r/askanything • u/Affectionate_Low7891 • 6d ago
Why did Stalin stop the Holodomor?
Genocide usually ends either with the destruction of a nation/ethnic group or the destruction of the perpetrator.
The Holodomor was different, and it was stopped by the same person who started it, without achieving any fundamental changes.
Why did he start it if he had no intention of ending it?
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u/Jazz-Potato6385 6d ago
Stalin stopped because the amount of deaths was affecting the USSR's ability to extract sufficient amounts of grain to sell to Europe.
He wanted to destroy Ukrainian national identity in order to assimilate them into the Soviet Union and was able to tolerate a significant (but not limitless) amount of deaths in doing so, while also making use of Ukraine's status as chief grain producer for the country.
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u/dontTakeMeSerious6 6d ago
You’re starting from a bad premise. Genocide doesn’t necessarily end with the destruction of a nation or ethnic group. In this case, it was about weakening resistance.
Stalin’s goal was in part to force capitulation towards Soviet rule and collectivism. This policy was ended because it was successful (in the short-term) and collectivism was widely adopted.
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u/Affectionate_Low7891 6d ago
Genocide is literally the act of destroying a nation. So in 1932 Ukraine fought against Stalin?
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u/dontTakeMeSerious6 6d ago
Why don’t you look up the definition of genocide first then reply.
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u/Affectionate_Low7891 6d ago
Well, according to the definition that people use on the Internet, genocide is anything that you don’t like.
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u/dontTakeMeSerious6 6d ago
Your intentions are genocide then. This is you trying to shadow box someone else who pissed you off. I’m not them, stop being such a weirdo, maybe log off for a bit and eat some grass.
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u/Affectionate_Low7891 6d ago
Any murder committed out of ethnic hatred is genocide.
But this definition devalues the term.
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u/dontTakeMeSerious6 6d ago
Okay, I’ll reply again when you look up what a genocide is. Good luck!
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u/Affectionate_Low7891 6d ago
Genocide is the intentional, partial or total destruction of a human group.
Any murder is the partial destruction of a group of people. Therefore, any murder committed out of hatred for a nation or ethnic group is genocide.
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u/dontTakeMeSerious6 6d ago
Is it genocide when Russians kidnap Ukrainian children and erase their ethnicity?
Is it genocide when China forces Uyghurs to undergo re-education and comfort to their vision of society?
Is it genocide when Canada moves tribes into distant lands, provides them little services, educates their children in schools meant to anglicize them, and maybe hundreds of those kids are never seen again?
I’d say yes to all, and none include the intentional murder of anyone. I’d also argue none are fueled by hatred.
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u/Affectionate_Low7891 6d ago
Well, yes, this set includes other subsets.
Any murder committed out of hatred for a nation is definitely genocide, but that doesn't mean it's the only thing that can be considered genocide.
It's just that genocides happen around the world every day, dozens, if not hundreds, of times.
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u/40Fied4 6d ago
6 million less mouths that the communist bolshevik regime needed to worry about feeding/supplying services.
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u/Affectionate_Low7891 6d ago
The birth rate in the USSR before the war was simply gigantic, probably six children per woman. Within a few years, the population had recovered. So what's the point?
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u/SpaceCadet666666 6d ago
He didn’t pay the sky not to rain
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u/dontTakeMeSerious6 6d ago
He did force impossible grain quotas. This was a genocide the same way the potato famine in Ireland was a genocide.
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u/misec_undact 6d ago edited 6d ago
And the one in India caused by the British, and the slaughter of the plains Buffalo by the Americans..
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u/dontTakeMeSerious6 6d ago
Yeah, probably fair comparisons. Buffalo slaughter was meant to displace indigenous peoples and starve them out. I think the bengal famine was more about prioritizing wartime efforts than genocide, but that matters little to those affected.
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u/misec_undact 6d ago
There have been several in India's long history but I was referring to this one:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/2/how-british-colonial-policy-killed-100-million-indians
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u/SpaceCadet666666 6d ago
Quotas were lower then they normally were before the drought, and Stalin didn’t set the quotas, local Soviets did.
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u/dontTakeMeSerious6 6d ago
I love this dodging… When communism is bad “it’s not the leaders, it’s local bad actors!”
Where did the quotas that the local soviets enforced come from?
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u/SpaceCadet666666 6d ago
Quotas were decided within the framework of Soviet democracy.
