Stary Wylk writes:
The Holodomor was starving Ukrainians through crop seizure, not mass deportations. Those came later.
The Holodomor never even happened. And murderous deportations were indeed part of the process that killed many people in that region in 1932.
The starvation was just as bad as in the Ukraine if not worse in a number of other places including the Lower Volga and western Kazakhstan. The Kazakhs supported Stalin, and the Russians of the Rostov were fanatical Stalin supporters. Also the Holodomor hit the east of the Ukraine where the Russians live very hard. Support for Stalin was and is still strong in this area. 1 million people died in Siberia. There were a lot of deaths in Moscow. Did Stalin unleash a “terror famine” in Eastern Ukraine, the Rostov, the Lower Don, western Kazakhstan, Siberia and even Moscow? Of course not.
There was no terror famine. There was a famine harvest. In one year, the harvest collapsed and was only 50% of normal.
You can argue why that happened.
Crops had to be seized because the Ukies were setting their crops on fire and piling them in the fields to get rained on until they molded. The kulaks killed half the livestock in the USSR in the years leading up to the Holodomor. This made things worse, as there was a shortage of horses to plow fields and livestock to eat.
Also the Ukies waged an insurgency where they were attacking the collective farms, burning crops, killing livestock and raping and murdering collective farm workers. At the height there were 20-30 attacks a day going on. All of this was going on in the context of the Holodomor. Actually many deaths occurred in the context of a vicious counterinsurgency campaign combined with some very cruel mass deportations of Ukies to Siberia. 390,000 Ukrainians were killed in this savage counterinsurgency/deportation campaign. If you want to add that to Stalin’s kill total, I would not object.
Ukraine suffered the most deaths, but that was where the harvest collapse was worst. 90% of food exports back from the state for famine relief went to the Ukraine that year.
There was no terror famine!
