Should Stalin apologists be treated in the same way as Nazi sympathisers

[DinoDoc]

What I really want to know is where Propaganda, the real Stalin apologist is?

Speak of the devil and the devil appears before you.

[Propaganda]

Serb,

spasibo, tovarish..ti dlya menya zdelal chast' raboti.

[TheStinger]

Propoganda you are quoting a number of econmic historians there who are well known Commie sympathisers. There were loads queing up in the 30's and 40's to praise uncle Joe. The were among those he called the useful idiots.

[Propaganda]

Originally posted by Oerdin
DD: Oh, Stalin had a reason for engineering a mass famine amoung the farmers. Namely, the farmers weren't supporting his regime so he starved them to death.

Capitalism has been engineering mass famines and genocides for years.

The fact that capitalism kills and/or oppresses millions around the world every year doesn't seem to bother anyone, however. I guess it's all OK, "as long as I don't have to hear about it or live through it", right?

[TheStinger]

If Stalin came back he would have Propoganda executed within 6 months. he wouldn't trust someone who defended him this much

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Propaganda
Capitalism has been engineering mass famines and genocides for years.

We're not talking about Capitalism. However we are talking about Stalin. If you really want to jack the thread into a communism v capitalism debate, Start your own.

[Propaganda]

Originally posted by TheStinger
Propoganda you are quoting a number of econmic historians there who are well known Commie sympathisers. There were loads queing up in the 30's and 40's to praise uncle Joe. The were among those he called the useful idiots.

Which ones? Tottle?

But that's OK, I'm willing to cite another source.

This one's from Mark Tauger, who has studied(and is still studying) the famine using Ukranian archival sources, like Getty, Wheatcroft, Manning, Tottle, etc. who have access to the Soviet archives today.

WHAT CAUSED FAMINE IN UKRAINE? -- A POLEMICAL RESPONSE. (This article by Professor Mark B. Tauger (mark.tauger@mail.wvu.edu), Ph.D., associate professor at West Virginia University, responds to the article by Dr. Taras Kuzio in "RFE/RL Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine Report" of 12 June 2002.)

Dr. Kuzio's article concerns a discussion on H-Net Russia, which began when in response to a question, I sent in a list of my recent publications (listed below) and summarized their main points. These points were that the 1933 famine was not limited to Ukraine and resulted from a shortage due to natural disasters that no other scholars have investigated. Dr. Kuzio's article distorts this discussion and misrepresents Western scholarship and my works in particular, which were the main ones at issue but which apparently almost none of my detractors had read.

Dr. Kuzio claims that Western scholars refuse to compare Soviet and Nazi crimes, and are Russia-centric. On the first point, he quotes other scholars' statements that any questioning of the Ukrainian genocide argument is "immoral and absurd." On the second point, he cites my doubts concerning Ukrainian memoirs and asserts that no one questions similar accounts of the Holocaust. He refers to my criticism of Robert Conquest's work and cites James Mace's dismissal of my work as "baseless statistical circumlocutions" and "garbage." He asserts that Western scholars ignore Ukrainian sources and publications, and that the famine left no "memory" in the Russian consciousness. Here I will briefly respond to these claims.

With respect to memory of the famine in Russia, Dr. Kuzio seems unaware of such publications as "Tragediya sovetskoi derevni," a massive five-volume collection of documents published in Russia with the support of the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, which evidences the severity of the famine in Russia as well as Ukraine, and the imprint of the famine on the consciousness of all the Soviet peoples. Dr. Kuzio's point is also problematic because Ukraine is a multinational state, all of whose citizens -- Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Poles, Tatars, and others -- were victims of the famine, as documented in recent Ukrainian publications.

Dr. Kuzio is wrong to characterize me as a Russia-centered Western scholar. I use Ukrainian sources, I have worked in Ukrainian archives, and I have published a study of the Ukrainian famine of 1928-1929 that the Ukrainian scholar S.V. Kulchytskyy described as one of the "blank spots" to which Dr. Kuzio refers. I published this in a collection of articles on Soviet history in the national republics ("Provincial Landscapes," listed below) by a group of scholars, and this publication is not unique. Dr. Kuzio's criticism of U.S. scholarship, therefore, at least as it refers to me, my associates, and many other Western scholars, is unjustified.

