Kapitalizam 101

TO REDUCE WAGES, LENGTHEN THE WORKING DAY, WEAKEN THE PROLETARIAT AND SMASH ITS ORGANISATIONS — SUCH ARE THE OBJECTS OF THE GENERAL ASSOCIATION OF CAPITALISTS.

 - J.V. STALIN, THE CLASS STRUGGLE (1906)

IT IS DIFFICULT FOR ME TO IMAGINE WHAT “PERSONAL LIBERTY” IS ENJOYED BY AN UNEMPLOYED HUNGRY PERSON. TRUE FREEDOM CAN ONLY BE WHERE THERE IS NO EXPLOITATION AND OPPRESSION OF ONE PERSON BY ANOTHER; WHERE THERE IS NOT UNEMPLOYMENT, AND WHERE A PERSON IS NOT LIVING IN FEAR OF LOSING HIS JOB, HIS HOME AND HIS BREAD. ONLY IN SUCH A SOCIETY PERSONAL AND ANY OTHER FREEDOM CAN EXIST FOR REAL AND NOT ON PAPER.

 - INTERVIEW BETWEEN I.V. STALIN AND ROY HOWARD (PRESIDENT OF SCRIPPS-HOWARD NEWSPAPERS), MARCH 1ST, 1936.
(VIA STALINSOCIETY)

Filipenko wrote:Pravo pitanje je koliko bi ih pomrlo da nije bilo Staljina? 

No Country wrote:у подужој историји Украјине

No Country wrote:Ту има нека шала...?

No Country wrote:Зна гугла. По бројкама је сасвим упоредиво, геноцидну намеру је већ много теже доказати. Извини, мислио сам да правиш некакву пошалицу.

James‏ @historyboy77  6. јул 2015.
(1) #Holodomor On this day 1932, Kaganovich & Molotov sent a pair of telegrams to Stalin asking for his opinion about proposed plans for
(2) grain procurement in Ukraine and also covering up the real state of affairs in the Ukrainian SSR, because they knew that if the famine
(3) received any sort of wide scale coverage, especially from foreign press, than it would discredit the USSR in a propaganda war w the west
(4) Stalin's reply was a resolution demanding "unconditional fulfillment" of extracting 356 m poods of grain from out of the Ukr countryside
(5) Stalin also agreed that covering up the #Holodomor was a good idea, & also to target Ukr communists who advocated reducing grain quotas
(6) such as Mykola Skrypnyk, who was also an advocate of Ukranianization. Exactly one year and a day later Skrypnyk would be dead.
(7) "supposedly" Skrypnyk "commited suicide" by "self-inflicted gunshot wound" after having been accused of "promoting nationalism"

 Forced collectivization and ineffective industrialization dealt the coun-
try a blow from which it never fully recovered. In 1930–1932, hundreds of
thousands of “wreckers” and “kulaks” were shot or imprisoned in camps,
and more than 2 million kulaks and their family members were sent into
exile.26 Many of those exiled were just as doomed as those who were shot.
Kulak families were sent to live in barracks not suitable for habitation and
sometimes simply dropped off in open fields. Terrible living conditions,
backbreaking labor, and hunger brought on mass fatalities, especially
among children.27

 The situation for peasants who were not arrested or exiled was hardly
better. The Soviet village, ravaged by collectivization, was seriously de-
graded. Agricultural production plummeted, and the livestock sector was
hit hard. Between 1928 and 1933 the number of horses dropped from 32 mil-
lion to 17 million, heads of cattle fell from 60 million to 33 million and pigs from 22 million to 10 million.28 Despite such declining productivity, the state pumped an ever-growing share of its yield out of the countryside. And yet throughout the Soviet period, the kolkhozes were unable to adequately
feed the country. Most Soviet citizens survived on meager rations. Many
periods were marked by famine. One of the worst was the famine of 1931–
1933, the predictable result of Stalin’s Great Leap.

Famine

 When the time arrived to announce the results of the First Five-
Year Plan, Stalin had to be creative. Exercising the privilege of power, he
did not cite a single actual figure but simply proclaimed that the emperor
was indeed wearing clothes. The Five-Year Plan, he said, had been fulfilled
ahead of schedule!29 Of course the investment of vast resources and tons of
equipment purchased from the West did yield results. Many modern fac-
tories were built, and industrial production did increase significantly. But
there was no miracle. The unachievable five-year targets were, predictably,
not achieved. The actual production figures were not even close: 6.2 mil-
lion metric tons of cast iron in 1932 instead of the desired 17 million; 21.4
million tons of petroleum instead of 45 million; 48,900 tractors instead of
170,000; 23,900 automobiles instead of 200,000.30 The state of consumer
goods manufacturing was particularly lamentable.

But the main problem with the First Five-Year Plan was that it estab-
lished a ruinously inefficient approach to industrialization. Vast sums and
resources were poured into undertaking construction that was never com-
pleted; into equipment for which no use was ever found, purchased from
abroad out of Soviet gold reserves; into wasteful redesigns, the inevitable
result of excessive haste; and into goods so poorly produced as to be un-
usable. The task of arriving at an approximation of these losses rests with
historians. Much better known are the statistics from another tragic result
of the Great Leap—the toll taken by the Great Famine.

 This famine, which reached its peak over the winter of 1932–1933, took
the lives of between 5 million and 7 million people.31 Millions more were
permanently disabled. In a time of peace and relatively normal weather,
agriculturally rich regions were ruined and desolated. Although the famine
was a complex phenomenon, posterity has every right to call it the Stalin
Famine. The Stalinist policy of the Great Leap was its primary cause; more-
over, it was Stalin’s decisions in 1932 and 1933 that, instead of easing the
tragedy, made it worse.

