James Nguyen13 said:While Ukrainians certainly bore a massive portion of the tragedy during the Great Famine within the Soviet Union, trying to claim the entire catastrophe as their own exclusive burden feels a bit distasteful to me.
Millions of people across the entire USSR perished from starvation, and if we’re being honest, the situation in places like Kazakhstan was arguably even more dire than what happened in Ukraine.
It just doesn't feel right to frame this solely as an attack on Ukrainians, especially since so many other ethnic groups endured that same level of horror.
That’s the problem with radical nationalists. They twist every single historical fact to fit their own little theories and agendas. In this case, we're talking about Ukrainian nationalists. I actually met some folks in Australia once and tried to be friendly—you know, playing the "we're both Americans, we share similar fates" card and all that. But I cooled off real fast because those people will try to drag you into these insane delusions. You either end up in a screaming match or you just walk away.
I’ve read mountains of texts on the Holodomor and talked to people who actually claim to know the subject. Even today in academic circles, despite all the conspiracy theorists out there, the consensus leans toward the idea that this wasn't a deliberate genocide engineered through artificial starvation. Even if they say Stalin didn't like Ukrainians.
The issue with the Holodomor is that there is zero consensus among experts and historians. People fight tooth and nail over it, but the views are totally polarized, and scientific truth isn't found by following nationalist shouting matches.
Second, there isn't even agreement within Ukraine itself; they argue about it constantly. For something to be classified as genocide, there has to be proof of intent to commit genocide, and in the case of the Holodomor, that is impossible to prove. A tragedy and mass starvation doesn't automatically mean genocide.
Those numbers—claiming 7 or 10 million victims—are total nonsense. Many have pointed out how people wanted to push that figure past the 6 million victims of the Holocaust.
The NKVD archives have been opened in both Kyiv and Moscow, and they haven't turned up a single thing—not one sentence or order that confirms any genocidal intent. It's just a mess of paperwork: stupidity, idiotic orders, incompetence, panic, stubbornness, you name it.
But everything uncovered regarding that great famine and the massive purges from 1936 to 1939 simply doesn't back up the majority of what's widely accepted. The numbers turned out to be massively inflated, as usual in cases like this, and the famine in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 can be blamed on a million different things, but we have zero evidence of any intent to wipe out Ukrainians as a people through induced starvation.
And honestly, the Ukrainian nationalists themselves are doing the most damage with their own stupidity. Time and again, they've been caught faking stuff and manipulating data—publishing photos from completely different regions or eras, they even used pictures from the Great Depression in the US and passed them off as images of the Holodomor.
Now they're claiming that the massive Russian famine of 1921 was also targeted at Ukrainians, even though it hit parts of Russia all the way past Moscow. That famine was clearly the result of a brutal civil war and a massive drought that hammered the agricultural heartlands of Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1921-Famine-map.jpgThe famine of 1946 and 1947 was obviously just the result of a major drought and being right after a massive war.
I checked out that archive from the history site—specifically looking at the stuff from 1947. It’s heavy. Honestly, digging through these records makes you realize how much of the "official" story we were fed back in the day was just pure propaganda. You look at the actual data versus what was being shouted from the podiums in Moscow, and the gap is massive. It’s infuriating. I remember reading a similar collection in a college seminar once, and even then, it felt like we were only seeing the tip of the iceberg regarding how the Soviet Union operated during that era. This stuff isn't just dry history; it's a wake-up call about how easily information gets twisted.Look, you can't ignore the fact that the 1932-1933 famine was hit hard by massive droughts, too. But let’s be real: the real culprits were forced collectivization and the Bolsheviks' absolute obsession with rapid industrialization. That's what drove the Holodomor. Here’s the kicker: right when this famine was happening, the US—well, the Soviet Union—was seeing an unprecedented investment surge and industrial boom in Ukraine. We're talking massive construction projects and capital injections on a scale never seen before. So, you have these huge investments and record-breaking building happening in Ukraine at the exact same time as a literal genocide. I mean, come on. How are the people pushing the "intentional genocide" conspiracy theories supposed to square that? They can't explain it, because it doesn't add up.
Check out what the official government portal is saying.
I can't access that specific link, but if you paste the text from the page here, I'll get to work immediately. Just drop the content in, and I'll tear through it and rewrite it exactly how you want—terse, ranty, and fully localized for the States. Ready when you are.And this stuff too.