On the question of statistics, James Mace and other advocates of the genocide argument insist that the famine was "man-made" on the basis of Soviet official statistics that the total grain harvest in 1932 was 68.9 million tons and testimonies and memoirs from decades after the event that the harvest was excellent. Their argument therefore rests on the statistical claim that no genuine food shortage prevailed in the USSR in 1932. If it can be shown that such a shortage prevailed, this argument has to be rejected.

The official statistics, however, show that the procurements taken from the 1932 harvest were less than the procurements in any other year in the 1930s (and archival documents show that the data actually overstate the amount procured). In other words, the rural remainder for the whole USSR in that year appears larger than any other year in the early 1930s, so there should not have been a famine by those statistics. Several other scholars noted this before me, including the Ukrainian emigre scholar Dmytro Solovey. These are not "baseless statistical circumlocutions" but a fundamental problem in the evidence, which Conquest, Mace, and other recent Ukrainian scholarship never mention.

Yet there was a famine, and as the archives document exhaustively, people were dying of starvation all over the country (see the article by Wheatcroft in Getty and Manning, "Stalinist Terror," Cambridge University Press 1997). So that harvest statistic is wrong. As I show, the harvest figure that Mace and others rely on was a biological yield projection, not harvest data, and was imposed on Soviet statistics by Stalin in 1933.

I obtained the archival annual reports from the collective farms themselves, including those from more than 40 percent of the collective farms in Ukraine (the remainder of the farms did not complete and submit annual reports, apparently because of the crisis). These data show that the 1932 harvest was at least one-third below the official figures. These are data from the farms, including Ukrainian farms, data gathered and prepared by Ukrainian peasants and other villagers at the time that the famine took place. I also show that even these data, which imply in Ukraine a harvest of less than 5 million tons instead of the 8 million-ton official figure, overstate what must have been a famine harvest. I show that these annual-report data are the only reliable data on Soviet grain production in the 1930s, and that peasants used them to resist outside officials' demanding high procurements based on Soviet biological yields.

So while Mace stands by Stalin's false statistics, backed up with memoirs written decades later, to argue that a small harvest did not occur, my evidence (which Mace calls "garbage") -- desperately put forward by Ukrainians and other peasants themselves, which Soviet leaders received and rejected -- documents incontrovertibly that the country had a famine harvest. This is why I question Ukrainian memoir accounts. Their insistence on the false assertion that the harvest was good undermines their credibility. It is also a general principle of evidence that contemporaneous evidence concerning an event is considerably more reliable than reports decades after the event: The memoir and testimony sources on the famine date from the 1950s to the 1980s and later. Substantial critical literatures in history and psychology have demonstrated the problems of memoirs and oral history, which contrary to Dr. Kuzio's claim have been applied extensively to the literature of Holocaust memoirs and testimonies.

The evidence that I have published and other evidence, including recent Ukrainian document collections, show that the famine developed out of a shortage and pervaded the Soviet Union, and that the regime organized a massive program of rationing and relief in towns and in villages, including in Ukraine, but simply did not have enough food. This is why the Soviet famine, an immense crisis and tragedy of the Soviet economy, was not in the same category as the Nazis' mass murders, which had no agricultural or other economic basis. This evidence also explains why it is false to describe me and other Western scholars as "deniers" of the famine. There is nothing "immoral" or "absurd" about this evidence, which comes directly from Ukrainians and other villagers at the time, and it is in no way comparable to a denial of the Holocaust.

Mace, Krawchenko, and Kuzio responded to careful research that tests received interpretations, certainly accepted scholarly practice, with derogatory comments, misrepresentations, and moral condemnations, without apparently having read all of the publications they attacked. Perhaps this is why they have encountered some opposition to their views in the United States. This kind of ad hominem attack only makes it more difficult to get at the truth behind the tragedies in Soviet history.

