To this day, it remains unknown how many people were executed by the lethal hunger (the Holodomor) in Ukraine in 1932-1933."
Posted on 04/18/2022 3:26:38 PM PDT by Thunder90
>> The issue with small farms is that they can keep their owners affluent but incapable of producing enough output to feed the entire population of the country. This is the cause of repeated famines in Russian Empire and the continuing pattern in early USSR (1920s-1930s), and it is the combining of small plots that eliminated famines in the 1930s.<<
What Stalinist apologist are you getting your information from? Farm collectivization caused unbelievably horrible famines in the 1930s! Meanwhile, exactly the OPPOSITE of what you say: Family food plots take up only 3% of the farm acreage, but 40% of the food production. That means that they are TWENTY times more productive than collective farms.
https://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/economies/Europe/Russia-AGRICULTURE.html
No need to get upset, simply look at the facts.
The famines were a permanent phenomenon in Russia for decades (if not centuries), despite private ownership of land, and they stopped after 1930s.
Here is one ref, on the 1891-1892 famine:
http://people.loyno.edu/~history/journal/1994-5/Lilly.htm
there were many more.
If you can explain this by any factor other than (yes, very brutal) Stalin’s collectivization, please do.
Apropos!
Russian Journal of Economics is a poor source
https://rujec.org/article/49746/
It is not quite so.... try:
https://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/economies/Europe/Russia-AGRICULTURE.html
“Primary agriculture in Russia continues to be dominated by inefficient, Soviet-type collective farms with outdated technologies and management skills and strong political connections, especially at the regional level...
THE LARGE FORMER STATE AND COLLECTIVE FARMS CONTROL MOST LAND.
Farm workers can branch off as private farmers by obtaining a grant of land from their parent farm, though they LACK FULL OWNERSHIP RIGHTS. Private farms and garden plots of individuals account for more than one-half of all agricultural production. Much of the agricultural sector has been almost unaffected by the transition to the free market. Accordingly, the output performance of agriculture has been very weak.
The land code proposed by the Russian legislature (the Duma) DOES NOT CHANGE existing law— that is, it does NOT ALLOW THE FREE PURCHASE AND SALE OF LAND for agricultural use or use the land as collateral for obtaining loans.
Rather, it would ALLOW land to be BOUGHT and SOLD solely for economically insignificant purposes, such as building a summer cottage or dacha.”summer cottage, a dacha.”
The economic reform that began in Russia in the early 1990s reduced Russia’s livestock sector. The down-sizing of the livestock sector ended the need for imports of feed grain, soybeans, and meal. At the same time, imports of meat and other high-value products such as processed foods, fruit, and beverages grew considerably.
OLDER HISTORY:
“George V.Pinchuk. History of Ukraine: The genocide of Ukrainians by Stalin.
Kremlin dictator saw himself emperor who rules the whole world. STALIN thought to expand his realm by invading other countries, which would expand and strengthen the Red Army at any and all cost. Trotsky was disgraced and exiled in 1928. STALIN took some of his ideas through relentless propaganda, made them sound like his own.
Particularly, the main objective of the Soviet state was now to be an accelerated industrialization accompanied by a total “collectivization” of agriculture. THE LATTER meant ELIMINATION of any right of an agricultural worker to own the agricultural produce.
Individual farms were joined into enormous “collective farms” where the local people worked, essentially, like slaves. Formally, the produce of the collective farm was its collective property, but actually BECAME the property of the state, because the collective farms had to sell the produce to the state for ridiculously low prices established by the state organs reporting to the Soviet government and the Communist high-positioned functionaries.
The food “bought” (or, in reality, simply taken) by the state was distributed among the Red Army soldiers and industrial workers in the cities, and also sold abroad, with the proceeds going to the ever-increasing militarization of the USSR.”
The “collective farmers” were left with very little. In most cases, the monetary revenue after “selling” their produce to the state was so tiny that a farmer’s family could afford to buy something like a pair of boots and a set of rough garb-looking clothes per year or two, and little else. The collective farmers were paid for their back-breaking work in kind, like with some grain or potatoes. They were allowed to keep tiny plots of land around their dwellings, and used them for growing vegetables; also, they were allowed to keep liVestock, like one cow and one pig etc.; however, they often had too little time and energy left to take good care of their plots because the work at their collective farm was not legally limited by any hours, and they had to pay taxes for the right to keep liVestock. Thus, the life of peasants was turned into one endless nightmare, with hunger, cold, and disease becoming everyday realities.
