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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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I was always told the Stalin quote: "one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic"
Except there is no evidence he ever said this.
Nothing sours your opinion on an ideology like realizing its biggest proponents have been lying to you your whole life and they almost got away with it without you noticing.
Stalin did say this though: "I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy."
Sure but like, the thing people attribute the quote to be about most certainly did fucking happen. After all, nothing quite sours your opinion on an ideology like mass genocide
There was never a genocide. That was also made up
... I'm sorry? The Purges were made up? The systemic starvation of Ukraine was made up? The mass deportations in a deliberate attempt to break up and assimilate various non-slavic groups and cultures was made up? There's so many things here that you're claiming are 'made up' that I think I'd hit the word limit listing them all.
Next you'll be telling me Troksy just accidentally fell on that icepick
How does a purge of corrupt officials constitute a genocide? Let alone mass genocide which was your claim.
There was no systemic starvation of Ukrainians. There was famine that killed a comparable number of Russians and Kazakhs. However, Soviet industrialization and dam building ended a cycle of harsh famines that predated communism, providing a stable food supply for Ukrainians and all nationalities in the Soviet Union.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/UKR/ukraine/population
From the beginning of this graph to the end of communism, the Ukrainian population grew 13 million. That's unusual if Stalin wanted to genocide Ukrainians, seems like he's not very good at it. Seems like the more effective genocidal policy based on the graph starts immediately after the end of communism. Curious.
And no, Stalin killing Trotsky was not made up I don't think. But I have no issue with that; I only wish he had gotten to all of the Trotskyists.
Oh so there were a million corrupt officials all deserving death were there? Perhaps genocide is technically the wrong word due to the lack of a specific focus, but that sure is an awful lot of death which I dunno, I somewhat doubt was done with good intentions, given it was fuelled by a paranoid maniac and also targeted minority groups. You trying to tell me that The Polish Operation was necessary?
...I think most historians agree that the Holodomor was either a systemic man-made famine with the purpose of genocide, or the single worst agricultural fuck up in the history of the world, with the blame falling squarely on the Soviet government due to their forced collectivisation programme. Also it's real convenient that your graph only starts in 1950, three years before Stalin's death and twenty years after the Holodomor. And I mean a population growth of 13 million from 1950 to 1991? If we go by some estimates, that means it took 40 years to recover from the 10 million population deficit caused by the Holodomor. Also, you know genocide isn't just about straight murder right? It's about stamping out an entire culture, something that very much did happen to Ukraine, and the USSR's success at Russification is literally one of the things Putin is using to excuse his invasion.
Also I see you not answering the question about the deportation and forced assimilation of various groups in occupied areas under the Soviet regime. Yes population transfer with the purpose of fragmenting and destroying a cultural group is genocide. I mean I sure you wouldn't argue against it being anything else if the subject was America or Australia doing the same thing to their respective native peoples.
Yezhov was responsible for that. He abused his power, and was rightly executed.
Collectivization of farming happened in every modern economy in the world. There's a reason why only 4 countries in the US produce all of the chicken and eggs. It is simply more efficient than having thousands individual farmers. When the USSR began, they still plowed fields with tractors. Before and after the Russian revolution, malnutrition was the norm. To end this, agriculture has to be modernized like it had been in other countries. This had to be built from scratch. There were virtually no factories building tractors, harvesters, etc. Dams offset the effects of drought by creating reservoirs of water in good times to allow saving for bad times. The USSR had some of the world's greatest hydroelectric projects, but these could not be built immediately. So clearly, prioritization of industry was vital for population growth to be sustained with a stable food supply.
In a capitalist system the market determines food prices. If people can't afford to buy food at the market price, the food is destroyed, and production is scaled back. Sometimes food is destroyed in massive quantities on purpose to manipulate the market. There are very recent examples of this in the US where fresh milk is simply dumped down the drain by the gallon. Before collectivization, some farmers in the USSR were destroying grain. After collectivization, this type of rebellion and manipulation is not possible.
When farmland is parcelized, it makes it hard for the individual landowners to afford the necessary equipment to increase output. When farmland is consolidated, a dozen farmers can pool together funds to buy a tractor. In capitalist countries, this happened gradually over time when more efficient larger farms bought out smaller ones, cutting out small farmers completely. In the USSR, this process was accelerated and they did not have to wait decades to modernize, it could happen in years. And at the end of the day, the small farmers still had a stake. These soviet policies did not cause the famine. They would have prevented it if they could have been implemented sooner.
Why not say 100 million Ukrainians since we are just making up numbers? 10 million is like double the estimate for ALL the USSR, not just Ukraine. And that's the figure coming from scholars who say the Holodomor was even a thing. Like, according to them, it was 2-3 million Ukrainians. How does that create a deficit of 10 million?
I went for the first result when searching "Ukraine population graph." Most results on Google start at 1950. What, is Worldometers communist now? I'm sorry professor, I know this isn't A+ work, but frankly, I give a shit about other things besides debate silly people online class.
