How Joseph Stalin Starved Millions in the Ukrainian Famine

At the height of the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine under Joseph Stalin, starving people roamed the countryside, desperate for something, anything to eat. In the village of Stavyshche, a young peasant boy watched as the wanderers dug into empty gardens with their bare hands. Many were so emaciated, he recalled, that their bodies began to swell and stink from the extreme lack of nutrients.

"You could see them walking about, just walking and walking, and one would drop, and then another, and so on it went," he said many years later, in a case history collected in the late 1980s by a Congressional commission. In the cemetery outside the village hospital, overwhelmed doctors carried the bodies on stretchers and tossed them into an enormous pit.....

continued @ the link above

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Rogue Valley said:

How Joseph Stalin Starved Millions in the Ukrainian Famine

Cruel efforts under Stalin to impose collectivism and tamp down Ukrainian nationalism left an estimated 3.9 million dead.

A string of carts with bread confiscated from peasants, circa 1932.



A look at Joseph Stalin's efforts to starve Ukraine into submission. A genocide today known as the Holodomor (a Ukrainian word that translates as "to kill by starvation").

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Felis Leo said:

Since you are very interested in the Russia/Eurasia, Rogue Valley, I highly recommend for your consideration Stephen Kotkin's epic Stalin biography and history in trilogy format. It does go into detail about the historical context of Russia and Eurasia, the motivations behind Stalin and his coterie's push for collectivization, and the self-destructively harmful methods used to bring it about in order to crush opposition and supposed "class enemies." One of the enduring themes in the books is Stalin's general fear of "capitalist encirclement," and the belief that Russia's former periphery states, such as the Ukraine and the Baltic States would be used as launchpads by imperialist powers to invade the Soviet Union and unseat the Communist Party.

Additionally, it goes into the history of Russia's vastness, and the eternal issue of regimes prior to Stalin's and their inability to fully exert control over the entirety of Russia's vast and varied countryside. Not even the most vicious Czars managed to exert full control over the country, and had to constantly do a delicate dance of playing interests against each other, whether courtier against courtier, Boyar against peasant, city versus countryside, etc. Collectivization was Stalin's means of cutting the former Czarist Empire's eternal Gordian Knot. Forced collectivization as we know caused horrible shortages, inefficiencies and mismanagement, but it allowed the Communist Party to assert control over the country. Essentially, Stalin preferred that the countryside be inefficiently under state control (and thus under his control) than be efficient, highly productive, but autonomous and possibly given to allow the countryside to turn against the industrialized cities.

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Rogue Valley said:

How Joseph Stalin Starved Millions in the Ukrainian Famine

Cruel efforts under Stalin to impose collectivism and tamp down Ukrainian nationalism left an estimated 3.9 million dead.

A string of carts with bread confiscated from peasants, circa 1932.



A look at Joseph Stalin's efforts to starve Ukraine into submission. A genocide today known as the Holodomor (a Ukrainian word that translates as "to kill by starvation").

Click to expand...

joko104 said:

So why is this on this International Politics board and not this board: https://www.debatepolitics.com/history/ ?

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Rogue Valley said:

When you become a Mod, I'll answer that question. Until then, MYOB.

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Rogue Valley said:

How Joseph Stalin Starved Millions in the Ukrainian Famine

Cruel efforts under Stalin to impose collectivism and tamp down Ukrainian nationalism left an estimated 3.9 million dead.

A string of carts with bread confiscated from peasants, circa 1932.



A look at Joseph Stalin's efforts to starve Ukraine into submission. A genocide today known as the Holodomor (a Ukrainian word that translates as "to kill by starvation").

Click to expand...

joko104 said:

Joseph Stalin is dead. The USSR has been dead for decades.

So why is this on this International Politics board and not this board: https://www.debatepolitics.com/history/ ?

I gather this is just a hate on Russians thread, right? It's not like this is something no one knows already.

I suppose a comparative response would be to start a political thread about the USA's mass killing of Native Americans and then proceed to start another political thread on the Democratic Party's KKK after the Civil War as a new political topic thread. Would the Trojan War also correctly go on the International Politics board?

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joko104 said:

To understand Joseph Stalin is to understand the direction the current fascist-socialist Democratic Party is pursuing - a federal socialist collectivist economy entirely managed by a central federal government, enforcing this with fascist tactics.

Although maybe not expressed by the majority of Democrats, many including as high of profile as Oprah have openly expressed they want old conservatives to literally die - and even on this forum there are messages by Democrats wanting all 60,000,000 Trump supporters imprisoned, Christianity outlawed etc. Once a centralized government becomes god, the mass killings soon follow.

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Moderator's Warning:

Stop trying to play mod and derail this thread. Focus on the topic only.