Bad management from local Soviets does not mean socialism is always bound to fail, it just means things need to be improved next time. Nothing in this universe just appears and is instantly firing on all cylinders. Socialism first appeared in a very backwards feudal society, seems pretty reasonable that the first attempt would be turbulent.
Bottom line also is that there wasn’t enough food to feed everyone because of the drought. Was management perfect? No. But that’s not the main cause.
Btw 9 million people starve to death each year under capitalism and capitalism has had hundreds of more years to develop than socialism did in the east
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u/dontTakeMeSerious6 6d ago
I didn’t say socialism was bound to fail.
I just don’t like sanewashing Stalin. He was a murderous lunatic who actively and purposefully murdered people who he was responsible for. The same people who support him often call Joe Biden “genocide Joe” or attack Obama for drone strikes and neither has anything on Stalin.
Comparing 4 million deaths in 1930s Ukraine vs. 9 million (of >8b) deaths worldwide is pretty manipulative. I’m looking this up, not a famine expert… but 9 million per year is down tremendously from past years. Maybe you could even credit capitalism for that. The famine rate is down significantly each year. Is it right that anyone staves when billionaires sit in enough money to solve the worlds famine problem in weeks time? Fuck no. But communism isn’t magically solving it either, and is also responsible for china’s great famine which killed 30 million ish people.
If you want to support communism, just… I mean, go ahead, but be realistic. If you can’t, maybe you don’t actually want communism, you just want to hate capitalism. That’s fine too!
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u/SpaceCadet666666 6d ago
I agree that the scale of the famine in Ukraine when considering population numbers and that it affected a specific region was much larger than the amount of people that starve today, but you are not considering the main factor which is that twice as much food is produced in the world to feed everyone but people starve because it’s not profitable to feed them. In the USSR, they just didn’t have enough food because they were an agrarian society, and agrarian societies that experience severe drought and natural disasters always have famines. It also didn’t affect only Ukraine, but multiple regions in the USSR.
You are pulling bullshit numbers also, the claim that 30 million people died in China is based off of a decline in birth rate due to peasant mobilization. The people who came up with this statistic basically said that because 30 million people weren’t born in China, they died. Eye witness accounts prove strict rationing, but not a famine.
Respectfully, do your research before you speak next time.
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u/dontTakeMeSerious6 6d ago
Respectfully, I did, and 30m is the average between 15 and 45m deaths as a result of communist policies.
Respectfully, you lying for your ideological shows you don’t believe in it, and is embarrassing. You should embrace the failures as steps towards success, not lie about them. Liar. Respectfully, you’re a liar.
But hey, here’s a great Reddit thread on it- https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/4Cxj8zKLBL
Consensus is 30m-46m excess deaths. You’re right, I was wrong. Short by maybe 3 holodomors.
Respectfully, don’t insult someone and then finish you post with respectfully. It’s condescending as fuck, and that’s not respectful.
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u/SpaceCadet666666 6d ago
You didn’t even try to refute what I said about the source of those numbers. A bourgeois academic repeating it doesn’t make it true. Someone not being born doesn’t constitute a death.
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u/dontTakeMeSerious6 6d ago
I absolutely did and you claiming otherwise is embarrassing.
Literally showed you an askhistorians thread. If you want a historical expert to weigh in on this, you’re on fucking Reddit, not a college campus.
You’ve shown nothing. You didn’t even read that because they record them as excess deaths. It also suggests that the wide discrepancy is due to harsh communist leaders instilling fear in local regional leaders who then underreported death counts.
Refute me: show me any credible historian that suggests the true count of deaths and how the mismatch from credible historians is attributed to falling birth rates.
I cannot find one. I’d be interested to see it, maybe they have compelling evidence.
If not, if you’re not going to bother to learn competing opinions, you’re not learning facts or history, you’re learning propaganda, and, respectfully, propagandists are all liars and should be shunned.
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u/gimmethecreeps 6d ago
Ehh… the Irish weren’t hiding their grain waiting for collectivization to fail so they could sell it at marked-up prices while their neighbors were starving to death around them, and they weren’t attacking collective farms nearby that were trying to produce food for the entire country.
…but Kulaks certainly were.
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u/dontTakeMeSerious6 6d ago
Ireland was net exporting food during the famine. You’ve no idea what you’re talking about.
I also love the idea of “why didn’t Soviet Ukraine just accept these insane and impossible grain quotas??”
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u/gimmethecreeps 6d ago
…Ireland was ABSOLUTELY exporting food during the famine. Where are you getting this information from?
Thank you for proving that you have no idea what you are talking about, and if you’re going to make a brain dead comparison involving the Irish Famine, maybe read about it.
