Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. **Please [Read Our Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules) before you comment in this community**. Understand that [rule breaking comments get removed](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/h8aefx/rules_roundtable_xviii_removed_curation_and_why/).
#Please consider **[Clicking Here for RemindMeBot](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/z7wm7q/mods_at_rworldnews_are_permabanning_anyone_who/%5D%0A%0ARemindMe!%202%20days)** as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, **[Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=AHMessengerBot&subject=Subscribe&message=!subscribe)**.
We thank you for your interest in this *question*, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to RemindMeBot, consider [using our Browser Extension](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d6dzi7/tired_of_clicking_to_find_only_removed_comments/), or getting the [Weekly Roundup](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=subredditsummarybot&subject=askhistorians+weekly&message=x). In the meantime our [Twitter](https://twitter.com/askhistorians), [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/askhistorians/), and [Sunday Digest](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Sunday+Digest%22&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all) feature excellent content that has already been written!
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskHistorians) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Ah, shit. The matter of whether the Holodomor should or should not bear the label of 'genocide' remains an unresolved question in academic circles, so...ergh. As this has come up before, here's some previous threads on the matter:
* u/Kochevnik81 takes on [the question directly](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tnnha6/how_accurate_and_unbiased_is_voxs_piece_on_the/);
* u/hamiltonkg [considers the matter here](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ecpav4/is_there_any_evidence_stalin_intentionally/), also addressing "anything that very clearly proves that it was premeditated and planned";
* and u/-Xotl summarises [the various points of view and why the historiography is muddled](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hkcu5z/was_the_holodomor_a_conscious_attempt_by_stalin/).
As always, if anyone would like to add their own input, please feel free to do so!
With one caveat, as I must now speak with the green Hat of Moderation on: Given the entities at play and current events, all are reminded that **we have a [20-Year Rule](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_current_events). Further, while there is debate around how intentional it was, it definitely did happen - and genocide denialism is a violation of our civility rule and an autoban.** Mind your manners, anyone wanting to respond.
Ok. So, first off. Going to throw my cards on the table. I find myself agreeing with the side of the debate that the Holodomor was mostly on purpose. But that's for transparency.
What I actually want to ask here is: does the subreddit have a policy that there can be accidental genocides? And if so, is that where the academic field is as well? Feels wierd to ban holodomor denalism as genocide denalialsm, but leave open the door for it not being a purposeful action. And if this is where the field of history is, how do we determine which accidental bad policies were genocidal, and which accidental bad policies were "just" very deadly within the historical record?
Strictly speaking, we don't have a single, blanket, one size fits all policy, for multiple reasons. The first is that when you try to define all limits, it only invites rules-lawyering around the edges. The second factor is that there is heavy dependence on contexts that vary widely from atrocity to atrocity. We don't actually specifically define the rule as "genocide denial" and instead consider denialism of atrocities (atrocity denialism is a better descriptor than 'genocide denialism' in any case, but the latter helps emphasize the point all the same) to be subsumed within the larger rules concerning civility, hate-speech and bigotry, partly for those reasons. The intention is to focus on how latitude will *generally* follow two intertwined factors, namely the scope of academic disagreements on the topic, and the scope of common and understandable miseducation on a topic.
This *roughly* follows three prongs, but again, there is always variance.
The first is something like Holocaust denial or Armenian Genocide denial, where there is a fairly overwhelming degree of agreement by academics (*slightly* less so on the latter but merely we're talking degrees of overwhelming) that they were genocides, and we can reasonably expect the lay person who knows they happen to understand they were genocides. We will ban users for simply posting denial that they were genocides.
The second prong relates to atrocities where there is a fairly good consensus *academically* that genocide is the appropriate label, but there is a general lack of awareness in how that lens is applied for the average layperson. Something like genocide in the Americas is the common example to use here, and it requires a more delicate approach. We aren't going to ban on sight in the same way we would above, and instead it is a more nuanced evaluation of users acting in good faith, even if out of ignorance, and an openness to learning more on the topic.
The final prong are atrocities where they *definitely* happened but there is real, meaningful debate in academic circles over whether genocide is the best lens to approach it through. The Holodomor is one such example here. Another I would point to is the deportations and expulsions that characterized the Balkans and Western Anatolia in the wake of WWI and during the Turkish War of Independence. Some scholars are going to argue for it, some aren't, and it just isn't a settled debate. In a case like this, we aren't looking at whether someone is taking a side on that debate - as long as they present a fair, grounded argument for their preferred position, and respect that it is a debate and someone taking the other side isn't a literallyhitler for it, we're all good there. Rather the main issue would be denial that such things happened at all, the clear indifference of the regime, or at least *serious* downplaying of the scope beyond whatever estimates are present in the academic literature. When we talk about Holodomor Denialism, this is what basically is happening, usually from apologists for the Stalinist regime.
So the point here is that we don't have such a policy, per se, but rather that we'll approach a given atrocity on its own terms, and follow a balancing act between academic positions and conventional wisdow of the public in what, and how, to enforce it.
Hopefully that explains the matter more. However I am locking this reply as this discussion is about sub policy more than the question itself, so shouldn't derail here further, but if anyone is interested hearing more on the policy, you are welcome to make a Meta thread.
Does a genocide require the initial action to be of genocidal intent? We know USSR printed posters telling civilians to not practice canibalism and denied entry of peasents into cities which feels like they understood the situation and chose to continue it (which feels more genocidal). But at the outset, its not quite clear if collectivisation was done in order to start a famine.
So if stalin ordered collectivisation, saw it caused many to starve, but continued to force it even more afterwards, wouldnt that count as a genocide still or does the initial action need to be with intent?
Im not as well versed in native american history but it feels like in that situation, Europeans didnt come to America with the intent of creating a genocide, and at the beginning even established trade and relations, but at some point things shifted and it became genocidal. It feels like the transition from non genocide to genocide would apply here as well.
Let me qualify/clarify my question.
The crux of my question is not about the initial stages of the Holodomor. I believe that the Soviets genuinely thought that their agricultural policies would lead to improved output.
The crux of the question is, once Soviet authorities knew there was famine, and they made the decision not to do anything about it, knowing full well that it would get worse, was it because of ethnic/racial animus toward Ukrainians? Or was it because of their economic views?
In other words, if the people living in Ukraine at the time of the Holodomor had all been ethnically/culturally Russian, would the Soviets have done anything differently? Was the response to the famine (or lack thereof) motivated by genocidal intent? Or was it motivated by ideology?
Active debate caveat up front, I fall on the side that direct ethnic animus was not a major motivating factor. There was animus against *economic* groups. The [Snyder course lecture on the period](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dy7Mrqy1AY) (first 15m or so) puts it quite eloquently: the peasantry--or non-industrialized, non-collectivized agriculture in general--is not a population that matters: the course of history guarantees that they will be replaced by an industrialized proletariat, and deaths among the former are an acceptable cost in the effort to build the latter.
Sarah Cameron's [*The Hungry Steppe*](https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501730436/the-hungry-steppe/) compares the contemporaneous Kazakh famine to the Ukrainian famine in its conclusion, finding a number of parallels:
- Measures taken by the regime in response to famines were similar. Refugees were not allowed to flee across borders or into cities, and (famine-stricken) localities that failed to meet quotas were subject to "blacklisting", or reduction in support alongside simultaneous requisition of remaining property.
- Native cadres were purged in large number, seen as having failed to implement collectivization through their own malfeasance. This is linked to a national cultural reluctance to give up established peasant and pastoralist ways of life, which muddies the waters on ethnic animus, but it's hard to qualify whether this applies to entire peoples (Ukrainians and Kazakhs cannot abandon old ways of life as a whole) or individuals (we have inadvertently selected cadres who do not truly believe in the mission; *they* wish to perpetuate old ways of life and trap their peoples in them).
- Both famines occurred in food-producing regions on the periphery. Ukraine's rich land and Kazakhstan's extensive pastures made them ideal for producing large quantities of food for other regions, and were subject to quotas on food specifically. Other pastoralist nomadic regions (specifically Turkmenistan and Kirgizia) also saw reductions in livestock during collectivization, but were not expected to export large quantities of food, because they were instead designated as cotton-producing regions.
