Help me understand the holodomor

according to a thread on /r/askhistorians i saw: did stalin wake up one day and think to himself "hmm today I will starve ukraninans to death". no he didn't. however he could have done more to alleviate the situation.

Was there a famine in the USSR in the 30s? Definitely. Was it a genocide planned by the Soviet state? Definitely not. Famines had happened for time immemorial under the Russian empire - nobody accuses those of being genocidal. The Dust Bowl was happening all through the 30s in the USA - due to a mix of environmental factors and bad farming methods, again, nobody accuses the US government of genocide (not in this case anyway).

I think the same applies in the USSR. A mix of bad weather and mistakes made with farming, essentially a “run of the mill” famine. Also, the rich peasants were 100% hiding their produce and doing spiteful things like killing livestock rather than let it be collectivised.

The effort to paint the famine as “The Holodomor”, some kind of genocide, has been a nazi project since the very start. This really ramped up after the Holocaust in an attempt by nazis to draw a false equivalence between their crimes and the USSR, and Ukrainian fascists loved spreading it too. And, as always, the capitalists were more than happy to go along with the Nazis because it studied their purposes for Cold War propaganda.

ETA: at a bare minimum stop calling it Holodomor. Every time someone does it’s a victory for fascist propaganda.

basically he went back in time because of bran and because he said it that way, that's why he always says that right? like "hold the door" -> "holodomor" pretty simple really

A few of the sources they used in that episode were really bad, I've commented on it in my profile before. I highly reccomend Wheatcroft's, J Arch Getty's, and Moshe Lewin's work on the subject, and the swampside chats episode that was linked in this thread.

Academic resources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gxwhh-vdeB--47HM-20cEVRC9eAMhrapbNf0Sk8VSOs/edit#heading=h.ty1cm2sp6wbz

Here's my response to someone saying it was an intentional genocide. Literally just ask the people there at the time. Not even from the USSR or communists.

1. Then why did it hit parts of Russia,Kazakhstan,Romania,Poland and the EASTERN part of Ukraine where there was and still is a major Russian population?
2. Why did Stalin then send aid from the other republics to relieve the famine?

The Uk.S.S.R. received from other republics more than 320,000 tons of grain, in other words, nearly twice as much as the republic ‘exported’, and was authorised to use (from both internal and imported sources) some 520,000 tons of grain as seed, about two‐thirds of total seed loans for the entire Soviet Union.’ https://books.google.rs/books?id=jpv0NICOEb8C&pg=PA157&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS2319/h16/pensumliste/stalin-and-the-soviet-famine-of-1932-33_-a-reply-to-ellman.pdf

3. Every single source claiming it was an intentional genocide goes back to literal fascists. The Hearst Press run by William Hearst, at the time even known as America's #1 fascist, whose newspaper was bought by non other than Nazi Germany in 1935. They used photos from Thomas Walker who was apparently in Ukraine in 1933/4 tho his American colleague in Moscow, Louis Fischer, did some digging and found out he had never passed anywhere near Ukraine and the photos he used were edited photos of people dying in the civil war era famine and WW1 famines. Some photos not even from Russia but from Austro-Hungary.

http://neodemocracy.blogspot.com/2017/12/fraud-famine-and-fascism-hearst-press.html

