The Impact Of Food Crisis On Performance Of Agribusiness: Fill & Download for Free

“Throughout Russian history famines and droughts have been a common feature, often resulting in humanitarian crises traceable to political or economic instability, poor policy, environmental issues and war. Droughts and famines in Russia and the Soviet Union tended to occur fairly regularly, with famine occurring every 10–13 years and droughts every five to seven years. Golubev and Dronin distinguish three types of drought according to productive areas vulnerable to droughts: Central (the Volga basin, North Caucasus and the Central Chernozem Region), Southern (Volga and Volga-Vyatka area, the Ural region, and Ukraine), and Eastern (steppe and forest-steppe belts in Western and Eastern Siberia, and Kazakhstan).”Source: Droughts and famines in Russia and the Soviet Union - Wikipedia“Pre-1900 droughts and faminesIn the 17th century, Russia experienced the famine of 1601–1603, believed to be its worst as it may have killed 2 million people (1/3 of the population). Major famines include the Great Famine of 1315–17, which affected much of Europe including part of Russia as well as the Baltic states. The Nikonian chronicle, written between 1127 and 1303, recorded no less than eleven famine years during that period. One of the most serious crises before 1900 was the famine of 1891–92, which killed between 375,000 and 500,000 people, mainly due to famine-related diseases. Causes included a large Autumn drought resulting in crop failures. Attempts by the government to alleviate the situation generally failed which may have contributed to a lack of faith in the Czarist regime and later political instability.[List of post-1900 droughts and faminesStarving woman, c. 1921Three children who are dead from starvation, 1921Starving children in 1922The Golubev and Dronin report gives the following table of the major droughts in Russia between 1900 and 2000.Central: 1920, 1924, 1936, 1946, 1972, 1979, 1981, 1984.Southern: 1901, 1906, 1921, 1939, 1948, 1951, 1957, 1975, 1995.Eastern: 1911, 1931, 1963, 1965, 1991.1900sThe failed Revolution of 1905 likely distorted output and restricted food availability.1910sDuring the Russian Revolution and following civil war there was a decline in total agricultural output. Measured in millions of tons the 1920 grain harvest was only 46.1, compared to 80.1 in 1913. By 1926 it had almost returned to pre-war levels reaching 76.8.1920sThe early 1920s saw a series of famines. The first famine in the USSR happened in 1921–1923 and garnered wide international attention. The most affected area being the Southeastern areas of European Russia (including Volga region, especially national republics of Idel-Ural, see 1921–22 famine in Tatarstan) and Ukraine. An estimated 16 million people may have been affected and up to 5 million died.Fridtjof Nansen was honored with the 1922 Nobel Peace Prize, in part for his work as High Commissioner for Relief In Russia. Other organizations that helped to combat the Soviet famine were International Save the Children Union and the International Committee of the Red Cross.When the Russian famine of 1921 broke out, the American Relief Administration's director in Europe, Walter Lyman Brown, began negotiating with Soviet deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, in Riga, Latvia. An agreement was reached on August 21, 1921, and an additional implementation agreement was signed by Brown and People's Commisar for Foreign Trade Leonid Krasin on December 30, 1921. The U.S. Congress appropriated $20,000,000 for relief under the Russian Famine Relief Act of late 1921.At its peak, the ARA employed 300 Americans, more than 120,000 Russians and fed 10.5 million people daily. Its Russian operations were headed by Col. William N. Haskell. The Medical Division of the ARA functioned from November 1921 to June 1923 and helped overcome the typhus epidemic then ravaging Russia. The ARA's famine relief operations ran in parallel with much smaller Mennonite, Jewish and Quaker famine relief operations in Russia. The ARA's operations in Russia were shut down on June 15, 1923, after it was discovered that Russia renewed the export of grain.”Source: Droughts and famines in Russia and the Soviet Union - WikipediaThe famine in the Ukraine in 1932–1933 was caused by drought, higher birth rates prior to it, the urbanization of the population, deliberate sabotage, and other factors.In this photograph Soviet workers found grain hidden by kulaks. Many hid the grain to speculate on the grain market or to hold out for higher requisition prices. Meanwhile people in the cities were starving.“The Famine of 1932–33 affected population of at least three Soviet republics, not just Ukraine, and in the areas predominantly populated by ethnic Russians:Southern RussiaNorth Kazakhstan (primarily populated by ethnic Russians)Central and Eastern Ukraine (primarily populated by ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking population).”Source: Serge MavrodisGoebbels blamed Stalin for the famine, which was untrue. In fact Stalin ordered grain to be sent to alleviate the famine:“It is a matter of some significance that Cardinal Innitzer’s allegations of famine-genocide were widely promoted throughout the 1930s, not only by Hitler’s chief propagandist Goebbels, but also by American Fascists as well.It will be recalled that Hearst kicked off his famine campaign with a radio broadcast based mainly on material from Cardinal Innitzer’s “aid committee.” In Organized Anti-Semitism in America, the 1941 book exposing Nazi groups and activities in the pre-war United States, Donald Strong notes that American fascist leader Father Coughlin used Nazi propaganda material extensively. This included Nazi charges of “atrocities by Jew Communists” and verbatim portions of a Goebbels speech referring to Innitzer’s “appeal of July 1934, that millions of people were dying of hunger throughout the Soviet Union.”Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 49-51″Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor“This is Stalin urging the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine to take appropriate measures to prevent a crop failure.The Political Bureau believes that shortage of seed grain in Ukraine is many times worse than what was described in comrade Kosior’s telegram; therefore, the Political Bureau recommends the Central Committee of the Communist party of Ukraine to take all measures within its reach to prevent the threat of failing to sow [field crops] in Ukraine.Signed: Secretary of the Central Committee – J. STALINFrom the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation. Fond 3, Record Series 40, File 80, Page 58.Excerpt from the protocol number of the meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party (Bolsheviks) “Regarding Measures to Prevent Failure to Sow in Ukraine, March 16th, 1932.”Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor“This is the response of Anna Louise Strong, an American journalist famous for reporting on the Soviet Union, to a question about the supposed genocide.QUESTION: Is it true that during 1932-33 several million people were allowed to starve to death in the Ukraine and North Caucasus because they were politically hostile to the Soviets?ANSWER: Not true. I visited several places in those regions during that period. There was a serious grain shortage in the 1932 harvest due chiefly to inefficiencies of the organizational period of the new large-scale mechanized farming among peasants unaccustomed to machines. To this was added sabotage by dispossessed kulaks, the leaving of the farms by 11 million workers who went to new industries, the cumulative effect of the world crisis in depressing the value of Soviet farm exports, and a drought in five basic grain regions in 1931.The harvest of 1932 was better than that of 1931 but was not all gathered; on account of overoptimistic promises from rural districts, Moscow discovered the actual situation only in December when a considerable amount of grain was under snow.Strong, Anna Louise. Searching Out the Soviets. New Republic: August 7, 1935, p. 356Here is Strong again on the harvest of 1933.The conquest of bread was achieved that summer, a victory snatched from a great disaster. The 1933 harvest surpassed that of 1930, which till then had held the record. This time, the new record was made not by a burst of half-organized enthusiasm, but by growing efficiency and permanent organization … This nationwide cooperation beat the 1934 drought, securing a total crop for the USSR equal to the all-time high of 1933.Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 44-45This is what a study of the Russian Archives led to.Recent evidence has indicated that part of the cause of the famine was an exceptionally low harvest in 1932, much lower than incorrect Soviet methods of calculation had suggested. The documents included here or published elsewhere do not yet support the claim that the famine was deliberately produced by confiscating the harvest, or that it was directed especially against the peasants of the Ukraine.Koenker and Bachman, Eds. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Washington: Library of Congress, 1997, p. 401Another confirmation after a search of the Russian archives.In view of the importance of grain stocks to understanding the famine, we have searched Russian archives for evidence of Soviet planned and actual grain stocks in the early 1930s. Our main sources were the Politburo protocols, including the (“special files,” the highest secrecy level), and the papers of the agricultural collections committee Komzag, of the committee on commodity funds, and of Sovnarkom. The Sovnarkom records include telegrams and correspondence of Kuibyshev, who was head of Gosplan, head of Komzag and the committee on reserves, and one of the deputy chairs of Komzag at that time.We have not obtained access to the Politburo working papers in the Presidential Archive, to the files of the committee on reserves or to the relevant files in military archives. But we have found enough information to be confident that this very a high figure for grain stocks is wrong and that Stalin did not have under his control huge amounts of grain, which could easily have been used to eliminate the famine.Stalin, Grain Stocks and the Famine of 1932-1933 by R. W. Davies, M. B. Tauger, S.G. Wheatcroft.Slavic Review, Volume 54, Issue 3 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 642-657.”Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on HolodomorThe Holodomor Hoax: Joseph Stalin’s Crime That Never Took PlaceThis newspaper was published by Hearst as part of his deal with Goebbels to promote the Nazis. Hearst was also a Nazi supporter. The photos were found to be from other famines, one of them 10 years earlier. The “reporting” was fabrication. Other reporters that actually looked into it report that while there was a famine it was not intentional.“The CIA believed that Ukrainian nationalism could be used as an efficient cold war weapon.While the Ukrainian nationalists provided Washington with valuable information about its Cold War rivals, the CIA in return was placing the nationalist veterans into positions of influence and authority, helping them to create semi-academic institutions or academic positions in existing universities.By using these formal and informal academic networks, the Ukrainian nationalists had been disseminating anti-Russian propaganda, creating myths and re-writing history at the same time whitewashing the wartime crimes of OUN-UPA.“In 1987 the film “Harvest of Despair” was made. It was the beginning of the ‘Holodomor’ movement. The film was entirely funded by Ukrainian nationalists, mainly in Canada. A Canadian scholar, Douglas Tottle(1), exposed the fact that the film took photographs from the 1921-22 ‘Volga famine’ and used them to illustrate the 1932-33 famine. Tottle later wrote a book, ‘Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard,‘ about the phony ‘Holodomor’ issue,” Professor Furr elaborated. “The Holodomor Hoax: Joseph Stalin’s Crime That Never Took Place“In the last 15 years or so an enormous amount of new material on Stalin … has become available from Russian archives. I should make clear that as a historian I have a strong orientation to telling the truth about the past, no matter how uncomfortable or unpalatable the conclusions may be. … I don’t think there is a dilemma: you just tell the truth as you see it.