Holodomor Remembrance Day...

[FriendlyFire]

I think you are on to something here. Value parallels are a great way to understand the other point of view. IIRC the view on Holodomor in Russia is negative because it is seen as a deliberate genocide of Ukrainians and because it neglects victims of the same hunger in other parts of USSR. Ukrainians (and Russians, and others) were dying of the same hunger outside the territory of Ukraine, but the current policy on the official victims says that they did not exist.
I have my doubts about the deliberate and project-like nature of this hunger. I do not know enough to call this hunger deliberate, especially in the view of the many hungers that happened in the former Russian Empire. I don't appreciate this deliberate victimhood of specific "high-value people" that is, quite frankly, very common in today's world. Instead of focusing on the common sorrow problems are amplified by selective victimhood.

If we were to make parallels, lets say that in Australia they declared victims of Japanese concentration camps to be the only victims of the Japanese WW2 government, that thousands of South-East Asians, Americans etc didn't suffer in those camps. And they picked a fancy name, such as the "Great Payback of Japanese Criminals for Our Great Asia-Pacific Crusade"? How do you think the governments and people and relatives of those victims of Japanese WW2 policies would feel towards this Australian selectiveness?

Starvation did also affect other parts of Russia, why would that fact be neglected ?
But as you can see where most of the Dying was taking place, its not that hard to figure out what was happen. Where your food production population are dying by the millions but your food consuming regions are mostly fine.
And the State is busy selling and exporting grain.

Should I complain that the Jews havent acknowledge that homosexuals were also being exterminated ? Maybe the Jews should be forced to build monuments to the minorities that were sent into the concentration camps.
The same way that Ukraine remembers that they were the ones being Starved to death, same with the Jews being the ones remember the Jews. Russians Remember the Russian, Australians remember Australians,

 

[red_elk]

Starvation did also affect other parts of Russia, why would that fact be neglected ?

The claims that the famine was deliberately engineered to kill ethnic Ukrainians neglect non-Ukrainian victims which were majority.

 

[Zardnaar]

The claims that the famine was deliberately engineered to kill ethnic Ukrainians neglect non-Ukrainian victims which were majority.

You're mostly nitpicking here. The famines were deliberately engineered at least the responses to it.

And they gave fake tours to hide it but it was kinda impossible.

 

[Birdjaguar]

@FriendlyFire What are the %s in the map key?

 

[Birdjaguar]

I suspect that the Cherokee or the Sioux have not denied the misfortunes of the other Native American tribes though or separated their cause from their own, but I understand your point.

Thats because it is a political invention based on a real hunger in former USSR.

My experience with Native Americans is that they are more focused on the destruction of their culture rather than the collective Indian population. They don't deny it, but just are not very interested.

What are you saying is an "invention"?

 

[red_elk]

@FriendlyFire What are the %s in the map key?

Depopulation.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Depopulation.

Thanks. So regardless of any intent or policy on the part of the Soviet government (or not), most of the deaths happened in the central Ukraine.

EDIT: This wiki article is not very kind to the soviets and points to government action as a significant part of the disaster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932–1933

 

[red_elk]

Thanks. So regardless of any intent or policy on the part of the Soviet government (or not), most of the deaths happened in the central Ukraine.

Even from this truncated map, 4 out of 7 worst affected regions were in Eastern and South-Eastern Ukraine.

Full map includes regions of RSFSR and Kazakhstan

 

[Birdjaguar]

@red_elk Key to your map above:

Famine in the Soviet Union, 1933. Areas of most disastrous famine marked with black. A – grain-consuming regions, B – grain-producing regions. C – former land of Don, Kuban and Terek cossacks, C1 – former land of Ural and Orenburg cossacks. 1. Kola Peninsula, 2. Northern region, 3. Karelia, 4. Komi, 5. Leningrad Oblast, 6. Ivanovo Oblast, 7. Moscow Oblast, 8. Nizhny Novgorod region, 9. Western Oblast, 10. Byelorussia, 11. Central Black Earth Region, 12. Ukraine, 13. Central Volga region, 14. Tatar, 15. Bashkortostan, 16. Ural region, 17. Lower Volga region, 18. North Caucasus Krai, 19. Georgia, 20. Azerbaijan, 21. Armenia.[1]

So areas 12 and 18 were hardest hit.

 

[red_elk]

As a reference, contemporary languages map, which roughly corresponds to ethnic composition.
Most of "red" regions were appended to Ukrainian SSR in 1922, a decade before the famine.

 

[Gelion]

Thanks. So regardless of any intent or policy on the part of the Soviet government (or not), most of the deaths happened in the central Ukraine.

Here are two less Ukraine-centered maps:

Deaths per 1000 in the rural areas:

Deaths per 1000 in urban areas:


I think its enough to prove that not all the deaths were in Ukraine and that the hunger was specifically limited to Ukraine.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I do not think anyone has been saying that only Ukrainians died or that the food crisis was limited to the Ukraine. I think we can all agree that famine happened and that millions died.

