Comment by racional | Hacker News Reader

Comment by racional | Hacker News Reader

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Wikipedia cites the Holodomor

You cited, as an encyclopedic fact, 10M as having perished specifically "Yagoda's torture chambers" per your words, which can only refer to NKVD (or otherwise "political") persecutions -- not the various deportations en masse or the Holodomor. The WP page you cited confirms upper bound for the former set of excess fatalaties (i.e. the one that you were explicitly referencing) at 770k -- which we shall charitably round up to 1M for the sake of "civility" here -- for the entire USSR during the pre-war era.

Far short of the 10M figure you are introducing for whatever imaginitive and creative purposes.

Again: 10M in this category -- the number who perished "Yagoda's torture chambers" throughout the USSR before the start of the war; and "about half" being in Ukraine; or around 5M, is the number you put forth -- apparently for the nifty rhetorical effect you thought it might bring.

Whereas the historical consensus for this category is <400k.

> Far short of the 10M figure you are introducing for whatever imaginitive and creative purposes.

I didn't introduce the 10M figure, I linked an example article where it was used (the Ynetnews one) -- it is a common number I have seen of those who died in Soviet prisons. Maybe not specifically those who were captured by the NKVD -- but I think a lot of people were dropping dead who were also not political prisoners.

> 10M in this category -- the number who perished "Yagoda's torture chambers" throughout the USSR before the start of the war; and "about half" being in Ukraine;

No -- I said about half of these excess deaths were in Ukraine, most of that half being made up of the 5 million people killed in the Holodomor.

I'm sorry I don't have perfectly legible accounting of the millions of people Stalin killed in Ukraine, but with the lower bound being in the millions I don't think saying 7.5 million people killed in Ukraine is unreasonable. The Holodomor killed 5 million and then there's assuredly another 2.5 million made up in further excess deaths there somewhere. I don't know if it is perfectly accurate and I don't care. These were the people who Bandera had a fiduciary duty to protect, as a leader of Ukrainians. I don't support the evil things that happened in Volhyn and Galicia, but those things had a historical context where there was a credible threat of millions more lives of his countrymen on the line. Tough choices had to be made and he made them.

> I didn't introduce the 10M figure, I linked an example article where it was used (the Ynetnews one) -- it is a common number I have seen of those who died in Soviet prisons.

That's not how it works champ, we need sources. An article from a random "journalist" (Sever Plocker?? who is that? he has no history on the web, very suspicious) does not count as a source. Anyone can go to the web and write random numbers in a post, that doesn't make it true. Don't believe everything you read blindly, always look for a source first.

Okay. Let's pretend the Soviets killed nobody in Ukraine other than the Holodomor. That's 5 million people. The credible threat of millions more being butchered by the Soviets was real. At this point, we are disputing small fractions of the total deaths. I don't care if it was only 5 million, though it was millions more.

There is no Ukrainian/Soviet distinction. Ukrainians were Soviet at the time. Ukraine was historically part of the Russian empire and only split very briefly after the revolution. You are trying to promote the idea of a split between Russia and Ukraine that didn't certainly exist at the time.

Putting that aside, nobody "killed" 5 million people. Killed certainly isn't the correct term, as the Holodomor was about deaths by starving and not by shooting. We're talking about mismanagement, not murders. Otherwise we'd have to consider every death caused by government mismanagement as murder.

When a homeless dies for the cold do you consider him to have been killed by his country?

When someone dies because they couldn't afford insuline, is it a murder by the government?

When a worker dies in a factory accident, was he killed by an unequal economic system?

Between 17500 and 46500 homeless died in the USA in 2018 alone[0], was that mass murder by the government? No? Then the Holodomor wasn't a genocide.

By the way, get your numbers straight again, it's 3.9 millions[1], not 5.

- [0]: https://nhchc.org/homeless-mortality/

- [1]: https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resour....

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