(“Stalin’s Wars”, FPM February 12, 2007. At http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/35305.html )The common or “mainstream” view of Stalin as a bloodthirsty tyrant is a product of two sources: Trotsky’s writings of the 1930s and Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” to the XX Party Congress in February, 1956. This canonical history of the Stalin period – the version we have all learned — is completely false. We can see this now thanks mainly to two sets of archival discoveries: the gradual publication of thousands of archival documents from formerly secret Soviet archives since the end of the USSR in 1991; and the opening of the Leon Trotsky Archive at Harvard in 1980 and, secondarily, of the Trotsky Archive at the Hoover Institution (from where I have just returned).Khrushchev LiedIn its impact on world history Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” is the most influential speech of the 20th century. In it Khrushchev painted Stalin as a bloodthirsty tyrant guilty of a reign of terror lasting more than two decades.After the 22nd Party Congress of 1961, where Khrushchev and his men attacked Stalin with even more venom, many Soviet historians elaborated Khrushchev’s lies. These falsehoods were repeated by Cold War anticommunists like Robert Conquest. They also entered “left” discourse through the works of Trotskyists and anarchists and of “pro-Moscow” communists.Khrushchev’s lies were amplified during Mikhail Gorbachev’s and Boris Eltsin’s time by professional Soviet, then Russian, historians. Gorbachev orchestrated an avalanche of anticommunist falsehoods that provided the ideological smokescreen for the return to exploitative practices within the USSR and ultimately for the abandonment of socialist reforms and a return to predatory capitalism.During 2005-2006 I researched and wrote the book Khrushchev Lied. In my book I identify 61 accusations that Khrushchev made against either Stalin or, in a few cases, Beria. I then studied each one of them in the light of evidence available from former Soviet archives. To my own surprise I found that 60 of the 61 accusations are provably, demonstrably false.The fact that Khrushchev could falsify everything and get away with it for over 50 years suggests that we should look carefully at other supposed “crimes” of Stalin and of the USSR during his time.Trotsky’s ‘Amalgams’From 1980 till the early 1990s Pierre Broué, the foremost Trotskyist historian of his day, and Arch Getty, a prominent American expert in Soviet history, discovered that Trotsky had lied, repeatedly and about many issues, in his public statements and writings in the 1930s. In my book Trotsky’s ‘Amalgams’ (2015) I discussed the implications of these lies by Trotsky and of some additional lies of his that I discovered myself. They completely invalidate the “Dewey Commission,” to whom Trotsky lied shamelessly and repeatedly, as well as Trotsky’s denials in the Red Book and elsewhere of the charges leveled against him in the First and Second Moscow Trials.Challenging the “Anti-Stalin Paradigm”I have not reached these conclusions out of any desire to “apologize” for – let alone “celebrate” — the policies of Stalin or the Soviet government. I believe these to be the only objective conclusions possible based on the available evidence.The conclusions I have reached about the history of the Soviet Union during the Stalin period are unacceptable to people who, like Proyect, are motivated by prior ideological commitments rather than by a determination to discover the truth “and let the chips fall where they will.”The “anti-Stalin paradigm” is hegemonic in the field of Soviet history, where it is literally “taboo” to question, let alone disprove as I do, the Trotsky-Khrushchev-Cold War falsehoods about Stalin and the Stalin period. Those in this field who do not cut their research to fit the Procrustean bed of the “anti-Stalin paradigm” will find it hard if not impossible to publish in “mainstream” journals and by academic publishers. I am fortunate: I teach English literature and do not need to publish in these “authoritative” but ideologically compromised vehicles.Those who, like Proyect, are motivated not to discover the truth but to shore up their ideological prejudices think that everybody must be doing likewise. Therefore Proyect argues not from evidence, but by guilt by association, name-dropping, insult, and lies.A few examples:Guilt by association: Proyect claims that I am “like” Roland Boer, Roger Annis, and Sigizmund Mironin.Name-dropping: Davies and Wheatcroft are well-known and disagree with Tauger, so – somehow – they are “the most authoritative,” “right” while Tauger is “wrong.”Insult: Tauger is complicit in “turning a victim into a criminal.”Proyect: “…it seems reasonable that Stalin was forced to unleash a brutal repression in the early 30s to prevent Hitler from invading Russia—or something like that.” In reality neither I nor Tauger say anything of the kind.Lies: Proyect quotes a passage from Tauger’s research about the Irish potato famine and then accuses Tauger of wanting to exculpate the British:“The British government responsible? No, we can’t have that.”But the very next sentence in Tauger’s article reads:“Without denying that the British government mishandled the crisis…”Proyect is a prisoner of the historical paradigm that controls his view of Soviet history. A few examples:* Proyect persists in using the term “Holodomor.” He does not inform Cp readers that Davies and Wheatcroft, whose work he recommends, reject both the term “Holodomor” and the concept in the very book Proyect recommends!* Proyect: “…no matter that Lenin called for his [Stalin’s] removal from party leadership from his death-bed.”But, thanks to careful research by Valentin Sakharov of Moscow State University, even “mainstream” researchers know that this note, like “Lenin’s Testament,” is probably a forgery:There is no stenographic original of the “Ilich letter about the [general] secretary.” In the journal of Lenin’s activities kept by the secretarial staff there is no mention of any such “Ilich letter.” … not a single source corroborates the content of the January 4 dictation. Also curious is the fact that Zinoviev had not been made privy to the “Ilich letter about the [general] secretary” in late May, along with the evaluations of six regime personnel. The new typescript emerged only in June. (Stephen Kotkin, Stalin 505)* Proyect: “Largely because of his bureaucratic control and the rapid influx of self-seeking elements into the party, Stalin could crush the opposition…”However, in his 1973 work Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution Stephen Cohen wrote:But machine politics alone did not account for Stalin’s triumph. … within this select oligarchy, Stalin’s bureaucratic power was considerably less imposing…. By April 1929, these influentials had chosen Stalin and formed his essential majority in the high leadership. They did so, it seems clear, less because of his bureaucratic power than because they preferred his leadership and politics. (327)* Proyect: “Stalin’s forced march did not discriminate between rich and poor peasants.”But in 1983 James Mace, a champion of the Ukrainian Nationalist fascist collaborators, wrote about the role of “committees of poor peasants,” komitety nezamozhnykh selian, in supporting collectivization. There is much other evidence of peasant support for collectivization.ConclusionCorrectly understood, history is the attempt to use well-known methods of primary-source research in an objective manner, in order to arrive at accurate – truthful — statements about the past. Very often the result is disillusioning to those who cling to false ideological constructs, even when those constructs constitute the “mainstream” of politicized historiography.No one who does not try to discover the truth and then tell it without fear or favor, is worthy to be called a historian, regardless of how famous, honored, or “authoritative” he or she may appear to be.Distortions and lies about Soviet history of the Stalin period predominate everywhere, including Ukraine, Russia, and in the West. These lies mainly consist in repeating Trotskyist and Khrushchevite lies, in defiance or in willful ignorance of the primary-source evidence now available.The newly-available evidence from archival sources necessitates a complete rewriting of Soviet history of the Stalin period and a complete revision of Stalin’s own role. This exciting yet demanding prospect is of great importance to all who wish to learn from the errors, as well as from the successes, of the Bolsheviks, the pioneers of the communist movement of the 20th century.”Source: The Ukrainian Famine: Only Evidence Can Disclose the TruthAfter the collectivization of agriculture and the relocation of the kulaks the output of agriculture improved significantly. Prior to Stalin’s reforms farmers were using livestock and wooden plows on small plots. America was using more advanced methods at this time. Stalin brought in modern farm equipment and improved efficiency. But the climate of the Soviet Union and drought have plagued it forever. Thanks to Putin’s reforms and adopting the large agribusiness model Russia has had no food shortages.Stalin’s reforms had been such a boost that despite urbanization the average person in the Soviet Union had a higher calorie and more nutritious diet than the average American.AMERICAN AND SOVIET CITIZENS EAT ABOUT THE SAME AMOUNT OF FOOD EACH DAY BUT“Why Kolkhoz or Collektivize or not Collektivize?Before 1918 Russian agriculture was in especially bad shape. Agriculture has suffered centuries of backwardness, primitive methods of work and excess labor. The caricature from approximately 1860illustrates the main reason for the ineffectiveness — a mind breaking patchwork of tiny plots prevented the usage of mechanization.Almost all agricultural work was performed manually or by using the horse-drawn (sometimes human-drawn) plow. Mineral fertilizers (mostly imported) accounted for no more than 1.6 kg per sown hectare (exclusive for landowners and kulak households). Agricultural and livestock productivity was low (cereal harvest in 1909-18 was about 7.4 kg/ha(yield per hectare of cereals in Europe —2800kg/ha), the mean annual yield of milk from a cow -- about 1000 kg (15 000 kg in Israel kibbutz). Underdevelopment of the agriculture, their total dependence on the natural environment had caused frequent crop failures, mass death of livestock; in lean years famine covered millions of farms.Sokha - WikipediaSoviet leaders, Stalin among them, decided that the only solution was to reorganize agriculture on the basis of large factory-type farms like some in the American Midwest, which were deliberately adopted as models. When sovkhozy or “Soviet farms” appeared to work well the Soviet leadership made the decision to collectivize agriculture.Contrary to anti-communist propaganda, most peasants accepted collectivization (emphasis added). Resistance was modest; acts of outright rebellion rare. By 1932 Soviet agriculture, including in the Ukrainian SSR, was largely collectivized.(ibid)Hence the answer to the title question cannot be other than collectivization in the USSR was a long time overdue action, not a blunder.II. MethodOf course, it could be nice if Bolsheviks could mobilize an army of social workers in the US and entrust them with the task. Such an army would highly likely demonstrate an utmost politically correct way to perform that crash project of collectivization and make it in a colorful festival of happiness and goodwill. Alas, at that time the West was busy with the opposite -- to smash the newbie Soviet Union ASAP and be what. So the Bolsheviks many of them former poor villagers themselves used the methods which once the Empire used against them.The former day, about six,I visited Sennaya*.The peasant woman there by whipWas beaten, devil power.No any sound's heard from chest,The only scourge was whistling.Then to my Muse I said: "Look best -Here's your sister-sibling!"Nikolay Nekrasov 1848Translation: Людмила 31---* Sennaya street in St.PetersburgBUT!The widely spread in the Western Sovietology allegation that the authorities killed 6-7 million during collectivization in 1929-1932 does not hold water. According to Viktor Zemskov, in 1930-1931 authorities did exile slightly more than 1.8 million so-called kulaks (mostly rich farmers and second-hand grain dealers). The fact is that since 1935, the fertility in the kulak settlements has become higher than mortality: 1932-1934 in kulak's settlement 49168 was born and 271367 died but in 1935-1940 the numbers changed to 181090 and 108154 respectively.Do you see that? 1.8 million (1.8%) exiled out of the 100 million-strong private peasantry. That was the price. To declare it Holodomor (Golodomor) is a shameless lie.The truth is that the famine of 1930 has had environmental causes, collectivization not one of them. True, the timing was bad. But was there an option to delay the project for a more suitable time?III. Timing.The industrialization of agriculture was a matter of life or death, no question of it. And there was not any other time to accomplish it before the Nazi invasion.A Triumph of SocialismThe Soviet collectivization of agriculture is one of the greatest feats of social reform of the 20th century, if not the greatest of all, ranking with the “Green Revolution,” “miracle rice,” and the water-control undertakings in China and the USA. If Nobel Prizes were awarded for communist achievements, Soviet collectivization would be a top contender.The historical truth about the Soviet Union is unpalatable not only to Nazi collaborators but to anticommunists of all stripes. Many who consider themselves to be on the Left, such as Social-Democrats and Trotskyists, repeat the lies of the overt fascists and the openly pro-capitalist writers. Objective scholars of Soviet history like Mark B. Tauger , determined to tell the truth even when that truth is unpopular, are far too rare and often drowned out by the chorus of anticommunist falsifiers.”Source: Hersh Bortman, Hersh Bortman's answer to Why was collectivization in the USSR such a blunder?Photos of Collective FarmingSergey Bobyk's answer to Would it be accurate to say that the Soviet famine known as Holodomor targeted ethnic Ukrainians specifically?Further, the reaction of the kulaks to the collectivization is important to understand. This is from Cass Dean:“Only recently have the NKVD archives opened to researchers, and one thing found has been reports of agents who attended all the rallies by the anti-government peasants’ parties and movements, passing back the slogans, the mood of the crowds, etc.They chanted “Sow no seeds!” Their brilliant leadership told them the way to defeat taxes (in kind): If the government was going to take 30% of your harvest, plant 30% less. (How do you blame Stalin for that? He was very big on everyone getting at least a primary education.)At the center of the revelations will be Mark B. Tauger, a professor of history whose specialization is “the history of agriculture and its impact on the history of civilizations.” There’s a bibliography on his website.One thing every theory needs to take into account is that in 1933 there was a bumper harvest, brought in on the same land, by the same people, still newly collectivized, still with no draft animals, easily surpassing the supposed impossible quotas of 1932. It’s also interesting that nobody had heard of the holodomor until all the witnesses were dead. It was entirely a theory of OUN until they started putting money into publicizing it in the late 1980s, when the paid for the first book ever to be written on it. (They wrote most of it, too.)Things that were simply not true. There was very little grain exported. The quotas were not “impossible” to attain. The quotas were also lowered repeatedly when the local agents reported shortages. Huge amounts of grain were returned as aid. Since the archives have been opened, we have such hard evidence as the railway manifests of shipments.Things to be remembered. Russian agriculture had always been communal; it was not a great innovation. The grain was cut, taken to threshing yards to be beaten off the stems, stored centrally and milled in a single facility. At no time did peasants have grain in their homes or barns. Or fake graveyards. Any they took home in the normal way would go home as flour. So any peasants who had troops dragging grain out of their cellars or attics or barns were guilty of sabotage or theft, no question.Another thing nobody thinks about. The center requisitioned grain even when there was not enough to feed the locals. They took it to the cities, the mines, the armies, where there was NONE AT ALL. What is a government supposed to do in an emergency shortage? Gather all the supplies and ration. What the Soviet Union did was what has always been done and always will be, and only in one case has it ever been questioned.The core issue was who owned the grain? The peasant attitude seemed to be that while it was all very nice to have foresters, miners, roads, railways, sailmakers, telegraphs, merchants, blacksmiths, cartwrights, publishing houses, defense forces, a merchant marine, none of these external entities were entitled to food. If there was a surplus, fine, they could buy it. But if there was a shortage, the grain belonged to the tiller.