Stalin had big plans for revolutionizing the Soviet Union and nowhere where those plans bigger than Ukraine. 90% percent of the population in the republic were small time farmers who worked the same plots of land their ancestors always had. He wanted to dispossess all of them and force everyone into large industrial plantations where they would become employees of the state. Convinced that that the "fascist" Western democracies were itching to invade, he wanted to take the agrarian Soviet Union and turn it into an industrial superpower capable defeating the "capitalist encirclement" in just 5 years. However, to do that he needed money... lots of money and the Soviet Union would have to export grain... lots and lots of grain to get it. But what if his own people didn't have enough to eat? In that case the industrialized "proletarian" regions would be fed and the backward agricultural ones would have to do without. He reasoned that to create this new bulwark of Socialism the peasants would have to be "sacrificed." Lenin had said that peasants "need to do a little starving" now and then and this would be no exception. The "Worker's Paradise" had no use for these vestiges of the feudal past and if some of these were lost it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. But he also saw Ukraine as a hotbed of "counterrevolutionaries," "kulaks," "wreckers," "Petliurists," and about a dozen other hidden "class enemies." They were all threats to Soviet power and had connections to "fascist" Western democracies. These were people that needed to be taught a lesson they wouldn't soon forget. What followed would be one of the darkest man made catastrophes on Earth but it would happen systematically, in deliberate stages. Stalin would later confess to Churchill that he had to "destroy 10 million." It would be known as the "Holodomor" or "death by hunger." It doomed the population of Ukraine to a slow, lingering death. Ultimately, 13% of the population perished in less than two years. Nonetheless, a sympathetic New York Times reporter from the time would say "you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet." Do the ends always justify the means? Today, the United States, along with 18 other countries officially recognize it as a genocide. Unsurprisingly, Putin's Russia is not one of them. They do not teach it in schools and still deny it ever occurred. If you want to know why every day people would be willing to fight to the death in the streets of Kiev to repel a Russian invader, look no further.
Stalin had big plans for revolutionizing the Soviet Union and nowhere where those plans bigger than Ukraine. 90% percent of the population in the republic were small time farmers who worked the same plots of land their ancestors always had. He wanted to dispossess all of them and force everyone into large industrial plantations where they would become employees of the state. Convinced that that the "fascist" Western democracies were itching to invade, he wanted to take the agrarian Soviet Union and turn it into an industrial superpower capable defeating the "capitalist encirclement" in just 5 years. However, to do that he needed money... lots of money and the Soviet Union would have to export grain... lots and lots of grain to get it. But what if his own people didn't have enough to eat? In that case the industrialized "proletarian" regions would be fed and the backward agricultural ones would have to do without. He reasoned that to create this new bulwark of Socialism the peasants would have to be "sacrificed." Lenin had said that peasants "need to do a little starving" now and then and this would be no exception. The "Worker's Paradise" had no use for these vestiges of the feudal past and if some of these were lost it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. But he also saw Ukraine as a hotbed of "counterrevolutionaries," "kulaks," "wreckers," "Petliurists," and about a dozen other hidden "class enemies." They were all threats to Soviet power and had connections to "fascist" Western democracies. These were people that needed to be taught a lesson they wouldn't soon forget. What followed would be one of the darkest man made catastrophes on Earth but it would happen systematically, in deliberate stages. Stalin would later confess to Churchill that he had to "destroy 10 million." It would be known as the "Holodomor" or "death by hunger." It doomed the population of Ukraine to a slow, lingering death. Ultimately, 13% of the population perished in less than two years. Nonetheless, a sympathetic New York Times reporter from the time would say "you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet." Do the ends always justify the means? Today, the United States, along with 18 other countries officially recognize it as a genocide. Unsurprisingly, Putin's Russia is not one of them. They do not teach it in schools and still deny it ever occurred. If you want to know why every day people would be willing to fight to the death in the streets of Kiev to repel a Russian invader, look no further.
I don’t know how much experience you have with Psychology. I've had the experience teaching it at the high school level. A course like AP psychology really tries to do everything. One minute your doing neuro anatomy, another you are learning about Gestalt, then you are learning about pathologies and then there is psychoanalysis. It's all over the place really. There’s one unit in the course that at its face doesn't seem all too interesting but its actually it's probably the most applicable to explain why people do the things they do. Its a section called Behavioral Psychology. Behavioral psychology is different because it concentrates not on thoughts and feelings but on actual observable behavior. How do people react to stimuli. Negative and positive things.. Think back to that intro to psychology course where you learned about the rat in the box. He does one thing and he gets a food pellet. He does another thing and he gets an electric shock. In time the animal figures out the little system…hopefully. He avoids the bad and gets the good. We call this conditioning. Now you have classical conditioning where responses involuntary. There was that famous experiment where Pavlov fed the dog meat powder and started ringing a bell beforehand… Wouldn’t you know it when the dog would hear the bell the thing would salivate. It knew bell=food. That is classical conditioning. Its involuntary happens on its own. Then there is operant conditioning. The person or animal gets to make a choice and the choice results in something positive or negative. The decision the subject makes is influenced by the outcome. It is “conditioned.” Now there are 2 contingencies categories. You have reinforcers and you have punishers. A reinforcer will either add something you want (positive reinforcer) or take away something you don’t (negative reinforcer) as a consequence of your action. It “reinforces” whatever it is you did. Then there are “punishers.” This is when the decision results in adding something bad into the mix (positive punishment) or taking away something good (negative punishment). Of course it gets way more complex than that but at its core that's behavioral psychology for you. It's about the here and now. Its about actions you can see. Now the Soviets were obsessed with Behavioral Psychology. Pavlov was Russian obviously.. But he was one a a whole school of Soviet behaviorists whose work is still influential today. It's not hard to imagine why. Think about it. You have created a whole society where the normal things that motivate the individual have been removed. Capitalism is all about selfishness. Let's face it. Gordon Gekko was on to something when he said “greed is good.” In order for the system to work people need to want to go out and accumulate for themselves. That only happens by providing something that others want. We make self interested decisions all day every day and all these millions… hell maybe billions of decisions are what makes society function. But socialism says “no!! That's selfish!! You are forcing social hierarchy on others you are exploiting!” But people can't just change their psychological makeup overnight. The selfishness built up over the millenia won't just evaporate overnight. No. You have to create incentives for people to do their part. You need carrots and sticks… and all that on a mass scale… And you won't have the help of traditional morality. That's been polluted by class antagonism. There is no God… remember?? Now you can reinforce behavior you like.. But in a society that is supposed to be classless you are limited to sort of symbolic rewards and honors. That leaves punishment… They say fear is more powerful than greed and that's a fact not lost on any Socialist state that's ever been. Remember punishment is not pain for pain’s sake. It's not retribution. It is a tool for eliciting the correct behavior. Positive punishments adverse stimulus and negative punishments remove a good stimulus. Step out of line and bad things will happen. Its in your best interest to do what we say. I don't need to elaborate on this concept. I think you get it. This is the core logic around which the Soviet system was built. The legal code gave the state immense power to inflict pain on any individual that transgressed the “will of the people.” But what do you do when a whole group of people step out of line? How do you inflict punishment on millions of people at once to make them act the way you need them to? What we are going to talk about today can be described in just such terms. Socialism will be forced on an entire nation of 170 million people and the plan would be to have it done in just 5 years. The people responsible were no fools… but they were ideologies. They believed in the philosophy of Marx and Engels as unquestionable truth and now… for the first time they would attempt to take those ideas to their logical conclusion. The result would be one of the great tragedies of human history.. Its Collectivization and the Ukrainian Genocide.
