Ironically, I mainly see foreigners drawing that false equivalence, and am always puzzled by it, as it seems to be far more persistent than anything constructed by the Soviets themselves. So I don't really think it's rooted in Soviet propaganda, it's always been there, even during early USSR which was worshipping the International. The perception in the US was especially persistent, you can see this in every media article and every public document/speech dating back to the 1920s as calling Soviets "Russians" was widespread.

It's not really surprising. The West has always seen USSR as a new reincarnation of the Russian colonial empire, and its nomenclature reflects that. Conversely, Soviet propaganda always focused on "internationalism" and "brotherhood of the nations" (on paper), and thus always made a clear distinction between the two.

Well to be brutally honest the West is just not that interested in the complicated history and ethnicity of that part of the world and just likes to simplify things.

Anything East of Berlin is "Eastern Europe" for instance.

I've to step in here, because also native Russians starved during the Holodomor. My grandmother saw half-starved people and corpses as a child in the city

In fact more Kazakhs starved than Ukrainians. The idea that the famine was confined to Ukraine is completely ahistorical.

Collateral damage

The fact that Holodomor was causing collateral damage as you call it means that it was not specifically targeted at Ukranians. The target must have been something else that might even not have to do with nationality

Dare to substitute Holocaust for Holodomor in this context?

If, of course, what you're telling is true.

Just to clarify - native Russians in Ukraine or outside of it? If the former then it’s not surprising, the genocide was directed at specific territories.

Outside. Basically, there was a broad swath of territories where smallholder peasants thrived and wouldn't agree to collectivization without state terror. It included most of Soviet-controlled Ukraine and a large chunk of southern Russia.

The discussion basically amounts to "are heavy-handed anti-crime policies targeting urban youths racist against Blacks or not?"

- "No they aren't, because they target all urban youths, including Hispanics and Whites, and not just Blacks" - "Yes they are, because they affect a disproportionate share of young Black people. The fact that they affect a disproportionate share of young Hispanics doesn't make it less racist"

I don't think "genocide" is the right term here. It is part of a wider man-made famine, which is an act of great evil perpetrated by the communist regime, but it affected all parts of the southern USSR, including areas with mainly ethnic Russian populations. For more information, you may want to read more about the policies that led to this event, such as "dekulakization"

I am aware that genocide is a disputed term in this context. I lean towards it because the famine disproportionately affected Ukrainians (and Kazakhs) and was at least in part not mitigated intentionally to punish minorities with a stronger anti-Soviet sentiment.

There's an interesting question there whether the primary distinction for those "minorities with a stronger anti-Soviet sentiment" was ethnic or economic. It just so happens that your average Ukrainian (and, to a lesser extent, southern Russian) peasant was a fair bit more rich - partly because of better soil and climate, and partly because the brutal Russian take on serfdom wasn't practiced as long there as it had been in central Russia. And rich peasants were considered "economic enemies", which Soviets interpreted in very draconian terms (tainted the whole family).

But, of course, this possibility does not exclude the other. If this was the primary motivation, however, it neatly explains why some southern Russian regions were also severely affected despite not having any separatist tendencies.

> I am aware

Yet you use it.

> I lean towards

Maybe because you just want to use it? Just look at the map[0], read the legend. Explain who were the people in 18, 17, 11 regions?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Famine_en_URSS_1933.jpg

Probably a lot of ethnic Ukrainians? Are you aware that Ukraine previously had more expansive borders? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Map_of_U...

That's 14 years before 1933, and the border was not there by then, but...

This particular map is the territory claimed by the then still newly-minted Ukrainian state. Basically the then-current Ukrainian equivalent of the likes of Greater Serbia, Greater Hungary etc.

There was no border in those territories for so long, anything they could have drawn wouldn't really have any meaningful historical connection. So IIRC they went by the Russian Imperial demographic maps and claimed most territories on those showed >25% "Malorossians". Ironically, this ended up pilfering some territories from Belarus, as well - note where Pinsk is on that map!

It's kinda amusing what these people are bashing current Russian maps with Kherson, yet they are fine with a postcard as the evidence of.. expansive borders.

> Are you aware that Ukraine previously had more expansive borders

I would prefer a slighly more credible resource than a postcard made in times of great turmoil.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Evropays...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2f/Su...

The second map separates big cities and the rest, could look misleading in some cases.

Rostov-on-Don. It was kind of founded 1749 on decree of the Empress Elizabeth so it couldn't get even more Russian. But we have many different ethnicities there https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TWD2Kkrd_bo (german filmmaker 1918)

> Just to clarify - native Russians in Ukraine or outside of it? If the former then it’s not surprising, the genocide was directed at specific territories.

Outside. Specifically, Volga Region, Kazakhstan, Urals and Siberia

This Wiki article describes it in details

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%93...

>The association "USSR = Russians" is part of the systematic attempt by the soviet regime at cultural (and sometimes literal) genocide.

Using "Soviet" and "Russian" interchangeably was, in my opinion, mostly a Western phenomenon. I don't remember Soviet propaganda mixing the two. It always felt weird to me when in Cold War Hollywood movies they would refer to USSR as Russia, or Soviets as Russians. You wouldn't do it here. Usually they put emphasis on "Soviet man", not on particular ethnicities.

> Usually they put emphasis on "Soviet man", not on particular ethnicities.

Putting an emphasis on the Soviet man who always speaks Russian language, I can understand how that could create an impression of everyone being Russian.

I am curious to know whether this Western perception was supported or opposed by the Soviet state. They have definitely “prioritized” Russian culture internally, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this conflation was at least in part created by the Soviets.

Well, the original Russian culture was destroyed/changed by the communists as much as the Ukrainian one (collectivization, anti-religious movement, industrialization, etc.) The Russian culture before the revolution was very different from what was under USSR. There was little left in the USSR of it other than the language and a few fairy tales.

Never really thought of that in this way. Do you think Russian poets, writers, composers, artists of the early and mid 20th century were a product of the Soviet culture more than the Tsarist/pre-Soviet world?

Holodomor was not genocide.

Communists were internationalists and judged people based on their social class, not nationality. Many areas of the USSR, including in Russia proper, did experience precisely the same level of suffering and death from hunger.

Also, food requisitions in Ukraine which led to Holodomor were organised and conducted by native Ukrainians. It is easy to look up that most senior party and NKVD posts in 1932-33 in Ukrainian SSR were held by Ukrainians - how many posts in Gestapo were held by Jews? For some reason Hitler didn't put Jews in charge of the Holocaust.

It was not a systemic attempt also: if the USSR leaders wanted to kill of all Ukrainians, for some reason they didn't do it systematically at all, year after year. Maybe they didn't want to kill all Ukrainians, after all?

Holodomor, hunger in all other parts of the USSR, Stalin's terror were all the result of the Soviet rule, deeply rooted in class struggle ideology and complete disregard for human life. A lot of people died of hunger simply because Stalin needed to export food taken from them to pay for his Industrialization. No, nationality did not play a role in choosing whom to plunder. Food requisitioners took food from whoever they could find.

If you want a real genocide example perpetrated by the USSR, it is the Chechen expulsion. Systematic, not led by Chechens, ban on settlement remained for many decades. Holodomor was neither targeted only at Ukrainians, was led in Ukraine by Ukrainians, was not systemic, was never a policy of any kind.

You are stating some of the objections to the argument of whether Holodomor constitutes a genocide, (minus the "there were ukranians in senior party positions," this seems a weak new argument to me, especially considering group 13: there absolutely were Jewish people working with the Gestapo), however I agree with Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide," and believes the famine was planned by Stalin because he feared Ukrainian independence.

Poke through the wikipedia article on the subject, it's well sourced, and I think anybody can see that though there was famine across the USSR at the time, the situation in Soviet Ukraine was unique for many reasons, including in terms of how hard they were hit by the famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

> there absolutely were Jewish people working with the Gestapo

Name one Jew on a senior leadership (~Gauleiter level) position in Nazi Germany. There were certainly tons of Ukrainians occupying positions on all levels of power in USSR. Hell, Ukrainian nationals held top position in the USSR far longer than Russians did. Imagine Nazi Germany headed by a Jew?

As for Wikipedia article, at this age the question is very political and Wikipedia reflects that. Some Ukraians want the first place in this victimhood olympics, and the current political situation favours them in the current political landscape, so they can bend history interpretation to their interests. But you know what, if we use very specific words like "fascism" or "genocide" to name different things we don't like, these words will eventually lose their meaning and become generic insults.

Was Holodomor a tragedy? Sure. Was it a genocide - a targeted systemic effort to kill people of one specific nation - not even close.

Btw, I too could take part in this victimhood olympics if I wanted: my grandparents have fled the Voronezh area (near the Volga river) in 1947 because of extreme famine [0] that killed a lot of people. Note the wording in English version:

"Regions that were especially affected included the Ukrainian SSR with 300,000 dead, and the Moldavian SSR with 100,000 dead. Other parts of the Soviet Union such as the Russian SFSR and the Byelorussian SSR were also affected with 500,000 deaths." - so "especially affected" areas lost fewer people than Russian SFSR which was "also" affected. Unfortunately, these tragedies that were a result of a Soviet rule are viewed through nationalistic lens today, and are being used in propaganda pieces.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1946%E2%80%...

But, through amazing coincidence, all the bad things the Russian Empire/USSR did were done by Russians while everything good by Ukrainians. It was some kind of magic. E.g. invasions in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Afghanistan - 100% Russians, not a single Ukrainian, even Brezhnev was Russian. Russian mathematicians? 100% Ukrainians, even Euler. Pushkin? He is the grand-grand-father of Bendera himself. Chikatilo? He is actually a cousin of Putin.

> Russian mathematicians? 100% Ukrainians

It's not true. For example: Andrey Kolmogorov (Soviet Union) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Kolmogorov

Nikolai Lobachevsky (Russian Empire) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Lobachevsky

Ivan Vinogradov (Russian Empire, USSR) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Vinogradov

And many others.

Do not spread propaganda. Be objective, please.

He's been sarcastic: "through amazing coincidence"