MORE RECENT HISTORY
“During the 1998, the economic crisis reduced Russia’s ability to import food. After plunging to extremely low levels in late 1998, agricultural imports rebounded in 1999. Imports of most agricultural and food products grew to roughly 60% of the level of the pre-crisis period. Imports dropped because the crisis reduced consumer incomes, thereby decreasing demand for food in general, and the severe crisis-induced depreciation of the ruble made imported food more expensive compared to Russian domestic output.”
To this day, it remains unknown how many people were executed by the lethal hunger (the Holodomor) in Ukraine in 1932-1933."
STALIN & THE HOLODOMOR
In Ukraine, however, with its milder climate and exquisitely rich soils, that was unheard of. Not only wealthy, but middle-income level Ukrainian peasants became extremely hostile to the idea of communal land and agricultural produce ownership. In 1929-1930, hundreds of peasant uprisings were documented in Ukraine and brutally suppressed by the Red Army and special police force units. At one point, the government backed up and announced that the collective farming should be voluntary. Immediately, the number of Ukrainian peasants who had joined the collective farms plummeted, so the government had to resume repressions and harassment of individual landowners. By the end of 1930, a campaign of mass deportation of wealthy individual landowners (“kulaks” in Russian or “kurkuli” in Ukraine) resulted in forceful re-settlement of hundreds of thousands of rural families from Ukraine to remote areas of Siberia and Middle Asia. Over there, those who managed to survive the most brutal conditions of transportation were organized into “special settlements” not actually differing from concentration camps.
Stalin and the narrow inner circle of his henchmen began task to completely remove UKAINE out of their way to: eliminate it as a nation, a culture, and a political subject.
The task consisted of four parts:
(1) to destroy the intellectual core of Ukraine, its “brain” – the writers, artists, scientists, engineers, managers, doctors, teachers;
(2) to rip off Ukraine’s “heart” – the clergy, the spiritual, religious leaders who remained outside of the control from Moscow;
(3) to wipe out the Ukrainian peasantry with its traditions of individual ownership and responsibility, with its resilience against the dictatorship of the state; and
(4) to kill off all the islets of the Ukrainian language and culture outside the borders of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Stalin wanted to see Ukraine merely as a territory with rich farmland that could be exploited for his pragmatic plan: to strengthen the army that, eventually would subjugate the whole world, molding it into his personal empire.
The most horrific genocide was committed in rural areas. In June 1932, Ulas Chubar, then the head of the government of the Ukrainian SSR, wrote to Stalin that after the forced collectivization and the numerous requisitions of grain, Ukraine urgently needs help or, otherwise, there will be mass starvation. In response, the quotas of grain that the Ukraine farmers “owed” to the government were only increased.
In June 30, 1932, the entire stock of seed grain was taken away from Ukraine. On August 7, 1932, Stalin’s government issued a decree that made it a crime for a farmer to take home even a tiny amount of grain from the collective farm fields. Those who were caught gleaning grain were ordered to be executed on the spot. Only if the weight of the “stolen” grain was equal to, or less than, the weight of approximately 5 kernels of wheat, the execution could be replaced by at least 10 years of hard labor with confiscation of all belongings.
Children were not exempt from this barbaric law.
In that same month of August, employees of all railroads in Ukraine were ordered not to let peasants board the trains going from the rural areas to big cities, unless they had a special permit from their collective farm and local Communist Party authorities.
All highways and country roads were patroled by armed special police units. So, millions of impoverished, exhausted, hungry, sick, barely moving people were herded to the collective farm fields for back-breaking labor every day, without being even minimally compensated and without any chance to escape.
To make things even deadlier, a number of regions in Ukraine (especially areas in the east and southeast where the soil was the richest) were demanded to pay absolutely fantastic fines for not reaching the grain quotas; for example, an area could receive orders to pay its “debt” in grain, and then, as punishment, also 15 times this weight paid with meat of the livestock (which was not there because it had been slaughtered due to hunger and the lack of fodder).