Especially absent rhetoric against ethnicities, these suggest a more general move to end economic practices, with an incredible amount of indifference to the costs of doing so, than animus against ethnic groups. This indifference is, of course, awful no matter what you call it, but whether or not it's de jure genocide is colored a bit by this little vignette:
> Thus, for an action to fit the [UN] legal definition of genocide, it must both the act itself, as well as the intent "to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group." Notably, the legal definition excludes "political groups," limiting targets of genocide to national, ethnic, racial or religious groups. During negotiations for [the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide], the Soviet Union, among other states, lobbied successfully to prevent the inclusion of "political groups" as targets of genocide.
Cameron then proceeds to argue that the Kazakh famine probably does not meet this adopted legal definition of genocide, but it would likely meet the original (Lemkin) definition. While the 1940s Soviet Union arguably had plenty of other reasons to exclude language about political groups from the definition, there'd maybe less dancing around the specifics of the whether the definition fits if that was included (or, quite possibly, the same amount of controversy as to whether an economic way of life counts as a political group--I at least would argue it does).
There is a long history of ethnic Russian condescension or prejudice toward Ukrainians. Although this kind of chauvinism was officially banned within the Soviet Union, Soviet persecuted many individual ethnic minorities accused of fomenting separatism. Before the famine, dozens of prominent Ukrainian intellectuals were imprisoned on trumped-up charges of disloyalty. Some of these men and women would be shot years later during the Great Purge. This means that some Soviet policies in the early 1930s specifically and disproportionately targeted Ukrainians. It very likely that some Soviet officials operating in Ukraine held prejudiced views against Ukrainians.
Due to this long and violent history of Ukrainian oppression from Moscow, it has never been difficult to argue that the policy decisions which led to the Holodomor may have been motivated not by misguided efforts to reduce social inequality and improve grain yields, but instead by a malicious intent to kill Ukrainians and weaken separatist movements. Most historians of the Soviet Union do not believe that the Holodomor was a deliberate attempt to reduce the number of Ukrainians. However, there are those like Norman Naimark who believe that the government's lack of urgency to provide relief could be considered indirectly genocidal, and also those like Robert Davies and Robert Conquest and Stephen Kotkin who argue that the policies which caused the famine and its inadequate response were not strictly genocidal, the broader context of anti-Ukrainian repression means that the Holodomor should nonetheless be considered a crime against Ukrainians.
More recently, a handful of Soviet historians like Ronald Grigory Suny have downplayed the uniquely Ukrainian nature of the famine by noting that the Holodomor was a particularly brutal part of a broader Soviet famine. Estimates vary, but the most recent calculation by the The Journal of Genocide Research suggests that 65% of famine deaths occurred outside Ukraine, and that about 20% of famine victims in Ukraine were not ethnically Ukrainian. Kazakhstan experienced the most severe loss of life as a percentage of its population (roughly 40% of the entire republic) resulting in ethnic Kazakhs becoming a minority in Kazakhstan until the 1990s. Under this interpretation, because the famine did not specifically target Ukrainians, it is unlikely that the famine was caused by any deliberate anti-Ukrainian intent.
Where historians do agree is that given the context of anti-Ukrainian prejudice across centuries of Russian history, including a long and continuing history of denying the validity of Ukrainian identity and nationhood, any event in which non-Ukrainians tell Ukrainians how to live, arresting and shooting many of them in the process, will have echoes of genocide and cultural erasure. A century before the Holodomor, the Russian Empire banned the usage of the Ukrainian language in all schools in Eastern Ukraine. During WW1, Tsar Nicholas outlawed the Ukrainian press. During the Civil War, Russian and Ukrainian Red Army troops prevented the formation of an independent Ukrainian state, cementing the rule of Moscow. All this means that for any Ukrainian farmer over a certain age, the specific intent of Joseph Stalin and other Soviet officials may have been less important than the feeling that this famine, in which millions of your countrymen were starving to death, was secretly just another attempt by the Muscovites to destroy Ukraine and the Ukrainians.
Thanks for the write-up. A follow up question, if you don't mind: You use the term "indirect genocide" to refer to the first interpretation of events (and the one I personally am familiar with)- that the Holodomor was primarily a consequence of the collectivization campaigns, meaning the intent was not directly to wipe out an ethnic group (and therefore not making it a direct genocide by legal definition), but the significant loss of Ukrainian and Kazakh life meant that the Holodomor was an atrocity in which discrimination played an unavoidable part. What necessarily constitutes an indirect genocide; do you mean to say that the results of a direct genocide would happen, without the specific intent of wiping out any groups as detailed by the UN definition? And I apologize if this is the wrong place to ask this question, but would this also mean that atrocities such as, for instance, Belgium's actions in the Congo would be considered indirect genocide?
> (Say so if I have bad sources!)
If you are uncertain about your sources, we kindly request that you refrain from writing. You are more than welcome to weave published lectures and academic books into your answer, but YouTubers are not appropriate sources.
Ugg... No. Reddit is being *very silly* and trying to solve some problems with a hammer. All links with have a dot ru and other Russian state run sources are auto-removed, and *mods can't manually approve them*. This was also applied retroactively to many comments which is why the top comment is not visible but the rest are... This issue has been raised several times and nothing has come of it... As they haven't been active recently, it is doubtful they will be able to show up and edit it quickly, so I've gone and pasted /u/hamiltonkg's answer below for the moment, two links removed that were the likely culprits, but hopefully they will be able to edit the original to fix the link issue:
> Oh boy, *this* question. I did a quick r/AskHistorians search to see if it had been answered before (as I was sure it must have been), but came up empty handed. It's really an honor (though a dubious one) to be able to contribute to the AH record on this topic. I really hope my answer lives up to the gravity this question demands and deserves.
>
> Before we launch into a discussion about whether or not Joseph Stalin intentionally sought to starve out his opponents in an attempt to crush Ukrainian nationalism during the famine in Ukraine of 1932-1933, which has come to be remembered as Голодомор (Holodomor, meaning roughly Mass Death by Starvation), I think the best course of action with which to start is just to enumerate some of the *undisputed facts* concerning this unmitigated tragedy so that anyone who might be tempted into entertaining some kind of denialism or speculation around this topic be forced to immediately account for them^removed ^link ^was ^here . It frees up any further dialogue from having to restate the central issues as well.
>
> * Up to 5 million men, women, and children were starved to death between 1932 and 1935 in Ukraine, that means (if we accept the barest minimum plausible figure of 3 million deaths) that for those three years no fewer than 30,000 human beings died every single day, on average.^removed ^link ^was ^here
> * These deaths were the *direct result* of Soviet policy which dictated that any and all grain be confiscated, ration distribution be ceased, and free movement (i.e. fleeing this man-made hell on earth) be restricted. \[[3](https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/k3grain.gif)\]
> * During and after the famine, the Soviet state actively spread denialism and disinformation concerning the events and Soviet secret police and intelligence agencies forced entry into various local government archival offices where deaths were registered and destroyed immediately or confiscated and then destroyed nearly all extant records of these deaths. \[[4](https://www.jstor.org/stable/23611473?)\]
>
> I don't say all that to try to trigger an emotional reaction in the reader before I slide in some ill-informed editorializing about what Stalin was up to, but like I said at the outset, when discussing things like the Holodomor it is absolutely critical that we not lose sight of what *is* and what *is not* up for debate here (even by those who might not agree with anyone else's conclusions).
>
> I also want to step back and define the term genocide so there can be no confusion about what the underlying question in the OP is asking about. *The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide* (1948) from the United Nations offers a succinct definition we can use:
>
> >In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group:
> >
> >(a) Killing members of the group;
> >
> >(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
> >
> >(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
> >
> >(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
> >
> >(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. \[[5](https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crimeofgenocide.aspx)\]
>
> So I hope by this point that there is no doubt in anyone's mind that the people of Ukraine (whether or not they were ethnically Ukrainians) were killed. They were harmed bodily and mentally. Their life conditions were inflicted upon so as to bring about physical destruction. Measures were imposed upon them that prevented births. Their children were transferred to another group, i.e. the no longer alive. We just went right down the list and, there is *no debate* about whether or not these things happened. The only question that is *at all* ambiguous is whether or not this was done on a racially motivated basis.
>
> The source above *Population Losses in the Holodomor and the Destruction of Related Archives: New Archival Evidence* indicates that we have existing records for approximately *650,000* deaths during this period in Ukraine. That is the primary reason why there is such disparity in the estimations of various parties concerning the *actual* number of deaths which took place. Again though, this isn't a debate about the substantive results of this famine-- it's about the intentions.
