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Dealing with a famine against deliberate sabotage is very tough:
>[The kulak’s] fellows in the villages had no leadership, but decided as one man, with the unanimity and stubbornness of wronged farmers the world over, to oppose their oppressors. Their opposition took the initial form of slaughtering their cattle and horses in preference to having them collectivized. The result was a grievous blow to Soviet agriculture, for most of the cattle and horses were owned by the kulaks. Between 1928 and 1933 the number of horses in the USSR declined from almost 30,000,000 to less than 15,000,000; of horned cattle from 70,000,000 (including 31,000,000 cows) to 38,000,000 (including 20,000,000 cows); of sheep and goats from 147,000,000 to 50,000,000; and of hogs from 20,000,000 to 12,000,000. Soviet rural economy had not recovered from this staggering loss by 1941.
(Frederick L. Schuman, Russia Since 1917: Four Decades of Soviet Politics, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1957, pp.151, 152.)
Cannot be compared to e.g. Winston Churchill 1937:
>I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, “The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.” They had not the right, nor had they the power.
https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/
Or this one from 1944:
>Expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been the case in Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before.
https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/70...
Or 1947:
>“I hate Indians,” he told the Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” The famine was their own fault, he declared at a war-cabinet meeting, for “breeding like rabbits.”
https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,203199...
There's no point in conjuring up boogeymen, or to go "East" to find people to compare Stalin to, when Churchill would be a much fairer comparison, and Stalin comes out far ahead of him.
And I guess Katyń never happened too, or we deserved it? Mass deportations were also a myth, right?
Two acceptable options are (1) engage by posting substantively and thoughtfully; or (2) just walk away and remember the internet is already wrong about nearly everything.
"Solzhenitsyn was just a fiction writer and totally made it all up" "The purges in the Red Army and of political dissidents were just western propaganda" "Trotsky shot himself in the back of the head" etc.
>Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's controversial new book on Soviet prison‐camps was described as “folklore” by his former wife in an interview published here today. Natelya Reshetovskaya told the conservative newspaper Le Figaro that the book, “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956,” was based on unreliable information: She also told the newspaper's Moscow correspondent that she was still living with Mr. Soizhenitsyn when he wrote the book and that she had typed part of it. They parted in 1970 and were subsequently divorced. She said: “The subject of ‘Gulag Archipelago,’ as I felt at the moment when he was writing it, is not in fact the life of the country and not even the life of the camps but the folklore of the camps.”
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-ex...
There were about as many people in Gulags at peak, war-with-Nazis paranoia than in America today.
>Yes. The overall numbers at present are broadly similar (2.2 million prisoners in the US at present, compared to 2.6 million at the peak of GULAG, though that was drawn from a smaller population), but US prisons have much lower death rates (especially compared to WWII-era GULAG — hopefully there will be no similar invasion of the US and so we will not have the opportunity to see if a wartime US massacres its prisoners in a similar fashion), and a smaller fraction of the prisoners are slave laborers (in GULAG it was nearly 100%).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20532353
(Notice the second post is informed by the first--100% slave, etc. Ample evidence contradicts that.)
... in 1974, while living in the USSR at the prime of Andropov's KGB.
On a 0-10 scale, how much freedom do you think she had to form an opinion and express that to a foreign journalist?
If you like those horror stories check out the North Korean ones, they have oodles of stuff about people dying and reappearing, being shot out of cannons, eating human faeces, and whatever else the human imagination can come up with.
Unlike North Korea, I was born in the USSR and saw all that with my own eyes, and I personally know several dissidents who were imprisoned in the 1980s. To suggest that she had any freedom of speech, particularly to a foreign journalist, is deeply ignorant of the conditions at the time. People were scared to openly talk even with their relatives from the West. In 1974, a foreign journalist heard only what the KGB wanted them to hear.
Mass deportations were a sad but not uncommon operation at the time, as seen for example by this Churchill speech from 1937:
>I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, “The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.” They had not the right, nor had they the power.
https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/
Or this one from 1944:
>Expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been the case in Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before.
https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/70...
The absurdity comes when they're used to try to conjure up a boogeyman.
> Katyn was done by Nazis
> Gulags were not that bad
> Deportations were unfortunate, but look, someone did it too, therefore it's ok
> Molotov-Ribbentrop was a fake, whatabout [insert some unrelated nonsense]
> The rape of Berlin never happened
Nothing like the whiff of braindead and morally bankrupt ideology in the morning
Some falsehoods, some distorsions, most of which are handled superbly by this book chapter on the Khrushchev Report: https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-the-secret-report/
Beevor is particularly vile with his rape-storytelling, and his stuff does not check out. See, "Hordes of Rapists: The Instrumentalization of Sexual Violence in German Cold War Anti-Communist Discourses": https://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/476
Seek truth from facts, brother.
We have to ban accounts that keep breaking the rules.