4. The actual causes are as follows:

-Kulak sabotage(From Professor Scuman who was actually in Ukraine at the time says: "Their [kulak] opposition took the initial form of slaughtering their cattle and horses in preference to having them collectivized. The result was a grievous blow to Soviet agriculture, for most of the cattle and horses were owned by the kulaks. Between 1928 and 1933 the number of horses in the USSR declined from almost 30,000,000 to less than 15,000,000; of horned cattle from 70,000,000 (including 31,000,0000 cows) to 38,000,000 (including 20,000,000 cows); of sheep and goats from 147,000,000 to 50,000,000; and of hogs from 20,000,000 to 12,000,000. Soviet rural economy had not recovered from this staggering loss by 1941. ... Some [kulaks] murdered officials, set the torch to the property of the collectives, and even burned their own crops and seed grain. More refused to sow or reap, perhaps on the assumption that the authorities would make concessions and would in any case feed them. The aftermath was the "Ukraine famine'' of 1932--33 .... Lurid accounts, mostly fictional, appeared in the Nazi press in Germany and in the Hearst press in the United States, often illustrated with photographs that turned out to have been taken along the Volga in 1921 .... The "famine'' was not, in its later stages, a result of food shortage, despite the sharp reduction of seed grain and harvests flowing from special requisitions in the spring of 1932 which were apparently occasioned by fear of war in Japan. Most of the victims were kulaks who had refused to sow their fields or had destroyed their crops.")

-A drought hit Ukraine 3 years in a row (in his A History of Ukraine, Mikhail Hrushevsky, described by the Nationalists themselves as Ukraine's leading historian, writing of the year 1932, claimed that 'Again a year of drought coincided with chaotic agricultural conditions'.

Professor Michael Florinsky, who struggled against the Bolsheviks during the Civil War, noted: `Severe droughts in 1930 and 1931, especially in the Ukraine, aggravated the plight of farming and created near famine conditions'. )

-The third cause of the famine was a typhoid epidemic that ravaged Ukraine and North Caucausus. (Dr. Hans Blumenfeld, internationally respected city planner and recipient of the Order of Canada, worked as an architect in Makayevka, Ukraine during the famine. He wrote: `There is no doubt that the famine claimed many victims. I have no basis on which to estimate their number .... Probably most deaths in 1933 were due to epidemics of typhus, typhoid fever, and dysentery. Waterborne diseases were frequent in Makeyevka; I narrowly survived an attack of typhus fever.'

Horsley Grant, the man who made the absurd estimate of 15 million dead under the famine --- 60 per cent of an ethnic Ukrainian population of 25 million in 1932 --- noted at the same time that `the peak of the typhus epidemic coincided with the famine .... it is not possible to separate which of the two causes was more important in causing casualties.')

-The fourth cause of the famine was the disorder provoked by the reorganization of agriculture and the equally profound upheaval in economic and social relations: lack of experience, improvisation and confusion in orders, lack of preparation and leftist radicalism among some of the poorer peasants and some of the civil servants. (Hans Blumenfeld gives, in his autobiography, a résumé of what he experienced during the famine in Ukraine: "The famine was caused by a conjunction of a number of factors. First, the hot dry summer of 1932, which I had experienced in northern Vyatka, had resulted in crop failure in the semiarid regions of the south. Second, the struggle for collectivization had disrupted agriculture. Collectivization was not an orderly process following bureaucratic rules. It consisted of actions by the poor peasants, encouraged by the Party. The poor peasants were eager to expropriate the kulaks,'' but less eager to organize a cooperative economy. By 1930 the Party had already sent out cadres to stem and correct excesses .... After having exercised restraint in 1930, the Party put on a drive again in 1932. As a result, in that year the kulak economy ceased to produce, and the new collective economy did not yet produce fully. First claim on the inadequate product went to urban industry and to the armed forces; as the future of the entire nation, including the peasants, depended on them, it could hardly be otherwise .... `In 1933 rainfall was adequate. The Party sent its best cadres to help organize work in the kolkhozes. They succeeded; after the harvest of 1933 the situation improved radically and with amazing speed. I had the feeling that we had been pulling a heavy cart uphill, uncertain if we would succeed; but in the fall of 1933 we had gone over the top and from then on we could move forward at an accelerating pace.' )

And to top it all off here's what the Ukrainian nationalist Isaac Mazepa had to say about it

"At first there were disturbances in the kolkhosi [collective farms] or else the Communist officials and their agents were killed, but later a system of passive resistance was favored which aimed at the systematic frustration of the Bolsheviks' plans for the sowing and gathering of the harvest .... The catastrophe of 1932 was the hardest blow that Soviet Ukraine had to face since the famine of 1921-- 1922. The autumn and spring sowing campaigns both failed. Whole tracts were left unsown, in addition when the crop was being gathered ... in many areas, especially in the south, 20, 40 and even 50 per cent was left in the fields, and was either not collected at all or was ruined in the threshing."