“Stalin was convinced that stubborn peasants simply hide grain and forced confiscations.”This was true. It had happened before and it happened in the 30s. It wasn’t just Stalin being paranoid. The trouble was that just leaving the locality to rely on hidden grain, however much there was, meant the population was at the mercy of those who had hidden it, probably not the most merciful among them.”Source: Sergey Bobyk's answer to Would it be accurate to say that the Soviet famine known as Holodomor targeted ethnic Ukrainians specifically? comments section.The Ukraine was not the only area affected by famine.Dmitry Leontiev:“There was a famine in middle Asia. This famine was named after comrade Philip Goloshekin, who started confiscation campaign in Kazahkstan. 90% of cattle was killed because there was no food for them and this was one of the main reasons of famine in 1931–1933. I dunno how did communists achieved this, because there was plenty of food in steppes before collectivization.” Id.“An important additional consideration is that the locals hid important information that made the problem worse.Local leadership at this time run their turf more like a medieval barons. They get rewarded for hitting the targets (and more importantly been left alone) and investigated for failures. Investigation was likely to cost a place and a head and open a can of worms with likely irregularities, embezzlement and cronyism. In this situation they actively started to suppress an information to the central administration. By 1933 signals from the ground still managed to get to Kremlin and GPU (State security) had to investigate UNDER COVER OF EPIDEMIOLOGISTS. They did not trusted a local cadres at all and had to move undercover. Sound idiotic but its not. Below is actual documents from one of this reports from Ukraine.On a 5th March 1933.This is now declassified internal report regarding a Dnepro area with 35 rural districts in it. Total: starving 7291 families, dead 1814. It also mention an epidemic of malaria in areas close to Dnepro this year causing considerably death toll on already weakened population.Moscow realized that harvest failing and DECREASED grain tax on peasants as of 6th May 1932. Exports was cut off 4 times and some grain was even returned back. But it was all too late. Real harvest of 1932 was times worse off than usual but due to “estimates” based and widely falsified by local bosses numbers still hidden.Collapse in agriculture and lack of emergency grain stocks caused a dilemma between feeding the cities and countryside. There was already no good option left. Stalin was convinced that stubborn peasants simply hide grain and forced confiscations. So he tried to restrict a population movement by Army rightly fearing that influx of seriously pissed off and desperate millions to the central cities would likely to create an explosion he would not be able to control. Lessons of 1917 when Bread (or rather lack of it in capitals caused by intentional sabotage as country was overfilled in reality due to lack of exports for 3 years and exceptional harvest of 1916) was a direct trigger for fall of Empire was not wasted. Stalin was not willing to take a chances especially with even Party being split between Trotskysts and Stalinists.Problem was that if official harvest numbers would be correct (a big IF) than after collection of allocated grain tax peasants should still have a plenty left. But that meant to open up the falsifications of local administrations and likely execution for doing so. Result was that they dig the heels and in attempt to save an own hide to take a grain at all cost. But as reality of harvest was a lot worse, grain taken to feed the cities was not a surplus but a survival minimum for a peasants. Big issue was that growing cities and lacking yields created situation when a country could not really produce reliably a necessary amount of bread for itself. At the end Stalin sorted this problem on a minimal consumption level but growing population with increased affluence brought the same problem back in 1950s-1990s and eventually caused a collapse of USSR. Finally this 200 years old Russian nightmare got solved only now by Putin who finally managed impossible and turned country agriculture around for good.”Source: Sergey Bobyk's answer to Would it be accurate to say that the Soviet famine known as Holodomor targeted ethnic Ukrainians specifically?Putin’s Reforms“By 2005 one of the most dramatic changes in Russian agriculture was the emergence of externally owned and managed commercial farming operations that are exceptionally large, typically ranging between 10,000-250,000 hectares. The investment community had long considered Russian agriculture as the sector with the most risk, carrying a high potential for loss and a low return on investment. By 2005, however, investors from outside the agricultural sector had acquired control over farm assets and millions of hectares of farmland and had begun introducing organizational changes such as vertical integration, custom and contract farming, land leasing, and central machinery stations. Responding to real profit opportunities, these entrepreneurs brought with them the means to overcome market and institutional imperfections, as well as human and physical capital limitations.This new phenomenon of non-agricultural new agricultural operators (NAO) participating in farm production and decision-making and engaging in "value through risk" investment ran contrary to the common expectation of how Russian agriculture would evolve in the post-Soviet era. Rather than a vibrant family-farming sector, what was emerging was a kind of Russian latifundia, owned not by the nobility [as under the Czars] or the State [as under the Soviets] but by corporations that in many cases are not directly related to food and fiber production.The highest level of vertical integration exists in the domestic poultry industry, where the five leading companies control 24 former collectives and newly established farms, providing 35% of the national broiler output. In other subsectors of Russian agriculture the level of integration is much lower even though the overall presence of leading agribusiness companies in agriculture is high. For example, in the grain industry, six of the ten leading exporters have grain production operations.The decision-making structure of the mother company is typically rooted in an industrial, trading, or financial culture that emphasizes economies of scale, standardization, and top-down approaches. This managerial orientation is not particularly well-suited for agriculture. Consequently the potentially hugebenefits of centralization and economies of scale are offset by the inability to make timely, local decisions. When the holding company tries to increase local decision-making authority, it often increases the risk of resource misuse and theft.Yields improved mainly because of the rise of these "new operators" - large, vertically integrated enterprises that combine primary agriculture, processing, distribution, and sometimes retail sale. The most common types of farms in these countries are big corporate farms, most of which are the former State and collective farms of the Soviet period that remained largely unreformed even into the 2000s. The more dynamic new operators usually acquire a number of these corporate farms and improve them, as well as bring investment; superior technology, including the use of imported high-quality seed; and better management practices into the entire agro-food system. The new operators are especially interested in grain production because of the opportunities for profitable export.”Agriculture Policy - Putin

Yes.Stalin knew that by engineering a mass killing he could thwart his own plans to industrialize by starving his own population further. He was obviously suicidal.He intended to collectivize to reduce famines, but this was just a silly idea, because he really loved famines, that is why he did the Holomodor.The government went house to house to find hidden grain not to make sure the people in the cities were given rations like everyone else, nor to stop the kulaks from selling the grain in open markets at high prices, but because Stalin was a dick. He liked killing and starving people, because that is the kind of guy he was.Stalin caused the famine to ensure that the people in the cities who were going to do his industrial plan were starving. He thought everyone needed a good solid diet.Because engineering famines is cool.He wanted to exterminate the kulaks, which he did—oops, nevermind, I forgot he moved them and didn’t exterminate them. Nevermind.Joseph Goebbels and William Randolph Hearst never had a $400,000 contract for him to publish pro-Nazi propaganda, nor did Hearst know that his “reporter” recycled photos from the famine of the 1920’s during the war with the Whites to fabricate his famous newspaper articles. Wait, nevermind. This gets confusing.Russia never had famines in the past, especially during the period of the Tsar. Everything was great until that mean Stalin started trouble. Darn you Stalin!A brief history of Russian famines:“Throughout Russian history famines and droughts have been a common feature, often resulting in humanitarian crises traceable to political or economic instability, poor policy, environmental issues and war. Droughts and famines in Russia and the Soviet Union tended to occur fairly regularly, with famineoccurring every 10–13 years and droughts every five to seven years. Golubev and Dronin distinguish three types of drought according to productive areas vulnerable to droughts: Central (the Volga basin, North Caucasus and the Central Chernozem Region), Southern (Volga and Volga-Vyatka area, the Ural region, and Ukraine), and Eastern (steppe and forest-steppe belts in Western and Eastern Siberia, and Kazakhstan).”Source: Droughts and famines in Russia and the Soviet Union – Wikipedia“Pre-1900 droughts and faminesIn the 17th century, Russia experienced the famine of 1601–1603, believed to be its worst as it may have killed 2 million people (1/3 of the population). Major famines include the Great Famine of 1315–17, which affected much of Europe including part of Russia as well as the Baltic states. The Nikonian chronicle, written between 1127 and 1303, recorded no less than eleven famine years during that period. One of the most serious crises before 1900 was the famine of 1891–92, which killed between 375,000 and 500,000 people, mainly due to famine-related diseases. Causes included a large Autumn drought resulting in crop failures. Attempts by the government to alleviate the situation generally failed which may have contributed to a lack of faith in the Czarist regime and later political instability.[List of post-1900 droughts and faminesStarving woman, c. 1921Three children who are dead from starvation, 1921Starving children in 1922The Golubev and Dronin report gives the following table of the major droughts in Russia between 1900 and 2000.Central: 1920, 1924, 1936, 1946, 1972, 1979, 1981, 1984.Southern: 1901, 1906, 1921, 1939, 1948, 1951, 1957, 1975, 1995.Eastern: 1911, 1931, 1963, 1965, 1991.1900sThe failed Revolution of 1905 likely distorted output and restricted food availability.1910sDuring the Russian Revolution and following civil war there was a decline in total agricultural output. Measured in millions of tons the 1920 grain harvest was only 46.1, compared to 80.1 in 1913. By 1926 it had almost returned to pre-war levels reaching 76.8.1920sThe early 1920s saw a series of famines. The first famine in the USSR happened in 1921–1923 and garnered wide international attention. The most affected area being the Southeastern areas of European Russia (including Volga region, especially national republics of Idel-Ural, see 1921–22 famine in Tatarstan) and Ukraine. An estimated 16 million people may have been affected and up to 5 million died.Fridtjof Nansen was honored with the 1922 Nobel Peace Prize, in part for his work as High Commissioner for Relief In Russia. Other organizations that helped to combat the Soviet famine were International Save the Children Union and the International Committee of the Red Cross.When the Russian famine of 1921 broke out, the American Relief Administration‘s director in Europe, Walter Lyman Brown, began negotiating with Soviet deputy People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, in Riga, Latvia. An agreement was reached on August 21, 1921, and an additional implementation agreement was signed by Brown and People’s Commisar for Foreign Trade Leonid Krasin on December 30, 1921. The U.S. Congress appropriated $20,000,000 for relief under the Russian Famine Relief Act of late 1921.At its peak, the ARA employed 300 Americans, more than 120,000 Russians and fed 10.5 million people daily. Its Russian operations were headed by Col. William N. Haskell. The Medical Division of the ARA functioned from November 1921 to June 1923 and helped overcome the typhus epidemic then ravaging Russia. The ARA’s famine relief operations ran in parallel with much smaller Mennonite, Jewish and Quaker famine relief operations in Russia. The ARA’s operations in Russia were shut down on June 15, 1923, after it was discovered that Russia renewed the export of grain.”Source: Droughts and famines in Russia and the Soviet Union – WikipediaThe famine in the Ukraine in 1932–1933 was caused by drought, higher birth rates prior to it, the urbanization of the population, deliberate sabotage, and other factors.In this photograph Soviet workers found grain hidden by kulaks. Many hid the grain to speculate on the grain market or to hold out for higher requisition prices. Meanwhile people in the cities were starving.