There is much more to this subject but I don't want to make an already long post, longer. The larger story of how this happened stretched from well before WW1 all the way through WW2. Going all the way back to Lenin, the Bolsheviks and up to Stalin & the Soviet Union.
--- INTRO ---
To introduce you, the Holodomor Holocaust was perpetuated by Stalin on the Ukranian people as a result of growing fear of a counter-revolution as the Soviet Union sought to indigenize Ukraine & expand their empire. The holocaust was initiated by an artificial grain famine that put millions without food who eventually died. Even the Ukrainian government were effectively dethroned during this time as Stalin initiated mass-scale political repressions through widespread intimidation, arrests, and imprisonment. Thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals, church leaders, and Ukrainian Communist Party functionaries who had supported pro-Ukrainian policies were executed by the Soviet regime.
--- CAUSES OF HOLODOMOR ---
By the end of the 1920s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin consolidated his control over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Feeling threatened by Ukraine's strengthening cultural autonomy, Stalin took measures to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry and the Ukrainian intellectual and cultural elites to prevent them from seeking independence for Ukraine.
At the same time, Stalin decreed the First Five Year Plan, which included the collectivization of agriculture, effectively ending the NEP. Collectivization gave the Soviet state direct control over Ukraine's rich agricultural resources and allowed the state to control the supply of grain for export. Grain exports would be used to fund the USSR's transformation into an industrial power.
The majority of rural Ukrainians were independent small-scale or subsistence farmers who opposed collectivism. They were forced to surrender their land, livestock and farming tools, and work on government collective farms (kolhosps) as laborers. Historians have recorded about 4,000 local rebellions against collectivization, taxation, terror, and violence by Soviet authorities in the early 1930s. The Soviet secret police (GPU) and the Red Army ruthlessly suppressed these protests. Tens of thousands of farmers were arrested for participating in anti-Soviet activities, shot, or deported to labor camps.
The wealthy and successful farmers who opposed collectivism were labeled "kulaks" by Soviet propaganda ("kulak" literally means "a fist"). They were declared enemies of the state, to be eliminated as a class. The elimination of the so-called "kulaks" was an integral part of collectivization. It served three purposes: as a warning to those who opposed collectivization, as a means to transfer confiscated land to the collective farms, and as a means to eliminate village leadership. Thus, the secret police and the militia brutally stripped "kulaks" not only of their lands but also their homes and personal belongings, systematically deporting them to the far regions of the USSR or executing them.
--- HOLODOMOR ---
Fearing that opposition to Stalin's policies in Ukraine could intensify and possibly lead to Ukraine's secession from the Soviet Union, Stalin set unrealistically high grain procurement quotas on the farmers. Those quotas were accompanied by other Draconian measures intended to wipe out a significant part of the Ukrainian nation.
In August of 1932, the decree of "Five Stalks of Grain," stated that anyone, even a child, caught taking any produce from a collective field, could be shot or imprisoned for stealing "socialist property." At the beginning of 1933, about 54,645 people were tried and sentenced; of those, 2,000 were executed.
As famine escalated, growing numbers of farmers left their villages in search of food outside of Ukraine. Directives sent by Stalin and Molotov (Stalin's closest collaborator) in January of 1933 prevented them from leaving, effectively sealing the borders of Ukraine.
The Holodomor Holocaust started in 1932.
When did WW2 "start" & what happened leading up to it?
Here's the connection I'm making & I say this with unease. That maybe it wasn't entirely the the Jewish population we read in all the history books that were being persecuted at a mass scale, quite possibly it were Ukrainians (and in some cases, Russians). Jews were persecuted but I believe this is where history starts to diverge. At this time, thousands of Ukrainians were put on trial, thousands were executed, thousands of farmers were being deported on trains, overworked and millions of Ukrainians died as a result. Even some starving Ukrainians resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. Western institutions and the media at the time were not only covering up the truth about this Holocaust up but effectively weaponized it in order to gin up public support for a war against another country, dare I say Germany. At the time, Germany was a specific economic and military threat to western nations and it was not only a direct threat to the Soviet Union, but Britain as well. If you control the media & academia, you can literally distort history and spin it to your advantage.
No one seems to know about this. It's not that it didn't happen, it seems to of become a footnote to the pages of our history, or, actively suppressed for a reason. Wait until you read what a writer, who looked into this decades ago, had to say about the Western countries reaction to this (read below)-
Here is what a writer back in the 80's described the situation:
Writer Marco Carynyk:
"Most western intellectuals British, French, German, Canadian, American were pro-Soviet. Stalin said that he was engaged in a "great noble experiment for the benefit of all mankind". And they believed him. The primary responsibility for this lay, of course, with Stalin. He engaged- he began a deliberate campaign of misinforming the west of suppressing, concealing the facts about the famine as much as possible. This is not surprising, he had good reasons to do so in his own interest to suppress the facts.
What is surprising, however, is that institutions in the west, including reputable newspapers and major western governments went along with this and helped Stalin, in affect, to conceal the fact that millions of people had died or were dying. Now, when I say major institutions including newspapers, I have in mind specifically the New York Times, which went along with what Stalin was doing and whose reporter in Moscow, Walter Durant, he, mind you, deliberately misrepresented the facts, but even more strongly, I would say he knowingly lied.
Now, another example of this deliberate coverup is the British government. I've had the opportunity to study the archival records and it is clear that in the course of 1933, Whitehall, the British government in London, informed in great detail about what was going on in Ukraine. British embassy and consular officials in Moscow were sending back detailed dispatches week by week, day by day describing gasly things. It was no secret to people in London, to officials in London, that there was a famine going on and… 10 million people had died. The same Whitehall officials who have been receiving these reports about the famine situation and agreeing that they were true, now called this an “alleged famine”. This was the word they used, “alleged famine”, and said, ‘sorry, we cannot do anything because we have normal relations with the Soviet Union.”
Video: https://rumble.com/v1okdsg-holodomor-hidden-holocaust-1930s.html
Article: https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/holodomor
#1957
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Q
Historians disagree about whether Holodomor was intentional. The fact that it's been accepted as genocide is ridiculous TBH. It was mismanagement, typical communist bullshit. The idea that Stalin did it on purpose to genocide Ukraine is a completely unsupported idea.
The communists hated the NEP (new economic plan) they we forced into it by the Kulaks and peasants. They waited to get the tractors and equipment to replace them,they they intentionally killed them off.
It was no accident.
Historians disagree. Prove it.
Read their own words. They wrote tons of books on Russia in the 20s and 30s.
Historians just write propaganda these days,and have about as much credibility as the msm.
This particular take, expressed by the OP, is your standard MSM take, actually. There is nothing here whatsoever that contradicts the mainstream narrative. In fact, OP's opinion borders on the "it wasn't real communism!" excuse, used by leftists who deny Soviet atrocities. OP is saying communism could work, but Evil Stalin made communism look bad.
What I am saying is shit like the Ukraine famine are inherent to communism. OP is saying communism could have worked, and Stalin could have fed Ukraine, but chose not to out of spite. Not only is this view not supported by actual facts, like the fact that grain shipments to Ukraine actually increased during the famine, but it is essentially a form of the "not real communism" excuse.