--Original credit for above comment to reddit user Denntarg

I'm not super familiar with the specific situation so I'll defer to others in this thread, but I'd still like to add my two cents - few (if any, even) famines in history were truly caused by nature. Farmers are smart, and tend to have diverse income streams and food sources, if something incredibly crazy happens one year that kills off all the crops, they can still rely on food stores and livestock to survive. Look at any famine and you'll generally find a war, aristocracy/landlords keeping people impoverished, mismanagement, or other human causes. It's only when people are already dirt poor that things like a drought will lead to starvation.

A great example of this is the Irish potato famine. It's true that the failure of the potato crop was a natural occurrence. It's also true that food was being exported to England during the famine to pay the English landlords who had decided they owned everything. Nature makes an extremely convenient scapegoat because (what should be) small problems occur all the time, and it is often the case (as with the potato famine) that those with the power to set the narrative are also the ones with the power to have prevented it, and thus have every reason to deflect blame onto the weather.

As for which humans were at fault in this specific situation, I don't know enough to say, but I find emizeko's narrative credible. All landlords are bastards, after all, and farms are much less efficient when the farm is owned by a landlord because the farmer does not receive the benefit of labor spent improving the land and nurturing the soil. But I'm skeptical of any narrative that attributes the primary cause to the weather, for the above reasons.

I'm sure some people will disagree with me, but I believe it's important to say clearly that nature is not the enemy, because of how often it is used to deflect blame. When r/neoliberal tries to justify sweatshops, for example, their argument depends upon the assumption that the natural state of humanity is so abysmal and miserable that sweatshops are an improvement. Making it seem like the world is just naturally awful is a very useful piece of propaganda for the people who are making the world so awful, not just because it deflects blame but also because it serves as a boogeyman - "If we change anything, then we disrupt the delicate balance by which we've escaped the horrible clutches of nature where everyone dies at 40 and you starve every time it doesn't rain."

This doesn't answer the question, but imo, whether or not the Holodomor happened and how is not a relevant question to ask (except out of curiosity), and that's true no matter what your position is on it.

What are the actual ideological consequences? Everyone agrees that, had it been a state-organized genocide, that would be extremely bad and morally wrong. If there were a significant amount of people going around saying "the Holodomor happened and was a purposeful genocide and I think that was a good thing" then it would be highly relevant because those people would be fucking nuts and would need to be addressed in some way.

So if it's just the facts at issue, then you could use it as an argument for or against the USSR's governmental structure; it would be a reason to oppose that kind of organization, the logic being a government that allows that sort of thing is a bad idea. In that case, though, basically everyone agrees that the state could have orchestrated such a genocide if it for some reason wanted to; this isn't unique to the Soviet Union, plenty of states with all sorts of different organizational structures have committed terrible atrocities. So if someone is trying to make the (bad) argument "Soviet-style government enabled the Holodomor and is therefore bad," whether or not it actually happened and was a genocide is paradoxically not relevant here either.

Ultimately the reason people care so much about it is to either make the point "USSR good" or "USSR bad" which I see as pointless and more of an aesthetic thing than something with actual consequences in the real world. As a leftist I'm not really invested in whether people have an overall positive impression of the USSR, I'm invested in determining which of their practices were good and which were bad and learning lessons that can actually be applied in the future instead of LARPing that it's 90 years ago.

It's true that people use it to propagandize against socialism, but even then, it seems better to point out that socialism isn't inherently tied to the actions of socialist states, or states that claimed to be socialist, than to get into arguments over what those actions were.