“The Famine of 1932–33 affected population of at least three Soviet republics, not just Ukraine, and in the areas predominantly populated by ethnic Russians:Southern RussiaNorth Kazakhstan (primarily populated by ethnic Russians)Central and Eastern Ukraine (primarily populated by ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking population).”Source: Serge MavrodisGoebbels blamed Stalin for the famine, which was untrue. In fact Stalin ordered grain to be sent to alleviate the famine:“It is a matter of some significance that Cardinal Innitzer’s allegations of famine-genocide were widely promoted throughout the 1930s, not only by Hitler’s chief propagandist Goebbels, but also by American Fascists as well.It will be recalled that Hearst kicked off his famine campaign with a radio broadcast based mainly on material from Cardinal Innitzer’s “aid committee.” In Organized Anti-Semitism in America, the 1941 book exposing Nazi groups and activities in the pre-war United States, Donald Strong notes that American fascist leader Father Coughlin used Nazi propaganda material extensively. This included Nazi charges of “atrocities by Jew Communists” and verbatim portions of a Goebbels speech referring to Innitzer’s “appeal of July 1934, that millions of people were dying of hunger throughout the Soviet Union.”Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 49-51″Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor“This is Stalin urging the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine to take appropriate measures to prevent a crop failure.The Political Bureau believes that shortage of seed grain in Ukraine is many times worse than what was described in comrade Kosior’s telegram; therefore, the Political Bureau recommends the Central Committee of the Communist party of Ukraine to take all measures within its reach to prevent the threat of failing to sow [field crops] in Ukraine.Signed: Secretary of the Central Committee – J. STALINFrom the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation. Fond 3, Record Series 40, File 80, Page 58.Excerpt from the protocol number of the meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party (Bolsheviks) “Regarding Measures to Prevent Failure to Sow in Ukraine, March 16th, 1932.”Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor“This is the response of Anna Louise Strong, an American journalist famous for reporting on the Soviet Union, to a question about the supposed genocide.QUESTION: Is it true that during 1932-33 several million people were allowed to starve to death in the Ukraine and North Caucasus because they were politically hostile to the Soviets?ANSWER: Not true. I visited several places in those regions during that period. There was a serious grain shortage in the 1932 harvest due chiefly to inefficiencies of the organizational period of the new large-scale mechanized farming among peasants unaccustomed to machines. To this was added sabotage by dispossessed kulaks, the leaving of the farms by 11 million workers who went to new industries, the cumulative effect of the world crisis in depressing the value of Soviet farm exports, and a drought in five basic grain regions in 1931.The harvest of 1932 was better than that of 1931 but was not all gathered; on account of overoptimistic promises from rural districts, Moscow discovered the actual situation only in December when a considerable amount of grain was under snow.Strong, Anna Louise. Searching Out the Soviets. New Republic: August 7, 1935, p. 356Here is Strong again on the harvest of 1933.The conquest of bread was achieved that summer, a victory snatched from a great disaster. The 1933 harvest surpassed that of 1930, which till then had held the record. This time, the new record was made not by a burst of half-organized enthusiasm, but by growing efficiency and permanent organization … This nationwide cooperation beat the 1934 drought, securing a total crop for the USSR equal to the all-time high of 1933.Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 44-45This is what a study of the Russian Archives led to.Recent evidence has indicated that part of the cause of the famine was an exceptionally low harvest in 1932, much lower than incorrect Soviet methods of calculation had suggested. The documents included here or published elsewhere do not yet support the claim that the famine was deliberately produced by confiscating the harvest, or that it was directed especially against the peasants of the Ukraine.Koenker and Bachman, Eds. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Washington: Library of Congress, 1997, p. 401Another confirmation after a search of the Russian archives.In view of the importance of grain stocks to understanding the famine, we have searched Russian archives for evidence of Soviet planned and actual grain stocks in the early 1930s. Our main sources were the Politburo protocols, including the (“special files,” the highest secrecy level), and the papers of the agricultural collections committee Komzag, of the committee on commodity funds, and of Sovnarkom. The Sovnarkom records include telegrams and correspondence of Kuibyshev, who was head of Gosplan, head of Komzag and the committee on reserves, and one of the deputy chairs of Komzag at that time.We have not obtained access to the Politburo working papers in the Presidential Archive, to the files of the committee on reserves or to the relevant files in military archives. But we have found enough information to be confident that this very a high figure for grain stocks is wrong and that Stalin did not have under his control huge amounts of grain, which could easily have been used to eliminate the famine.Stalin, Grain Stocks and the Famine of 1932-1933 by R. W. Davies, M. B. Tauger, S.G. Wheatcroft.Slavic Review, Volume 54, Issue 3 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 642-657.”Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on HolodomorThe Holodomor Hoax: Joseph Stalin’s Crime That Never Took PlaceThis newspaper was published by Hearst as part of his deal with Goebbels to promote the Nazis. Hearst was also a Nazi supporter. The photos were found to be from other famines, one of them 10 years earlier. The “reporting” was fabrication. Other reporters that actually looked into it report that while there was a famine it was not intentional.“The CIA believed that Ukrainian nationalism could be used as an efficient cold war weapon.While the Ukrainian nationalists provided Washington with valuable information about its Cold War rivals, the CIA in return was placing the nationalist veterans into positions of influence and authority, helping them to create semi-academic institutions or academic positions in existing universities.By using these formal and informal academic networks, the Ukrainian nationalists had been disseminating anti-Russian propaganda, creating myths and re-writing history at the same time whitewashing the wartime crimes of OUN-UPA.“In 1987 the film “Harvest of Despair” was made. It was the beginning of the ‘Holodomor’ movement. The film was entirely funded by Ukrainian nationalists, mainly in Canada. A Canadian scholar, Douglas Tottle(1), exposed the fact that the film took photographs from the 1921-22 ‘Volga famine’ and used them to illustrate the 1932-33 famine. Tottle later wrote a book, ‘Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard,‘ about the phony ‘Holodomor’ issue,” Professor Furr elaborated. “The Holodomor Hoax: Joseph Stalin’s Crime That Never Took Place“In the last 15 years or so an enormous amount of new material on Stalin … has become available from Russian archives. I should make clear that as a historian I have a strong orientation to telling the truth about the past, no matter how uncomfortable or unpalatable the conclusions may be. … I don’t think there is a dilemma: you just tell the truth as you see it.(“Stalin’s Wars”, FPM February 12, 2007. At http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/35… )The common or “mainstream” view of Stalin as a bloodthirsty tyrant is a product of two sources: Trotsky’s writings of the 1930s and Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” to the XX Party Congress in February, 1956. This canonical history of the Stalin period – the version we have all learned — is completely false. We can see this now thanks mainly to two sets of archival discoveries: the gradual publication of thousands of archival documents from formerly secret Soviet archives since the end of the USSR in 1991; and the opening of the Leon Trotsky Archive at Harvard in 1980 and, secondarily, of the Trotsky Archive at the Hoover Institution (from where I have just returned).Khrushchev LiedIn its impact on world history Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” is the most influential speech of the 20th century. In it Khrushchev painted Stalin as a bloodthirsty tyrant guilty of a reign of terror lasting more than two decades.After the 22nd Party Congress of 1961, where Khrushchev and his men attacked Stalin with even more venom, many Soviet historians elaborated Khrushchev’s lies. These falsehoods were repeated by Cold War anticommunists like Robert Conquest. They also entered “left” discourse through the works of Trotskyists and anarchists and of “pro-Moscow” communists.Khrushchev’s lies were amplified during Mikhail Gorbachev’s and Boris Eltsin’s time by professional Soviet, then Russian, historians. Gorbachev orchestrated an avalanche of anticommunist falsehoods that provided the ideological smokescreen for the return to exploitative practices within the USSR and ultimately for the abandonment of socialist reforms and a return to predatory capitalism.During 2005-2006 I researched and wrote the book Khrushchev Lied. In my book I identify 61 accusations that Khrushchev made against either Stalin or, in a few cases, Beria. I then studied each one of them in the light of evidence available from former Soviet archives. To my own surprise I found that 60 of the 61 accusations are provably, demonstrably false.The fact that Khrushchev could falsify everything and get away with it for over 50 years suggests that we should look carefully at other supposed “crimes” of Stalin and of the USSR during his time.Trotsky’s ‘Amalgams’From 1980 till the early 1990s Pierre Broué, the foremost Trotskyist historian of his day, and Arch Getty, a prominent American expert in Soviet history, discovered that Trotsky had lied, repeatedly and about many issues, in his public statements and writings in the 1930s. In my book Trotsky’s ‘Amalgams’ (2015) I discussed the implications of these lies by Trotsky and of some additional lies of his that I discovered myself. They completely invalidate the “Dewey Commission,” to whom Trotsky lied shamelessly and repeatedly, as well as Trotsky’s denials in the Red Book and elsewhere of the charges leveled against him in the First and Second Moscow Trials.Challenging the “Anti-Stalin Paradigm”I have not reached these conclusions out of any desire to “apologize” for – let alone “celebrate” — the policies of Stalin or the Soviet government. I believe these to be the only objective conclusions possible based on the available evidence.The conclusions I have reached about the history of the Soviet Union during the Stalin period are unacceptable to people who, like Proyect, are motivated by prior ideological commitments rather than by a determination to discover the truth “and let the chips fall where they will.”The “anti-Stalin paradigm” is hegemonic in the field of Soviet history, where it is literally “taboo” to question, let alone disprove as I do, the Trotsky-Khrushchev-Cold War falsehoods about Stalin and the Stalin period. Those in this field who do not cut their research to fit the Procrustean bed of the “anti-Stalin paradigm” will find it hard if not impossible to publish in “mainstream” journals and by academic publishers. I am fortunate: I teach English literature and do not need to publish in these “authoritative” but ideologically compromised vehicles.Those who, like Proyect, are motivated not to discover the truth but to shore up their ideological prejudices think that everybody must be doing likewise. Therefore Proyect argues not from evidence, but by guilt by association, name-dropping, insult, and lies.A few examples:Guilt by association: Proyect claims that I am “like” Roland Boer, Roger Annis, and Sigizmund Mironin.Name-dropping: Davies and Wheatcroft are well-known and disagree with Tauger, so – somehow – they are “the most authoritative,” “right” while Tauger is “wrong.”Insult: Tauger is complicit in “turning a victim into a criminal.”Proyect: “…it seems reasonable that Stalin was forced to unleash a brutal repression in the early 30s to prevent Hitler from invading Russia—or something like that.” In reality neither I nor Tauger say anything of the kind.Lies: Proyect quotes a passage from Tauger’s research about the Irish potato famine and then accuses Tauger of wanting to exculpate the British:“The British government responsible? No, we can’t have that.”But the very next sentence in Tauger’s article reads:“Without denying that the British government mishandled the crisis…”Proyect is a prisoner of the historical paradigm that controls his view of Soviet history. A few examples:* Proyect persists in using the term “Holodomor.” He does not inform Cp readers that Davies and Wheatcroft, whose work he recommends, reject both the term “Holodomor” and the concept in the very book Proyect recommends!