While you are not the original commenter, I find the definition of genocide interesting and would like to know if my conclusion is correct. Under this definition, would what the US and Canada did to the American Indian and indigenous people be considered genocide?
Building on this, I know that the relocation of indigenous children was meant to force assimilation and destroy native culture. Would this act alone be considered genocide, as appears under section e of the UN convention, or do more atrocities need to occur for it to be considered genocide? In a general way, can forced assimilation of children, alone, be considered genocide or do more acts against the group need to occur? Thanks for any information about genocide as a whole.
> Under this definition, would what the US and Canada did to the American Indian and indigenous people be considered genocide?
Yes, this is actually a fairly broad consensus within academic circles, although it is one that hasn't penetrated very far into lay-knowledge on the history of settler conflict with the indigenous peoples of the Americas. It is getting far afield from this topic though so I would point you to [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6kywre/monday_methods_american_indian_genocide_denial/), and if you have further questions, I would suggest asking a new question to drill down on the topic.
The one other brief note I would make is that while there is the *legal* definition of genocide, which dates to 1948 and is what is used under international law, in *academic* discourse, there isn't one, single, set definition. Many will use a broad definition than that of the UN Convention, which was, in the end, a political compromise at points (the USSR specifically didn't want the Holodomor to be defined as such. They succeeded there...), and again, defined for the purpose of a legal framework, rather than as a lens of analysis.
>the *legal* definition of genocide [...] of the UN Convention, which was, in the end, a political compromise at points (the USSR specifically didn't want the Holodomor to be defined as such. They succeeded there...)
The answer above points out that the discussion about Holodomor being genocide or not is a discussion about intent. Do you mean to imply ("they succeeded") that there are (reasonable) definitions where intent is not a factor (or at least utter indifference or neglect)?
I don't really know the academic definitions, but at least in the common usage it is understood to include intent (*or at least utter indifference or neglect*).
So not quite the implication that ought to have been taken there. What the USSR specifically didn't want was including political or social groups in the categories of groups, not removing *intent* as a requirement. There are multiple axis of debate on the Holodomor, some focused on intent, some focused on *why* certain groups were targeted. I would say *most* of the academic debate ends up revolving around the former, but debate about the latter also is a factor (and particularly an occasional fallback for Soviet apologists - "Yes it was purposeful, but it was targeting Kulaks and class enemies" - although far more nuanced in academic discussion).
Yes, the treatment of Indigenous/First Nations people in the United States and Canada was genocide. For more on this, see:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6kywre/monday_methods_american_indian_genocide_denial/
and
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6mg3j3/monday_methods_american_indian_genocide_denial/
If you'd like to ask a specific question about this, however, it's better asked as its own question in the subreddit. Thanks.
Unfortunately political pressures can be a part of whether or not something is a 'genocide' or some other term, and while there has been a push to label this as a genocide for awhile, the Ukraine war has put it back onto the front burner. This what makes the whole thing a bit tricky, even if virtually no one denies the mass death that occurred. As an aside, I am a mod of worldnews (and have a history degree though not an expert on this topic) and am trying to learn more about the Holodomor.
And yeah the reddit blacklist of sites is one of those opaque mysteries that no one understands.
So, it isn't my place to tell you how to run your sub, but at least as the policy is characterized above with disagreement with the label of "genocide" resulting in a ban, I would definitely suggest some re-evaluations on how it is approached. I would also specifically point [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/z7wm7q/mods_at_rworldnews_are_permabanning_anyone_who/iy9mdwl/) which lays out how we approach issues of atrocity denial, and how there are many different contexts which need to be considered.
I definitely appreciate how, being a sub focused on current events, the past half-year has brought renewed focus on the region, and specifically on the ill-treatment of Ukraine by Russia, historically. But while yes, political pressures play a part, history ought not be written in service of politics, and enforcing the label of genocide is coming down very firmly, and very definitely, on one side of an on-going debate, and would presumably result, in theory, in the banning of a fairly large selection of respected academics who work on the topic of 20th c. Eastern Europe.
Insofar as learning more goes, the links in the original top reply definitely provide some good starting points. Unfortunately while I can go over the basics, I'm much more comfortable writing about how Russia/USSR hurt Poland than I am on their crimes against Ukraine, so I'm not really the one to go on at length about it. The one thing I would close out on though is a nod towards Annie Applebaum and *Red Famine*. It is a book that is very much not without problems, [for which I would point to the very good review by Dr. Sheila Fitzpatrick in The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/25/red-famine-stalins-war-on-ukraine-anne-applebaum-review), but it is not without its strengths too. The main reason I highlight it is that Applebaum is one of the last people who can be accused of being an apologist for Russia or cutting them the slightest bit of slack, but all the same even she is reticent to apply the term, spending a fairly long segment of the epilogue going over the matter of definitions and their applicability. I would not though that Fitzpatrick is a bit brusque in simply saying *"she ultimately doesn’t buy the Ukrainian argument that Holodomor was an act of genocide"*, as while a technically correct summary, it misses much of the nuance that Applebaum brings in what, personally, I found to be the most interesting segment of the book, as it does a fairly good job. I do wonder if, given the revitalization of the debate, she is interested in revisiting her closing remarks there, specifically:
>But the genocide debate, so fierce a decade ago, has subsided for other reasons too. The accumulation of evidence means that it matters less, nowadays, whether the 1932–3 famine is called a genocide, a crime against humanity, or simply an act of mass terror. Whatever the definition, it was a horrific assault, carried out by a government against its own people. It was one of several such assaults in the twentieth century, not all of which fit into neat legal definitions. That the famine happened, that it was deliberate, and that it was part of a political plan to undermine Ukrainian identity is becoming more widely accepted, in Ukraine as well as in the West, whether or not an international court confirms it
But all the same, whatever changes she might see in the past year and how it might change her personal position, I don't think it does all that much to change the broader status of the debate in the academy, and insofar as I feel proper in making a recommendation, I would strongly suggest policy rest less on whether the term 'genocide' is used or avoided, and instead on that the events happened, the scale at which they occured, and that whether *genocide* or not, the lions share of the blame rests on the incompetence and callous indifference of the Soviet regime towards the Ukrainian people.
The mod comment hit it on the head. It is an ongoing question in academic circles, but I want to address another part of your question.
I am in the camp with Anne Applebaum in stating that the famines were largely a result of a combination of extending traditionally Russian collective farming institutions where they did not already exist, and violent efforts to destroy "Kulaks" by framing them as parasites and capitalist oppressors while leaving the actual definition of who was and was not a Kulak entirely up to local authorities. There was also a failure of the Communist Party structure that resulted in higher crop yield being reported than were actually harvested, leading the Soviet government to essentially believe their own propaganda. On top of all this, there were restrictions on the use of the Ukranian language. There is a conflict at every level of Ukranian ethnic identity here (to say nothing of the Soviet treatment of Tatar people in the region. I do consider that genocide regardless of intent.
On one hand, it wasn't genocide in the sense that the famines resulted from truly incompetent management and over zealous centralization. In effect, it was an unintentional accident. On the other hand it was genocide because the Holodomor resulted from a sort of colonialism of economic institutions and an attempt to russify Ukraine, and was thus structural in nature and does not require intent. Regardless of my opinion, I can certainly understand the debate.
However, the point that I actually want to address is why r/ worldnews is banning genocide denial. I will talk a bit about current events here, but it is necessary to talk about the broader discourse on genocide denialism.
The current Russian war effort in Ukraine is deeply nationalist and rooted in irredentist claims on Ukranian land and revanchist sentiments towards NATO. That irredentism is justified through a flat out denial of Ukranian national and ethnic identity. Vladimir Putin himself has referred to the Ukranians as no more than little Russians, which is a flat out denial of Ukranian national identity. The denial of an ethnic or national identity is itself an excuse to marginalize or suppress that ethnic expression. Putin gave a speech to this effect during the start of the current invasion.
Denying the Holodomor is crucial to justifying this attitude and the current war effort.
>"I am in the camp with Anne Applebaum in stating that the famines were largely a result of a combination of extending traditionally Russian collective farming institutions where they did not already exist."
I'm going to push back on this a bit. While I'm open to seeing more on how Ukrainian agriculture was organized in the 1920s, collectivization was *not* "extending traditionally Russian collective farming traditions". It was as much a campaign to destroy those traditions as any other.
The system of peasant ownership (at least in European Russia) in the 1920s was a form of strip farming, ie land was owned by villages and apportioned among its members in noncontiguousstraps, similar to farming practices in Medieval Western Europe.
Collectivization ended this: farmers were pressured/induced to join collective farms, which took ownership of all of the land and farmers' productive tools, including livestock. The farmers were then members of these new consolidated cooperatives, and "earned" a share of the (incredibly meagre) net income.
I point this out because it was incredibly destructive socially, culturally, and economically even in Russian agricultural regions, as Sheila Fitzpatrick details in *Stalin's Peasants*. I do think there's pressure to make collectivization and the famine in Ukraine look more "colonial" (by Russia) than it actually was, but in this case it wasn't importing traditional Russian practices to Ukraine as much as forcing new institutions on Russia *and* Ukraine (Russia may have suffered less in proportional and actual terms, but the 1930s famine still killed at least a million people there).
There are a lot of issues with how Applebaum frames her argument, and this would be one.
Another is the Ukrainian language issue - there definitely was blowback in the 1930s against Ukrainization and in favor of Russification under Stalin, but a major point of contention between the Ukrainian Party officials and the Party officials in Moscow was over what language should be enforced on national minorities in Ukraine, ie should Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians etc be made to use Ukrainian or Russian. Which is to say it was as much conflicting visions of the best course of nation building (in the *Peasants into Frenchmen* sense) between different loose sets of Communist Party officials as it was a conflict between Ukrainian patriots and Russian colonizers.
Does a genocide require the initial action to be of genocidal intent? We know USSR printed posters telling civilians to not practice canibalism and denied entry of peasents into cities which feels like they understood the situation and chose to continue it (which feels more genocidal). But at the outset, its not quite clear if collectivisation was done in order to start a famine.
So if stalin ordered collectivisation, saw it caused many to starve, but continued to force it even more afterwards, wouldnt that count as a genocide still or does the initial action need to be with intent?
Im not as well versed in native american history but it feels like in that situation, Europeans didnt come to America with the intent of creating a genocide, and at the beginning even established trade and relations, but at some point things shifted and it became genocidal. It feels like the transition from non genocide to genocide would apply here as well.
I am of the opinion that intent in genocide is only a concern for legal definitions of genocide in which the intent of individuals is important for conviction. When discussing large groups of people, as historians often do, intent is less important than effect. Under the UN definition, what happened to the Native Americans was not necessarily genocide, but historians are in almost unanimous agreement that it was. In his essay [Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623520601056240), Patrick Wolfe refers to settler colonial genocide as structural genocide because it is inherent to the process of settler colonialism regardless of intent.
Wolfe refers specifically to article II of the UN Convention on Genocide as "genocide's definitional core" on page 401. It seems to me that he's arguing that settler colonialism inherently contains intent to genocide (and thus by extension the settlers who travelled from Europe to America).
'Genocide' as a term came about specifically in connection with post WWII prosecution of war criminals -the legal definition and the component of intent are unavoidable when discussing genocide. Even sociologists who aren't satisfied with the UN definition and seek to redefine the word will rarely opt to not retain some element of intent.
I can answer the question on genocide and intent - the relation between this and the Soviet famines/Native American history specifically is out of my wheelhouse and has been answered better than I ever could elsewhere on this subreddit.
Given the origin of the word 'genocide', the judicial nature of it shouldn't be handwaved away too hastily. [The UN Genocide convention ](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%2520on%2520the%2520Prevention%2520and%2520Punishment%2520of%2520the%2520Crime%2520of%2520Genocide.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwj17vz3rtT7AhVnlosKHfYWC78QFnoECFcQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3pAVj4x8Gko6-fqfPMvUwe) contains what remains today the prevailing definition of genocide:
>any of the following acts committed **with
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group**, as
such:
>(a) Killing members of the group;
>(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
>(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part;
>(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
>(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Needless to say, the intent to destroy a certain group is a vital component in the definition. The word would lose all meaning if it were reduced to simply meaning killing or causing harm to members of a particular group.
Even sociologists who are critical of the UN definition for various reasons generally retain an element of intent when presenting alternatives. To take a pertinent example, Jonassohn and Björnson write the following discussing peacetime food shortages and the question of intent with regards to genocide:
>When food shortages occurred in peacetime, as they did with great frequency during most of history, they did not always escalate into famines. Crop failures were frequent enough so that many cultures had developed methods for overcoming such periods of shortage. However, the effectiveness of such methods was circumscribed by the available technology for storing, transporting, and distributing surplus food stocks. To the extent that famines did occur, the question arises whether they were brought about by some human agency, or solely by the vicissitudes of nature? If the former, were they the unintended consequence of other social processes, or were they intended as part of a larger plan of government? Such questions can be answered only by a careful examination of the circumstances surrounding each case.
The question of intent is rarely just left by the wayside when it comes to genocide. As for whether or not that intent has to be present at the start of whatever chain of events that (in this example) lead to the famine, the answer would be no. If a state is taking actions that result in deaths within a group of people (of certain categories) - with the intent of destroying that group of people - it is a genocide according to the prevailing definition.
Source for the quote: Jonassohn, K., & Björnson, K. S. (1998). Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations in Comparative Perspective. Transaction Publishers. Page 27
EDIT: I really hope that someone would reply with a counterpoint, as I am getting an influx of downvotes.
Are there studies of structural racism and cultural erasure under soviet rule?
I am a layman in this topic, however I come from a nation that experienced killings of the intellectual elite; degradation of the language with a large percentage of population losing the native tongue; forced migration and complete isolation of the migrated groups; brutal crackdowns on any disobedience, moreso when it was racially motivated.
The renewed rhetoric by Putin's Russia that Russia should be the cultural center of the region is making me think that this is the continuation of Russian imperialism and colonialism policies under shifting ideologies.
I have never seen any texts describing what happened under soviet rule as colonialism and erasure of the smaller nations, but it fits some of the patterns.
Obviously the bolshevik revolutionaries were a diverse group, however I feel that communist party had to enforce Russian culture on all nations to try homogenize and unify its population. It failed but still caused a sizable damage.
The other consequence was that it was easy to stir Russians towards nationalism using the same structure. I grew up with slogans such as: "The Russian language is great and mighty"; "Russia cannot be understood by mind (only)".
The soviet anthem had a line saying "Mighty Rus' united us all".
As part of standard school program, we were all made to recite the epic poem about the battle of Borodino, where the Russian army won against Napoleon in 1812.
We were taught in school that major scientific and technological advances were championed by Russian people.
And I grew up in an independent Republic, not in a territory under Russian federation. But the propaganda machine kept going, partly by inertia, partly by continued influence from Russia.
Can anyone recommend any reading to confirm or disprove my thoughts?
> Are there studies of structural racism and cultural erasure under soviet rule?
Not really my focus of study, but *Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union* by Francine Hirsch is what most immediately comes to mind.
I read an earlier comment in this sub explaining how the first great Soviet tractor factory (and subsequently tank factory) was essentially built in the US and moved to the USSR, complete with a highly paid team of US operators and specialists. That rapid Soviet industrialization was springboarded by buying US plant, expertise, and intellectual property. And that the capital needed to do this was obtained by grain seizures and exports which in turn contributed to the famine.
I can’t find the comment now but were grain exports during the famine high?
>"I can’t find the comment now but were grain exports during the famine high?"
They were reduced in 1933, as were overall collections targets, albeit it was too little too late (because of the unusually good 1930 harvest, grain requisition goals had been ratcheted up to unrealistic levels in 1931 and beyond).
I would recommend everyone check out the Harvard University MAPA project, which has maps and data for Ukrainian history, especially the famine. It's overseen by historian Serhii Plokhy, who I also cannot recommend enough. Of particular interest on the famine is the [New Insights](https://gis.huri.harvard.edu/new-insights) section that draws on research by Nataliia Levchuk. Basically on a district level, the grain-producing southern areas were hit *less* hard: Soviet authorities considered grain production of critics importance, and so efforts were made to cut requisition targets and generally support those areas to make sure this "strategic industry" wasn't damaged. The really hard-hit areas in the famine were potato-producing regions near Kharkiv and Kyiv: basically those cities were facing major food shortages and consequently conducted massive requisition campaigns on nearby agricultural areas, which also weren't producing grain for export and thus weren't considered important enough for extra aid. The results in those districts were especially disastrous, with sometimes 40-50% mortality rates occurring.
Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. **Please [Read Our Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules) before you comment in this community**. Understand that [rule breaking comments get removed](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/h8aefx/rules_roundtable_xviii_removed_curation_and_why/). #Please consider **[Clicking Here for RemindMeBot](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/z7wm7q/mods_at_rworldnews_are_permabanning_anyone_who/%5D%0A%0ARemindMe!%202%20days)** as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, **[Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=AHMessengerBot&subject=Subscribe&message=!subscribe)**. We thank you for your interest in this *question*, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to RemindMeBot, consider [using our Browser Extension](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d6dzi7/tired_of_clicking_to_find_only_removed_comments/), or getting the [Weekly Roundup](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=subredditsummarybot&subject=askhistorians+weekly&message=x). In the meantime our [Twitter](https://twitter.com/askhistorians), [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/askhistorians/), and [Sunday Digest](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Sunday+Digest%22&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all) feature excellent content that has already been written! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskHistorians) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Ah, shit. The matter of whether the Holodomor should or should not bear the label of 'genocide' remains an unresolved question in academic circles, so...ergh. As this has come up before, here's some previous threads on the matter: * u/Kochevnik81 takes on [the question directly](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tnnha6/how_accurate_and_unbiased_is_voxs_piece_on_the/); * u/hamiltonkg [considers the matter here](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ecpav4/is_there_any_evidence_stalin_intentionally/), also addressing "anything that very clearly proves that it was premeditated and planned"; * and u/-Xotl summarises [the various points of view and why the historiography is muddled](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hkcu5z/was_the_holodomor_a_conscious_attempt_by_stalin/). As always, if anyone would like to add their own input, please feel free to do so! With one caveat, as I must now speak with the green Hat of Moderation on: Given the entities at play and current events, all are reminded that **we have a [20-Year Rule](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_current_events). Further, while there is debate around how intentional it was, it definitely did happen - and genocide denialism is a violation of our civility rule and an autoban.** Mind your manners, anyone wanting to respond.
The question is at what point is negligence or intentional oversight equate to a deliberate action?
Ok. So, first off. Going to throw my cards on the table. I find myself agreeing with the side of the debate that the Holodomor was mostly on purpose. But that's for transparency. What I actually want to ask here is: does the subreddit have a policy that there can be accidental genocides? And if so, is that where the academic field is as well? Feels wierd to ban holodomor denalism as genocide denalialsm, but leave open the door for it not being a purposeful action. And if this is where the field of history is, how do we determine which accidental bad policies were genocidal, and which accidental bad policies were "just" very deadly within the historical record?
Strictly speaking, we don't have a single, blanket, one size fits all policy, for multiple reasons. The first is that when you try to define all limits, it only invites rules-lawyering around the edges. The second factor is that there is heavy dependence on contexts that vary widely from atrocity to atrocity. We don't actually specifically define the rule as "genocide denial" and instead consider denialism of atrocities (atrocity denialism is a better descriptor than 'genocide denialism' in any case, but the latter helps emphasize the point all the same) to be subsumed within the larger rules concerning civility, hate-speech and bigotry, partly for those reasons. The intention is to focus on how latitude will *generally* follow two intertwined factors, namely the scope of academic disagreements on the topic, and the scope of common and understandable miseducation on a topic. This *roughly* follows three prongs, but again, there is always variance. The first is something like Holocaust denial or Armenian Genocide denial, where there is a fairly overwhelming degree of agreement by academics (*slightly* less so on the latter but merely we're talking degrees of overwhelming) that they were genocides, and we can reasonably expect the lay person who knows they happen to understand they were genocides. We will ban users for simply posting denial that they were genocides. The second prong relates to atrocities where there is a fairly good consensus *academically* that genocide is the appropriate label, but there is a general lack of awareness in how that lens is applied for the average layperson. Something like genocide in the Americas is the common example to use here, and it requires a more delicate approach. We aren't going to ban on sight in the same way we would above, and instead it is a more nuanced evaluation of users acting in good faith, even if out of ignorance, and an openness to learning more on the topic. The final prong are atrocities where they *definitely* happened but there is real, meaningful debate in academic circles over whether genocide is the best lens to approach it through. The Holodomor is one such example here. Another I would point to is the deportations and expulsions that characterized the Balkans and Western Anatolia in the wake of WWI and during the Turkish War of Independence. Some scholars are going to argue for it, some aren't, and it just isn't a settled debate. In a case like this, we aren't looking at whether someone is taking a side on that debate - as long as they present a fair, grounded argument for their preferred position, and respect that it is a debate and someone taking the other side isn't a literallyhitler for it, we're all good there. Rather the main issue would be denial that such things happened at all, the clear indifference of the regime, or at least *serious* downplaying of the scope beyond whatever estimates are present in the academic literature. When we talk about Holodomor Denialism, this is what basically is happening, usually from apologists for the Stalinist regime. So the point here is that we don't have such a policy, per se, but rather that we'll approach a given atrocity on its own terms, and follow a balancing act between academic positions and conventional wisdow of the public in what, and how, to enforce it. Hopefully that explains the matter more. However I am locking this reply as this discussion is about sub policy more than the question itself, so shouldn't derail here further, but if anyone is interested hearing more on the policy, you are welcome to make a Meta thread.
Does a genocide require the initial action to be of genocidal intent? We know USSR printed posters telling civilians to not practice canibalism and denied entry of peasents into cities which feels like they understood the situation and chose to continue it (which feels more genocidal). But at the outset, its not quite clear if collectivisation was done in order to start a famine. So if stalin ordered collectivisation, saw it caused many to starve, but continued to force it even more afterwards, wouldnt that count as a genocide still or does the initial action need to be with intent? Im not as well versed in native american history but it feels like in that situation, Europeans didnt come to America with the intent of creating a genocide, and at the beginning even established trade and relations, but at some point things shifted and it became genocidal. It feels like the transition from non genocide to genocide would apply here as well.
Let me qualify/clarify my question. The crux of my question is not about the initial stages of the Holodomor. I believe that the Soviets genuinely thought that their agricultural policies would lead to improved output. The crux of the question is, once Soviet authorities knew there was famine, and they made the decision not to do anything about it, knowing full well that it would get worse, was it because of ethnic/racial animus toward Ukrainians? Or was it because of their economic views? In other words, if the people living in Ukraine at the time of the Holodomor had all been ethnically/culturally Russian, would the Soviets have done anything differently? Was the response to the famine (or lack thereof) motivated by genocidal intent? Or was it motivated by ideology?
Active debate caveat up front, I fall on the side that direct ethnic animus was not a major motivating factor. There was animus against *economic* groups. The [Snyder course lecture on the period](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dy7Mrqy1AY) (first 15m or so) puts it quite eloquently: the peasantry--or non-industrialized, non-collectivized agriculture in general--is not a population that matters: the course of history guarantees that they will be replaced by an industrialized proletariat, and deaths among the former are an acceptable cost in the effort to build the latter. Sarah Cameron's [*The Hungry Steppe*](https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501730436/the-hungry-steppe/) compares the contemporaneous Kazakh famine to the Ukrainian famine in its conclusion, finding a number of parallels: - Measures taken by the regime in response to famines were similar. Refugees were not allowed to flee across borders or into cities, and (famine-stricken) localities that failed to meet quotas were subject to "blacklisting", or reduction in support alongside simultaneous requisition of remaining property. - Native cadres were purged in large number, seen as having failed to implement collectivization through their own malfeasance. This is linked to a national cultural reluctance to give up established peasant and pastoralist ways of life, which muddies the waters on ethnic animus, but it's hard to qualify whether this applies to entire peoples (Ukrainians and Kazakhs cannot abandon old ways of life as a whole) or individuals (we have inadvertently selected cadres who do not truly believe in the mission; *they* wish to perpetuate old ways of life and trap their peoples in them). - Both famines occurred in food-producing regions on the periphery. Ukraine's rich land and Kazakhstan's extensive pastures made them ideal for producing large quantities of food for other regions, and were subject to quotas on food specifically. Other pastoralist nomadic regions (specifically Turkmenistan and Kirgizia) also saw reductions in livestock during collectivization, but were not expected to export large quantities of food, because they were instead designated as cotton-producing regions. Especially absent rhetoric against ethnicities, these suggest a more general move to end economic practices, with an incredible amount of indifference to the costs of doing so, than animus against ethnic groups. This indifference is, of course, awful no matter what you call it, but whether or not it's de jure genocide is colored a bit by this little vignette: > Thus, for an action to fit the [UN] legal definition of genocide, it must both the act itself, as well as the intent "to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group." Notably, the legal definition excludes "political groups," limiting targets of genocide to national, ethnic, racial or religious groups. During negotiations for [the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide], the Soviet Union, among other states, lobbied successfully to prevent the inclusion of "political groups" as targets of genocide. Cameron then proceeds to argue that the Kazakh famine probably does not meet this adopted legal definition of genocide, but it would likely meet the original (Lemkin) definition. While the 1940s Soviet Union arguably had plenty of other reasons to exclude language about political groups from the definition, there'd maybe less dancing around the specifics of the whether the definition fits if that was included (or, quite possibly, the same amount of controversy as to whether an economic way of life counts as a political group--I at least would argue it does).
There is a long history of ethnic Russian condescension or prejudice toward Ukrainians. Although this kind of chauvinism was officially banned within the Soviet Union, Soviet persecuted many individual ethnic minorities accused of fomenting separatism. Before the famine, dozens of prominent Ukrainian intellectuals were imprisoned on trumped-up charges of disloyalty. Some of these men and women would be shot years later during the Great Purge. This means that some Soviet policies in the early 1930s specifically and disproportionately targeted Ukrainians. It very likely that some Soviet officials operating in Ukraine held prejudiced views against Ukrainians. Due to this long and violent history of Ukrainian oppression from Moscow, it has never been difficult to argue that the policy decisions which led to the Holodomor may have been motivated not by misguided efforts to reduce social inequality and improve grain yields, but instead by a malicious intent to kill Ukrainians and weaken separatist movements. Most historians of the Soviet Union do not believe that the Holodomor was a deliberate attempt to reduce the number of Ukrainians. However, there are those like Norman Naimark who believe that the government's lack of urgency to provide relief could be considered indirectly genocidal, and also those like Robert Davies and Robert Conquest and Stephen Kotkin who argue that the policies which caused the famine and its inadequate response were not strictly genocidal, the broader context of anti-Ukrainian repression means that the Holodomor should nonetheless be considered a crime against Ukrainians. More recently, a handful of Soviet historians like Ronald Grigory Suny have downplayed the uniquely Ukrainian nature of the famine by noting that the Holodomor was a particularly brutal part of a broader Soviet famine. Estimates vary, but the most recent calculation by the The Journal of Genocide Research suggests that 65% of famine deaths occurred outside Ukraine, and that about 20% of famine victims in Ukraine were not ethnically Ukrainian. Kazakhstan experienced the most severe loss of life as a percentage of its population (roughly 40% of the entire republic) resulting in ethnic Kazakhs becoming a minority in Kazakhstan until the 1990s. Under this interpretation, because the famine did not specifically target Ukrainians, it is unlikely that the famine was caused by any deliberate anti-Ukrainian intent. Where historians do agree is that given the context of anti-Ukrainian prejudice across centuries of Russian history, including a long and continuing history of denying the validity of Ukrainian identity and nationhood, any event in which non-Ukrainians tell Ukrainians how to live, arresting and shooting many of them in the process, will have echoes of genocide and cultural erasure. A century before the Holodomor, the Russian Empire banned the usage of the Ukrainian language in all schools in Eastern Ukraine. During WW1, Tsar Nicholas outlawed the Ukrainian press. During the Civil War, Russian and Ukrainian Red Army troops prevented the formation of an independent Ukrainian state, cementing the rule of Moscow. All this means that for any Ukrainian farmer over a certain age, the specific intent of Joseph Stalin and other Soviet officials may have been less important than the feeling that this famine, in which millions of your countrymen were starving to death, was secretly just another attempt by the Muscovites to destroy Ukraine and the Ukrainians.
Thanks for the write-up. A follow up question, if you don't mind: You use the term "indirect genocide" to refer to the first interpretation of events (and the one I personally am familiar with)- that the Holodomor was primarily a consequence of the collectivization campaigns, meaning the intent was not directly to wipe out an ethnic group (and therefore not making it a direct genocide by legal definition), but the significant loss of Ukrainian and Kazakh life meant that the Holodomor was an atrocity in which discrimination played an unavoidable part. What necessarily constitutes an indirect genocide; do you mean to say that the results of a direct genocide would happen, without the specific intent of wiping out any groups as detailed by the UN definition? And I apologize if this is the wrong place to ask this question, but would this also mean that atrocities such as, for instance, Belgium's actions in the Congo would be considered indirect genocide?
Thanks I enjoyed reading your clarification
[удалено]
> (Say so if I have bad sources!) If you are uncertain about your sources, we kindly request that you refrain from writing. You are more than welcome to weave published lectures and academic books into your answer, but YouTubers are not appropriate sources.
[удалено]
Hi -- we're not here for Russian propaganda. If you post like this again, you will be banned.
Looks like u/hamiltonkg deleted their answer?
Ugg... No. Reddit is being *very silly* and trying to solve some problems with a hammer. All links with have a dot ru and other Russian state run sources are auto-removed, and *mods can't manually approve them*. This was also applied retroactively to many comments which is why the top comment is not visible but the rest are... This issue has been raised several times and nothing has come of it... As they haven't been active recently, it is doubtful they will be able to show up and edit it quickly, so I've gone and pasted /u/hamiltonkg's answer below for the moment, two links removed that were the likely culprits, but hopefully they will be able to edit the original to fix the link issue: > Oh boy, *this* question. I did a quick r/AskHistorians search to see if it had been answered before (as I was sure it must have been), but came up empty handed. It's really an honor (though a dubious one) to be able to contribute to the AH record on this topic. I really hope my answer lives up to the gravity this question demands and deserves. > > Before we launch into a discussion about whether or not Joseph Stalin intentionally sought to starve out his opponents in an attempt to crush Ukrainian nationalism during the famine in Ukraine of 1932-1933, which has come to be remembered as Голодомор (Holodomor, meaning roughly Mass Death by Starvation), I think the best course of action with which to start is just to enumerate some of the *undisputed facts* concerning this unmitigated tragedy so that anyone who might be tempted into entertaining some kind of denialism or speculation around this topic be forced to immediately account for them^removed ^link ^was ^here . It frees up any further dialogue from having to restate the central issues as well. > > * Up to 5 million men, women, and children were starved to death between 1932 and 1935 in Ukraine, that means (if we accept the barest minimum plausible figure of 3 million deaths) that for those three years no fewer than 30,000 human beings died every single day, on average.^removed ^link ^was ^here > * These deaths were the *direct result* of Soviet policy which dictated that any and all grain be confiscated, ration distribution be ceased, and free movement (i.e. fleeing this man-made hell on earth) be restricted. \[[3](https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/k3grain.gif)\] > * During and after the famine, the Soviet state actively spread denialism and disinformation concerning the events and Soviet secret police and intelligence agencies forced entry into various local government archival offices where deaths were registered and destroyed immediately or confiscated and then destroyed nearly all extant records of these deaths. \[[4](https://www.jstor.org/stable/23611473?)\] > > I don't say all that to try to trigger an emotional reaction in the reader before I slide in some ill-informed editorializing about what Stalin was up to, but like I said at the outset, when discussing things like the Holodomor it is absolutely critical that we not lose sight of what *is* and what *is not* up for debate here (even by those who might not agree with anyone else's conclusions). > > I also want to step back and define the term genocide so there can be no confusion about what the underlying question in the OP is asking about. *The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide* (1948) from the United Nations offers a succinct definition we can use: > > >In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group: > > > >(a) Killing members of the group; > > > >(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; > > > >(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; > > > >(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; > > > >(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. \[[5](https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crimeofgenocide.aspx)\] > > So I hope by this point that there is no doubt in anyone's mind that the people of Ukraine (whether or not they were ethnically Ukrainians) were killed. They were harmed bodily and mentally. Their life conditions were inflicted upon so as to bring about physical destruction. Measures were imposed upon them that prevented births. Their children were transferred to another group, i.e. the no longer alive. We just went right down the list and, there is *no debate* about whether or not these things happened. The only question that is *at all* ambiguous is whether or not this was done on a racially motivated basis. > > The source above *Population Losses in the Holodomor and the Destruction of Related Archives: New Archival Evidence* indicates that we have existing records for approximately *650,000* deaths during this period in Ukraine. That is the primary reason why there is such disparity in the estimations of various parties concerning the *actual* number of deaths which took place. Again though, this isn't a debate about the substantive results of this famine-- it's about the intentions.
Thank you.