This is a classic dishonest motte and bailey tactic. When most people think genocide, they think of it as mass murder and forced sterilization targeting a specific ethnic group with the goal of elimination of that group. The same claim was made with the Uyghur genocide to get the idea in people's heads that China was mass murdering and sterilizing Uyghurs, an obvious lie if you research it. Then when people respond with scrutiny they backpedal and call it actually a "cultural genocide," whatever that means. But every claim that I've seen of a cultural genocide in Xinjiang I have later found was a lie. It's easy to debunk when we live in the 21st century, you can go to China and film people and buildings. Back then, not so much. Psyops in the news make their way into the textbooks.
Nationalism was limited by the USSR when it contradicted Proletarian Internationalism. For this reason the Russian tricolor was banned, and the official Russian flag was only a variation of the Soviet one. Is that cultural genocide against the Russians? If Ukrainian culture is flying a Wolfsangel flag, venerating Stepan Bandera, etc., then I guess they were suppressed. I'm not crying over it though. I think its clear Communists did Ukraine better than the current nationalists do.
It's the exact opposite! Listen again to Putin's speech on the eve of the SMO. He blames Lenin and communism for giving too much away to Ukraine. Lenin recognized Ukraine as a nation, which is a stretch. Then he gave Ukraine Russian land in the Southeast. Stalin gave Ukraine part of Poland, and Kruschev gave Ukraine Crimea. If anything, the communists did Ukrainization of Russia, and this is what Putin reacts against in his speech. You have it twisted.
They could have consolidated everything under the RSFSR during the revolution. This would have violated the Marxist principle of self determination of nations. Read Stalin's "On the National Question." The USSR's legislative system was even reformed from a unicameral to a bicameral system, introducing the Soviet of nationalities, giving smaller nationalities in the USSR disproportionately higher representation. This is comparable to the US, where despite California having nearly 80 times the population of Wyoming, they both have two senators, equal representation. Instead of over-representing rural people, in the USSR, smaller nationalities were over-represented.
...Yezhov was executed due to internal politics, his deputy's influence on Stalin, purging his own men, and just Stalin being paranoid. On the other hand, Stalin was afraid of a fifth column attack from within, as that happened over in Spain during the communist regime there. He was the one who ordered the operations, we have reports where he comments on how good things are going on the murdering Poles front, he was not unaware or mislead about this, he instigated it. Claiming Yezhov was executed and removed from history over the ethical concerns of genocide is a pretty laughable one.
Also, what Motte and Baily? No when I think genocide I also think about systemic cultural erasure not just the murder and sterilisation part. Because my own country's done that. Most of Europe has, in one way or another. It's impossible to talk about any country's history without bumping into the concept in one way or another. That definition has been around for a pretty damn long time. And it so happens that the USSR did rather a lot of it. The Holodomor is admittedly a complicated issue to unravel (not helped by your apparent dismissal of it? Like, you do know Glasnost happened right? The USSR did give you permission to acknowledge that there at least was a famine in Ukraine), but if you want I can give you some lovely examples from my next door neighbours over in the Baltics. Not to mention what the USSR tried to do to Finland.
Not because of anything China's done. Literally the only context that mentiong them would make sense in is with their own great famine (which slight errata on my part, the 49-51 great famine is the worst man made famine in human history, not the Holodomor) so where the fuck did you pull Uyghurs from? Kinda think that's a bit of a Freudian slip there mate.
Also I fucking know what collectivisation is mate, a textbook definition won't change the fact that even with the most neutral idealistic stance the USSR royally fucked over their attempt with Ukraine. That's not what's the debate's about. That's about the size and if it was sheer incompetence or something more politically motivated.
Anyways oh my god you're an unironic Stalin apologist aren't you?
Maybe that's what YOU think, but that's not what MOST people think, which is what I said. The Oxford dictionary defines genocide: "The deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of people from a particular group identified as having a shared ethnicity, nationality, etc…" Says nothing about culture, and is pretty unambiguous that genocide requires "deliberate and systematic killing" which is not what you saw in Ukraine. That's how most people would define a genocide.
It's another example where your motte and bailey tactic is used. First, you make the bold claim. Accuse of genocide, mass killings, sterilization, etc. Then when everyone debunks you on it, you fall back to your motte, your safe claim. "Oh no, I didn't mean genocide like they were systematically killing people, I meant it like a CULTURAL genocide. Nobody said anyone was getting mass murdered." What a joke. And like I said already, I bring Uyghurs up because its an example where it could be debunked in real time, because it's in the present. Because the so-called "holodomor" is in the past it is more murky, but the same tactics are used.
Oh, you are trying to psychoanalyze me now. Hmmm. 🤣🤣🤣
Did you not even read what I wrote? Where do I deny there was a famine? I mention it all the time. Did you accidentally reply to the wrong person or something?