* Proyect: “…no matter that Lenin called for his [Stalin’s] removal from party leadership from his death-bed.”But, thanks to careful research by Valentin Sakharov of Moscow State University, even “mainstream” researchers know that this note, like “Lenin’s Testament,” is probably a forgery:There is no stenographic original of the “Ilich letter about the [general] secretary.” In the journal of Lenin’s activities kept by the secretarial staff there is no mention of any such “Ilich letter.” … not a single source corroborates the content of the January 4 dictation. Also curious is the fact that Zinoviev had not been made privy to the “Ilich letter about the [general] secretary” in late May, along with the evaluations of six regime personnel. The new typescript emerged only in June. (Stephen Kotkin, Stalin 505)* Proyect: “Largely because of his bureaucratic control and the rapid influx of self-seeking elements into the party, Stalin could crush the opposition…”However, in his 1973 work Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution Stephen Cohen wrote:But machine politics alone did not account for Stalin’s triumph. … within this select oligarchy, Stalin’s bureaucratic power was considerably less imposing…. By April 1929, these influentials had chosen Stalin and formed his essential majority in the high leadership. They did so, it seems clear, less because of his bureaucratic power than because they preferred his leadership and politics. (327)* Proyect: “Stalin’s forced march did not discriminate between rich and poor peasants.”But in 1983 James Mace, a champion of the Ukrainian Nationalist fascist collaborators, wrote about the role of “committees of poor peasants,” komitety nezamozhnykh selian, in supporting collectivization. There is much other evidence of peasant support for collectivization.ConclusionCorrectly understood, history is the attempt to use well-known methods of primary-source research in an objective manner, in order to arrive at accurate – truthful — statements about the past. Very often the result is disillusioning to those who cling to false ideological constructs, even when those constructs constitute the “mainstream” of politicized historiography.No one who does not try to discover the truth and then tell it without fear or favor, is worthy to be called a historian, regardless of how famous, honored, or “authoritative” he or she may appear to be.Distortions and lies about Soviet history of the Stalin period predominate everywhere, including Ukraine, Russia, and in the West. These lies mainly consist in repeating Trotskyist and Khrushchevite lies, in defiance or in willful ignorance of the primary-source evidence now available.The newly-available evidence from archival sources necessitates a complete rewriting of Soviet history of the Stalin period and a complete revision of Stalin’s own role. This exciting yet demanding prospect is of great importance to all who wish to learn from the errors, as well as from the successes, of the Bolsheviks, the pioneers of the communist movement of the 20th century.”Source: The Ukrainian Famine: Only Evidence Can Disclose the TruthAfter the collectivization of agriculture and the relocation of the kulaks the output of agriculture improved significantly. Prior to Stalin’s reforms farmers were using livestock and wooden plows on small plots. America was using more advanced methods at this time. Stalin brought in modern farm equipment and improved efficiency. But the climate of the Soviet Union and drought have plagued it forever. Thanks to Putin’s reforms and adopting the large agribusiness model Russia has had no food shortages.Stalin’s reforms had been such a boost that despite urbanization the average person in the Soviet Union had a higher calorie and more nutritious diet than the average American.AMERICAN AND SOVIET CITIZENS EAT ABOUT THE SAME AMOUNT OF FOOD EACH DAY BUT“Why Kolkhoz or Collektivize or not Collektivize?Before 1918 Russian agriculture was in especially bad shape. Agriculture has suffered centuries of backwardness, primitive methods of work and excess labor. The caricature from approximately 1860illustrates the main reason for the ineffectiveness — a mind breaking patchwork of tiny plots prevented the usage of mechanization.Almost all agricultural work was performed manually or by using the horse-drawn (sometimes human-drawn) plow. Mineral fertilizers (mostly imported) accounted for no more than 1.6 kg per sown hectare (exclusive for landowners and kulak households). Agricultural and livestock productivity was low (cereal harvest in 1909-18 was about 7.4 kg/ha(yield per hectare of cereals in Europe —2800kg/ha), the mean annual yield of milk from a cow — about 1000 kg (15 000 kg in Israel kibbutz). Underdevelopment of the agriculture, their total dependence on the natural environment had caused frequent crop failures, mass death of livestock; in lean years famine covered millions of farms.Sokha – WikipediaSoviet leaders, Stalin among them, decided that the only solution was to reorganize agriculture on the basis of large factory-type farms like some in the American Midwest, which were deliberately adopted as models. When sovkhozy or “Soviet farms” appeared to work well the Soviet leadership made the decision to collectivize agriculture.Contrary to anti-communist propaganda, most peasants accepted collectivization (emphasis added). Resistance was modest; acts of outright rebellion rare. By 1932 Soviet agriculture, including in the Ukrainian SSR, was largely collectivized.(ibid)Hence the answer to the title question cannot be other than collectivization in the USSR was a long time overdue action, not a blunder.II. MethodOf course, it could be nice if Bolsheviks could mobilize an army of social workers in the US and entrust them with the task. Such an army would highly likely demonstrate an utmost politically correct way to perform that crash project of collectivization and make it in a colorful festival of happiness and goodwill. Alas, at that time the West was busy with the opposite — to smash the newbie Soviet Union ASAP and be what. So the Bolsheviks many of them former poor villagers themselves used the methods which once the Empire used against them.The former day, about six,I visited Sennaya*.The peasant woman there by whipWas beaten, devil power.No any sound’s heard from chest,The only scourge was whistling.Then to my Muse I said: “Look best –Here’s your sister-sibling!”Nikolay Nekrasov 1848Translation: Людмила 31—* Sennaya street in St.PetersburgBUT!The widely spread in the Western Sovietology allegation that the authorities killed 6-7 million during collectivization in 1929-1932 does not hold water. According to Viktor Zemskov, in 1930-1931 authorities did exile slightly more than 1.8 million so-called kulaks (mostly rich farmers and second-hand grain dealers). The fact is that since 1935, the fertility in the kulak settlements has become higher than mortality: 1932-1934 in kulak’s settlement 49168 was born and 271367 died but in 1935-1940 the numbers changed to 181090 and 108154 respectively.Do you see that? 1.8 million (1.8%) exiled out of the 100 million-strong private peasantry. That was the price. To declare it Holodomor (Golodomor) is a shameless lie.The truth is that the famine of 1930 has had environmental causes, collectivization not one of them. True, the timing was bad. But was there an option to delay the project for a more suitable time?III. Timing.The industrialization of agriculture was a matter of life or death, no question of it. And there was not any other time to accomplish it before the Nazi invasion.A Triumph of SocialismThe Soviet collectivization of agriculture is one of the greatest feats of social reform of the 20th century, if not the greatest of all, ranking with the “Green Revolution,” “miracle rice,” and the water-control undertakings in China and the USA. If Nobel Prizes were awarded for communist achievements, Soviet collectivization would be a top contender.The historical truth about the Soviet Union is unpalatable not only to Nazi collaborators but to anticommunists of all stripes. Many who consider themselves to be on the Left, such as Social-Democrats and Trotskyists, repeat the lies of the overt fascists and the openly pro-capitalist writers. Objective scholars of Soviet history like Mark B. Tauger , determined to tell the truth even when that truth is unpopular, are far too rare and often drowned out by the chorus of anticommunist falsifiers.”Source: Hersh Bortman, Hersh Bortman’s answer to Why was collectivization in the USSR such a blunder?Photos of Collective FarmingSergey Bobyk’s answer to Would it be accurate to say that the Soviet famine known as Holodomor targeted ethnic Ukrainians specifically?Further, the reaction of the kulaks to the collectivization is important to understand. This is from Cass Dean:“Only recently have the NKVD archives opened to researchers, and one thing found has been reports of agents who attended all the rallies by the anti-government peasants’ parties and movements, passing back the slogans, the mood of the crowds, etc.They chanted “Sow no seeds!” Their brilliant leadership told them the way to defeat taxes (in kind): If the government was going to take 30% of your harvest, plant 30% less. (How do you blame Stalin for that? He was very big on everyone getting at least a primary education.)At the center of the revelations will be Mark B. Tauger, a professor of history whose specialization is “the history of agriculture and its impact on the history of civilizations.” There’s a bibliography on his website.One thing every theory needs to take into account is that in 1933 there was a bumper harvest, brought in on the same land, by the same people, still newly collectivized, still with no draft animals, easily surpassing the supposed impossible quotas of 1932. It’s also interesting that nobody had heard of the holodomor until all the witnesses were dead. It was entirely a theory of OUN until they started putting money into publicizing it in the late 1980s, when the paid for the first book ever to be written on it. (They wrote most of it, too.)Things that were simply not true. There was very little grain exported. The quotas were not “impossible” to attain. The quotas were also lowered repeatedly when the local agents reported shortages. Huge amounts of grain were returned as aid. Since the archives have been opened, we have such hard evidence as the railway manifests of shipments.Things to be remembered. Russian agriculture had always been communal; it was not a great innovation. The grain was cut, taken to threshing yards to be beaten off the stems, stored centrally and milled in a single facility. At no time did peasants have grain in their homes or barns. Or fake graveyards. Any they took home in the normal way would go home as flour. So any peasants who had troops dragging grain out of their cellars or attics or barns were guilty of sabotage or theft, no question.Another thing nobody thinks about. The center requisitioned grain even when there was not enough to feed the locals. They took it to the cities, the mines, the armies, where there was NONE AT ALL. What is a government supposed to do in an emergency shortage? Gather all the supplies and ration. What the Soviet Union did was what has always been done and always will be, and only in one case has it ever been questioned.The core issue was who owned the grain? The peasant attitude seemed to be that while it was all very nice to have foresters, miners, roads, railways, sailmakers, telegraphs, merchants, blacksmiths, cartwrights, publishing houses, defense forces, a merchant marine, none of these external entities were entitled to food. If there was a surplus, fine, they could buy it. But if there was a shortage, the grain belonged to the tiller.“Stalin was convinced that stubborn peasants simply hide grain and forced confiscations.”This was true. It had happened before and it happened in the 30s. It wasn’t just Stalin being paranoid. The trouble was that just leaving the locality to rely on hidden grain, however much there was, meant the population was at the mercy of those who had hidden it, probably not the most merciful among them.”Source: Sergey Bobyk’s answer to Would it be accurate to say that the Soviet famine known as Holodomor targeted ethnic Ukrainians specifically? comments section.The Ukraine was not the only area affected by famine.Dmitry Leontiev:“There was a famine in middle Asia. This famine was named after comrade Philip Goloshekin, who started confiscation campaign in Kazahkstan. 90% of cattle was killed because there was no food for them and this was one of the main reasons of famine in 1931–1933. I dunno how did communists achieved this, because there was plenty of food in steppes before collectivization.” Id.