Mark B. Tauger, "The 1932 Harvest and the Soviet Famine of 1932-1933," Slavic Review v. 50 No. 1, Spring 1991;

Tauger, R.W. Davies, and S. G. Wheatcroft, "Stalin, Grain Stocks, and the Famine of 1932-1933," Slavic Review v. 54 No. 3, Fall 1995;

Tauger, "Natural Disaster and Human Action in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933," The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh, No. 1506, 2001 (65pp); (412) 648 9881

Tauger, "Statistical Falsification in the Soviet Union: A Comparative Case Study of Projections, Biases, and Trust," The Donald Treadgold Papers in Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies, University of Washington, No. 34, 2001 (82pp); (206) 221 6348

Tauger, "Grain Crisis or Famine? The Ukrainian State Commission for Aid to Crop Failure Victims and the Ukrainian Famine of 1928-1929," in Donald Raleigh, ed., "Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimensions of Soviet Power," 1917-1953, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001

[DinoDoc]

Show of hands: How many people read Propy's posts as they are now? ... No one? Just as I thought.

How many people would actually read them if he actually summarized them, quoted only the relevent parts, and linked to the source in question?

[Propaganda]

Uh, the sources are all provided. If you don't feel the want to read any of this, then piss off, by all means.

[Propaganda]

But anyway, I'll bold the important parts for you, and even bold the sources that should be obvious to see.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Propaganda I'm sorry, but you are incorrect. The majority of the peasants(read: of poor and some of them of middle-class origin) supported collectivization. In fact, the collectives grew enormously, so much so that the Party was surprised and didn't know know what to do with the "surplus."

Oh yes! Such a surplus that 7 million of them had to be 'liquidated' by starvation to keep the system going, eh?

I give you one thing, you never tire. You're like the Stalinist chihuahua.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Propaganda
If you don't feel the want to read any of this, then piss off, by all means.

I don't care to read the reams of crap cut and paste posts you attempt to bury threads you find to inconvenient to post original thoughts of your own. If all you are going to to is cut and post long papers, just link to the sources and leave the thread.

[Propaganda]

Originally posted by notyoueither


Oh yes! Such a surplus that 7 million of them had to be 'liquidated' by starvation to keep the system going, eh?

I give you one thing, you never tire. You're like the Stalinist chihuahua.

My ****ing god, you'll do anything to twist any words around to curry your own beliefs.

You don't read anything, you just come and piss all over everything. And obviously, you know **** about collectivization and/or Stalin, so you start ****ing rumors.

I say, all of you, piss off. I'm surprised I have been generous as to not ask for sources of all your information. You people just come here and post bull****, yet not one source confirming or agreeing with what you said was posted.

[DinoDoc]

Oh well. Tit for tat.

The Soviet Famines of 1921 and 1932-3

In the space of little more than a decade the Soviet Union managed to inflict two devastating famines on its people and provide a blueprint for how governments could and would transform limited natural disasters into full blown starvation.

The Famine of 1921

The famine of 1921 began with a drought that caused massive crop failures, including total crop failure on about 20 percent of Soviet farmland (1). Although certainly a disaster of large proportions, such periodic drastic crop failures were not unknown in Russia. A similar drought struck in 1892, for example, which led to the worst crop failure of late tsarist Russia (2).

The comparisons between the droughts ends, and the tragedy begins, when the Bolsheviks reacted markedly different to the natural disaster. Tsarist officials arranged for the delivery of food supplies to the affected regions which, in combination with private relief efforts, kept deaths down to 375,000 to 400,000 (3).

The Bolsheviks, by contrast, simply ignored the famine until it was largely too late. Unable or unwilling to admit natural disasters could strike in the worker's paradise, Lenin took actions to protect himself politically but did nothing to prevent the starvation. In May and June 1921, Lenin ordered food purchases abroad, but earmarked them for the politically important cities rather than for starving peasants. Bolshevik leaders avoided visiting the areas suffering from famine (4).

Even when finally requesting famine aid, the Bolsheviks relied on the nominally private All-Russian Public Committee to Aid the Hungry (Pomgol). Pomgol requested the assistance of the American Relief Association founded by Herbert Hoover, then-U.S. Secretary of Commerce. The ARA responded by spending over $61.6 million to relieve the Russian famine. The ARA fed up to 11 million people a day at the height of relief efforts. The ARA suspended relief operations in June 1923 when it was revealed the Soviet Union was offering foodstuffs for sale abroad -- specifically millions of tons of cereals which it preferred to sell for hard currency rather than feed its starving people (5).