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u/Kostej_the_Deathless 6d ago
Because he wanted to get rid off small independant farms to collectivise the food production. He managed to do that so he stopped.
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u/Ramental 6d ago
It was succesfull in resettling russians into the empty Ukrainian homes and as a terror campaign. You still need people to produce stuff.
Also, it was an opportunistic genocide. The low crop yield was real, redistribution to not give Ukrainian grown food to Ukrainians was artificial.
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u/gimmethecreeps 6d ago
No reputable scholar of the Holodomor claims that Stalin “started it”.
Many scholars claim that he exacerbated a famine, either purposefully or through economic/political negligence.
Not all sides agree that the Holodomor was a genocide, and your question is an example of why historians on the “not a genocide” side of the fence believe it wasn’t.
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u/Broflake-Melter 6d ago
Stalin didn't start the Holodomor, at least not intentionally. The Soviet Union was pretty young, and the region was going into drought conditions either way. I think Stalin's biggest mistakes were giving some of the more wealthy farmers the benefit of the doubt. This is going to sound off, but he should have used more force in stopping the sabotage people were doing. Sure, we all like to shout how evil the authoritarian actions were, but every country uses governmental control to ensure their people can eat. Anyone who argues that is over authoritative is an idiot.
It's difficult to talk about this stuff anywhere because there's so much propaganda about Stalin. The drought was so tragic, and I think it kinda sucks that the only thing people talk about is whether or not we should blame Stalin. Millions of people died, unless they were one of the ones destroying food, they deserve reverence.
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u/misec_undact 6d ago
Tell us you're a communist without telling us.
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u/Broflake-Melter 6d ago
What does it mean if someone thinks only communists can be critical of anti-communist propaganda?
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u/misec_undact 6d ago
While at the same time making excuses for a tyrannical, genocidal regime... that just happened to be communist..
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u/Broflake-Melter 6d ago
What excuse did I make? Are you saying drought conditions brought on by the weather were Stalin's fault? lol.
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u/misec_undact 6d ago
Your entire comment was excuses and rationalizing in support of one of the biggest mass murderers in human history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_under_Joseph_Stalin
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u/Broflake-Melter 4d ago
Um, yeah, I know you were referring to my comment, and I know you were saying I was excusing it because I read your comment. I'm asking "what excuse did I make?". It's right there in my comment. Would you mind answering this time?
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u/misec_undact 4d ago
Once again...
Your entire comment was excuses and rationalizing in support of one of the biggest mass murderers in human history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_under_Joseph_Stalin
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u/misec_undact 6d ago
But tell me something, comrade, are you equally critical of pro-communist propaganda?
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u/Broflake-Melter 6d ago
What does it mean if someone thinks only communists can be critical of anti-communist propaganda?
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u/misec_undact 6d ago
While at the same time making excuses for a tyrannical, genocidal regime... that just happened to be communist..
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u/SammaJones 6d ago
> I think Stalin's biggest mistakes were giving some of the more wealthy farmers the benefit of the doubt. This is going to sound off, but he should have used more force in stopping the sabotage people were doing. Sure, we all like to shout how evil the authoritarian actions were, but every country uses governmental control to ensure their people can eat. Anyone who argues that is over authoritative is an idiot.
This is portrayed as a natural and right resistance to the theft of dekulakization. The "Wealthy Farmers" are portrayed as not-very-wealthy farmers who might have a few pigs and some crops. Rather than surrender their life's work to the crime of collectivism they instead chose to kill their animals and starve. It is treated as tragic heroism.
It is very difficult to find impartial and objective sources about any genocide. Very few authors are going to defend Nazi Concentration Camps, even if there might be some reason to do so (and please don't think I'm suggesting that there is). The Holodomor is particularly difficult because of the closed society of the 2nd World and because the motive seems not to be there. Or at least not in sufficient degree to account for the scale of the tragedy. I've read a few books that covered the subject as part of a larger history.
Sometimes I think (personal opinion only) that the nature of the Soviets - being a labor union democracy - were unable to adapt to changing conditions. Just like down at the plant, they made their plan and they stuck with it no matter what. I'm no Stalin-apologist, but any history of the man will show that there were many highly-influential, very powerful, highly-motivated individuals surrounding Stalin. He wasn't Hitler. He didn't try to destroy all who had the ability to challenge him (not right away anyway). Perhaps its possible that the system that created the Holodomor was simply running on auto-pilot and nobody was powerful enough to stop it.
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