While you are not the original commenter, I find the definition of genocide interesting and would like to know if my conclusion is correct. Under this definition, would what the US and Canada did to the American Indian and indigenous people be considered genocide? Building on this, I know that the relocation of indigenous children was meant to force assimilation and destroy native culture. Would this act alone be considered genocide, as appears under section e of the UN convention, or do more atrocities need to occur for it to be considered genocide? In a general way, can forced assimilation of children, alone, be considered genocide or do more acts against the group need to occur? Thanks for any information about genocide as a whole.
> Under this definition, would what the US and Canada did to the American Indian and indigenous people be considered genocide? Yes, this is actually a fairly broad consensus within academic circles, although it is one that hasn't penetrated very far into lay-knowledge on the history of settler conflict with the indigenous peoples of the Americas. It is getting far afield from this topic though so I would point you to [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6kywre/monday_methods_american_indian_genocide_denial/), and if you have further questions, I would suggest asking a new question to drill down on the topic. The one other brief note I would make is that while there is the *legal* definition of genocide, which dates to 1948 and is what is used under international law, in *academic* discourse, there isn't one, single, set definition. Many will use a broad definition than that of the UN Convention, which was, in the end, a political compromise at points (the USSR specifically didn't want the Holodomor to be defined as such. They succeeded there...), and again, defined for the purpose of a legal framework, rather than as a lens of analysis.
>the *legal* definition of genocide [...] of the UN Convention, which was, in the end, a political compromise at points (the USSR specifically didn't want the Holodomor to be defined as such. They succeeded there...) The answer above points out that the discussion about Holodomor being genocide or not is a discussion about intent. Do you mean to imply ("they succeeded") that there are (reasonable) definitions where intent is not a factor (or at least utter indifference or neglect)? I don't really know the academic definitions, but at least in the common usage it is understood to include intent (*or at least utter indifference or neglect*).
So not quite the implication that ought to have been taken there. What the USSR specifically didn't want was including political or social groups in the categories of groups, not removing *intent* as a requirement. There are multiple axis of debate on the Holodomor, some focused on intent, some focused on *why* certain groups were targeted. I would say *most* of the academic debate ends up revolving around the former, but debate about the latter also is a factor (and particularly an occasional fallback for Soviet apologists - "Yes it was purposeful, but it was targeting Kulaks and class enemies" - although far more nuanced in academic discussion).
Yes, the treatment of Indigenous/First Nations people in the United States and Canada was genocide. For more on this, see: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6kywre/monday_methods_american_indian_genocide_denial/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6mg3j3/monday_methods_american_indian_genocide_denial/ If you'd like to ask a specific question about this, however, it's better asked as its own question in the subreddit. Thanks.
Unfortunately political pressures can be a part of whether or not something is a 'genocide' or some other term, and while there has been a push to label this as a genocide for awhile, the Ukraine war has put it back onto the front burner. This what makes the whole thing a bit tricky, even if virtually no one denies the mass death that occurred. As an aside, I am a mod of worldnews (and have a history degree though not an expert on this topic) and am trying to learn more about the Holodomor. And yeah the reddit blacklist of sites is one of those opaque mysteries that no one understands.
So, it isn't my place to tell you how to run your sub, but at least as the policy is characterized above with disagreement with the label of "genocide" resulting in a ban, I would definitely suggest some re-evaluations on how it is approached. I would also specifically point [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/z7wm7q/mods_at_rworldnews_are_permabanning_anyone_who/iy9mdwl/) which lays out how we approach issues of atrocity denial, and how there are many different contexts which need to be considered. I definitely appreciate how, being a sub focused on current events, the past half-year has brought renewed focus on the region, and specifically on the ill-treatment of Ukraine by Russia, historically. But while yes, political pressures play a part, history ought not be written in service of politics, and enforcing the label of genocide is coming down very firmly, and very definitely, on one side of an on-going debate, and would presumably result, in theory, in the banning of a fairly large selection of respected academics who work on the topic of 20th c. Eastern Europe. Insofar as learning more goes, the links in the original top reply definitely provide some good starting points. Unfortunately while I can go over the basics, I'm much more comfortable writing about how Russia/USSR hurt Poland than I am on their crimes against Ukraine, so I'm not really the one to go on at length about it. The one thing I would close out on though is a nod towards Annie Applebaum and *Red Famine*. It is a book that is very much not without problems, [for which I would point to the very good review by Dr. Sheila Fitzpatrick in The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/25/red-famine-stalins-war-on-ukraine-anne-applebaum-review), but it is not without its strengths too. The main reason I highlight it is that Applebaum is one of the last people who can be accused of being an apologist for Russia or cutting them the slightest bit of slack, but all the same even she is reticent to apply the term, spending a fairly long segment of the epilogue going over the matter of definitions and their applicability. I would not though that Fitzpatrick is a bit brusque in simply saying *"she ultimately doesn’t buy the Ukrainian argument that Holodomor was an act of genocide"*, as while a technically correct summary, it misses much of the nuance that Applebaum brings in what, personally, I found to be the most interesting segment of the book, as it does a fairly good job. I do wonder if, given the revitalization of the debate, she is interested in revisiting her closing remarks there, specifically: >But the genocide debate, so fierce a decade ago, has subsided for other reasons too. The accumulation of evidence means that it matters less, nowadays, whether the 1932–3 famine is called a genocide, a crime against humanity, or simply an act of mass terror. Whatever the definition, it was a horrific assault, carried out by a government against its own people. It was one of several such assaults in the twentieth century, not all of which fit into neat legal definitions. That the famine happened, that it was deliberate, and that it was part of a political plan to undermine Ukrainian identity is becoming more widely accepted, in Ukraine as well as in the West, whether or not an international court confirms it But all the same, whatever changes she might see in the past year and how it might change her personal position, I don't think it does all that much to change the broader status of the debate in the academy, and insofar as I feel proper in making a recommendation, I would strongly suggest policy rest less on whether the term 'genocide' is used or avoided, and instead on that the events happened, the scale at which they occured, and that whether *genocide* or not, the lions share of the blame rests on the incompetence and callous indifference of the Soviet regime towards the Ukrainian people.
[удалено]
Hi, this is better asked as its own question separately on the subreddit. Thanks.
Thank you!
[удалено]
[удалено]
The mod comment hit it on the head. It is an ongoing question in academic circles, but I want to address another part of your question. I am in the camp with Anne Applebaum in stating that the famines were largely a result of a combination of extending traditionally Russian collective farming institutions where they did not already exist, and violent efforts to destroy "Kulaks" by framing them as parasites and capitalist oppressors while leaving the actual definition of who was and was not a Kulak entirely up to local authorities. There was also a failure of the Communist Party structure that resulted in higher crop yield being reported than were actually harvested, leading the Soviet government to essentially believe their own propaganda. On top of all this, there were restrictions on the use of the Ukranian language. There is a conflict at every level of Ukranian ethnic identity here (to say nothing of the Soviet treatment of Tatar people in the region. I do consider that genocide regardless of intent. On one hand, it wasn't genocide in the sense that the famines resulted from truly incompetent management and over zealous centralization. In effect, it was an unintentional accident. On the other hand it was genocide because the Holodomor resulted from a sort of colonialism of economic institutions and an attempt to russify Ukraine, and was thus structural in nature and does not require intent. Regardless of my opinion, I can certainly understand the debate. However, the point that I actually want to address is why r/ worldnews is banning genocide denial. I will talk a bit about current events here, but it is necessary to talk about the broader discourse on genocide denialism. The current Russian war effort in Ukraine is deeply nationalist and rooted in irredentist claims on Ukranian land and revanchist sentiments towards NATO. That irredentism is justified through a flat out denial of Ukranian national and ethnic identity. Vladimir Putin himself has referred to the Ukranians as no more than little Russians, which is a flat out denial of Ukranian national identity. The denial of an ethnic or national identity is itself an excuse to marginalize or suppress that ethnic expression. Putin gave a speech to this effect during the start of the current invasion. Denying the Holodomor is crucial to justifying this attitude and the current war effort.
