The Soviet Ordeal Ep. 6 The Holodomor

Stalin's plan to Collectivize the Soviet Union was finally in full swing. Peasants everywhere were being forced to abandon their antiquated bucolic lifestyles and become modern proletarians on large agroindustrial farms. Marx’s dream of “labor armies” in the countryside was finally coming true.  "The worker's paradise is upon us comrades!!" Well... not so fast. The pushback against this plan was widespread and determined... so much so that even Stalin had to publicly admit it simply wouldn't be possible to forcibly coerce 100 million people to voluntarily become cogs in the colossal wheel of Soviet socialism. It was time for plan B. ``What if we made it impossible for people NOT to join the collective farms? What if we taxed anyone that didn't give in so hard they would be begging for mercy?" As it turned out, plan B did work... sort of... but then a new problem arose. These farms were simply not producing enough food to go around. Socialism wasn't working. Uh oh… So did he back off? Try a different plan? You know that's not how Stalin rolls. It was full speed ahead. “Damn the torpedoes.”  Millions of people might starve but it was all for a good cause right? The Soviet Union had to meet those export targets. They needed a lot of hard cash to build those shiny new factories and there was no other way to get it but by selling grain on the world market. If that meant people at home had to go hungry then so be it. “They should have worked harder,” he would say. Of course, the epicenter of this very predictable disaster would be Ukraine. Stalin had an almost pathological distrust for non Russian nationalities that refused to wholeheartedly submit to Soviet power. And of all the nationalities that had resisted his rule so far, none had been more troublesome than the Ukrainians. What he did there in the years 1932-3 has been declared a genocide by 16 countries (inluding the United States). The man who invented the word "genocide" even declared it a genocide. At the famine’s height, a territory the size of France, consisting of 30 million people would be hermetically sealed off from the outside world and its inhabitants left to die a slow, lingering death. Inside the death zone, to even grab a handful of grain from a field could get one executed or sent to the Gulag for a decade long sentence (which was just as good). Many would go insane. Others would become criminals. Some would even resort to cannibalism. No one who survived these years would ever be the same again.  Stalin once said "It is ideas that matter, not the individual." Well how about 4 to 5 million individuals?  How many eggs do you need to break to make this omelet? Seems like a lot of eggs to me. It would later be called "The Holodomor '' or "death by starvation," and increasingly, historians see it as a deliberate act of a totalitarian regime to break the will of an entire nation. If you want to know why the Ukrainian people of today would be willing to fight with such tenacity to defy the will of a dictator in Moscow, then look no further. After listening to this then you'll get it. Or don’t listen to it. Putin wouldn’t want you to anyways. You know… “fascist” propaganda and all.