In the years 1932 and 1933, a catastrophic famine swept across the Soviet Union. It began in the chaos of collectivization, when millions of peasants were forced off their land and made to join state farms. It was then exacerbated, in the autumn of 1932, when the Soviet Politburo, the elite leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, took a series of decisions that deepened the famine in the Ukrainian countryside. Despite the shortages, the state demanded not just grain, but all available food. At the height of the crisis, organized teams of policemen and local Party activists, motivated by hunger, fear, and a decade of hateful propaganda, entered peasant households and took everything edible: potatoes, beets, squash, beans, peas, and farm animals. At the same time, a cordon was drawn around the Ukrainian republic to prevent escape. The result was a catastrophe: At least 5 million people perished of hunger all across the Soviet Union. Among them were nearly 4 million Ukrainians who died not because of neglect or crop failure, but because they had been deliberately deprived of food.
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They even stole the seeds. I'm surprised they didn't burn the
ReplyDeletepeasants alive as a gift to satan.
Hunger is a terrible way to die. We can't appreciate how terrible, because none of us (with rare exceptions) have ever been hungry like that.
DeleteI imagine.
DeleteI read a book years ago that had Stalin not have purged the farmers there would have been enough and a surplus of foodstuffs. It described bunker crops the 3 years previous and 2 years after that horrible crime. It was the Bolsheviks doing plain and simple. And the leftest today wonder why we won't embrace socialism or communism. History is a very good teacher.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely.
DeleteThere were also hat were called the "Laws of the Wheat Ears". This made it a criminal offence to so much as possessed any food that was not distributed by the state and made it a capital offence to glean any field after the crops had been harvested.
ReplyDeleteIs there any wonder then why the Ukrainians still hate the Russians to this day? It is the primary reason so many Ukrainians welcomed the Nazis as liberators in 1941. If Hitler had turned them into allies rather than an occupied people the story of the war on the Eastern Front could will have been quite different.
Is there any wonder then why the Ukrainians still hate the Russians to this day? It is the primary reason so many Ukrainians welcomed the Nazis as liberators in 1941.
DeleteIf Hitler had turned them into allies rather than an occupied people the story of the war on the Eastern Front could will have been quite different.
Fully agree.
Stalin also starved the Kazakhs, my wife's ethnic group. 1/3 of them.
ReplyDeleteThanks and I wasn't aware.
Delete