepared for an industrial war and the Germans would have won, in which case there would have been hundreds of millions of deaths.
Do you agree that continuing food requisition from starving regions increased the number of deaths?
I shall not continue in this Socratic dialogue if you continue to ignore my arguments.
I'm not. You think industrialisation was above life.
I didn't say that, though Stalin certainly thought it. It also worked, given that they survived WW2.
You're a Stalinist.
That's an exaggeration. He was 70% good, 30% bad.
wild to call any dictator good.
what was bad about him?
Not really. Plenty of democratically elected leaders are bad, why can't some dictators be good? Gaddafi was pretty good, given the alternatives. Fidel Castro was good. Democratic leaders are also usually nowhere near as democratic as they're made out to be, (nor are dictators often as dictatorial), so the line is much blurrier than you might think.
As for Stalin, he purged a lot of people that didn't need purging, he had Beria as the NKVD head, he made the famine worse than it could have been, he supported the creation of the state of Israel, and he withheld support for the communists during the Greek civil war in order to maintain good relations with the west. There's other stuff that I can't think of off the top of my head.
Dictators are bad because they have complete power, they can't be removed by the populace without violent bloodshed.
You're going to want to be sitting down for this. I regret to inform you that two of the last five democratically elected US presidents, as well as other democratically elected leaders, have been directly implicated in a child sex trafficking operation. The other US presidents; war criminals George Bush, Barack Obama, and Joseph Robinette Biden, certainly knew about this operation but chose to do nothing, for some reason. It was an open secret among the democratic leaders of the free world and also their good friends in the gulf monarchies (which are paragons of human rights despite using slavery and being ruled by dictators, and are therefore friends rather than enemies of the democratic west.) It brings me no pleasure in having to relay this information.
Ugh, as always, the US defaultism. I'm so sick of seppo cunts always defaulting back to their infantile tribalist politics and assuming the rest of the world must behave as ridiculously as they do. The US isn't a direct democracy, they're a republic. It's hardly representative of the effectiveness of democracies when the core of the democratic majority doesn't even apply in its so-called elections.
But even if I do consider your US-defaultist reply, it doesn't magically invalidate the distinction of democracy and dictatorships. In a democracy, leaders can be investigated, prosecuted and removed from power through democratic means. In a dictatorship, you can't do this at all.
And hey, you may want to be sitting down for this. It brings me great pleasure to relay this information to you. Stalin enabled and tolerated the crimes of Beria, who only after Stalin's death, was finally accused of sexual violence, abuse and sex trafficking. And it took the death of Stalin to get him executed. Is that a part of your Stalin was 70% good?
Tell me honestly, do you legitimately believe a dictatorship is superior to a democracy?
I'm not an American either, buddy. But they're our mutual imperial overlord. You can't just silo off Australia and Canada and Europe as the "good democracies" that are totally separate from the flawed American quasi-democracy - we've been following them in lockstep since the end of WW2, and only once the idiot Trump decided that soft power was gay did we even start to think about doing something different.
You have at least one former prime minister in the Epstein files, plus other politicians and businessmen. The Euros have plenty as well. This thing was an open secret and what just part of doing business. Beria was one man (I mentioned he's part of the bad 30% btw) and he got shot pretty much immediately after Stalin died. The Epstein thing is the entire political and business elite of the western "democratic" world.
Sure, in principle democracy is obviously better than dictatorship, but what democracy? I used quotations around "democratic" because we don't really have democracy. This goes for the rest of the western "democracies" as well as the US. Popular will has little effect on public policy, and voting just usually means selecting the bad option over the worse option. The worse option still wins about half the time. When a genuinely popular and progressive candidate comes along, the party and media machinery is sure to sabatoge them.
Chomsky (Epstein associate, but this doesn't invalidate all of his points) wrote about this in Manufacturing Consent - the media, despite all of our nominal free speech rights, despite not being state controlled, only presents a narrow ideoloogical spectrum, acting as propaganda just as surely as the state-run media in an undemocratic country does. Chomsky argues that this is due to market forces, internalized assumptions, etc. As he said during an interview "I'm sure you believe all that, but you wouldn't be working here if you didn't." Chomsky could get away with this not just because he was an anticommunist who was good friends with the ruling class's child pimp, but because a certain level of dissent is required to maintain the illusion that free speech matters. The system is built to tolerate dissent and subtly mold public opinion and public expectations. It's a very sophisticated and very effective method of control compared to the crude methods employed by "authoritarian" states.
But let's put all that aside for a moment. What good is democracy when it's democracy for a few rich countries that exploit the world's poor majority? Even in a social democratic fantasy where we all have democracy, human rights, and strong social safey nets, we're still just sitting at the top, extracting wealth from and oppressing the majority of the world. As Lenin said, “freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.”
You're just dripping with hypocrisy. You're siloing off Stalin from his atrocities, and siloing the soviet union from other dictatorships, saying they're good. But I'm not allowed to do the same with democracy? For shame, man.
And again, the hypocrisy: Kevin Rudd being in the files (despite Epstein contacting him and Rudd refusing further contact) apparently invalidates Australian democracy -- Yet Chomsky being in the files is now exempt from being invalidated.
Though I can't really be bothered arguing with a Stalinist, so I ask, do you prefer dictatorships over democracies? Simple yes or no.
I didn't say that Chomsky was exempt from being invalidated, I just said that his theory about how propaganda works in a supposedly free press is by and large an accurate framework. Actually, I would argue that, although largely accurate, his theory is also in part chaff to cover up how deeply influenced by intelligence agencies the media is. Chomsky has always been very anti-conspiratorial, and the fact that he was also involved with a pedophile conspiracy should give one pause.
Anyway, you're of course free to argue which "democratic" leader was whatever percent good or bad you like. You could argue that Churchill was 60% good because of WW2 but 40% bad because of the Bengal famine, something like that. My point is that bourgeois democracy is actually the dictatorship of capital, and however much they might buy us off (which is not very much, these days), they're still operating an extractive/financial empire that enslaves most of the world, and their death toll is far higher than Stalin could have hoped to match in 100 lifetimes.
Though I can’t really be bothered arguing with a Stalinist, so I ask, do you prefer dictatorships over democracies? Simple yes or no
This is not how discussions work, my friend
you cannot have a discussion with an authoritarian since they don't believe in discussions or common ground.
so I ask, do you prefer dictatorships over democracies? Simple yes or no
You cannot have a discussion with an "anti-authoritarian" because they are naive and deeply delusional about the world.
so I ask, do you think the brutal domination of the third world by the first world is justified by the fact that the rich countries are "democracies"?
do you prefer dictatorships over democracies? Simple yes or no
What democracies?
anything other than the us
Happy US vassals until last year. Now unhappy vassals, but still vassals.
Is Sweden a US vassal?
Yes!
Every democracy is a US vassal?
Every western country is a US vassal to a greater or lesser extent. The democracies that aren't US vassals tend to get overthrown by the US - see the entire history of South America, Africa, Iran before the Shah, etc.
Notice how the Swede dogs are once again in lockstep with the US over the illegal, unprovoked, full-scale Amero-Israeli aggression against Iran? Or your government or my government for that matter. All the rich white democracies are outraged when america threatens us, but clap like seals for all their wars of aggression against nonwhites.
uh-huh, that's nice
have you ever considered that you might be wrong or overgeneralising just a smidge?
Nope, my opinions have been formed according to a preponderance of evidence, and they continue to be proven correct. The Europeans, who were so vocal about Putin's invasion of Ukraine, are all-in on their nazi pedohile overlord's illegal unprovoked full-scale aggression against Iran.
you've never been wrong with anything ever?
Of course not! I used to believe all that nonsense about good democracies vs evil dictatorships like you do.