Welcome back to Savage Continent. If you are listening to this show in March of 2022 unless you are living under a rock or in an ice cave on an Antarctic ice shelf you will be well aware of what is going on between Ukraine and Russia. Now I absolutely promise that this show was not done in response to recent news events. Look at my last 4 episodes in my series in the soviet union. This is something I had planned on speaking about months ago but man… It's not often that history and current events run headlong into each other like this. It's a bit nuts. The show so far has been about the nuclear arms race and soviet communism. Suddenly all of that is relevant. I have no crystal ball! But I think I picked some good subject matter eh? Well anyways don't be shy. Leave a review for me on apple podcasts if you like the show or click the 5 star button if you could. I buy lots of books for this show… lots. And my 7 month old son would rather those funds be distributed to apple mango baby food. Well… Where were we??
So when we left off Stalin had at last secured his place at the head of what you could call a governing council that pretty much had unquestioned control over the Soviet Union. That would be the Politburo. And now he was ready to implement the most ambitious plan of economic and social engineering in the history of mankind perhaps. But first let's step back a bit and retrace our steps because we have covered a ton of ground in this series in just 4 episodes. So if you are just joining the podcast you might want to take another look at the last 4 episodes but if you don't have that kind of time at the moment no worries. Here is a bare bones rundown. Socialism is an idea that has been around forever… Groups of people pooling assets and redistributing them on an egalitarian basis has been done before… but rarely on a large scale. In the mid 19th century Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels made it their life’s work to interpret all history through an economic lens and explain how the world got to where it was.. The world of the mid 19th century. They postulated that social hierarchy… One class of people exploiting the labor of another had been around since the birth of civilization. That has never changed. However, starting at the end of the Middle Ages a new means of production arose and really took off in the 17th and 18th centuries. This was capitalism. Capitalism was a system in which a new business class. The bourgeoisie started spending their accumulated wealth on creating goods more efficiently. Factories began producing items in mass quantities that individual craftsmen could only make on a piecemeal basis. The investments were huge but so were the profits. This class of individuals amassed the type of wealth only aristocrats could dream of in former times. Things became more affordable for everyone. Life got better.. Well kind of. This new system of production made a lot of traditional trades obsolete. Legions of destitute people began to crowd into the cities of Europe in search of work. More often than not they would end up working monotonous industrial jobs for wages that were barely enough to scrape by. The work was monotonous, dirty and often dangerous. Their employers could pay them better but often that might not be the case. Competition was fierce and there were numerous booms and busts. Marx and Engels documented all of this and formulated a way out. A hope for mankind. This system of production they would keep. No turning back the clock there. It was so damn efficient. But the ownership, the distribution of profits… that had to change. Why not give the ownership to the people who actually did the labor. Split everything equitably. There would be more than enough to go around. No one need go hungry, fear losing employment. Everyone would be provided for. Great. Well not so fast. The people on top.. The bourgeoisie would never sacrifice their hard earned gains for some system where everyone is equal. After all… exploitation is great… if you're an exploiter. The answer was a revolution… and most likely one in which force was required. It might be violent but look at the end result. How could you not want that? Now to make this possible it would be necessary to reprogram everyone’s way of thinking… and I mean everyone. All the beliefs, the values… everything had to be “ruthlessly criticized” because in all likelihood they had been corrupted by this system of class exploitation. This would be hard to do but they believed history and more importantly science was on their side. Marx and Engles both died with their ideas still just ideas… True Socialism had some impact on how societies.. In western Europe and North America treated the working class but the gains had been marginal. The revolution they really wanted had not come to pass. Well you know how the story goes. A giant war occurs. A generation of young men fight and die on the battlefields of Europe. The great empires that had dominated Europe since the Napoleonic wars all broke under the strain and were no more. People demanded change. They wanted a say in government. Russia however saw the most dramatic changes. In March 1917 the Emperor Nicholas II was forced to abdicate and in his place a “provisional government” took charge. Russia had been the most autocratic place on Earth. The Czar had almost unlimited power. True, there had been some reforms during the second half of the 19th century and more after a failed 1905 revolution but compared to any western power it was the last place you would expect to see anything democratic… then one day… poof!! Just like that. Czar gone. Trouble had been brewing for awhile for sure. Russia took greater losses than any other European power during the war. People were hungry. The peasants wanted land. Workers wanted representation in government. There will be a strike in St. Petersburg that will get out of hand. Nicholas decides to head to the scene then next thing you know he’s under arrest. That's it. So this provisional government is going to be this hodge podge of political parties that run the gamut from monarchists, to business class types, to agro anarchists, and then you have several types of Socialists who… all hate each other. In the middle of this confusing mess you have this little party called the Bolsheviks. There’s not many of them and they have zero say in actual government. You see these guys are strict Marxists. They think this whole provisional government thing is just a pathetic sellout to the bourgeoisie. It has no chance of success. This is a smart move because the Provisional Government is indeed rubbish. The plan in 1917 is for this little coalition government to run the show until there can be a general election at some point later in the year. The situation in early 1917 was a little two volatile and well there has never been such a thing in Russia ever up until that point… and oh yeah there’s the war. You might think that when the Czar was deposed then no more war right? Wrong. Its not that people were enthusiastic about fighting and dying against the Germans and Austrians but to drop out?? That might be even worse. You see World War I is a war with these big giant alliances. Everyone is in on this. Simply put you have Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire on one side and You have Russia, France, Britain, Italy and later the United States on the other. I left out numerous smaller powers but I’m trying to keep it as simple as possible here eh? Well how do you think Britain, France and Italy would feel if Russia just folded up shop and quit in the middle of this thing? Not so good. They’d be pissed. Not only that but the Russian government was basically living on loans from these people. If they were to quit then all that money goes bye bye. It's a rock and a hard place situation to be sure. So the Provisional Government, led by sort of a left moderate Social Democrat named Alexander Kerensky will decide to stay the course. They will keep fighting. After all, its becoming increasingly clear that Germany and her allies won't