See Elazar Barkan, Elizabeth A. Cole and Kai Struve, in Shared History, Divided Memory: Jews and Others in Soviet-Occupied Poland, 1939–1941 (2007):
>The overwhelming majority of historians in contemporary Ukraine interpret the famine as a genocide planned and consciously directed against the Ukrainian people by the Soviet leadership. In the public debates as well as in some monographs on the famine published since the 1990s, the genocide is called the “Ukrainian Holocaust.” This term was introduced and first popularized by the Ukrainian diaspora in North America before Ukraine became independent. In those monographs, very often the term “Holocaust” is not explained at all. The term is nationalized and thus the memory of the Jewish Holocaust is eclipsed. […] Through a victimized national narrative as well as the presentation of the Great Famine of 1932-1933, they have tried to compete with the Jewish narrative in order to obscure the “dark sides” of Ukraine’s national history and to counter accusations that their fathers collaborated with the Germans.
https://books.google.ca/books?id=_BbvQbiaqAEC&pg=PA121#v=one...
And Dovid Katz for Jewish Currents in 2017:
>Within the mythology of East European nationalists, particularly but not exclusively in the Baltics and western Ukraine — where there was massive local participation in the actual killing of Jews, usually by shooting at local pits rather than by deportation to faraway camps — the Bogus moral equivalence of the Holocaust has been from the time of the actual massacres the myth that the Jews were all Communists and got what they deserved because Communism was every bit as genocidal as Nazism. Hence what the Jews call the Holocaust is a kind of opposite and equal reaction to the first genocide, the crimes of Communism.
https://jewishcurrents.org/the-double-genocide-theory
You can also read Mark Tauger's discussion of Anne Applebaum's Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017):
>When even academics avoid confronting popular histories that mislead the public, they perpetuate a problem in the history field. The American historian Peter Charles Hoffer wrote in his book on malfeasance in American history writing, Past Imperfect: “In law to defraud is to misrepresent or conceal with the intention of deceiving and the aim of gaining from deceit. In historical scholarship, falsification, plagiarism, and fabrication were devastating types of fraud. They might not be indictable in a court of law, but they undermined the very foundations of scholarly authority. What was more, they tested the profession's ability and willingness to police itself.”
"Solzhenitsyn was just a fiction writer and totally made it all up" "The purges in the Red Army and of political dissidents were just western propaganda" "Trotsky shot himself in the back of the head" etc.
>Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's controversial new book on Soviet prison‐camps was described as “folklore” by his former wife in an interview published here today. Natelya Reshetovskaya told the conservative newspaper Le Figaro that the book, “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956,” was based on unreliable information: She also told the newspaper's Moscow correspondent that she was still living with Mr. Soizhenitsyn when he wrote the book and that she had typed part of it. They parted in 1970 and were subsequently divorced. She said: “The subject of ‘Gulag Archipelago,’ as I felt at the moment when he was writing it, is not in fact the life of the country and not even the life of the camps but the folklore of the camps.”
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-ex...
There were about as many people in Gulags at peak, war-with-Nazis paranoia than in America today.
>Yes. The overall numbers at present are broadly similar (2.2 million prisoners in the US at present, compared to 2.6 million at the peak of GULAG, though that was drawn from a smaller population), but US prisons have much lower death rates (especially compared to WWII-era GULAG — hopefully there will be no similar invasion of the US and so we will not have the opportunity to see if a wartime US massacres its prisoners in a similar fashion), and a smaller fraction of the prisoners are slave laborers (in GULAG it was nearly 100%).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20532353
(Notice the second post is informed by the first--100% slave, etc. Ample evidence contradicts that.)
... in 1974, while living in the USSR.
On a 0-10 scale, how much freedom do you think she had to form an opinion and express that to a foreign journalist?
If you like those horror stories check out the North Korean ones, they have oodles of stuff about people dying and reappearing, being shot out of cannons, eating human faeces, and whatever else the human imagination can come up with.
Unlike North Korea, I was born in the USSR and saw all that with my own eyes, and I personally know several dissidents who were imprisoned in the 1980s. To suggest that she had any freedom of speech, particularly to a foreign journalist, is deeply ignorant of the conditions at the time. People were scared to openly talk even with their relatives from the West. In 1974, a foreign journalist heard only what the KGB wanted them to hear.
Meanwhile, in that time, Solzhenitsyn was outed as a conspiratorial antisemite.
If you want to opt into a goofy American spy movie, be my guest, but your arbitrary choices of who is believable and who isn't are utterly unconvincing.
As to the crimes themselves, they've been meticulously documented by human rights organizations like Memorial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_(society)
Edit: well, not entirely - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35469335 was bad. Please stay within the rules when commenting on HN.