In the many areas that were announced to be “malicious debtors,” all food stores were closed down and farmers’ markets were outlawed. Meanwhile, special armed bands of the military and civilian “activists” continued to raid villages, taking away all food.
Beginning from fall 1932, they received orders not to leave anything edible to the peasants; if they could not carry more food after loading their trucks or carriages, they had to PHYSICALLY DESTROY ANY FOOD they would find in the villagers’ dwellings. So, they POURED SOUP OR STEW ON THE GROUND, STOMPED POTATOES to mesh with their boots etc. They also took away clothes and pottery.
Their activities became openly genocidal.”
Over the fall 1932 and winter 1932-33, the rural dwellers in several major grain-producing areas of Ukraine were dying by thousands over thousands. However, the peak of the genocide was in spring and early summer of 1933, when the villagers had already eaten all dogs, cats, rats, crows, tree bark etc. When the new grass appeared, many people avidly ate it until they died of bowel obstruction. Cannibalism became rampant, people hunting and eating other people (especially children), and then, eventually, eating their own children.
Because of an extremely low amount of albumin in their blood, people looked swollen and lost the capacity to use their muscles.
The dead were everywhere: in the houses, in the yards, on the road from villages to the collective farm fields, and on the fields. Some desperate men and women who still could move traveled illegally to cities with the hope to get food there by begging.
Most of them, however, died during the travel or soon after arrival to a city. The urban dwellers who had small rations of food were told that these new arrivals from villages are the enemies of the people who refuse to work.
The police did not help the dying people and did not allow the city dwellers to help them.
To this day, it remains unknown how many people were executed by the lethal hunger (the Holodomor) in Ukraine in 1932-1933.”
Let us not go into discussions of what are good sources and what are not.
What we are seeing is that country has become a net exporter for the first time in its history, and a major one, despite deficiencies of the land and climate; and the article talking about inefficiencies, and at the same time lumping together situation of 10 years ago, 20 years, 50 years ago and 100 years ago.
Is a good source?
Obviously not, they don’t even bother to look at just what has changed.
NO WONDER!
Putin signed a ban on comparisons between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany last July.
That means someone could be jailed for mentioning the collaboration between Hitler and Josef Stalin. “Stalin perpetrated a man-made famine that can be called a genocide in Ukraine 90 years ago, the ‘Holodomor’ which claimed some 3 million Ukrainian live.
Personally, I reject the “Russian Journal of Economics” [rujec.org] as biased.
https://rujec.org/article/49746/
“If you can explain this by any factor other than (yes, very brutal) Stalin’s collectivization, please do.”
My post explained the factors.
Basically, “The large former state and collective farms control most land. Farm workers can branch off as private farmers by obtaining a grant of land from their parent farm, though they lack full ownership rights.
The land code proposed by the Russian legislature (the Duma) does not change existing law—that is, it does not allow the free purchase and sale of land for agricultural use.”
Stalin’s famine was 100 times worse... AFTER collectivization, so...
100 times is probably a hyperbole, it was not even the worst one in absolute terms; the worst one was was 1601-1603 which killed 1/3 of the population. The distinction of the famine of the 1930s was that it was the last one.
Look, let’s be objective for a change ... I am not suggesting that collectivization was the right way to solve the problem or that it was not a very messy and ugly affair — surely it was. But it solved the problem that had to be solved — large scale farming was needed and it delivered it.
Could it be done in a more humane way? Perhaps.. but the Brits who had a similar problem also solved it in an ugly way — but with good ultimate results (Inclosure Acts)
Just wait till they start installing lenin closets too.
What are you going to do about it?
OK, I didn’t go back to 1600. But the point is that collectivization was the direct cause of tens of millions of people starving to death in the Soviet Union. You can’t spin this. You can’t wave it away: Collectivization is one of the worst, most terrible things that can ever happen to society. It is worse than the black death. And reaching back to 1600 to find something deadlier than the modern era is just simply bizarre... since serfdom is far more like collectivization than it is like small, independent, family-run farms.