be able to hold out for long. Austria-Hungary is looking dicey and the Ottoman Empire is an absolute wreck. The German Emperor will complain that he feels like he is “shackle to a corpse.” The Germans are well aware their situation is growing increasingly perilous. And to make matters worse America will soon join the war ON THE WRONG SIDE. What to do? One of their generals has a plan. He has heard of this obscure Marxist politician that is the de facto leader of this obscure party that call themselves the Bolsheviks, which means “majority”. And thats an irony because you could fit every one of them into a AA college basketball arena and still have room to spare. His name is Vladmir Uliyonov but he goes by the name “Lenin” (they all have these weird sobriquets) oh well whatever. Although he has barely been to Russia in the past two decades he has been writing furiously, giving speeches, rabble rousing.. Doing whatever he can to undermine the government of his home country so he can put his Bolshevik party in charge. Ok so what? You say. Well unlike almost all the other party leaders he is AGAINST THE WAR. He wants Russia to just quit. Drop everything, pick up sticks, take the ball and go home. So the German government decides to take a chance. They sneak him into Russia on a “sealed train.” They fund him and his little pipsqueak party and despite a nearly fatal false start in July. He easily could have been arrested and shot when he had to flee to Finland for 2 months but the border guards were drunk apparently. He comes back at the Provisional Government is just cratering in popularity. The war is still going. People are hungry. Then you have all these peasants.. They want their own land. None of these things are getting done. The Bolsheviks.. Still funded by the Germans hit the streets “PEACE, LAND, BREAD.” No more war. Land for all these poor peasants. And oh yeah we can fix the rumbly in your tummy. Well all that German gold and Lenin and his compatriot Leon Trotsky’s charisma does the trick. All of a sudden the Bolsheviks are on the map. They get enough of a following.. Especially in the urban areas to put them over the top In November they stage a coup. Karinsky and the provisional government make tracks as fast as they can. Done deal right?? Well remember that election? The date is set. Its ready to go. Lenin and his boys think they will be a shoe in… then… uh oh… gulp. They lose. The next day they bar the doors to the Tauride Palace where this new assembly was to meet and that was that. There would never be a free election in Russia until 1991. Opposition newspapers were made illegal. Opposition party members were arrested as “counterrevolutionary.” So that was it right? Dictatorship of the proletariat yet? Not yet. The country would descend into a brutal Civil War that I can no way do justice to in the space I have in this episode. It is a crazy war… especially if you follow it on a map. You know all those territories in Asia that you only hear about when playing risk? Irkutsk, Yakutsk, Ural, Kamchatka… Its going on in all of those places… and its literally the Bolsheviks against the world.. But dont get too carried away. True, the opposition (the whites) will be aided by all the western European powers by this point everyone is sick of war and fairly broke to boot. The Bolsheviks win but it looked dodgy at times. Worse, they had to make promises and concessions they knew they could never live up to. They promise the peasants that they will get to own their own land when the war is done. They promise that places like Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Georgia and you guessed it… Ukraine would gain political independence. These were lies but lying is ok.
Sebestyen, Victor Lenin p.439
The war is brutal. I already discussed this at length in the past two episodes so if you are interested in this period you know where to find it. The economy tanks.. And when I say tank I mean it falls fat on its face. You are looking at manufacturing down 80-90% from pre wwi levels. Food production down ⅓. Well less people are around to feed right? Kind of. You might see a population loss of 7 or 8% across the entire former czarist empire. You don't have to to be a statistics major to see how this is a recipe for total disaster. The Bolsheviks go into a sort of panic mode. Its called “War Communism.” Its simple. Groups of armed revolutionaries roam the countryside. They take hostages, they torture, they murder. The goal is “revolutionary terror” (something Marx did actually write about.) “Look guys.” The proletarians in the cities are hungry. Hand over all your grain or we will straight up murder you.
Lenin had a famous quote: “A revolution without firing squads is meaningless.”
Now peasants are like 80% of the country at this point. In Ukraine.. Even more. A lot of people started to regret helping Lenin and his boys come to power in the first place. Many will go over and fight for the whites.. The term whites denotes a single unified army of opposition but don't be misled. There were a number of armies on a number of fronts that barely were able to coordinate on a good day. At certain points in 1918 and 1919 it seems as though they will prevail but the Bolsheviks manage to hold on to the nation’s industrial heartland and successfully drive out the last organized opposition to their rule. Now however there is a problem. In order to get the support they needed to win the war they had to promise all these places like Ukraine, the Baltic states and so on independence when the war ended. You know how this goes… their mouths were writing checks that their asses couldn't cash. War ensues.Under a charismatic leader named Seymon Petliura Ukraine takes the lead here. They form an alliance with Poland and fight Russia or the RSFSR… (not soviet union yet but lets not get ahead of ourselves here). The period is confusing. But the long and short of it is the Bolsheviks by 1920 are a battle hardened opponent. Even with the help of the Poles (whom they had been fighting like 5 minutes before. I said it was confusing) they get steamrolled. Bolshevik forces will advance all the way to Warsaw before being halted by Joseph Pilsudski in what became known as “The miracle on the Vistula.” In return for recognition of its territory Poland signs a separate peace with the Bolshevik regime and leaves its erstwhile Ukrainian ally out in the cold. Isolated, Ukraine is forced to submit to the rule of Moscow. A puppet government is set up and Petliura goes into exile.
By 1921 the military situation had calmed down but the economic situation was beyond horrible for the Bolshevik regime. As I discussed in the last 2 episodes the famine that will hit the country will be beyond description. We are talking about well over 5 million people starving to death here. The countryside especially is on the brink of total anarchy. The whole Soviet experiment is on the verge of collapse (and by 1922 you can use the term Soviet. That's when the official legal framework for the state comes into being). Yes, the rival armies were gone but the reputation of Lenin and his boys in Moscow is pretty much mud. I mean hell… even when the country is depending on like salvation army handouts they are still selling any remaining valuables for more guns and ammo. Lol.. Priorities. This is when Lenin makes the single compromise that saves the regime. The New Economic Policy will allow for a limited amount of free enterprise in the cities while any big industry remains in the hands of the state. More importantly they would back off these draconian grain requisitions in the countryside. And…more importantly.. They would respect private claims to land. That's a huge deal. 170 million people 80% of which are peasants and now you are telling these guys its ok for them to own property… yeah you cant underestimate that. And for the most part it works… by 1926/27 starvation is no longer a problem. People are settling in. The wild hyperinflation that nearly destroyed the state was finally under control. It seems like the Soviet Union will be ok after all.
And this is where we find ourselves at the close of the last episode. You have this new Soviet government living in this contradiction where they are allowing capitalism to sort of exist. Peasants are allowed to sell grain voluntarily to the state. They get paid for it. You even have this class of people called “NEP men” that are actually doing pretty well. They are buying and selling things in order to make a profit… speculating. That would be unthinkable just a couple years earlier. But there are problems. Industrial production controlled by the state isn't doing to hot. You have this “scissors crisis” where the people in the countryside are unable to get the manufactured goods the want because there isn't enough to go around but the food production is so great that there is a glut in the market. So peasants are increasingly unwilling to sell at prices that are so low that they cant afford you know… a pair of scissors.
So Lenin dies in 1924.. And again this was discussed in the last episode so I don't want to get into it but you have a sort of power struggle in the Politburo.. This 9 man governing council that runs the state. People are divided over this NEP. All think its something that eventually has to be done away with. Capitalism is sin after all. But people are divided about how and when this should happen. You have people like Trotsky who want it gone immediately. You have people like Bukharin that say “do that and we are toast.” Joseph Stalin… the party general secretary (an office that wasn't such a big deal but would become so because of him) seems kind of in a middle. So first he sides with the conservatives and accuses opponents of the NEP as traitors who are acting against the will of Lenin. He gets them all forced out of power.. Not killed mind you. Thats not happening at this stage. With that done he replaces the ousted Politburo members with people loyal to himself. He then turns on the people on the right who had supported the NEP and ousts them or bullies them into compliance. So lets cut to the chase. Stalin has a radical plan for the USSR. He thinks that if the Soviet Union will survive it has to make some major changes. It has to industrialize pronto… and it needs to happen in 5 years. But his plans are even bigger for the countryside. This private ownership of land? Its gotta go. He thinks that farms will be much more efficient if they are consolidated into giant, state run enterprises. The farmers will be employees of the state. WIth that done the Soviet Union will be the most powerful, prosperous nation on earth. No one will want to mess with it. And this is key. He is absolutely obsessed with the idea that people want to mess with it. Its almost a mania with him. Its not entirely off the wall. I mean look at the Civil War. The Bolsheviks had NO FRIENDS. Every major power in Europe, the Americas and Asia wanted them gone. And while their efforts were for the most part half hearted they either sent troops or military and financial aid to the White forces. That cannot be allowed to happen again, he reasoned but he was convinced that the next war would be decided on the assembly line, not just the battlefield. Industrial wise all the Western Powers and Japan to boot were light years ahead of the Soviets. If they ever decided to put their heads together the Soviet Union would be toast. And this is where Stalin's ideological convictions came into play. As I established in the last episode Stalin was a man driven by ideology… driven. He was a convinced Marxist Leninist. Their writings were like the Bible, Koran, Talmud, Vedas and… and every other religious text rolled into one. He backed up everything he did with excerpts from them. That's why people were willing to go along with this guy. He wasn’t some deranged maniac. He read 250 pages a day. He didn't have the education that some of the other top brass had but he was scholarly to be sure. He had a library that had as many as 30,000 volumes. So Stalin and the leadership in Moscow were convinced that capitalism was on the ropes and it was in its final stages. The end was in sight but this was the most dangerous stage of all. Capitalism would get desperate. The Bourgeoisie would do whatever it took to defend their ill gotten gains. Now on its face.. And you can just look at a map here. The political situation in the mid 1920s was not threatening at all. Pretty much every state in Europe (with the notable exception of Italy) had a democratically elected government. You have no war monger dictators talking about toppling this Socialist paradise over in Russia. People are tired of war. The world economy is in the “roaring 20s.” But the Soviet elite still manage to find enemies.
We talked a little bit about the idea of fascism in the last episode. The term is very hard to pin down even today. Hell, when Putin is denouncing his political opponents as “Fascists” or Nazis and is believed but a great deal of his own people you know you are in the presence of a slippery concept.
Merriman, John A History of Modern Europe p. 1002
There is only one “fascist” state in history and that is Italy. At least the only one that would use the term to describe itself. You might say to yourself: So what? But it really is a unique thing when you think about it. Compare that with how many states that have used the term “socialist” in their official title and you see what I mean. But Italian fascism never had the one thing that we associate with facism the scientific racism and the anti semitism that stemmed from it. Still, looking at Italy Soviet thinkers saw a government taken over by a group of Socialists that seemed to lose their way. Mussolini was a socialist early on. No bones about it. But… he never identified with some international proletarian movement. He was willing to embrace a local nationalism that traditional Marxists eschewed. He loved his Nietzsche and believed in these very non Marxist Materialist concepts like the “national will” and whatnot. In the eyes of a socialist you would say he was more of a heretic than an infidel. This is a concept that you just have to grasp. So this idea of “fascism” would be extended to all of the socialists in Europe that decided to deviate from the Marxist path. But don't think that they have to endorse some sort of authoritarian government scheme. No… the most dangerous fascists in this period were what were called “social fascists.” These were socialists that attempted to work within the Capitalist system in the governments that they lived under and campaigned for things like “reform” instead of “revolution.” Officially in this period they are known as “Social Democrats.” They believe in common ownership of property. They believe the government should provide extensive social services and guarantee employment for all… but they also believe in elected Democracy. This made them MORE dangerous than the authoritarian fascists. Why? Because authoritarian fascists denounced capitalism and its excesses. These Social Fascists were willing to cozy up to the devil. They were the real wolves in sheep’s clothing. They called themselves socialist they were in league with the bourgeoisie and they wanted to see the elimination of true Marxists. This was established very early on.. A full decade before the Nazis came to power. Before anyone even knew Hitler’s name.
Historian theodore Draper would write:
“In October 1922, Benito Mussolini staged his “March on Rome” and formed his first government. Mussolini's success brought the subject of fascism sharply to the attention of the Communist International, which had previously given it little consideration. An Italian Commission was set up at the Comintern's Fourth Congress in November—December 1922, and its resolution referred to the fascists as “the most radical wing” of the bourgeoisie. But the old Italian Socialist party was blamed most for Mussolini's victory. “The real forerunner of fascism was reformism,” the resolution declared. “The treachery of the reformists is primarily responsible for the great sufferings of the Italian proletariat.”2
Joseph Stalin stated in a speech in 1924:
Fascism is not only a military-technical category. Fascism is the bourgeoisie’s fighting organization that relies on the active support of Social-Democracy. Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. There is no ground for assuming that the fighting organization of the bourgeoisie can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of Social-Democracy.[4]
This wasn’t Stalin’s idea initially. You can trace it back to Lenin but it was another contemporary of Lenin by the name of Grigory Zinoviev for that. The party made the decision that it would take a firm stance in the matter. Rather than ally with its opponents on the matter it would take a hard line “our way or the highway approach” and this would not change. If you were a Socialist you had to ally with the Soviet State or risk being labeled a fascist. It was that simple.
Historian Stephen Kotkin would write:
“Bolshevism, like Italian Fascism was an insurrection against both a liberal constitutional order and European Social Democracy. In Stalin's formulation codified at the 6th Comminern Congress in 1928 ‘a bourgeoisie desperate to retain its hold on power sought to establish extreme fascist regimes by co-opting social democrats.’ Therefore social democracy, which reconciles workers to capitalism, and thus lured them away from their supposed true home in the Communist Party constituted a handmaiden of fasciism, “social fascism.’ Social Democrats returned and often instigated the enmity expelling Communists from trade unions and agitated against the Soviet regime.”
One German Communist party congress would state publicly that it resolved that “social democracy is preparing the establishment of the fascist dictatorship.”
And it just got worse from there. The Social Democrats would respond by calling the Bolshevik regime and its communist followers fascists and pretty soon there is absolutely no one on the political left that is not labeled a “fascist.” Now you have some backslidden socialists like Josef Pilsudski painted with the old fascist brush but you have the British Labor Prime Minister Ramsay Mcdonald, French President Daladier, American labor leader Samuel Gompers, even future American President Franklin D. Roosevelt gets labeled a fascist. Communists especially in Germany where the movement had the most potential would complain bitterly about how Moscow was just screwing things up for them.
Clara Zetkin, a high profile German communist would write: “The Comminern has turned from a living political body into a dead mechanism, which on the one hand is capable only of swallowing orders in russian and on the other regurgitating them in different languages.” Of course this was an opinion she would keep to herself. Publicly she would back whatever the party in Moscow wanted.
What's really a shame is that in a place like Germany the Social Democrats are a huge deal. They outnumber the Communists like 10 to 1. Moscow insisting on this ideological purity and throwing the F bomb with reckless abandon is just going to help the real fascists in the end. In fact many Communists will applaud the Nazi accession since it indicated that Germany was at that point “ripe for Proleterian revolution.” By placing themselves in direct opposition to the idea of representative democracy they would only push the moderate socialists right into the laps of the Nazis. The soviets are quite literally painting themselves into a corner. This sort of psychological “splitting.” Seeing the world in black and white gives the regime a sort of deranged conspiratorial feel. Enemies are behind every rock and tree. We start seeing talk of a Capitalist encirclement. And this makes the Soviets of nearly a century ago not unlike Putin’s Russia today. This is an idea that would pervade all of Soviet history and I would argue contemporary Russian history. Enemies are on all sides. We need to be ready. We need to be prepared. We need a powerful military. We need “buffer” states. Stalin would address the Politburo in 1926 saying the following:
“We are not living on an island. We are living within a capitalist encirclement. The fact that we are building socialism, and thereby revolutionizing the workers of the capitalist countries, cannot but evoke the hatred and enmity of the whole capitalist world. To think that the capitalist world can look on indifferently at our successes on the economic front, successes which are revolutionizing the working class of the whole world, is to harbor an illusion. Therefore, so long as we remain within a capitalist encirclement, so long as the proletariat is not victorious in a number of countries at least, we cannot regard our victory as final.”
So someone like Stalin looks at a map of Europe in the 1920’s and he doesn’t see a bunch of peaceful democracies and one or two authoritarian nationalist states. No… he sees a whole continent of imperialist fascist capitalist states. A brood of bourgeois vipers that would be all too willing to combine forces to destroy the one state that wanted to make the dreams of Marx end Engels a reality. This he accepted as an article of faith. There would be a final day. There would be a final battle. And its just so ironic that even in the mid 1930s with Hitler firmly in power he believed the real threats to Soviet power were Britain and France. This makes sense. From his standpoint capitalism was strongest there. Germany on the other hand? Much more likely a Socialist revolution would happen there. I mean the guy that runs the place actively denounces Capitalist Imperialism. That in itself is a step in the right direction right?
Ok so back to our story. Collectivization will happen. The five year plan will go forward. Its imperative. Marxism is by definition superior to any system of government that has ever existed; it simply cannot fail. He thinks that the history of Russia is just one endless story of falling behind and getting beaten. It happens over and over again. In a speech to the Politburo Stalin said the following:
“To slacken the tempo would be to fall behind. And the backward get beaten. We don’t want to be beaten … The history of old Russia consisted, among other things, in her being ceaselessly beaten for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal rulers … by the Polish-Lithuanian lords. She was beaten by the Anglo-French capitalists … [and] by the Japanese barons. Everyone gave her a beating for her backwardness … They beat her because it was profitable and could be done with impunity … We have fallen behind the advanced countries by 50 to 100 years. We must close the gap in ten years. Either we do or we will be crushed.”
Arming the country and making it on par with the western militaries will make it able to withstand the last desperate gasp of a dying capitalist system will take some decisive measures. And Stalin means business here. The Soviet military at this point relies almost entirely on left over czarist stuff that is already showing its age and whatever it can bargain for with the west by the eve of WWII in 1941 it will be a military hyperpower. Germany… despite the most massive weapons building campaign of all time wouldn't even be close.
I mean after that Britain is like ⅓ of Germany at this point. Historians have long debated about Stalin’s designs on the West. Some say that he was getting ready to launch a war of aggression to build an empire of Soviet Socialism. Others say “No the army was for defensive purposes.” Nonetheless, thats a lot of toys to have if you aren’t planning to play with them.
And keep in mind that this is kicking into high gear 4 years before the Nazis would come to power, They had just 2% of the German electorate. They were nobodies. As we have mentioned earlier he was much more frightened of the Western Democracies. They were the real fascists.
