this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2025
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Forced famines are fucked up regardless of state ideology. Shame on the UK and on the USSR.
The 1930s famine wasn't forced, though. It was a combination of adverse weather conditions leading to lower crop yields, wealthy farmers called kulaks killing their livestock and burning their crops to "resist collectivization," and some degree of mismanagement. It's important to recognize that pre-1930s, Eastern Europe had regular famines as well, and that following collectivization the 1930s famine was the last famine outside of World War II (when the Nazis took Ukraine, the USSR's breadbasket).
Churchill intentionally caused and extended the Bengal Famine, he hated Indians:
They knowingly took their seed grain.
The Politburo was kept in the dark about how bad the famine was getting:
From: Archive of the President of the Russian Federation. Fond 3, Record Series 40, File 80, Page 58.
Excerpt from the protocol number of the meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party (Bolsheviks) “Regarding Measures to Prevent Failure to Sow in Ukraine, March 16th, 1932.
Letter to Joseph Stalin from Stanislaw Kosior, 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine regarding the course and the perspectives of the sowing campaign in Ukraine, April 26th, 1932.
Letter from Joseph Stalin to Stanislaw Kosior, 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, April 26th, 1932.
Further, quotas were lowered once the Politburo became aware of the extent of famine:
— Mark Tauger. (1992). The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933
There was no intentional famine.
The br*tish and the kulaks