“An important additional consideration is that the locals hid important information that made the problem worse.Local leadership at this time run their turf more like a medieval barons. They get rewarded for hitting the targets (and more importantly been left alone) and investigated for failures. Investigation was likely to cost a place and a head and open a can of worms with likely irregularities, embezzlement and cronyism. In this situation they actively started to suppress an information to the central administration. By 1933 signals from the ground still managed to get to Kremlin and GPU (State security) had to investigate UNDER COVER OF EPIDEMIOLOGISTS. They did not trusted a local cadres at all and had to move undercover. Sound idiotic but its not. Below is actual documents from one of this reports from Ukraine.On a 5th March 1933.This is now declassified internal report regarding a Dnepro area with 35 rural districts in it. Total: starving 7291 families, dead 1814. It also mention an epidemic of malaria in areas close to Dnepro this year causing considerably death toll on already weakened population.Moscow realized that harvest failing and DECREASED grain tax on peasants as of 6th May 1932. Exports was cut off 4 times and some grain was even returned back. But it was all too late. Real harvest of 1932 was times worse off than usual but due to “estimates” based and widely falsified by local bosses numbers still hidden.Collapse in agriculture and lack of emergency grain stocks caused a dilemma between feeding the cities and countryside. There was already no good option left. Stalin was convinced that stubborn peasants simply hide grain and forced confiscations. So he tried to restrict a population movement by Army rightly fearing that influx of seriously pissed off and desperate millions to the central cities would likely to create an explosion he would not be able to control. Lessons of 1917 when Bread (or rather lack of it in capitals caused by intentional sabotage as country was overfilled in reality due to lack of exports for 3 years and exceptional harvest of 1916) was a direct trigger for fall of Empire was not wasted. Stalin was not willing to take a chances especially with even Party being split between Trotskysts and Stalinists.Problem was that if official harvest numbers would be correct (a big IF) than after collection of allocated grain tax peasants should still have a plenty left. But that meant to open up the falsifications of local administrations and likely execution for doing so. Result was that they dig the heels and in attempt to save an own hide to take a grain at all cost. But as reality of harvest was a lot worse, grain taken to feed the cities was not a surplus but a survival minimum for a peasants. Big issue was that growing cities and lacking yields created situation when a country could not really produce reliably a necessary amount of bread for itself. At the end Stalin sorted this problem on a minimal consumption level but growing population with increased affluence brought the same problem back in 1950s-1990s and eventually caused a collapse of USSR. Finally this 200 years old Russian nightmare got solved only now by Putin who finally managed impossible and turned country agriculture around for good.”Source: Sergey Bobyk’s answer to Would it be accurate to say that the Soviet famine known as Holodomor targeted ethnic Ukrainians specifically?Putin’s Reforms“By 2005 one of the most dramatic changes in Russian agriculture was the emergence of externally owned and managed commercial farming operations that are exceptionally large, typically ranging between 10,000-250,000 hectares. The investment community had long considered Russian agriculture as the sector with the most risk, carrying a high potential for loss and a low return on investment. By 2005, however, investors from outside the agricultural sector had acquired control over farm assets and millions of hectares of farmland and had begun introducing organizational changes such as vertical integration, custom and contract farming, land leasing, and central machinery stations. Responding to real profit opportunities, these entrepreneurs brought with them the means to overcome market and institutional imperfections, as well as human and physical capital limitations.This new phenomenon of non-agricultural new agricultural operators (NAO) participating in farm production and decision-making and engaging in “value through risk” investment ran contrary to the common expectation of how Russian agriculture would evolve in the post-Soviet era. Rather than a vibrant family-farming sector, what was emerging was a kind of Russian latifundia, owned not by the nobility [as under the Czars] or the State [as under the Soviets] but by corporations that in many cases are not directly related to food and fiber production.The highest level of vertical integration exists in the domestic poultry industry, where the five leading companies control 24 former collectives and newly established farms, providing 35% of the national broiler output. In other subsectors of Russian agriculture the level of integration is much lower even though the overall presence of leading agribusiness companies in agriculture is high. For example, in the grain industry, six of the ten leading exporters have grain production operations.The decision-making structure of the mother company is typically rooted in an industrial, trading, or financial culture that emphasizes economies of scale, standardization, and top-down approaches. This managerial orientation is not particularly well-suited for agriculture. Consequently the potentially hugebenefits of centralization and economies of scale are offset by the inability to make timely, local decisions. When the holding company tries to increase local decision-making authority, it often increases the risk of resource misuse and theft.Yields improved mainly because of the rise of these “new operators” – large, vertically integrated enterprises that combine primary agriculture, processing, distribution, and sometimes retail sale. The most common types of farms in these countries are big corporate farms, most of which are the former State and collective farms of the Soviet period that remained largely unreformed even into the 2000s. The more dynamic new operators usually acquire a number of these corporate farms and improve them, as well as bring investment; superior technology, including the use of imported high-quality seed; and better management practices into the entire agro-food system. The new operators are especially interested in grain production because of the opportunities for profitable export.”Agriculture Policy – Putin

Hitler would have defeated the Tsar easily. The Tsar was a weak leader that wouldn’t have collectivized, thus not industrializing fast enough to defeat the Germans. Plus collectivizing would have destroyed the feudal system, so that would never happen under the Tsar.After the Germans prevailed they planned on a mass extermination campaign of Jews, communists, homosexuals, the disabled, Romani, gypsies, etc. More than half of Slavs were to be exterminated the remainder made slaves.Hitler conquering Russia early on would have allowed him to gain the strength needed to finish off the rest of Europe. It would have meant the beginning of the 1000 year Reich.There would have not been the Space Race.The only hope would have been an insurrection against the Germans, but the ability to resist them is questionable.Even more horrifying is the reality that many Poles, Romanians, Ukrainians and others preferred the Germans winning than the Soviets because they were right wing. Many Poles even informed on their Jewish neighbors and then the families would be rounded up and sent to the concentration camps.During WWI the Russian soldiers were horribly unequipped. Some soldiers didn’t even have guns. It was a bloodbath. During the battle of Tannenberg the Russian Army was nearly wiped out. The commanding officer committed suicide.Russian prisoners of war after the battle of Tannenberg.This is Tsar Nicholas II.The Tsar had his own secret police and gulags.After the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin assumed power. Lenin established a Marxist Leninist state.Stalin succeeded Lenin after Lenin’s death in 1924.The Soviet Union provided free education, free housing, free healthcare, free food, paid vacations, paid maternity leave, equal rights for all citizens, and free daycare. Guaranteed employment. The communists electrified the Soviet Union and Stalin industrialized the nation, turning it into the second largest industrial economy and a superpower. The Soviet Union also defeated Hitler.The standard of living for the people improved dramatically. Under the Tsar it was a semi-feudal, illiterate, peasant agrarian economy. Within forty years of being communist it would be leading the Space Race.Did Stalin cause the Ukrainian famine? No.“Throughout Russian history famines and droughts have been a common feature, often resulting in humanitarian crises traceable to political or economic instability, poor policy, environmental issues and war. Droughts and famines in Russia and the Soviet Union tended to occur fairly regularly, with famineoccurring every 10–13 years and droughts every five to seven years. Golubev and Dronin distinguish three types of drought according to productive areas vulnerable to droughts: Central (the Volga basin, North Caucasus and the Central Chernozem Region), Southern (Volga and Volga-Vyatka area, the Ural region, and Ukraine), and Eastern (steppe and forest-steppe belts in Western and Eastern Siberia, and Kazakhstan).”Source: Droughts and famines in Russia and the Soviet Union - Wikipedia“Pre-1900 droughts and faminesIn the 17th century, Russia experienced the famine of 1601–1603, believed to be its worst as it may have killed 2 million people (1/3 of the population). Major famines include the Great Famine of 1315–17, which affected much of Europe including part of Russia as well as the Baltic states. The Nikonian chronicle, written between 1127 and 1303, recorded no less than eleven famine years during that period. One of the most serious crises before 1900 was the famine of 1891–92, which killed between 375,000 and 500,000 people, mainly due to famine-related diseases. Causes included a large Autumn drought resulting in crop failures. Attempts by the government to alleviate the situation generally failed which may have contributed to a lack of faith in the Czarist regime and later political instability.[List of post-1900 droughts and faminesStarving woman, c. 1921Three children who are dead from starvation, 1921Starving children in 1922The Golubev and Dronin report gives the following table of the major droughts in Russia between 1900 and 2000.Central: 1920, 1924, 1936, 1946, 1972, 1979, 1981, 1984.Southern: 1901, 1906, 1921, 1939, 1948, 1951, 1957, 1975, 1995.Eastern: 1911, 1931, 1963, 1965, 1991.1900sThe failed Revolution of 1905 likely distorted output and restricted food availability.1910sDuring the Russian Revolution and following civil war there was a decline in total agricultural output. Measured in millions of tons the 1920 grain harvest was only 46.1, compared to 80.1 in 1913. By 1926 it had almost returned to pre-war levels reaching 76.8.1920sThe early 1920s saw a series of famines. The first famine in the USSRhappened in 1921–1923 and garnered wide international attention. The most affected area being the Southeastern areas of European Russia (including Volga region, especially national republics of Idel-Ural, see 1921–22 famine in Tatarstan) and Ukraine. An estimated 16 million people may have been affected and up to 5 million died.Fridtjof Nansen was honored with the 1922 Nobel Peace Prize, in part for his work as High Commissioner for Relief In Russia. Other organizations that helped to combat the Soviet famine were International Save the Children Union and the International Committee of the Red Cross.When the Russian famine of 1921 broke out, the American Relief Administration's director in Europe, Walter Lyman Brown, began negotiating with Soviet deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, in Riga, Latvia. An agreement was reached on August 21, 1921, and an additional implementation agreement was signed by Brown and People's Commisar for Foreign Trade Leonid Krasin on December 30, 1921. The U.S. Congress appropriated $20,000,000 for relief under the Russian Famine Relief Act of late 1921.At its peak, the ARA employed 300 Americans, more than 120,000 Russians and fed 10.5 million people daily. Its Russian operations were headed by Col. William N. Haskell. The Medical Division of the ARA functioned from November 1921 to June 1923 and helped overcome the typhus epidemic then ravaging Russia. The ARA's famine relief operations ran in parallel with much smaller Mennonite, Jewish and Quaker famine relief operations in Russia. The ARA's operations in Russia were shut down on June 15, 1923, after it was discovered that Russia renewed the export of grain.”Source: Droughts and famines in Russia and the Soviet Union - WikipediaThe famine in the Ukraine in 1932–1933 was caused by drought, higher birth rates prior to it, the urbanization of the population, deliberate sabotage, and other factors.In this photograph Soviet workers found grain hidden by kulaks. Many hid the grain to speculate on the grain market or to hold out for higher requisition prices. Meanwhile people in the cities were starving.“The Famine of 1932–33 affected population of at least three Soviet republics, not just Ukraine, and in the areas predominantly populated by ethnic Russians:Southern RussiaNorth Kazakhstan (primarily populated by ethnic Russians)Central and Eastern Ukraine (primarily populated by ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking population).”Source: Serge MavrodisGoebbels blamed Stalin for the famine, which was untrue. In fact Stalin ordered grain to be sent to alleviate the famine:“It is a matter of some significance that Cardinal Innitzer’s allegations of famine-genocide were widely promoted throughout the 1930s, not only by Hitler’s chief propagandist Goebbels, but also by American Fascists as well.It will be recalled that Hearst kicked off his famine campaign with a radio broadcast based mainly on material from Cardinal Innitzer’s “aid committee.” In Organized Anti-Semitism in America, the 1941 book exposing Nazi groups and activities in the pre-war United States, Donald Strong notes that American fascist leader Father Coughlin used Nazi propaganda material extensively. This included Nazi charges of “atrocities by Jew Communists” and verbatim portions of a Goebbels speech referring to Innitzer’s “appeal of July 1934, that millions of people were dying of hunger throughout the Soviet Union.”Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 49-51″Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor“This is Stalin urging the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine to take appropriate measures to prevent a crop failure.The Political Bureau believes that shortage of seed grain in Ukraine is many times worse than what was described in comrade Kosior’s telegram; therefore, the Political Bureau recommends the Central Committee of the Communist party of Ukraine to take all measures within its reach to prevent the threat of failing to sow [field crops] in Ukraine.Signed: Secretary of the Central Committee – J. STALINFrom the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation. Fond 3, Record Series 40, File 80, Page 58.Excerpt from the protocol number of the meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party (Bolsheviks) “Regarding Measures to Prevent Failure to Sow in Ukraine, March 16th, 1932.”Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor“This is the response of Anna Louise Strong, an American journalist famous for reporting on the Soviet Union, to a question about the supposed genocide.QUESTION: Is it true that during 1932-33 several million people were allowed to starve to death in the Ukraine and North Caucasus because they were politically hostile to the Soviets?ANSWER: Not true. I visited several places in those regions during that period. There was a serious grain shortage in the 1932 harvest due chiefly to inefficiencies of the organizational period of the new large-scale mechanized farming among peasants unaccustomed to machines. To this was added sabotage by dispossessed kulaks, the leaving of the farms by 11 million workers who went to new industries, the cumulative effect of the world crisis in depressing the value of Soviet farm exports, and a drought in five basic grain regions in 1931.The harvest of 1932 was better than that of 1931 but was not all gathered; on account of overoptimistic promises from rural districts, Moscow discovered the actual situation only in December when a considerable amount of grain was under snow.Strong, Anna Louise. Searching Out the Soviets. New Republic: August 7, 1935, p. 356Here is Strong again on the harvest of 1933.The conquest of bread was achieved that summer, a victory snatched from a great disaster. The 1933 harvest surpassed that of 1930, which till then had held the record. This time, the new record was made not by a burst of half-organized enthusiasm, but by growing efficiency and permanent organization … This nationwide cooperation beat the 1934 drought, securing a total crop for the USSR equal to the all-time high of 1933.Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 44-45This is what a study of the Russian Archives led to.Recent evidence has indicated that part of the cause of the famine was an exceptionally low harvest in 1932, much lower than incorrect Soviet methods of calculation had suggested. The documents included here or published elsewhere do not yet support the claim that the famine was deliberately produced by confiscating the harvest, or that it was directed especially against the peasants of the Ukraine.Koenker and Bachman, Eds. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Washington: Library of Congress, 1997, p. 401Another confirmation after a search of the Russian archives.In view of the importance of grain stocks to understanding the famine, we have searched Russian archives for evidence of Soviet planned and actual grain stocks in the early 1930s. Our main sources were the Politburo protocols, including the (“special files,” the highest secrecy level), and the papers of the agricultural collections committee Komzag, of the committee on commodity funds, and of Sovnarkom. The Sovnarkom records include telegrams and correspondence of Kuibyshev, who was head of Gosplan, head of Komzag and the committee on reserves, and one of the deputy chairs of Komzag at that time.We have not obtained access to the Politburo working papers in the Presidential Archive, to the files of the committee on reserves or to the relevant files in military archives. But we have found enough information to be confident that this very a high figure for grain stocks is wrong and that Stalin did not have under his control huge amounts of grain, which could easily have been used to eliminate the famine.Stalin, Grain Stocks and the Famine of 1932-1933 by R. W. Davies, M. B. Tauger, S.G. Wheatcroft.Slavic Review, Volume 54, Issue 3 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 642-657.”Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on HolodomorThe Holodomor Hoax: Joseph Stalin’s Crime That Never Took PlaceThis newspaper was published by Hearst as part of his deal with Goebbels to promote the Nazis. Hearst was also a Nazi supporter. The photos were found to be from other famines, one of them 10 years earlier. The “reporting” was fabrication. Other reporters that actually looked into it report that while there was a famine it was not intentional.“The CIA believed that Ukrainian nationalism could be used as an efficient cold war weapon.While the Ukrainian nationalists provided Washington with valuable information about its Cold War rivals, the CIA in return was placing the nationalist veterans into positions of influence and authority, helping them to create semi-academic institutions or academic positions in existing universities.By using these formal and informal academic networks, the Ukrainian nationalists had been disseminating anti-Russian propaganda, creating myths and re-writing history at the same time whitewashing the wartime crimes of OUN-UPA.“In 1987 the film “Harvest of Despair” was made. It was the beginning of the ‘Holodomor’ movement. The film was entirely funded by Ukrainian nationalists, mainly in Canada. A Canadian scholar, Douglas Tottle(1), exposed the fact that the film took photographs from the 1921-22 ‘Volga famine’ and used them to illustrate the 1932-33 famine. Tottle later wrote a book, ‘Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard,‘ about the phony ‘Holodomor’ issue,” Professor Furr elaborated. “The Holodomor Hoax: Joseph Stalin’s Crime That Never Took Place“In the last 15 years or so an enormous amount of new material on Stalin … has become available from Russian archives. I should make clear that as a historian I have a strong orientation to telling the truth about the past, no matter how uncomfortable or unpalatable the conclusions may be. … I don’t think there is a dilemma: you just tell the truth as you see it.(“Stalin’s Wars”, FPM February 12, 2007. At http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/35... )The common or “mainstream” view of Stalin as a bloodthirsty tyrant is a product of two sources: Trotsky’s writings of the 1930s and Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” to the XX Party Congress in February, 1956. This canonical history of the Stalin period – the version we have all learned — is completely false. We can see this now thanks mainly to two sets of archival discoveries: the gradual publication of thousands of archival documents from formerly secret Soviet archives since the end of the USSR in 1991; and the opening of the Leon Trotsky Archive at Harvard in 1980 and, secondarily, of the Trotsky Archive at the Hoover Institution (from where I have just returned).Khrushchev LiedIn its impact on world history Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” is the most influential speech of the 20th century. In it Khrushchev painted Stalin as a bloodthirsty tyrant guilty of a reign of terror lasting more than two decades.After the 22nd Party Congress of 1961, where Khrushchev and his men attacked Stalin with even more venom, many Soviet historians elaborated Khrushchev’s lies. These falsehoods were repeated by Cold War anticommunists like Robert Conquest. They also entered “left” discourse through the works of Trotskyists and anarchists and of “pro-Moscow” communists.Khrushchev’s lies were amplified during Mikhail Gorbachev’s and Boris Eltsin’s time by professional Soviet, then Russian, historians. Gorbachev orchestrated an avalanche of anticommunist falsehoods that provided the ideological smokescreen for the return to exploitative practices within the USSR and ultimately for the abandonment of socialist reforms and a return to predatory capitalism.During 2005-2006 I researched and wrote the book Khrushchev Lied. In my book I identify 61 accusations that Khrushchev made against either Stalin or, in a few cases, Beria. I then studied each one of them in the light of evidence available from former Soviet archives. To my own surprise I found that 60 of the 61 accusations are provably, demonstrably false.The fact that Khrushchev could falsify everything and get away with it for over 50 years suggests that we should look carefully at other supposed “crimes” of Stalin and of the USSR during his time.Trotsky’s ‘Amalgams’From 1980 till the early 1990s Pierre Broué, the foremost Trotskyist historian of his day, and Arch Getty, a prominent American expert in Soviet history, discovered that Trotsky had lied, repeatedly and about many issues, in his public statements and writings in the 1930s. In my book Trotsky’s ‘Amalgams’ (2015) I discussed the implications of these lies by Trotsky and of some additional lies of his that I discovered myself. They completely invalidate the “Dewey Commission,” to whom Trotsky lied shamelessly and repeatedly, as well as Trotsky’s denials in the Red Book and elsewhere of the charges leveled against him in the First and Second Moscow Trials.Challenging the “Anti-Stalin Paradigm”I have not reached these conclusions out of any desire to “apologize” for – let alone “celebrate” — the policies of Stalin or the Soviet government. I believe these to be the only objective conclusions possible based on the available evidence.The conclusions I have reached about the history of the Soviet Union during the Stalin period are unacceptable to people who, like Proyect, are motivated by prior ideological commitments rather than by a determination to discover the truth “and let the chips fall where they will.”The “anti-Stalin paradigm” is hegemonic in the field of Soviet history, where it is literally “taboo” to question, let alone disprove as I do, the Trotsky-Khrushchev-Cold War falsehoods about Stalin and the Stalin period. Those in this field who do not cut their research to fit the Procrustean bed of the “anti-Stalin paradigm” will find it hard if not impossible to publish in “mainstream” journals and by academic publishers. I am fortunate: I teach English literature and do not need to publish in these “authoritative” but ideologically compromised vehicles.Those who, like Proyect, are motivated not to discover the truth but to shore up their ideological prejudices think that everybody must be doing likewise. Therefore Proyect argues not from evidence, but by guilt by association, name-dropping, insult, and lies.A few examples:Guilt by association: Proyect claims that I am “like” Roland Boer, Roger Annis, and Sigizmund Mironin.Name-dropping: Davies and Wheatcroft are well-known and disagree with Tauger, so – somehow – they are “the most authoritative,” “right” while Tauger is “wrong.”Insult: Tauger is complicit in “turning a victim into a criminal.”Proyect: “…it seems reasonable that Stalin was forced to unleash a brutal repression in the early 30s to prevent Hitler from invading Russia—or something like that.” In reality neither I nor Tauger say anything of the kind.Lies: Proyect quotes a passage from Tauger’s research about the Irish potato famine and then accuses Tauger of wanting to exculpate the British:“The British government responsible? No, we can’t have that.”But the very next sentence in Tauger’s article reads:“Without denying that the British government mishandled the crisis…”Proyect is a prisoner of the historical paradigm that controls his view of Soviet history. A few examples:* Proyect persists in using the term “Holodomor.” He does not inform Cp readers that Davies and Wheatcroft, whose work he recommends, reject both the term “Holodomor” and the concept in the very book Proyect recommends!* Proyect: “…no matter that Lenin called for his [Stalin’s] removal from party leadership from his death-bed.”But, thanks to careful research by Valentin Sakharov of Moscow State University, even “mainstream” researchers know that this note, like “Lenin’s Testament,” is probably a forgery:There is no stenographic original of the “Ilich letter about the [general] secretary.” In the journal of Lenin’s activities kept by the secretarial staff there is no mention of any such “Ilich letter.” … not a single source corroborates the content of the January 4 dictation. Also curious is the fact that Zinoviev had not been made privy to the “Ilich letter about the [general] secretary” in late May, along with the evaluations of six regime personnel. The new typescript emerged only in June. (Stephen Kotkin, Stalin 505)* Proyect: “Largely because of his bureaucratic control and the rapid influx of self-seeking elements into the party, Stalin could crush the opposition…”However, in his 1973 work Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution Stephen Cohen wrote:But machine politics alone did not account for Stalin’s triumph. … within this select oligarchy, Stalin’s bureaucratic power was considerably less imposing…. By April 1929, these influentials had chosen Stalin and formed his essential majority in the high leadership. They did so, it seems clear, less because of his bureaucratic power than because they preferred his leadership and politics. (327)* Proyect: “Stalin’s forced march did not discriminate between rich and poor peasants.”But in 1983 James Mace, a champion of the Ukrainian Nationalist fascist collaborators, wrote about the role of “committees of poor peasants,” komitety nezamozhnykh selian, in supporting collectivization. There is much other evidence of peasant support for collectivization.ConclusionCorrectly understood, history is the attempt to use well-known methods of primary-source research in an objective manner, in order to arrive at accurate – truthful — statements about the past. Very often the result is disillusioning to those who cling to false ideological constructs, even when those constructs constitute the “mainstream” of politicized historiography.No one who does not try to discover the truth and then tell it without fear or favor, is worthy to be called a historian, regardless