Today I Learned

Silence capital slave libshit. It was not targeted at ukraine, ukraine was always food basket of USSR. Its funny how you guys have just 2-3 critique of USSR which you are fed by propaganda, Ive way much coherent and better critique of that experiment.

Now holdomor

It wasn’t a deliberate famine. The famine was caused by crop failure and exacerbated by wealthy ukrainian farmers slaughtering their cattle, not an orchestrated genocide by the Soviets. The notion that the Holodomor was man-made by Stalin is a 30s fiction. The USA picked it up from Randolph Hearst's newspapers—anti-communist publications, and perpetuated that fabrication to build up the myth that communism was the cause.

Did you know that it wasn’t just Ukraine that suffered a large loss of death? Parts of Russia suffered it, and Kazakhstan had the largest loss of life as a percentage of its total population.

Alexander Dallin of Stanford University writes:

There is no evidence it was intentionally directed against Ukrainians... that would be totally out of keeping with what we know -- it makes no sense.

Moshe Lewin of the University of Pennsylvania stated:

This is crap, rubbish... I am an anti-Stalinist, but I don't see how this [genocide] campaign adds to our knowledge. It's adding horrors, adding horrors, until it becomes a pathology.

Lynne Viola of the University of Toronto writes:

I absolutely reject it... Why in god's name would this paranoid government consciously produce a famine when they were terrified of war [with Germany]?

Mark Tauger, Professor of History at West Virginia University (reviewing work by Stephen Wheatcroft and R.W. Davies) has this to say:

Popular media and most historians for decades have described the great famine that struck most of the USSR in the early 1930s as “man-made,” very often even a “genocide” that Stalin perpetrated intentionally against Ukrainians and sometimes other national groups to destroy them as nations... This perspective, however, is wrong. The famine that took place was not limited to Ukraine or even to rural areas of the USSR, it was not fundamentally or exclusively man-made, and it was far from the intention of Stalin and others in the Soviet leadership to create such as disaster. A small but growing literature relying on new archival documents and a critical approach to other sources has shown the flaws in the “genocide” or “intentionalist” interpretation of the famine and has developed an alternative interpretation.

Also here's a BBC article stating that the Ukrainian Kulaks burnt their own grain and slaughtered their own cattle - https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/ztqmwxs/revision/1 It would be more appropriate to frame this as, "the government is culpable of insufficiently rapid response" but the historiography on the matter is that the famine was not deliberate, was not a genocide, and (to quote Tauger) "was not fundamentally or exclusively man-made."

It was a terrible famine caused by two bad weather years, some bad planning and any human foul play was on the side of the kulaks who slaughtered livestock and encouraged their sympathizers to do so as well. You can do your own research on the sources rather than parroting Western propaganda.

Read about it from Doug Tottle in his book Fraud, Famine and Fascism. The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard (Toronto: Progress Books, 1987).

After WW2 the “man-made famine in Ukraine” myth became the credo of the pro-Nazi Ukrainian Nationalist front, many of whose leaders were settled in the US by the CIA after the war, and were funded to carry on their anti-Soviet propaganda. Until the early 1960s these fascist Ukrainian nationalist groups had terrorist cells within the USSR as well. Today this myth is an integral part of the nationalist ideology of the state of Ukraine. Reactionary capitalists and Neo-Nazis have used it to build up a history that legitimizes Ukrainian nationalism. And this myth of the “man-made genocide” is an integral part of the project of historical revisionism to build up the formation post-Soviet Ukraine. Since Ukrainian nationalism has been fascist from the beginning, the only way it can be “legitimized” is by ferocious anti-communism.

Most of the historiography on this is even written by sovietologists and cold warriors who were nevertheless good historians:

John A. Armstrong. Ukrainian Nationalism. NY: Columbia University Press, 1963.

Alexander Motyl. The turn to the right : the ideological origins and development of Ukrainian nationalism, 1919-1929. NY: Columbia U.P. 1980.

The excellent research by Prof. Mark Tauger, of the University of West Virginia, and others, has thoroughly exploded this Nazi-born myth of the “Man-Made Famine.” His research is now available online at his own website:

http://www.as.wvu.edu/history/Faculty/Tauger/ In addition I recommend the following article by two professional demographers:

Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver, “Demographic Analysis and Population Catastrophes in the USSR.” Slavic Review 44, 3 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 517-536. Available through JSTOR.

Robert Conquest, the most famous anti-Soviet phony “scholar” for the past half-century, the same dude who was paid $ 80,000 by Ukrainian Nationalist groups to write Harvest of Despair, the main English language book that spreads this notion. Actually cites bonafide Nazi propaganda as evidence in that book.

There are a couple of good reviews of his book, and of this issue. They are:

Jeff Coplon, “In Search of a Soviet Holocaust,” Village Voice Jan. 12, 1988. At http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/vv.html and his "Rewriting History: How Ukrainian Nationalists Imposed Their Doctored History on our High-School Students". Capital Region magazine (Albany, NY), March 1988. At http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/essays/coplonrewriting88.pdf

“The Hoax of the Man-Made Ukraine Famine of 1932-33.” Six-part series originally published in Challenge-Desafio, the newspaper of the Progressive Labor Party, beginning on February 25, 1987. At http://www.plp.org/cd_sup/ukfam1.html and following.

In addition, I recommend Arch Getty’s review of Conquest from the London Review of Books, January 22, 1987, pp. 7-8. And Doug Tottle’s book, which I referenced at the top of this post, also analyses both Conquest’s work and the fraudulent Ukrainian nationalist film “Harvest of Despair" (named after the book).