Officially declaring the so-called Holodomor as ‘genocide’, as the Bundestag proposes, means Germany, which invaded the USSR in 1941 to carry out the worst holocaust in history, re-embracing Nazi ideology. Stalin’s famine convulsed the entire USSR and had no ethnic element to it. A famine is a terrible misfortune but this was no genocide. The same disaster engulfed much of Russia and even parts of Soviet Central Asia. The forcible collectivisation was an irrational implementation of a desirable goal. It was ‘merely’ an gargantuan economic adventure and idiocy.
The Kulak insurrection that Stalin supressed was an agrarian petty bourgeois insurrection. Obviously it needed to be defeated to defend the workers state. It is correct to give critical support to defeating it without endorsing the brutal means that were used. The problem is that the collectivisation was carried out forcibly and entirely from above. What should have been done is to mobilise the mass of poorer rural workers and peasant against their exploiters, the Kulaks, to carry out expropriations from below. But the Stalin regime feared the independent mobilisation of the masses, with good reason.
Collectivisation should have begun earlier as there was a period of at least four years (1925-29) when the opposite policy was pursued, of urging the kulaks to “enrich themselves” and allowing them to get strong enough to wage a grain rebellion. The Left Opposition advocated gradual collectivisation through material and moral incentives but were denounced as ‘super-industrialisers’ and suppressed by the Centre-Right bloc. That Centre-Right bloc was only broken by the Kulak rebellion, which was suppressed by means of civil war, which could not fail to lead to a famine.
What the ‘Holodomor’ slur reveals is that anyone can be slandered by unscrupulous opponents. Even Stalin can be so smeared and the ‘Holodomor’ slur against the USSR is an example of such a smear. It equates the USSR with Nazi Germany and thereby Stalin with Hitler. And that is now the position of German imperialism, which invaded the USSR.
The post war myth of the ‘Holodomor’ is designed to evoke the Nazi holocaust to camouflage and excuse the role of Ukranian Nazis in slaughtering Ukrainian Jews. And to justify the Nazis murdering Russians by the tens of millions in WW2. Which the US-funded Nazis would like to repeat today. Including Zionists like Zelensky who repeatedly pay tribute to the SS.