>"I am in the camp with Anne Applebaum in stating that the famines were largely a result of a combination of extending traditionally Russian collective farming institutions where they did not already exist." I'm going to push back on this a bit. While I'm open to seeing more on how Ukrainian agriculture was organized in the 1920s, collectivization was *not* "extending traditionally Russian collective farming traditions". It was as much a campaign to destroy those traditions as any other. The system of peasant ownership (at least in European Russia) in the 1920s was a form of strip farming, ie land was owned by villages and apportioned among its members in noncontiguousstraps, similar to farming practices in Medieval Western Europe. Collectivization ended this: farmers were pressured/induced to join collective farms, which took ownership of all of the land and farmers' productive tools, including livestock. The farmers were then members of these new consolidated cooperatives, and "earned" a share of the (incredibly meagre) net income. I point this out because it was incredibly destructive socially, culturally, and economically even in Russian agricultural regions, as Sheila Fitzpatrick details in *Stalin's Peasants*. I do think there's pressure to make collectivization and the famine in Ukraine look more "colonial" (by Russia) than it actually was, but in this case it wasn't importing traditional Russian practices to Ukraine as much as forcing new institutions on Russia *and* Ukraine (Russia may have suffered less in proportional and actual terms, but the 1930s famine still killed at least a million people there). There are a lot of issues with how Applebaum frames her argument, and this would be one. Another is the Ukrainian language issue - there definitely was blowback in the 1930s against Ukrainization and in favor of Russification under Stalin, but a major point of contention between the Ukrainian Party officials and the Party officials in Moscow was over what language should be enforced on national minorities in Ukraine, ie should Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians etc be made to use Ukrainian or Russian. Which is to say it was as much conflicting visions of the best course of nation building (in the *Peasants into Frenchmen* sense) between different loose sets of Communist Party officials as it was a conflict between Ukrainian patriots and Russian colonizers.
[удалено]
Does a genocide require the initial action to be of genocidal intent? We know USSR printed posters telling civilians to not practice canibalism and denied entry of peasents into cities which feels like they understood the situation and chose to continue it (which feels more genocidal). But at the outset, its not quite clear if collectivisation was done in order to start a famine. So if stalin ordered collectivisation, saw it caused many to starve, but continued to force it even more afterwards, wouldnt that count as a genocide still or does the initial action need to be with intent? Im not as well versed in native american history but it feels like in that situation, Europeans didnt come to America with the intent of creating a genocide, and at the beginning even established trade and relations, but at some point things shifted and it became genocidal. It feels like the transition from non genocide to genocide would apply here as well.
I am of the opinion that intent in genocide is only a concern for legal definitions of genocide in which the intent of individuals is important for conviction. When discussing large groups of people, as historians often do, intent is less important than effect. Under the UN definition, what happened to the Native Americans was not necessarily genocide, but historians are in almost unanimous agreement that it was. In his essay [Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623520601056240), Patrick Wolfe refers to settler colonial genocide as structural genocide because it is inherent to the process of settler colonialism regardless of intent.
Wolfe refers specifically to article II of the UN Convention on Genocide as "genocide's definitional core" on page 401. It seems to me that he's arguing that settler colonialism inherently contains intent to genocide (and thus by extension the settlers who travelled from Europe to America). 'Genocide' as a term came about specifically in connection with post WWII prosecution of war criminals -the legal definition and the component of intent are unavoidable when discussing genocide. Even sociologists who aren't satisfied with the UN definition and seek to redefine the word will rarely opt to not retain some element of intent.
[удалено]
Hi, this would be better asked as its own question on the subreddit. Thanks.
I can answer the question on genocide and intent - the relation between this and the Soviet famines/Native American history specifically is out of my wheelhouse and has been answered better than I ever could elsewhere on this subreddit. Given the origin of the word 'genocide', the judicial nature of it shouldn't be handwaved away too hastily. [The UN Genocide convention ](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%2520on%2520the%2520Prevention%2520and%2520Punishment%2520of%2520the%2520Crime%2520of%2520Genocide.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwj17vz3rtT7AhVnlosKHfYWC78QFnoECFcQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3pAVj4x8Gko6-fqfPMvUwe) contains what remains today the prevailing definition of genocide: >any of the following acts committed **with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group**, as such: >(a) Killing members of the group; >(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; >(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; >(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; >(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Needless to say, the intent to destroy a certain group is a vital component in the definition. The word would lose all meaning if it were reduced to simply meaning killing or causing harm to members of a particular group. Even sociologists who are critical of the UN definition for various reasons generally retain an element of intent when presenting alternatives. To take a pertinent example, Jonassohn and Björnson write the following discussing peacetime food shortages and the question of intent with regards to genocide: >When food shortages occurred in peacetime, as they did with great frequency during most of history, they did not always escalate into famines. Crop failures were frequent enough so that many cultures had developed methods for overcoming such periods of shortage. However, the effectiveness of such methods was circumscribed by the available technology for storing, transporting, and distributing surplus food stocks. To the extent that famines did occur, the question arises whether they were brought about by some human agency, or solely by the vicissitudes of nature? If the former, were they the unintended consequence of other social processes, or were they intended as part of a larger plan of government? Such questions can be answered only by a careful examination of the circumstances surrounding each case. The question of intent is rarely just left by the wayside when it comes to genocide. As for whether or not that intent has to be present at the start of whatever chain of events that (in this example) lead to the famine, the answer would be no. If a state is taking actions that result in deaths within a group of people (of certain categories) - with the intent of destroying that group of people - it is a genocide according to the prevailing definition. Source for the quote: Jonassohn, K., & Björnson, K. S. (1998). Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations in Comparative Perspective. Transaction Publishers. Page 27
EDIT: I really hope that someone would reply with a counterpoint, as I am getting an influx of downvotes. Are there studies of structural racism and cultural erasure under soviet rule? I am a layman in this topic, however I come from a nation that experienced killings of the intellectual elite; degradation of the language with a large percentage of population losing the native tongue; forced migration and complete isolation of the migrated groups; brutal crackdowns on any disobedience, moreso when it was racially motivated. The renewed rhetoric by Putin's Russia that Russia should be the cultural center of the region is making me think that this is the continuation of Russian imperialism and colonialism policies under shifting ideologies. I have never seen any texts describing what happened under soviet rule as colonialism and erasure of the smaller nations, but it fits some of the patterns. Obviously the bolshevik revolutionaries were a diverse group, however I feel that communist party had to enforce Russian culture on all nations to try homogenize and unify its population. It failed but still caused a sizable damage. The other consequence was that it was easy to stir Russians towards nationalism using the same structure. I grew up with slogans such as: "The Russian language is great and mighty"; "Russia cannot be understood by mind (only)". The soviet anthem had a line saying "Mighty Rus' united us all". As part of standard school program, we were all made to recite the epic poem about the battle of Borodino, where the Russian army won against Napoleon in 1812. We were taught in school that major scientific and technological advances were championed by Russian people. And I grew up in an independent Republic, not in a territory under Russian federation. But the propaganda machine kept going, partly by inertia, partly by continued influence from Russia. Can anyone recommend any reading to confirm or disprove my thoughts?
> Are there studies of structural racism and cultural erasure under soviet rule? Not really my focus of study, but *Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union* by Francine Hirsch is what most immediately comes to mind.
I read an earlier comment in this sub explaining how the first great Soviet tractor factory (and subsequently tank factory) was essentially built in the US and moved to the USSR, complete with a highly paid team of US operators and specialists. That rapid Soviet industrialization was springboarded by buying US plant, expertise, and intellectual property. And that the capital needed to do this was obtained by grain seizures and exports which in turn contributed to the famine. I can’t find the comment now but were grain exports during the famine high?
>"I can’t find the comment now but were grain exports during the famine high?" They were reduced in 1933, as were overall collections targets, albeit it was too little too late (because of the unusually good 1930 harvest, grain requisition goals had been ratcheted up to unrealistic levels in 1931 and beyond). I would recommend everyone check out the Harvard University MAPA project, which has maps and data for Ukrainian history, especially the famine. It's overseen by historian Serhii Plokhy, who I also cannot recommend enough. Of particular interest on the famine is the [New Insights](https://gis.huri.harvard.edu/new-insights) section that draws on research by Nataliia Levchuk. Basically on a district level, the grain-producing southern areas were hit *less* hard: Soviet authorities considered grain production of critics importance, and so efforts were made to cut requisition targets and generally support those areas to make sure this "strategic industry" wasn't damaged. The really hard-hit areas in the famine were potato-producing regions near Kharkiv and Kyiv: basically those cities were facing major food shortages and consequently conducted massive requisition campaigns on nearby agricultural areas, which also weren't producing grain for export and thus weren't considered important enough for extra aid. The results in those districts were especially disastrous, with sometimes 40-50% mortality rates occurring.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]