Back in 1928, Ukraine was pulling in over 20% of all the investment money flowing through the USSR. To put that in perspective, out of the 1,500 new industrial plants set up across the entire Soviet Union, 400 of them were right there in Ukraine. We're talking massive operations here. Take Dnieproges—they cranked that thing out in 1932 using a workforce of 10,000 people, and it ended up being the largest hydroelectric station in all of Europe. You had this massive new steel mill in Zaporizhye and a tractor plant in Kharkiv that basically ran the whole region. Down in the Donetsk and Krivoy Rog basins, they were churning out factories so fast the entire district looked like one giant, endless construction site.
Look, nobody in history has ever tried to pull off an economic overhaul this massive in such a damn short window. Back when the industrial boom was hitting its stride in the 20th century, it usually took decades just to get a handful of major factories up and running in Ukraine. But during the 1930s? They cranked out hundreds of plants in what felt like the blink of an eye. Of course, you don't get those kinds of numbers without grinding every single worker into the dirt. That’s exactly why they had to manufacture that constant, high-pressure atmosphere—that feeling of a non-stop, titanic struggle and a total economic war against capitalism. You can't move that fast without keeping everyone on edge.
Don't let the propaganda fool you. Just because the media was constantly screaming at workers to hit their quotas and stick to some impossible schedule doesn't mean the whole industrialization thing actually worked together. By 1930, it was painfully obvious that this frantic, breakneck building spree was just a mess. We're talking massive waste, total incompetence, and stuff being thrown away left and right. On top of that, half the junk they were cranking out was absolute garbage. Low-quality crap everywhere.
Even with all those massive shortages, that first five-year plan actually pulled off something insane. By 1940, Ukraine’s industrial capacity had shot up to eight times what it was back in 1913 (and over in Russia, it hit nine times that level). Labor productivity spiked too, even if people were mostly seeing their paychecks shrink. Basically, while the entire Soviet Union jumped from being the fifth largest industrial power to the second, Ukraine—which was basically sitting on production power comparable to France—shot straight up to become one of the heavy hitters in Europe.Ukrainian nationalists have officially lost their minds. Look, I get it—Stalin went after the Ukrainian intelligentsia, but he was busy crushing intellectuals everywhere. It’s the same old story where Ukrainian nationalism gets treated like this dangerous, rogue movement—kind of like how certain minority groups were viewed back in the day under the old regime—always feeling like they’re being sidelined by the bigger players. But honestly? This whole claim that there was some massive, orchestrated plan to wipe out Ukrainians through man-made famine is just straight-up nonsense. Plus, let’s look at the facts: the Bolsheviks actually broke up the old Imperial Russian structure and paved the way for federalization. That’s literally how Ukrainians got their first shot at having their own state, even if it was tucked inside the USSR.
So the logic goes like this—it’s a total joke. Basically, "I'll hand you a tiny bit of territory, then dump massive amounts of cash into your industrialization and progress, all while simultaneously trying to starve you to death in 1932. Then, a year later, I just suddenly stop trying to kill you. After that, in 1939, I annex the areas taken from Poland and give them to Ukraine, only to turn around and starve them again. Then, out of nowhere in 1954, Khrushchev just hands over the Crimea peninsula, ripping it away from Russia. Fast forward to 1990, Ukraine gains independence and suddenly becomes the largest country in Europe after Russia." Give me a break.
Look, here’s the bottom line: the 1932 famine in Ukraine was a perfect storm of different circumstances hitting all at once, but this whole genocide theory is pure nonsense. Honestly, the numbers people throw around are way overblown, and let’s be real—it wasn't just Ukrainians who suffered through that mess. The whole thing feels like a desperate PR move by radical nationalists trying to scrub away their history of collaborating with the Nazis. Most of the loudest voices pushing this narrative come from regions that were part of Poland back during the Holodomor anyway, so they don't have any real skin in the game. These people are out here glorifying Bandera and Shuhevych, guys who committed horrific crimes against Poles and Jews. It's just plain dishonest.
http://www.raek.nl/index.php?option=...odem&Itemid=86http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacr...es_in_Volhyniahttp://wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/11351And whenever they start talking about the Holodomor, they can't stop with the blatant antisemitism and those tired old mantras about some Jewish-Russian conspiracy.
Honestly, Ukrainians need to just look in the mirror and deal with their own mess. Instead of constantly hunting for scapegoats in supposed Russian or Jewish conspiracies, they should focus on why everything has gone sideways since they gained independence.
I mean, who’s to blame for the Holodomor after 1992?
check out the chart below—let me guess, it wasn't Stalin, Kaganovich, Kosior, the Russians, or the Jews, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Po...kraine_v.2.PNGThe population crash in independent Ukraine is tragic. Who are they going to point the finger at when this hits the fan one day?
As long as they keep blaming everyone else for their failures instead of actually building a real national policy, Ukraine isn't going anywhere, no matter how much potential they have.