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this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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I think it depends on who "you" are when you say that it was a regime that wanted to explicitly murder "you". The first think that the Soviets did was kill off all the land owners, who were the people that actually knew how to cultivate that land, which caused a huge famine. They they murdered Ukrainians that tried to keep the enough food they produced for themselves to avoid starvation.
I'd say the main difference between the two was that Nazis wanted to replace "you" with "them" and Communists wanted to extract all of the labor you might have left in you before they kill you.
That didn't happen here (Romania). They confiscated the land, but they didn't murder anyone for it. Over the last 2 decades, there's been a lot of reappropriation as well, where those who still have the pre-communist deeds to the land can sue to get it back.
I won't pretend to know details of Romanian history. I do doubt that Dekulakization was bloodless there.
EDIT: Didn't understand we were talking about collectivization, sorry. Never heard the term Kulak before.
Actually, collectivization in Romania was very bloodless, at least until the USSR decided to lend a "helping hand" to "speed up" the process.
That's very interesting, thanks for sharing. It almost looks like Romania is an example of what happens when the process of collectivization occurs naturally and not forced through authoritarianism. That's actually nice to see.
Until, like you said, USSR tried to "help".
It would be wrong to hold up Romania as too much of a shining example though, even here. When the USSR expressed disappointment and offered their help, Romanian communists were very willing to show their independence from Moscow by refusing and breaking heads on their own to speed up the process.
This is why we can't have nice things.
That's... not at all what happened. The land owners largely emigrated after the conclusion of the Russian Civil War, and they didn't know jack shit about farming, leaving behind the peasantry. Things were fine on the agricultural front up until around 1928. The cause of the Soviet-wide famine in 1930 was the forced collectivization started in 1928, in which poorly-run kolkhoz were given frankly absurd conditions and shuffled labor around without concern for skill or morale. It wasn't that those who knew how to farm were killed or even thrown out - it was that they were simply ignored, or rather, had their input in a system that was notoriously slow to change in response to conditions.
Then they murdered Ukrainians by forcibly exporting grain at a much higher rate than the rest of the Soviet Union.
They did kill somewhere between 400,000 and 5,000,000 during Dekulakization between 1917 and 1933. It just took longer, so the estimates are fuzzy, but they did at some point designate a group of land owning peasants that were designated to be sent to the Gulags. And that's about as systematic as you can get.
Everything else you said also happened, just concurrently.
I think the only point of contention is the cause of the famine (you assert that agriculturally vital skills were removed from the labor pool; I assert that the problem was organizational and that the vital skills were still present in more-than-sufficient quantities), rather than the cruelty of the Soviet Union.
Fair enough. Malice vs incompetence.
I think at this point I jump straight to malice because before the '22 invasion of Ukraine there were still a lot of people online openly denying Holodomor as a actual genocide caused by the Soviet Union. And the common argument I've heard was that it wasn't a "real" genocide because it was a "logistical issue". So people were saying that it was incompetence that led to it, which doesn't fit the exact definition of a "genocide". Which I think is a disgusting way to defend a regime that caused so much pain.
I'm not saying that you're doing any of that. I think that technically you're correct and I'm just splitting hairs at this point. I just have a personal aversion to drawing distinctions between intent and effect in this specific case due to my past experiences. But it's important to have all your facts straight when making an argument, so I'll work on that.
No, no, I totally get it, I've run into Holodomor deniers using that line of thought too. It's important, for that very reason, to split the broader issue of the 30-33 famine and the Holodomor. The former was a very particular brand of callous incompetence. The latter was malice, absolutely.