The Soviet Union’s disastrous decision to force peasants to give up their land and join collective farms, a policy pushed forward by Joseph Stalin, the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, had led the countryside to the brink of starvation.
Even so, a greater tragedy could still have been avoided. In the summer of 1932 the regime could have asked for international assistance, as it had during a previous famine in 1921, or stopped requisitioning grain.
Instead, in the autumn of 1932, the Soviet politburo, the elite leadership of the Communist Party, decided to use the famine to crush Ukraine’s sovereignty and block any future peasant rebellion. They took a series of decisions that deepened the famine in the Ukrainian countryside, blacklisting villages and blocking escape.
Four million Ukrainians and another million people in the rest of the Soviet Union starved because Stalin wanted to end independent farming and because he sold the grain overseas for cash to industrialize.
So yeah, you motherfuckers continue to celebrate the centennial of the Soviet Union and dream of the glories that might have been if this evil system of government had been allowed to build communism on the rotten foundation of socialism.
Do take the time to register and read the horrors of communism that have more impact than just the statistic of 5 million dead, the broken eggs of an omelet that was never--and could never--be made.
Doing my part to stop that evil is why I enlisted.
