There’s a huge difference between “the famine never happened” and “The widespread crop failures caused famines in some regions due to ineffective policies, bad estimates grain production, and local conflict”.
The former is just as wildly ahistorical as the “Stalin did holodomer because he was evil” that’s taught in schools.
While that might work for someone whose only interest in the event is demonizing (or eulogizing) the USSR, if you actually want to know how and why things happened, a deeper understanding is necessary.
It certainly true that “Stalin did holodomer because he was evil” would be a stupid thing to say. Good thing very few people are actually saying that then.
The actual point is that when the crop failures started happening Stalin decided to make sure it disproportionately hurt non-Russians, especially Ukrainians. Whether that’s technically genocide or not depends how severe it was and what else they were doing to try to Russify the area at the time, but frankly, if we’re talking about the subtleties of the definition of genocide I hope we can agree that whether it crosses that threshold or not what happened was not okay.
Yes, as a matter of fact I did know that Stalin was Georgian. So? He didn’t care about that. He wanted the Soviet Union to be easier to rule, and right or wrong he thought making it less ethnically diverse would help with that goal. He didn’t want the USSR to become more Russian out of some kind of ethnic superiority garbage like the funny mustache guy from around the same time. He wanted it to further cement his control. That was pretty much the primary motivation for everything he did. Motivation isn’t really the issue with that kind of thing though, is it?
A repeat of 1932-1933 Ukraine, really.
Edit: Hoping the downvoters are just confused by what I’m talking about. I’ll just drop this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_denial
There’s a huge difference between “the famine never happened” and “The widespread crop failures caused famines in some regions due to ineffective policies, bad estimates grain production, and local conflict”.
The former is just as wildly ahistorical as the “Stalin did holodomer because he was evil” that’s taught in schools.
While that might work for someone whose only interest in the event is demonizing (or eulogizing) the USSR, if you actually want to know how and why things happened, a deeper understanding is necessary.
It certainly true that “Stalin did holodomer because he was evil” would be a stupid thing to say. Good thing very few people are actually saying that then.
The actual point is that when the crop failures started happening Stalin decided to make sure it disproportionately hurt non-Russians, especially Ukrainians. Whether that’s technically genocide or not depends how severe it was and what else they were doing to try to Russify the area at the time, but frankly, if we’re talking about the subtleties of the definition of genocide I hope we can agree that whether it crosses that threshold or not what happened was not okay.
Removed by mod
Yes, as a matter of fact I did know that Stalin was Georgian. So? He didn’t care about that. He wanted the Soviet Union to be easier to rule, and right or wrong he thought making it less ethnically diverse would help with that goal. He didn’t want the USSR to become more Russian out of some kind of ethnic superiority garbage like the funny mustache guy from around the same time. He wanted it to further cement his control. That was pretty much the primary motivation for everything he did. Motivation isn’t really the issue with that kind of thing though, is it?
Removed by mod
The whole nation starved due to policies in places and people in power.
As in Stalin and stallinist party.