He will champion the construction of what would be called mono towns which are basically a bunch of giant apartment blocks constructed around a colossal factory that might employ like 75,000 people. The most notable example would be the town of Magnitogorsk in present day Kazakhstan. Apparently Soviet engineers paid visits to some of the more notable American steel towns like Gary Indiana or Pittsburg PA and decided they would try the same thing on an even more grandiose scale. This was truly ambitious. Nothing like it had ever been tried before or again with the possible exception of Mao’s Great Leap Forward
Davies, Norman Europe a History p. 959, 961
But where to get the labor? The countryside of course. If you have a smaller number of giant collective farms and you outfit them with more modern farming technology like tractors and whatnot then you wouldn't need all these peasants for food production in the first place. And sure enough some 12 million peasants will leave the countryside for these new cities during this time period. But there are a couple of issues… 1. Building these colossal factories takes money… lots of it. The Soviet Union is pretty broke. Plus they don't have the trained engineers needed to pull this off. The only thing they have to sell is agricultural products and raise the necessary capital from abroad. 2. Turning a nation of peasants. People totally tied to the land, living a lifestyle that essentially changed little over the centuries would be a challenge. There would be resistance… which must be overcome one way or another. This is going to be tough. This is going to be risky. But if Socialism in One Country can succeed then what would stop it from spreading to the entire world?
Davies, Norman Europe a History p. 960- 961
Now a plan that is daring is likely to fall short of its goals. Even the most optimistic Soviet planner surely harbored his doubts that there existed a sort of “back up plan” for explaining why things might not go quite as well as could be expected.
One hallmark of the Soviet Union from the very outset was the belief in “enemies.” During the Civil War spotting and enemy was simpler. I mean there was a war on. People that opposed the regime were not shy about it. 1928 is a different story however. Foreign powers might not like the Soviet Union and what it stands for but there are no open hostilities. At home there are very few people who are willing to speak out against the regime. I would dare say that it was a quiet period in Soviet history. Nonetheless, that would change with the implementation of the first 5 year plan. So Stalin liked to put people into groupings. And while this tendency is prevalent in Soviet thought to begin with there is something about Stalin himself that really kicks it into high gear.
Kotkin, Stephen Stalin: Waiting For Hitler p. 11
What's it like to work for someone like that? He has a mind like a black box you don't know what he is going to do or whom he will smash and he is willing to do so with a callousness that I honestly cant compare to anything else I've seen. Nonetheless he is operating according to firm principles.. To morals. Beliefs that in themselves shouldn't be evil. Its all for the betterment of mankind. In a way he is too calculating. Too rational. He shows flashes of humanity now and then but in the end he is a disciple of a belief system that demands moral compromise.
While this drive for collectivization would be wholeheartedly backed by the party (at least publicly) to Stalin it was personal. It was his pet project. If it failed. He would fail. And that could not be tolerated. He was prepared to be absolutely ruthless in its implementation. They didn't call him the “man of steel” for nothing. He is going to talk about the peasants of the USSR as people who lived in a foreign land that needed to be subdued.
Applebaum, Anne Red Famine p. 90
So this is the part of the podcast where we start focusing on that part of the Soviet Union thats in the title of the episode. We did a rundown of Socialism.. Its birth, Its spread. And if you look around the world in the 1920’s and you are in the USSR this is the only place the seed has taken root. We’ve seen the promises the Soviet Union had to make and break just to exist. We have seen what Stalin’s plan going forward. We can look at it now and say the whole idea was foolhardy but that's anachronistic. That's hindsight bias. They know this plan will cost lives. They know millions would possibly go hungry.. But the end result would make it all worthwhile. But…. at some point this will no longer be about industrialization. It will no longer be about rearmament and grain sails. At some point what Stalin will do is something else entirely. It will be about punishment. Again… not in the vindictive sense. No… this is punishment in the psychological sense. This will about adding and removing stimuli to elicit the sort of operant behavior needed. At some point it wont help the economy. It will be about what is known as extinction. This is when a type of behavior no longer occurs… at least from an operant standpoint. This plan will have multiple phases. The phases will elicit resistance. The regime will do a calculus. The regime will knowingly sacrifice productivity in order to eliminate the behavior it doesn’t like in the places it doesn't like. It will start with a sort of a culling of the peasantry.
What he will do to the peasantry of the USSR will be national in scope… The lives claimed on a percentage basis will actually fall hardest in Kazakhstan but it will come down the hardest by far in Ukraine. For one the Ukraine is economically vital. Over ⅓ of Soviet grain comes from Ukraine. To lose it would be fatal… literally. Second, this more than any other republic of the Soviet Union is of suspect loyalty. Ukraine declared its independence, elected a head of state, allied with a foreign power and fought a set piece war with the Soviet state. The most powerful of the White army generals, Anton Deniken. At one point his forces made it to within 100 miles of Moscow itself. Surely there were countless supporters still there. How could their loyalty be counted on. It needed to be pacified.
And again this is where the grim psychological logic we discussed at the top of the show would come into play. This will happen in other places but the focus.. An almost obsessive focus is in Ukraine so let's zoom in. Stalin's plan would fall into separate stages. The first step would be to eliminate potential opponents in Ukraine's educated classes. What sort of people would be most likely to oppose this collectivization plan? Who would be the most likely to resist? Professors and teachers would be among the first to go. Anyone who had friends or contacts in “fascist” Poland were denounced and brought up on treason charges under the notorious “Anti Soviet agitation clause” of the infamous article 58 of the legal code. This attack actually preceded Collectivization slightly but its goal was to hollow out the Ukrainian elite and replace it with a Russian one. What Stalin needed was a case to prove that there was a class of people that was indeed disloyal and attempting to undermine Soviet socialism from within. It started with an infamous show trial.
Applebaum, Anne Red Famine p.97-8
This type of persecution would continue for another 10 years. Often “anti soviet leaflets” would be found or “Petliura friendly circles” would be unmasked… and all of them had ties to the….. Wait for it… international fascism. So even then… Before anyone who the Nazis were Ukraine was full of fascists. As will be a feature of these trials there was almost zero hope of any of the accused not being found guilty. It was either death or the Gulag in just about every case. But then again you have to admit. The plan has barely started yet. To expose these “saboteurs” and “wreckers” even if these individuals are just lambs to the slaughter does serve a sort of purpose. Once you have established that there is an unseen enemy from within… and they might be everywhere… hiding in plain sight. Well… if your plan doesn't go quite as you planned? There are will always be scapegoats. And this will be a problem btw. Accidents were legion. I read somewhere that a railroad accident of some sort was happening every 15 minutes somewhere in the USSR. The factories were death traps by modern standards. To brush that all off as intentional sabotage rather than ineptitude? And a lot of people really bought this hook line and sinker. Lev Kopalev was a young writer in Ukraine at the time.
Kotkin, Stephen Stalin: Waiting For Hitler p. 125
When everyone’s blood is up. When everyone thinks they have spotted the “enemy.” The fascist?? Its just so easy to throw rotten vegetables at the man in the dock. Until its you that is. So glad these guys never had twitter.
The Soviets liked to divide and conquer. They found it easiest to work on one group at a time and if possible to pit one group against another. That would be one of the defining features during the next part of the master plan.
So as mentioned earlier, Stalin firmly believed that the peasants of the USSR fell into 3 groupings. There were rich, middle and poor peasants in his mind. These rich peasants had been making money off the middle and poor peasants during NEP and they owned the most property. These “kulaks” as they were called had to be done away with. They were “enemies of the people” that “speculated” or worse still, hoarded grain, refusing to sell it to the hungry workers in the cities. This would not do. Everyone seemed to know something was up.
Applebaum, Anne Red Famine p. 111
The effort in the countryside started with a sort of PR campaign. There will be a large.. I guess you could call it an “army” of trained party activists known as the 25 thousanders because well. There were 25,000 of them. You see. In a country with 90% peasants people live in a fairly insular world. Radios were rare. Not many people knew how to read. The revolution and the Civil War came and went. It was traumatic to be sure. Millions of people died. There were grain requisitions but for the most part the life of the average everyday peasant was the same as it has always been. They worked the same land. Grew the same crops. The rhythm of the seasons sort of dictated life. The changes that the Soviet regime wanted to implement had to be introduced. They had to be explained to people in a way that they could understand. That was the goal of this activist group. They were sort of missionaries of Socialism. They wanted to convert the countryside and hopefully get people to be on board with this scheme. Remember collectivization was something that already existed but up to now it was voluntary. People could give up their farms and join a collective farm if they chose. Unfortunately just 1% made that choice and the whole project had been deemed a failure. They thought they were “agents of historical consciousness.” Moreover, a lot of people were unimpressed with how this Socialism project was turning out. Maybe they could explain it to people.
Applebaum, Anne Red Famine p. 117
The message was that these “kulaks” or wealthy peasants had undermined Socialism. It was their fault. If everyone would just denounce these scoundrels and just join the nice little collective farm up the street everything would be hunky dory. Well. the campaign didnt work out as planned.
Applebaum, Anne Red Famine p. 118-19
Many times these 25 thousanders will be met with outright hostility. Apparently there were more of these “kulaks” than expected and the definition evolved.
Applebaum, Anne Red Famine p. 123
Eventually orders came down from Moscow to “liquidate” the Kulaks.. And yeah that is just what it sounds like.
Snyder, Timothy The Bloodlands Europe Between Hitler and Stalin p. 26
These “kulaks” would often be sent to the most remote regions of the USSR.
Applebaum, Anne Red Famine p 131
Montifiore, Simon Stalin The Court of the Red Tsar p. 46-7
But you see all of this served (or was supposed to serve) a purpose. Stalin thought he was killing two birds with one stone by liquidating the kulaks and sending them into exile. For one, if you take them out of their original base of support they would be less likely to rebel. Secondly, Russia’s far north and east were woefully underdeveloped according to his rationale. To take these people who were on the face of it the more productive ones and to set them to work in places that no one would go voluntarily would greatly affect industries that the Soviet Union would sorely need if it wanted to industrialize like coal mining and forestry. In the far Eastern parts of the country immense gold reserves had been discovered which could really put a dent in that hard currency shortage that dogged the state. If you could put these “class enemies” to work there?? Makes perfect sense doesn't it? Nonetheless, as you might expect the way these plans were implemented left a lot to be desired. In Gulag Archipelago Alexander Soldyitsyn would describe the fate of some of these unfortunate enemies of the people.
“Even in 1935, drunken kolkhoz bosses went around the poverty-
stricken village at Easter demanding money for vodka from those
peasants who still farmed their own holdings. Give, or “We’ll dekulakize
you. We’ll deport you.” They could, too. If you farmed by yourself. This
was what the Great Break was all about.
The journey itself, the peasant’s Via Cruris, is something which our
socialist realists do not describe at all. Get them aboard, pack them off—
and that’s the end of the story. Episode concluded. Three asterisks,
please.
They were loaded onto carts ... if they were lucky enough to be taken
in the warm months, but it might be onto sledges in a cruel frost, with
children of all ages, babes in arms as well. In February, 1931, when hard
frosts were interrupted only by blizzards, the strings of carts rolled
endlessly through the village of Kochenevo (Novosibirsk oblast), flanked
by convoy troops, emerging from the snowbound steppe and vanishing
into the snowbound steppe again. Even going into a peasant hut for a
warm-up required special permission from the convoy, which was given
only for a few minutes, so as not to hold up the cart train. (Those GPU
convoy troops—they're still alive, they're pensioners now! I daresay they
remember it all! Or perhaps ... they can’t remember.) They all shuffled
into the Narym marshes—and in those insatiable quagmires they all
remained. Many of the children had already died a wretched death on the
cruel journey.
This was the nub of the plan: the peasant’s seed must perish together
with the adults. Since Herod was no more, only the Vanguard Doctrine
has shown us how to destroy utterly—down to the very babes. Hitler was
a mere disciple, but he had all the luck: his murder camps have made him
famous, whereas no one has any interest in ours at all.
The peasants knew what was in store for them. And if it was their
good fortune to be transported through inhabited places, when they
halted they would slip small children not too small to climb through
windows. Kind people may help you! Beg your way in the world! It’s
better than dying with us.
(In Archangel in the famine years of 1932-1933, the destitute
children of resettled peasants were not given free school lunches and
clothing vouchers, as were others in need.)
In that convoy of Don Cossacks, when the men arrested at the
“meeting” were carried separately from their women, one woman gave
birth to a child on the journey. Their rations were one glass of water a
day, and 300 grams of bread not every day. Was there a medical
attendant? Need you ask? The mother had no milk, and the child died on
the way. Where were they to bury it? Two soldiers climbed in for a short
trip between two stations, opened the door while the train was moving,
and threw the tiny body out.
(This transport was driven to the great Magnitogorsk building
operation.* Their husbands were brought to join them. Dig away, house
yourselves! From Magnitogorsk on, our bards have done their duty and
reflected ... reality?)
The Tvardovsky family were carted only as far as Yelnya, and luckily
it was April. There they were loaded into boxcars. The boxcars were
locked, and there were no pails, or holes in the floor, for them to relieve
themselves. Risking punishment, perhaps even imprisonment, for
attempted escape, Konstantin Trifonovich cut a hole in the floor with a
kitchen knife, while the train was moving and there was a lot of noise.
The feeding arrangements were simple: once every three days pails of
soup were brought along at main stations. True, they were only traveling
for ten days (to a station called Lyalya in the Northern Urals). It was still
winter there, and the transport was met by hundreds of sledges, which
carried them up the frozen river into the forest. There they found a hut
for twenty loggers, but more than five hundred people had been brought,
and it was evening. The Komsomol in charge of the place, a Permian
called Sorokin, showed them where to knock pegs into the ground:
there’ll be a street here, there’ll be houses there. This was how the
settlement of Parcha was founded.
It is hard to believe in such cruelty: on a winter evening out in the
taiga they were told: You’ve arrived! Can human beings really behave like
this? Well, they're moved by day so they arrive at nightfall—that’s all
there is to it. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands were carried into the
wilds and dumped down like this, old men, women, children, and all. On
the Kola Peninsula (Appatity) people lived through the dark polar winter
in thin tents under the snow. But was it so very much more merciful to
take trainloads of Volga Germans in summer (summer, 1931, not 1941—
don’t confuse the dates!) to waterless places in the Karaganda steppe,
ration their water, and order them to make themselves earth houses?
There, too, winter would come soon enough (by the spring of 1932 the
children and the old had all died of dysentery and malnutrition). In
Karaganda itself, and in Magnitogorsk, they built long, low communal
buildings of earth like vegetable storehouses. On the White Sea Canal the
new arrivals were housed in huts vacated by prisoners. Those who were
sent to work on the Volga Canal, even just beyond Khimki, were unloaded
before there was a camp, tipped out on the ground as soon as the
hydrographic survey was completed, and told to start swinging picks and
wheeling barrows. (The papers reported the “delivery of machinery for
the canal.”) There was no bread. They had to build their earth houses in
their spare time. (Nowadays pleasure boats carry Moscow sightseers over
this spot. There are bones on the bottom, bones in the ground, bones in
the concrete.)
Of course the “dekulakization” didn’t just happen in Ukraine but the effect was felt there the most by far. That Ukraine was being singled out is not hard to prove. The very first deportation quotas make that clear.
Applebaum, Anne Red Famine p. 125-6
And just like that… once that lightning bolt from the blue strikes you.. Your family. Everything is gone. And there in arbitrariness of it all…
That is a frightening aspect about how Stalinist repression worked and we will see more and more of this in the future. Lists are drawn up with numbers picked completely out of the sky. Didn't matter how many of these people there were. Just find them. Do. It.
Who were the kulaks? Even Stalin didn’t quite know. Among the marginalia from Politburo session from January 1930 Stalin wrote “What is a kulak?”
Montifiore, Simon Stalin The Court of the Red Tsar p.67
So the plan here was to make Soviet agriculture so productive that it could somehow feed not only the entire USSR but a good part of the rest of the world as well. What was important was “how much hard currency can we raise in the international market?” How can we in the space of a decade take the Soviet Union from one of the most backward places in Europe? It would have to be done on the backs of the peasants. They had always been seen as a “Bolshevik enemy.” Lenin had once even said: “The peasant must do a bit of starving.” Nonetheless by 1930 and in to 1931, the plan for making these relics of a feudal past into modern workers for a Communist future had gone off fairly well. Yes a large number of “kulaks” had disappeared but often their neighbors only requisitioned their property and thus didn’t miss them terribly. But these deportations would not stop. More “kulak traitors” would be unmasked, deported or murdered in the coming years. Eventually the total would reach over 2 million. But this was just the beginning. 1930 would see a growing resistance to Soviet designs and that resistance would be strongest in the grain producing regions of Ukraine. The Soviets had a number of tools in their kit for dealing with their perceived enemies. If dekulakization was a positive punishment. Their next would be something quite different. Rather than adding an adverse stimulus they would take away one that everyone needs…. Food. And this they would do intentionally. In 1932-3 there would be a famine in Ukraine unlike any the world had ever seen to that point. The weather would have nothing to do with it. And while people might have less food in other areas of the country than they were accustomed to there they won’t be suffering anything close to what these people will be suffering. This would be intentional.
Montifiore, Simon Stalin The Court of the Red Tsar p.93
And here is where we see a turn. Up until now you can look at what is going on and rationalize it if only in a very sinister way. The removal of the intelligentsia and the kulaks could have served a rational purpose. The intelligentsia might be able to organize resistance in the same way church leaders did. The kulaks had everything to lose from collectivization. Taking them out of the equation needn't be a terrible problem. They make up just a mid single digit portion of the population. They could be sacrificed. The harvests might not even be affected. Your Soviet bottom line might not be affected. The next several steps seem harder and harder to justify given economics. Ukraine will fall at the epicenter although in no way do I want to give the impression that its the only place the regime will show repression. There is a reason though that 17 countries have recognized what is taking place here as a genocide. What's about to happen cannot merely be seen as a miscalculation.. Or a regrettable sacrifice due to difficult circumstances. No this was intentional. This would serve a far more sinister but… at the same time very essential purpose if you are someone like Joseph Stalin. And he had more than enough believers to make his dreams a reality.
Applebaum, Anne Red Famine p.116
And there you see it right there. The sort of every genocide that has ever occured. There is always some recognition that the deeds being done are wrong on some level but that the ends.
The world to come. Future generations.. Would somehow benefit because the current one showed a level of “toughness” and cast aside the moral scruples that shrouded reason, destiny
Next time we see what Stalin does when the Ukrainian people decide they will no longer let an entire way of life be destroyed in the name of Soviet Socialism. If you are from this part of the world or know someone from there you will know that this is a big part of a sort of national self identity. Thats why the thought of Russians rolling into your country. Stalin made it quite clear “You, your entire people.. Your country. You belong to us. You are our colony.”
Now I had meant to do the entire ukrainian genocide in one episode but I decided to kind tell the story from the beginning to make it all a more coherent narrative. It was a bit longer than I hoped but we covered a lot of ground just now so I hope you will forgive me. Nonetheless this is all extremely relevant to where we find ourselves in the Spring of 2022. You simply cannot understand what is going on in Ukraine right now. Why so many everyday people would be willing to go out rifles in hand against one of the top military superpowers on earth unless you see the history through their eyes. This all matters. In our next episode we will see what happens when the Soviet Union decides to teach a lesson to its new “colony” that it would never forget.
Id like to thank you all for sticking with me for another episode. Once again, leave me a review or a rating and do tell someone about the show. That's how we can grow it and hopefully make it someone everyone can benefit from.