| HN Mirror

Please understand that I'm not trying to be argumentative; I believe this is a widely misunderstood era of Soviet history. The Holodomor and the 1921 famine predate the Barbarossa invasion significantly. The Holodomor was a product of the dekulakization efforts undertaken as part of the forced farm collectivization. The farm collectivization was driven in part by Stalin's ideology (he disliked the NEP for various reasons) and partly by the need to maintain hard currency levels to purchase machine tools etc from foreign states to maintain its industrialization push. The main exports of the USSR were grain and therefore the quotas were enforced by the NKVD at the expense of the lives of a large number of people. In certain areas, Stalin was persuaded to lower the quotas but in the geographical confines of the Holodomor (largely Ukraine SSR) the quotas were largely maintained. Historians still debate whether the Holodomor was an intentional act of genocide (because Stalin wanted to crush any independence movement within Ukraine SSR) or simply depraved indifference. Conservative estimates of the cost of the Holodomor vary from 3.3-6+ million dead.

You implicitly posed an interesting moral question. Can history justify the deaths of 3.3-6+ million (Holodomor), 4+million (dekulakization), 5 million (1921 famine, admittedly coincident with the civil war) when compared to the planned atrocities of the Nazis if we credit those deaths with greatly contributing towards the defeat of the Hitler and the NSDAP?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan