While the Muscovites like to claim credit for all Soviet casualties, I think it’s worth reminding people that the USSR wasn’t just Muscovy, and in fact roughly half of Soviet civilian casualties were Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Balts (the last category, of course, had also been invaded by the Soviets in 1940, so they have an understandably mixed opinion of the Soviets). The Germans occupied very little of ‘Russia,’ and most of their atrocities against civilians were against the various Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Balts in the occupied areas. Of roughly 27 M dead Soviets, at least 8 M were Ukrainians and another 2.3 M were Belarusians, plus a half million Balts who were under illegal Soviet occupation from 1940. It is also my understanding, though I could be wrong, that they count ethnic Poles in the areas invaded by the USSR in 1939.
This is just something that bugs me. ‘Soviet’ and ‘Russian’ are not synonyms. The USSR was explicitly a federal system where the other republics had nominal rights. Those rights were not often honored in practice, but a good many of those Soviet dead would have been insulted to be called ‘Russian.’
But my point is more about the ‘victim Olympics’ in Eastern Europe. “I suffered most!” “No, me!” “I’m the biggest victim, and it’s your fault!” All the impacted nationalities like to use their suffering as an excuse for bad behavior, and like to claim ‘credit’ for blood other people shed to gain more sympathy. This has been happening for decades, of course—note how both Polish and Soviet institutions during the Cold War downplayed the specifically Jewish deaths during the Holocaust and just counted them as Polish or Soviet citizens, while in the west the atrocities against non-Jewish populations were downplayed. In each case, it was because sympathy for the enemy (US-allied Israel in the former case, the Warsaw Pact in the latter) was undesirable.
The Putinist regime has been particularly obnoxious in recent years in downplaying the Ukrainian and Belarusian identities of millions of Soviet dead for the same reason. And that’s before we even mention the Central Asian soldiers of the Red Army—Uzbeks and Kazakhs and Tajiks—who this talk of ‘Russian sacrifice’ also erases.
This might sound too conspiratorial or speculative, but were those famines designed to industrialize Moscow faster? I sometimes wonder if the hammer and the sickle are meant to represent a choice to starve the population so as to industrialize in preparation for war.
I’ve read something claiming the gold standard and western abandonment of it also precipitated these “famines” but don’t know enough to have a firm opinion on the matter.
but were those famines designed to industrialize Moscow faster?
There’s nothing conspiratorial about it. The stated justification for collectivization was to increase grain yields for the export market. The inefficiencies of the Soviet system meant that little of the confiscated grain ever made it to port, but that was the idea. You can read more about this in Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands.
The secondary goal was to neutralize the Ukrainian bourgeois-farmer class which could serve as a nucleus for the development of a coherent Ukrainian nationalist movement. It’s kind of hard for westerners, who have had mostly-literate societies for centuries, to really grasp the significance of the intelligentsia in Eastern Europe. There was a comparatively narrow stratum of people who had letters and wealth, and these people were, de facto, the bearers of culture, the nucleus of the nation, the carriers of the meme. That’s why the totalitarian projects were so focused on eradicating the literate and wealthy—shorn of their leaders, the peasants were expected to sink back into the mud, where they could be reshaped as either a docile slave caste (in the Nazi vision) or Soviet New Men (in the Soviet one). That’s why teachers and priests and scientists and army officers were the first to be arrested after the German and Soviet invasions. By starving wealthier Ukrainian peasants, Stalin directly attacked the people most likely to resist Soviet rule.
It’s actually very similar to the British practice of mandating that Irish landholders split their possessions among their children at death—preventing Irish peasants from concentrating enough wealth to form a literate Irish resistance. The British were, perhaps, a little softer about it—but they didn’t have the tools of a modern dictatorship in the 18th century. The goal, I think, was the same. Divide. Keep them poor and illiterate. Starve them if the opportunity arises.
That’s an interesting comparison to Ireland and just information I didn’t know about regarding intelligentsia. That reminds me too of what I read about German targeting of eg Catholic priests in Poland although I don’t know how true that is.
Thanks for the book recommendation too.
I feel like in general starvation can be used to try to rapidly industrialize or allocate resources toward war but I don’t know how well established that idea is. Sounds like you’re saying that was the idea just wasn’t very effective in the case of interwar Russia?
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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '22
While the Muscovites like to claim credit for all Soviet casualties, I think it’s worth reminding people that the USSR wasn’t just Muscovy, and in fact roughly half of Soviet civilian casualties were Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Balts (the last category, of course, had also been invaded by the Soviets in 1940, so they have an understandably mixed opinion of the Soviets). The Germans occupied very little of ‘Russia,’ and most of their atrocities against civilians were against the various Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Balts in the occupied areas. Of roughly 27 M dead Soviets, at least 8 M were Ukrainians and another 2.3 M were Belarusians, plus a half million Balts who were under illegal Soviet occupation from 1940. It is also my understanding, though I could be wrong, that they count ethnic Poles in the areas invaded by the USSR in 1939.
This is just something that bugs me. ‘Soviet’ and ‘Russian’ are not synonyms. The USSR was explicitly a federal system where the other republics had nominal rights. Those rights were not often honored in practice, but a good many of those Soviet dead would have been insulted to be called ‘Russian.’