The Soviet famine of 1932–1933 killed millions of people in the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, Northern Caucasus, Volga Region and Kazakhstan,[2] the South Urals, and West Siberia.[3][4] It has been estimated that between 3.3[5] and 3.9 million died in Ukraine,[6] between 2 and 3 million died in Russia,[7] and 1.5–2 million (1.3 million of whom were ethnic Kazakhs) died in Kazakhstan.[8][9][10][11] Gareth Jones was the first Western journalist to report the devastation.[12][13][a]

The exact number of deaths is hard to determine due to a lack of records,[6][14] but the number increases significantly when the deaths in the heavily Ukrainian-populated Kuban region are included.

My understanding of the question at hand is this: Did the Soviet Government institute policies or actions that targeted Ukrainians and increased the deaths among them? The law of unintended consequences can account for lots of unexpected deaths in lots of places. Counting how many died is a different issue. I do not know enough Soviet history to know the answer, but there is certainly enough information to see that politics were involved at some level.

 

[red_elk]

I do not know enough Soviet history to know the answer, but there is certainly enough information to see that politics were involved at some level.

So, politics was involved more than during famines of 1922 and 1946?

 

[Birdjaguar]

So, politics was involved more than during famines of 1922 and 1946?

Of course politics were present, but perhaps the politics were different in each of the situations?

Are these "fake news" or real?

Law of Spikelets[edit]

The "Decree About the Protection of Socialist Property", nicknamed by the farmers the Law of Spikelets, was enacted on August 7, 1932. The purpose of the law was to protect the property of the kolkhoz collective farms. It was nicknamed the Law of Spikelets because it allowed people to be prosecuted for gleaning leftover grain from the fields. There were more than 200,000 people sentenced under this law.[35]

Passports[edit]
There was a wave of migration due to starvation and authorities responded by introducing a requirement that passports be used to go between republics and banning travel by rail.

Soviet internal passports (identity cards) were introduced on 27 December 1932 to deal with the exodus of peasants from the countryside. Individuals not having such a document could not leave their homes on pain of administrative penalties, such as internment in Gulag labor camps. The rural population had no right to freely keep passports and thus could not leave their villages without approval. The power to issue passports rested with the head of the kolkhoz, and identity documents were kept by the administration of the collective farms. This measure stayed in place until 1974.[citation needed]

The lack of passports could not completely stop peasants' leaving the countryside, but only a small percentage of those who illegally infiltrated into cities could improve their lot. Unable to find work or possibly buy or beg a little bread, farmers died in the streets of Kharkiv, Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, Vinnytsia, and other major cities of Ukraine.



Stalin's First Five-Year Plan, adopted by the party in 1928, called for rapid industrialization of the economy. With the greatest share of investment put into heavy industry, widespread shortages of consumer goods occurred while the urban labor force was also increasing. Collectivization employed at the same time was expected to improve agricultural productivity and produce grain reserves sufficiently large to feed the growing urban labor force. The anticipated surplus was to pay for industrialization. Kulaks who were the wealthier peasants encountered particular hostility from the Stalin regime. About one million kulak households (1,803,392 people according to Soviet archival data [29]) were liquidated by the Soviet Union. The kulaks had their property confiscated and were executed, imprisoned in Gulags, or deported to penal labor colonies in neighboring lands in a process called Dekulakization. Forced collectivization of the remaining peasants was often fiercely resisted resulting in a disastrous disruption of agricultural productivity. Forced collectivization helped achieve Stalin's goal of rapid industrialization but it also contributed to a catastrophic famine in 1932–33.[30]

 

[PhroX]

It's been a while since I did any reading on the subject, but from what I remember, the general conclusion was that the causes of the initial famine in the Ukraine in early 32 are debatable - there was definitely a confluence of weather and Soviet incompetency but it's not clear whether malice was also involved. However, the actions of the Soviet authorities during that time seriously increased the impact of the famine, and all but guaranteed that it would continue into '33 (they took the farmers' seed grain for god's sake) to the extent that it's very hard to believe they were not at least partially malicious.

 

[FriendlyFire]

The claims that the famine was deliberately engineered to kill ethnic Ukrainians neglect non-Ukrainian victims which were majority.

I dunno, "liquidation" sounds a lot like "Final solution"

Seem there was 3 main causes attributed to the famine.
1) Drought
2) Collectivsation
3) Export of Grain

Can blame Soviet for 1), but 2) and 3) are Soviets own doing.
Yes a lot of Russians also died during the famine, but it seemed that even if Soviets use the famine to break the resistance of kulaks.
The population of Moscow and Leningrade enjoyed eating meat while the rual population was dying by the Millions.

Unlike the Russian famine of 1921–1922, Russia's intermittent drought was not severe in the affected areas at this time
Stalin and other party members had ordered that kulaks were "to be liquidated as a class"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932–1933