With the worst of the famine over, though, this posed little political risk. For helping relieve the famine, Pomgol's members were liquidated; all but two of its members were arrested by the Soviet secret police and imprisoned (6).

Although exact casualty figures don't exist, a Soviet estimate put the death toll at 5.1 million (7).



1932-33

The massive famine which struck the Soviet Union in 1932-33 was, like the 1921 famine, caused by government actions but unlike that famine appears to have been at least partially intentional as part of Stalin's efforts to further his political goals.

Following the disastrous famine of 1921 and similar failures of central planning, the New Economic Policy liberalized agricultural policy in the Soviet Union and the country experienced a recovery. That all changed in 1928 when uncertainty caused by Soviet central planning schemes created disequilibrium in agricultural products (farmers had grain which they held in reserve due to artificially low prices created by the Soviet regime) (8).

Rather than rectify those problems, the Bolsheviks exacerbated the problem by ordering the seizing of grain from peasants. This soon gave way to dekulakizaton -- the liquidating of "rich" peasants -- and collectivization of agriculture. Combined with agricultural quotas that left peasants with almost nothing to eat, the results were predictably tragic. So predictable in fact that historians such as Robert Conquest believe Stalin intentionally inflicted the 1932-3 famine as part of a general assault on the Ukraine.

Conquest notes, for example, that in an unprecedented move in the autumn of 1932, seed grain was removed from the Ukraine and put in storage in cities -- a move which Conquest suggests shows authorities were concerned at protecting seed grain from hungry peasants who surely would have eaten it had they access to it at the height of the famine (9). More ominously, Conquest reports that beyond merely withholding food aid from the Ukraine, the Soviets stationed troops on the Ukrainian-Russian border to ensure neither food nor people went in or out of the Ukraine during the famine (Russia was spared the worst of the famine). As Conquest writes,

The essential point is that, in fact, clear orders existed to stop Ukrainian peasants entering Russia where food was available and, when they had succeeded in evading these blocks, to confiscate any food they were carrying when intercepted on their return. This can only have been a decree from the highest level and it can only have had one motive (10).

Regardless of the motives, the death toll was staggering. Conquest estimated 7 million people died from famine in 1932-3, with 5 million of those being Ukrainian victims. An additional 7.5 million died from dekulakization and other state violence from 1930-7 (11).

Footnotes:

1. Pipes, Richard. Russia under the Bolshevik regime. New York: Vintage Books, 1994, p.411.

2. Pipes, Richard. Russia under the Bolshevik regime. New York: Vintage Books, 1994, p.412.

3. Pipes, Richard. Russia under the Bolshevik regime. New York: Vintage Books, 1994, p.413.

4. Pipes, Richard. Russia under the Bolshevik regime. New York: Vintage Books, 1994, pp.413-6.

5. Pipes, Richard. Russia under the Bolshevik regime. New York: Vintage Books, 1994, pp.415-9.

6. Pipes, Richard. Russia under the Bolshevik regime. New York: Vintage Books, 1994, pp.416-419.

7. Pipes, Richard. Russia under the Bolshevik regime. New York: Vintage Books, 1994, p.419.

8. Conquest, Robert. The harvest of sorrow: Soviet collectivization and the terror-famine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, p.87-9.

9. Conquest, Robert. The harvest of sorrow: Soviet collectivization and the terror-famine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, p.326.

10. Conquest, Robert. The harvest of sorrow: Soviet collectivization and the terror-famine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, p.327-8.

11. Conquest, Robert. The harvest of sorrow: Soviet collectivization and the terror-famine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, p.306.

[Propaganda]

So, where does everyone's information come from? It has to come from somewhere, am I right?

From Solzhenitsyn, Conquest, the Medvedev brothers, Brezhinski, Deutscher, PBS/History Channel documentaries, school history books..? Hmm.