 The famine was the inevitable result of industrialization and collectiviza-
tion. From a productivity standpoint, the kolkhozes were a poor substitute
for the destroyed farms of those who had been branded “kulaks.” The only
advantage of the kolkhozes was that they gave the state a convenient means
of channeling resources out of the countryside. The exceptional exploita-
tion of peasants had two effects: agricultural workers were physically weak-
ened by hunger, and they were deprived of any incentive to work, leading to
despondency and apathy. They knew in advance that everything they grew
would be taken by the state, dooming them, at best, to semi-starvation.
Several years of this policy led to a gradual decline in output. In 1932 the
crops did not grow well and were also poorly harvested.

 The state’s interests and those of the peasants were diametrically op-
posed. The state was extremely aggressive in taking from the countryside as
many resources as possible. The peasants, like famine victims all over the
world, used “the weapons of the weak.”32 They sabotaged the fulfillment of
their obligations to the state and tried to stash away stores to feed them-
selves. Stalin was well aware of the hostility of the forcibly collectivized
countryside, but he placed the blame fully on the peasants’ shoulders. They
had declared war, he proclaimed, against the Soviet government.

 The looming crisis was obvious to everyone, including Stalin, long be-
fore the famine entered its most critical phase. There were obvious steps
that, if they did not prevent the famine altogether, could at least have di-
minished its impact. The first would have been to establish set norms for
grain deliveries to the state—in other words, a move from a system of con-
fiscation to a system of taxes. This step would have given the peasants an
incentive to boost production. Stalin, however, rejected this approach.33
He preferred to take as much as possible from the countryside without any
constraints. Another step to alleviate the famine might have been to reduce
grain exports or even buy grain abroad. Such purchases were made on a
limited basis during the spring of 1932, so they were in principle possible.34
But Stalin refused to make further purchases. Any concessions that hinted
at the misguidedness of the Great Leap were contrary to his nature and po-
litically dangerous to his dictatorship. To alleviate the pressure on the peas-
ants there would have to be a reduction in the pace of industrial growth.
Reluctantly, Stalin did agree to such a reduction in 1933, but his slowness to
take action cost millions of lives.

 By the autumn of 1932, critical delays, stubbornness, and cruelty had
led Stalin himself into a dead end. No good options remained. The har-
vest produced by the devastated countryside in 1932 was even worse than
the poor harvest of 1931. Meanwhile, industrialization continued apace,
and the Soviet Union’s foreign debt for purchases of equipment and raw
materials reached new heights. Given these circumstances, there was only
a little room to maneuver. The government could mobilize all available
resources, or dip into reserves, or appeal for international aid, as the Bol-
sheviks had done during the famine of 1921–1922.35 These measures came
with economic and political costs, but they were possible. Stalin probably
did not even consider them. Instead, the state intensified pressure on the
countryside.

 Documents discovered in recent years paint a horrific picture. All food
supplies were taken away from the starving peasants—not only grain, but
also vegetables, meat, and dairy products. Teams of marauders, made up of
local officials and activists from the cities, hunted down hidden supplies—
so-called yamas (holes in the ground), where peasants, in accordance with
age-old tradition, kept grain as a sort of insurance against famine. Hungry
peasants were tortured to reveal these yamas and other food stores, their
families’ only safeguard against death. They were beaten, forced out into
sub-freezing temperatures without clothing, arrested, or exiled to Siberia.
Attempts by peasants dying of hunger to flee to better-off regions were ruth-
lessly suppressed. Refugees were forced to return to their villages, doomed
to slowly perish, or be arrested. By mid-1933 some 2.5 million people were
in labor camps, prisons, or exile.36 Many of them fared better than those
who starved to death “in freedom.”

 At its peak in late 1932 and early 1933, the famine afflicted an area pop-
ulated by more than 70 million people: Ukraine, the North Caucasus, Ka-
zakhstan, and some Russian provinces. This does not mean that the remain-
ing Soviet population of 160 million was eating normally. Many in regions
not officially in a state of famine lived on the edge of starvation. The entire country was hit by epidemics, primarily typhus. Millions suffered serious illnesses, were left disabled, or died several years after the famine from the damage it had inflicted on their bodies. And no statistics can measure the moral degradation it caused. Secret OGPU and party summaries (svodkas), especially during the early months of 1933, are filled with accounts of wide-spread cannibalism. Mothers murdered their children, and deranged activists robbed and tormented the population.

 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 rea-
sons 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 per-
cent less than the previous year. While this decline was partially compen-
sated 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 collectiviza-
tion, and he had a point. In a letter to the Soviet writer Mikhail Sholok-
hov 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 un-
doubtedly 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 Cau-
casus 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 ex-
ploit the Ukrainian crisis.40 Overall, as Hiroaki Kuromiya points out, Stalin
was suspicious of all peasants, but “Ukrainian peasants were doubly sus-
pect both for being peasants and for being Ukrainian.”41

 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 ex-
aggerated, Stalin relieved himself and the central government of any obli-
gation 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 cyni-
cism: “One of our achievements is that the vast masses of the poor peas-
ants, 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.

Gargantua wrote:Filipovo luđenje na stranu, ja sam počeo da mrzim potezanje Staljina kao modela, hmm, anti-kapitalizma tj komunizma kao takvog (pošto je i to postojalo u više varijacija, ili nije postojalo nego se iz socijalizma kretalo ka komunizmu u više puteva).

Gargantua wrote:Hoću da kažem da socijalizam/komunizam ima ozbiljnijih problema od optužbi za staljinizam.