I’ll admit I learned this just fact-checking myself: although the 1601 famine may have been catalyzed by a Peruvian volcano, it was also JUST after a new, tyrannical crackdown on serfdom (1597) which prevented serfs from traveling to exchange crop seeds, as had been the previous practice to do after the harvest.
But not to get lost in the weeds: large-scale farming itself is not more efficient or famine-resistant! Industrial farming, which is necessarily large-scale, of course CAN be more efficient but farmers who don’t benefit from their land’s productivity have no motivation to ensure their land’s productivity.
This is not some long-ago issue: farm collectivization is being pushed HARD in places like Southern Africa, East Asia, and South America TODAY by blood-thirsty would-be dictators. Why you are spreading lies that WILL CERTAINLY be used to steal land and WILL CERTAINLY result in the deaths of tens of millions of people is beyond me. You seem to think this is some academic exercise of dick-measuring contest, but the more people believe you, the more people will die horrible deaths.
“crackdown on serfdom” = “crackdown of serfdom.”
We should take up the issue of “neo-Naziism” in Ukraine, with its president, who is a Jew and descendent of those who perished in concentration camps. / sarc
LOL, what I am doing is trying to provide a bit of understanding that you are as you just admitted are lacking; and trying to stay civil, which you seem to be uncapable of.
I’m not trying at all to diminish the harm it caused, I’m merely showing it in perspective.
What is a historic fact is that Russia had permanent problems with famines and while one can think of a cause for any of them (a war, a volcano, a stupid ruler), the reality was that they always happened. The cause — inefficient small household production — was understood even in Russian Empire and there were attempts to solve this, unsuccessful.
A land reform was needed.
Could it be done differently? Perhaps by allowing private ownership of land?-—to let large farms emerge naturally?
I suspect the answer is no. Surely, this would have worked over a few decades, but would have resulted in yet worse human losses and likely the end of country before then — without collectivization an industrial state just could not be built, and if Soviet industry remained at the 1930 level ten years later USSR would have lost the war.
So... there were pluses too. Don’t dismiss them because of your unwillingness to see the entire picture!
Was yet another solution possible? Something that would have achieved the results in a timely fashion and did not lead to massive loss of life? — Entirely possible, not that I’ve seen anyone suggesting just how this could be done... but the very nature of a totalitarian state is to seek the fast results, regardless of the cost.
As for the comparison to South Africa — it is a false one. Compare with UK industrialization as I suggested.
>> The cause — inefficient small household production — <<
As I stated, the notion that serfdom represents “small, household production” is turning the world upside-down.
>> I’m not trying at all to diminish the harm it caused, I’m merely showing it in perspective. <<
No, you can’t put the greatest democides in history (China’s Great Leap Forward was also based on collectivization) “in perspective.” And while locally, the two million who died in 1603 was at least similar in a death rate locally to the 1930s, “locally” means a far, far smaller population. And it was ALSO the result of forcing people to farm property that they had no ownership rights over, so it’s more similar to collectivization than family anyway. In fact, I would almost call Soviet collectivization the reimposition of serfdom.
The phrase “serfdom represents “small, household production” is turning the world upside-down.” is not something either you or me said previously, it is coming out of the blue and makes no sense to me.
1603 is not a unique case. I would not explain just why but I spent some time examining death records from a city in through the 19th century; they showed pretty bad die-outs that are not even mentioned in history books, figuring out the killers was fun :( . They did have a permanent problem with both famines per se and insufficient food (that led naturally to epidemics and like, perhaps killing more than a “true” famine would.)
And yes, I can and will put democides “in perspective”. Like most governments in history, Soviet government clearly committed a crime. But -— in their case there is a justification of a greater good that can be argued, this alleviates their crime. Then can make their case in court. Some would agree, some would not.
Now, Mr. Bush by some estimates murdered half a million people in Iraq — by sanctions. Can he make a plausible case in court? I don’t see how.
As for civil rights .. let’s not go there, civil rights is also what governments love to violate. Pandemic handling by Brandon would be one example, and we can — but I am sure I don’t have to — calculate death toll too.
This is what governments always did and will do :(
Sometimes their crimes are justifiable, usually — not. In the collectivization case, this is at least arguable.
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