of how famous, honored, or “authoritative” he or she may appear to be.Distortions and lies about Soviet history of the Stalin period predominate everywhere, including Ukraine, Russia, and in the West. These lies mainly consist in repeating Trotskyist and Khrushchevite lies, in defiance or in willful ignorance of the primary-source evidence now available.The newly-available evidence from archival sources necessitates a complete rewriting of Soviet history of the Stalin period and a complete revision of Stalin’s own role. This exciting yet demanding prospect is of great importance to all who wish to learn from the errors, as well as from the successes, of the Bolsheviks, the pioneers of the communist movement of the 20th century.”Source: The Ukrainian Famine: Only Evidence Can Disclose the TruthAfter the collectivization of agriculture and the relocation of the kulaks the output of agriculture improved significantly. Prior to Stalin’s reforms farmers were using livestock and wooden plows on small plots. America was using more advanced methods at this time. Stalin brought in modern farm equipment and improved efficiency. But the climate of the Soviet Union and drought have plagued it forever. Thanks to Putin’s reforms and adopting the large agribusiness model Russia has had no food shortages.Stalin’s reforms had been such a boost that despite urbanization the average person in the Soviet Union had a higher calorie and more nutritious diet than the average American.AMERICAN AND SOVIET CITIZENS EAT ABOUT THE SAME AMOUNT OF FOOD EACH DAY BUT“Why Kolkhoz or Collektivize or not Collektivize?Before 1918 Russian agriculture was in especially bad shape. Agriculture has suffered centuries of backwardness, primitive methods of work and excess labor. The caricature from approximately 1860illustrates the main reason for the ineffectiveness — a mind breaking patchwork of tiny plots prevented the usage of mechanization.Almost all agricultural work was performed manually or by using the horse-drawn (sometimes human-drawn) plow. Mineral fertilizers (mostly imported) accounted for no more than 1.6 kg per sown hectare (exclusive for landowners and kulak households). Agricultural and livestock productivity was low (cereal harvest in 1909-18 was about 7.4 kg/ha(yield per hectare of cereals in Europe —2800kg/ha), the mean annual yield of milk from a cow -- about 1000 kg (15 000 kg in Israel kibbutz). Underdevelopment of the agriculture, their total dependence on the natural environment had caused frequent crop failures, mass death of livestock; in lean years famine covered millions of farms.Sokha - WikipediaSoviet leaders, Stalin among them, decided that the only solution was to reorganize agriculture on the basis of large factory-type farms like some in the American Midwest, which were deliberately adopted as models. When sovkhozy or “Soviet farms” appeared to work well the Soviet leadership made the decision to collectivize agriculture.Contrary to anti-communist propaganda, most peasants accepted collectivization (emphasis added). Resistance was modest; acts of outright rebellion rare. By 1932 Soviet agriculture, including in the Ukrainian SSR, was largely collectivized.(ibid)Hence the answer to the title question cannot be other than collectivization in the USSR was a long time overdue action, not a blunder.II. MethodOf course, it could be nice if Bolsheviks could mobilize an army of social workers in the US and entrust them with the task. Such an army would highly likely demonstrate an utmost politically correct way to perform that crash project of collectivization and make it in a colorful festival of happiness and goodwill. Alas, at that time the West was busy with the opposite -- to smash the newbie Soviet Union ASAP and be what. So the Bolsheviks many of them former poor villagers themselves used the methods which once the Empire used against them.The former day, about six,I visited Sennaya*.The peasant woman there by whipWas beaten, devil power.No any sound's heard from chest,The only scourge was whistling.Then to my Muse I said: "Look best -Here's your sister-sibling!"Nikolay Nekrasov 1848Translation: Людмила 31---* Sennaya street in St.PetersburgBUT!The widely spread in the Western Sovietology allegation that the authorities killed 6-7 million during collectivization in 1929-1932 does not hold water. According to Viktor Zemskov, in 1930-1931 authorities did exile slightly more than 1.8 million so-called kulaks (mostly rich farmers and second-hand grain dealers). The fact is that since 1935, the fertility in the kulak settlements has become higher than mortality: 1932-1934 in kulak's settlement 49168 was born and 271367 died but in 1935-1940 the numbers changed to 181090 and 108154 respectively.Do you see that? 1.8 million (1.8%) exiled out of the 100 million-strong private peasantry. That was the price. To declare it Holodomor (Golodomor) is a shameless lie.The truth is that the famine of 1930 has had environmental causes, collectivization not one of them. True, the timing was bad. But was there an option to delay the project for a more suitable time?III. Timing.The industrialization of agriculture was a matter of life or death, no question of it. And there was not any other time to accomplish it before the Nazi invasion.A Triumph of SocialismThe Soviet collectivization of agriculture is one of the greatest feats of social reform of the 20th century, if not the greatest of all, ranking with the “Green Revolution,” “miracle rice,” and the water-control undertakings in China and the USA. If Nobel Prizes were awarded for communist achievements, Soviet collectivization would be a top contender.The historical truth about the Soviet Union is unpalatable not only to Nazi collaborators but to anticommunists of all stripes. Many who consider themselves to be on the Left, such as Social-Democrats and Trotskyists, repeat the lies of the overt fascists and the openly pro-capitalist writers. Objective scholars of Soviet history like Mark B. Tauger , determined to tell the truth even when that truth is unpopular, are far too rare and often drowned out by the chorus of anticommunist falsifiers.”Source: Hersh Bortman, Hersh Bortman's answer to Why was collectivization in the USSR such a blunder?Photos of Collective FarmingSergey Bobyk's answer to Would it be accurate to say that the Soviet famineknown as Holodomor targeted ethnic Ukrainians specifically?Further, the reaction of the kulaks to the collectivization is important to understand. This is from Cass Dean:“Only recently have the NKVD archives opened to researchers, and one thing found has been reports of agents who attended all the rallies by the anti-government peasants’ parties and movements, passing back the slogans, the mood of the crowds, etc.They chanted “Sow no seeds!” Their brilliant leadership told them the way to defeat taxes (in kind): If the government was going to take 30% of your harvest, plant 30% less. (How do you blame Stalin for that? He was very big on everyone getting at least a primary education.)At the center of the revelations will be Mark B. Tauger, a professor of historywhose specialization is “the history of agriculture and its impact on the historyof civilizations.” There’s a bibliography on his website.One thing every theory needs to take into account is that in 1933 there was a bumper harvest, brought in on the same land, by the same people, still newly collectivized, still with no draft animals, easily surpassing the supposed impossible quotas of 1932. It’s also interesting that nobody had heard of the holodomor until all the witnesses were dead. It was entirely a theory of OUN until they started putting money into publicizing it in the late 1980s, when the paid for the first book ever to be written on it. (They wrote most of it, too.)Things that were simply not true. There was very little grain exported. The quotas were not “impossible” to attain. The quotas were also lowered repeatedly when the local agents reported shortages. Huge amounts of grain were returned as aid. Since the archives have been opened, we have such hard evidence as the railway manifests of shipments.Things to be remembered. Russian agriculture had always been communal; it was not a great innovation. The grain was cut, taken to threshing yards to be beaten off the stems, stored centrally and milled in a single facility. At no time did peasants have grain in their homes or barns. Or fake graveyards. Any they took home in the normal way would go home as flour. So any peasants who had troops dragging grain out of their cellars or attics or barns were guilty of sabotage or theft, no question.Another thing nobody thinks about. The center requisitioned grain even when there was not enough to feed the locals. They took it to the cities, the mines, the armies, where there was NONE AT ALL. What is a government supposed to do in an emergency shortage? Gather all the supplies and ration. What the Soviet Union did was what has always been done and always will be, and only in one case has it ever been questioned.The core issue was who owned the grain? The peasant attitude seemed to be that while it was all very nice to have foresters, miners, roads, railways, sailmakers, telegraphs, merchants, blacksmiths, cartwrights, publishing houses, defense forces, a merchant marine, none of these external entities were entitled to food. If there was a surplus, fine, they could buy it. But if there was a shortage, the grain belonged to the tiller.“Stalin was convinced that stubborn peasants simply hide grain and forced confiscations.”This was true. It had happened before and it happened in the 30s. It wasn’t just Stalin being paranoid. The trouble was that just leaving the locality to rely on hidden grain, however much there was, meant the population was at the mercy of those who had hidden it, probably not the most merciful among them.”Source: Sergey Bobyk's answer to Would it be accurate to say that the Soviet famine known as Holodomor targeted ethnic Ukrainians specifically? comments section.The Ukraine was not the only area affected by famine.Dmitry Leontiev:“There was a famine in middle Asia. This famine was named after comrade Philip Goloshekin, who started confiscation campaign in Kazahkstan. 90% of cattle was killed because there was no food for them and this was one of the main reasons of famine in 1931–1933. I dunno how did communists achieved this, because there was plenty of food in steppes before collectivization.” Id.“An important additional consideration is that the locals hid important information that made the problem worse.Local leadership at this time run their turf more like a medieval barons. They get rewarded for hitting the targets (and more importantly been left alone) and investigated for failures. Investigation was likely to cost a place and a head and open a can of worms with likely irregularities, embezzlement and cronyism. In this situation they actively started to suppress an information to the central administration. By 1933 signals from the ground still managed to get to Kremlin and GPU (State security) had to investigate UNDER COVER OF EPIDEMIOLOGISTS. They did not trusted a local cadres at all and had to move undercover. Sound idiotic but its not. Below is actual documents from one of this reports from Ukraine.On a 5th March 1933.This is now declassified internal report regarding a Dnepro area with 35 rural districts in it. Total: starving 7291 families, dead 1814. It also mention an epidemic of malaria in areas close to Dnepro this year causing considerably death toll on already weakened population.Moscow realized that harvest failing and DECREASED grain tax on peasants as of 6th May 1932. Exports was cut off 4 times and some grain was even returned back. But it was all too late. Real harvest of 1932 was times worse off than usual but due to “estimates” based and widely falsified by local bosses numbers still hidden.Collapse in agriculture and lack of emergency grain stocks caused a dilemma between feeding the cities and countryside. There was already no good option left. Stalin was convinced that stubborn peasants simply hide grain and forced confiscations. So he tried to restrict a population movement by Army rightly fearing that influx of seriously pissed off and desperate millions to the central cities would likely to create an explosion he would not be able to control. Lessons of 1917 when Bread (or rather lack of it in capitals caused by intentional sabotage as country was overfilled in reality due to lack of exports for 3 years and exceptional harvest of 1916) was a direct trigger for fall of Empire was not wasted. Stalin was not willing to take a chances especially with even Party being split between Trotskysts and Stalinists.Problem was that if official harvest numbers would be correct (a big IF) than after collection of allocated grain tax peasants should still have a plenty left. But that meant to open up the falsifications of local administrations and likely execution for doing so. Result was that they dig the heels and in attempt to save an own hide to take a grain at all cost. But as reality of harvest was a lot worse, grain taken to feed the cities was not a surplus but a survival minimum for a peasants. Big issue was that growing cities and lacking yields created situation when a country could not really produce reliably a necessary amount of bread for itself. At the end Stalin sorted this problem on a minimal consumption level but growing population with increased affluence brought the same problem back in 1950s-1990s and eventually caused a collapse of USSR. Finally this 200 years old Russian nightmare got solved only now by Putin who finally managed impossible and turned country agriculture around for good.”Source: Sergey Bobyk's answer to Would it be accurate to say that the Sovietfamine known as Holodomor targeted ethnic Ukrainians specifically?Only the Soviet Union could have defeated HitlerThe Soviet Union was uniquely capable of massive industrialization thanks to a planned economy. The T-34 was instrumental in defeating Hitler. In fact, Hitler admitted in a recording that the production of heavy industry is why the German invasion failed: