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by userforcomment
1170 days ago
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Not sure about Holodomor, but famine in Kazakhstan which killed almost half of population was real. Third of population fled to China during the 1929-1933 and still remain there. To be honest though while Stalin is cruel, he is more comparable to Kim Jong Un than Hitler. |
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Dealing with a famine against deliberate sabotage is very tough:
>[The kulak’s] fellows in the villages had no leadership, but decided as one man, with the unanimity and stubbornness of wronged farmers the world over, to oppose their oppressors. Their opposition took the initial form of slaughtering their cattle and horses in preference to having them collectivized. The result was a grievous blow to Soviet agriculture, for most of the cattle and horses were owned by the kulaks. Between 1928 and 1933 the number of horses in the USSR declined from almost 30,000,000 to less than 15,000,000; of horned cattle from 70,000,000 (including 31,000,000 cows) to 38,000,000 (including 20,000,000 cows); of sheep and goats from 147,000,000 to 50,000,000; and of hogs from 20,000,000 to 12,000,000. Soviet rural economy had not recovered from this staggering loss by 1941.
(Frederick L. Schuman, Russia Since 1917: Four Decades of Soviet Politics, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1957, pp.151, 152.)
Cannot be compared to e.g. Winston Churchill 1937:
>I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, “The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.” They had not the right, nor had they the power.
https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/
Or this one from 1944:
>Expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been the case in Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before.
https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/70...
Or 1947:
>“I hate Indians,” he told the Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” The famine was their own fault, he declared at a war-cabinet meeting, for “breeding like rabbits.”
https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,203199...
There's no point in conjuring up boogeymen, or to go "East" to find people to compare Stalin to, when Churchill would be a much fairer comparison, and Stalin comes out far ahead of him.