Mass deportations were a sad but not uncommon operation at the time, as seen for example by this Churchill speech from 1937:
>I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, “The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.” They had not the right, nor had they the power.
https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/
Or this one from 1944:
>Expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been the case in Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before.
https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/70...
The absurdity comes when they're used to try to conjure up a boogeyman.
> Katyn was done by Nazis
> Gulags were not that bad
> Deportations were unfortunate, but look, someone did it too, therefore it's ok
> Molotov-Ribbentrop was a fake, whatabout [insert some unrelated nonsense]
> The rape of Berlin never happened
Nothing like the whiff of braindead and morally bankrupt ideology in the morning
Some falsehoods, some distorsions, most of which are handled superbly by this book chapter on the Khrushchev Report: https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-the-secret-report/
Beevor is particularly vile with his rape-storytelling, and his stuff does not check out. See, "Hordes of Rapists: The Instrumentalization of Sexual Violence in German Cold War Anti-Communist Discourses": https://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/476
Seek truth from facts, brother.
We have to ban accounts that keep breaking the rules.
Two acceptable options are (1) engage by posting substantively and thoughtfully; or (2) just walk away and remember the internet is already wrong about nearly everything.
Dealing with a famine against deliberate sabotage is very tough:
>[The kulak’s] fellows in the villages had no leadership, but decided as one man, with the unanimity and stubbornness of wronged farmers the world over, to oppose their oppressors. Their opposition took the initial form of slaughtering their cattle and horses in preference to having them collectivized. The result was a grievous blow to Soviet agriculture, for most of the cattle and horses were owned by the kulaks. Between 1928 and 1933 the number of horses in the USSR declined from almost 30,000,000 to less than 15,000,000; of horned cattle from 70,000,000 (including 31,000,000 cows) to 38,000,000 (including 20,000,000 cows); of sheep and goats from 147,000,000 to 50,000,000; and of hogs from 20,000,000 to 12,000,000. Soviet rural economy had not recovered from this staggering loss by 1941.
(Frederick L. Schuman, Russia Since 1917: Four Decades of Soviet Politics, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1957, pp.151, 152.)
Cannot be compared to e.g. Winston Churchill 1937:
>I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, “The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.” They had not the right, nor had they the power.
https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/
Or this one from 1944:
>Expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been the case in Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before.
https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/70...
Or 1947:
>“I hate Indians,” he told the Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” The famine was their own fault, he declared at a war-cabinet meeting, for “breeding like rabbits.”
https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,203199...
There's no point in conjuring up boogeymen, or to go "East" to find people to compare Stalin to, when Churchill would be a much fairer comparison, and Stalin comes out far ahead of him.
> "that region had regular famines and dry seasons in the past, before USSR too, and it only stopped after 40s, when various actions were taken to improve agricultural stability there" - care to elaborate on this?
You can believe that if you want. Without factual references to back up what you're saying, though - it's just a a flat, sweeping assertion.
See all the evidence here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35468886
Or even an arch-Cold Warrior like Robert Conquest, who literally wrote a book about it:
>In response to criticism from R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft following the opening of Soviet archives Conquest responded in a 2003 letter that he did not believe "Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine. No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it, but put “Soviet interest” other than feeding the starving first – thus consciously abetting it."
It really doesn't bother me.
Stalin was an ethnic Georgian. Why would he do that?
What "non-biased" sources would you recommend?
It's also not very wild, from a historical point of view, for an authoritarian leader to destroy or decimate ethnic groups or communities. In fact, it's extremely common, as it is an effective way of consolidating power.
Proving a political apparatus intended to genocide another race of people, is difficult. A competent politician will not record, share or allow that intent to be officially existant.
In popular culture, Joe Biden has cheapened the domestic meaning of the word genocide.
It used to be an existential threat to the whole west post-ww2 and now he is describing the russia-ukraine war in these terms.. probably accurately to some degree. But nonetheless genocide is on-the-table as a term people share liberally around when talking about small wars, in popular culture.
> https://www.garethjones.org/mr_jones/true_story.htm
I think it's relatively evenhanded in it's take.
> The new film Mr Jones aims to tell the story of my great uncle, the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones. It is based on his 1933 world exclusive exposing the great famine then raging across much of the USSR, particularly in Kazakhstan and Ukraine; a famine which Moscow was desperate to conceal. His scoop upset two governments and instead of being feted for his honest reporting he found himself denigrated by the pool of Moscow foreign correspondents, blacklisted by the Soviet Union and blackballed by the British establishment.
...
> The film leads the viewer to believe only Ukraine was affected, but, as my uncle reported, millions were dying across the Soviet Union. In his famous Berlin press conference, on 29 March 1933 on leaving Russia, he reports: ‘Everywhere was the cry, ‘'There is no bread. We are dying.'' This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, the North Caucasus, Central Asia.' Gareth was not just a ‘Hero of the Ukraine', he was also a hero for people suffering across the Soviet Union;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor