USSR leadership absolutely used forced requisition
True
as a tool of power and control and to punish the farmers
Bullshit.
The rapid collectivization of 1929-1934 was a very difficult endeavour, and is the FIRST IN HISTORY successful collectivization of agriculture. There have been many attempts since before the Roman Empire, but never had it been carried our successfully before. Grain requisitions were carried out because the effort of rapid collectivization was kickstarted in order to rapidly industrialize the nation. By introducing tractors into farms and collectivizing them in larger plots, fewer peasants were needed, and people could move to cities to build up an industrial sector. Moving people to cities meant feeding people in cities, and grain requisitions were carried out initially in order to force wealthy exploiter peasants (kulaks) to sell their grain at state mandated prices. Had it not been for the rapid collectivization and industrialization of the 1930s, the Soviets would have been crushed by Nazism, and tens of millions of people more would have been exterminated as it happened in Poland, Belarus or Ukraine. Rapid collectivization wasn’t an ideological decision, it was a pragmatic decision that averted the extermination of Eastern Europe at the hands of Nazism.
agrarian population and treated them like shit at least until later in the Union’s life
This is again bullshit. The region has never before or after seen the level of expenditure in infrastructure, education or healthcare that took place in rural USSR. Since the disappearing of the USSR, many massive rural exodus have taken place all over the eastern block.
Both the horrific ideologically motivated methods to punish peasants and agrarian population and the ideological dislike of agrarian population and the fast collectivization are well documented. I can quote you choice parts from Stalin: A new biography of a dictator by Oleg Khlevniuk when I get home from work, if you want the claims to be sourced.
Stalin disliking Kulaks or his personal beliefs towards peasants are not evidence of policy, and it’s the only source you will be able to provide. In contrast, I can bring you quotes by Anna Louise Strong, an American journalist (first woman to get a doctorate in Chicago university) who traveled and documented the USSR, proving that peasants generally supported the Bolshevik movement and government during the collectivization, and how most trials against Kulaks were carried out by peasants themselves. But go ahead, bring your sources.
So, grain requisitions? I never denied that those happened, I denied that it was used as a tool to oppress farmers. You also keep conflating Kulaks and non-landowning peasants, which is bad analysis.
Considering the systemic and politically motivated oppression and political terror and taking all their food, leaving them to starve, torturing people on the suspicion of not giving all of their grain etc just “grain requisitions” is pretty wild.’
But for the promised quotes, this is the first I came accross from the book “Stalin - A New Biography of a Dictator” by Khlevniuk, Oleg V. (2015)
While the entire country suffered from famine and mass repression, Ukraine and the North Caucasus were the most affected.37 It was in these two important regions of the USSR where the policy of punishing grain requisitions and terror were most brutally applied. Two interrelated reasons explain Stalin’s focus on these areas. The first could be described as economic. Ukraine and the North Caucasus supplied as much as half of all grain collected by the state. But in 1932–1933 they turned over 40 percent less than the previous year. While this decline was partially compensated by Russian grain-producing areas, which despite going hungry had significantly overfulfilled their plans, they could not completely make up the shortfall. In 1932 the state collected almost 20 percent less grain than in 1931.38 These figures partially explain the demands Stalin placed on Ukraine and the North Caucasus. He wanted “his” grain and was infuriated that they were not providing it.
Second, Stalin saw the crisis of 1932 as the continuation of the war against the peasantry and as a means of consolidating the results of collectivization, and he had a point. In a letter to the Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov on 6 May 1933, he wrote: “The esteemed grain growers were in essence waging a ‘quiet’ war against Soviet power. A war by starvation.”39 He undoubtedly considered the peasantry of Ukraine and the North Caucasus to be at the forefront of this peasant army battling the Soviet government. These regions had always been hotbeds of anti-Soviet sentiment, and Ukraine had been at the forefront of the anti-kolkhoz movement in 1930. Repeated incidents of unrest flared up in both Ukraine and the North Caucasus in 1931–1932. A further cause for concern was Ukraine’s border with Poland. Stalin feared that Poland, in its hostility toward the USSR, could exploit the Ukrainian crisis.40 Overall, as Hiroaki Kuromiya points out, Stalin was suspicious of all peasants, but “Ukrainian peasants were doubly suspect both for being peasants and for being Ukrainian.”
By proclaiming grain collection to be a war, Stalin was untying his own hands and the hands of those carrying out his orders. The ideological basis for this war was the Stalinist myth that “food difficulties” resulted from acts of sabotage by “enemies” and “kulaks.” Any suggestion of a link between the crisis and government policy was categorically rejected. By blaming all food shortages on “enemies” and on the peasants themselves while also promoting the idea that the scale of the famine was being maliciously exaggerated, Stalin relieved himself and the central government of any obligation to help the hungry. A statement by the general secretary in February 1933 at a congress of kolkhoz shock workers shows the depth of his cynicism: “One of our achievements is that the vast masses of the poor peasants, who formerly lived in semi-starvation, have now, in the collective farms, become middle peasants, have attained material security.… It is an achievement such as has never been known in the world before, such as no other state in the world has yet made.”42 This statement came at a time when thousands were dying every day.
And so on.
It’s a good book and very approachable. I highly recommend it.
So, as I had predicted, the only sources for intentionality against Ukrainians are a few personal remarks by Stalin in some obscure letter to a writer. I literally called this out before you brought up your comment because if there were any further evidence, it would be plastered all over, since there are BIG reasons for western propaganda to promote Russophobia and anticommunist sentiment now that Ukraine is an ideological hotbed.
Also, your source doesn’t discriminate between Kulaks and non-landowning peasants, again as I called you out for in another comment. Funnily enough the only numerical evidence in your source supports my thesis: that the regions most affected by the grain requisitions were the main grain-producing regions, including Ukraine and the Caucasus but also Southern Russia (not mentioned because you don’t care about Russians dying).
The final remark by Stalin is also true, by the way. The vast majority of peasants in 1929 were non-landowner peasants exploited by Kulaks in exchange for miserable wages, and by 1933 the collectivization was essentially complete and these peasants could now work their own lands collectively. There is no cynism there: one of the main motivations behind the Russian Revolution was the redistribution of lands, and the Bolsheviks achieved this for the first time in human history.
True
Bullshit.
The rapid collectivization of 1929-1934 was a very difficult endeavour, and is the FIRST IN HISTORY successful collectivization of agriculture. There have been many attempts since before the Roman Empire, but never had it been carried our successfully before. Grain requisitions were carried out because the effort of rapid collectivization was kickstarted in order to rapidly industrialize the nation. By introducing tractors into farms and collectivizing them in larger plots, fewer peasants were needed, and people could move to cities to build up an industrial sector. Moving people to cities meant feeding people in cities, and grain requisitions were carried out initially in order to force wealthy exploiter peasants (kulaks) to sell their grain at state mandated prices. Had it not been for the rapid collectivization and industrialization of the 1930s, the Soviets would have been crushed by Nazism, and tens of millions of people more would have been exterminated as it happened in Poland, Belarus or Ukraine. Rapid collectivization wasn’t an ideological decision, it was a pragmatic decision that averted the extermination of Eastern Europe at the hands of Nazism.
This is again bullshit. The region has never before or after seen the level of expenditure in infrastructure, education or healthcare that took place in rural USSR. Since the disappearing of the USSR, many massive rural exodus have taken place all over the eastern block.
Both the horrific ideologically motivated methods to punish peasants and agrarian population and the ideological dislike of agrarian population and the fast collectivization are well documented. I can quote you choice parts from Stalin: A new biography of a dictator by Oleg Khlevniuk when I get home from work, if you want the claims to be sourced.
Stalin disliking Kulaks or his personal beliefs towards peasants are not evidence of policy, and it’s the only source you will be able to provide. In contrast, I can bring you quotes by Anna Louise Strong, an American journalist (first woman to get a doctorate in Chicago university) who traveled and documented the USSR, proving that peasants generally supported the Bolshevik movement and government during the collectivization, and how most trials against Kulaks were carried out by peasants themselves. But go ahead, bring your sources.
The book has ample evidence for it having been a systemic policy, don’t worry about that.
By it being systemic policy, what do you mean it? What policy, specifically, and in what timeframe?
https://sopuli.xyz/post/36458404/20141296
https://sopuli.xyz/post/36458404/20149894
So, grain requisitions? I never denied that those happened, I denied that it was used as a tool to oppress farmers. You also keep conflating Kulaks and non-landowning peasants, which is bad analysis.
Considering the systemic and politically motivated oppression and political terror and taking all their food, leaving them to starve, torturing people on the suspicion of not giving all of their grain etc just “grain requisitions” is pretty wild.’
But for the promised quotes, this is the first I came accross from the book “Stalin - A New Biography of a Dictator” by Khlevniuk, Oleg V. (2015)
And so on.
It’s a good book and very approachable. I highly recommend it.
So, as I had predicted, the only sources for intentionality against Ukrainians are a few personal remarks by Stalin in some obscure letter to a writer. I literally called this out before you brought up your comment because if there were any further evidence, it would be plastered all over, since there are BIG reasons for western propaganda to promote Russophobia and anticommunist sentiment now that Ukraine is an ideological hotbed.
Also, your source doesn’t discriminate between Kulaks and non-landowning peasants, again as I called you out for in another comment. Funnily enough the only numerical evidence in your source supports my thesis: that the regions most affected by the grain requisitions were the main grain-producing regions, including Ukraine and the Caucasus but also Southern Russia (not mentioned because you don’t care about Russians dying).
The final remark by Stalin is also true, by the way. The vast majority of peasants in 1929 were non-landowner peasants exploited by Kulaks in exchange for miserable wages, and by 1933 the collectivization was essentially complete and these peasants could now work their own lands collectively. There is no cynism there: one of the main motivations behind the Russian Revolution was the redistribution of lands, and the Bolsheviks achieved this for the first time in human history.