Usually I only write about my Political Science class on here as my History courses so far don’t talk about “relevant” issues, if they do I (try to) reliably bring it up. What different for this week is that my history class is going to spend time talking about the holodomor. For a quick refresher, this history class is about Genocides, so that gives you an idea of how this whole thing will be talked about.
For this week we have to read Kiernan’s Blood and Soil chapter 13, Douglas Irvin-Erickson’s “Raphael Lemmon, Genocide, Colonialism, Famine, and Ukraine,” and Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famine and the Making of the Third World. I have no idea if that last one is about the holodomor but it is being covered this week. I will also have to watch accounts from these two websites:
Today was the first class and we didn’t talk about the holodomor but went over a very bastardized history of the Soviet Union. He starts the class by saying he is introducing the Soviet Union and their multitudes of war crimes, some of which might be considered genocide. So we begin the week with Nazi Germany’s “totalitarian” neighbour (yes, he really said that). He briefly goes over the Bolshevik revolution and this concept called “war communism,” he does not talk about the Tsars at all. Lenin institutes a new economic policy, my professor calls it a “recognition of reality,” this went on from 1921-1928 and were, in his opinion, the best years. Lenin dies in 1924 and there is a power struggle that Stalin eventually wins. He then goes on to say that Stalin doesn’t believe in anything except what directly supports him, so he bounced back between factions depending on who supported him. Some girl then asks about Trotsky’s assassination for some reason, her exact question was when he was killed. After finding out the date, which someone had to look up, he decides to say, while he’s not a Trotskyist, he believes that Trotsky was an alternative route that wouldn’t have been as bad as Stalin.
Then we talked about the 5 year plan. According to this lecture the 5 year plan was supposed to transform the Soviet Union into full communism. It would remove the peasantry from their farms to turn said farms into collective ones, which would theoretically increase agricultural output, but that output would not actually happen, chaos would ensue and the famine would become a reality. the 5 year plan would liquidate, exterminate, those who resist it, AKA the Kulaks. The Kulaks are defined as land owning peasants who were the targets of violence due to their resistance. Throughout this lecture he and other students make parallels between the Soviets and the Nazis so prepare for that. If the Nazis targeted the Jews as scapegoats and the origins of suffering, then the Soviets did the same but with the Kulaks. He says Stalin’s Soviet Union generates mass violence and suffering like Nazi Germany, Mao’s China, and Polpot’s Cambodia. He then shows a slide with the apparent death toll, I would share the exact numbers but the slides aren’t yet available.
In 1937 there would be mass political purges due to Stalin’s paranoia. There was the Katyn massacre that killed around 22,000 politics military officers, intellectuals, and leaders. This is considered an elimination of a people’s identity. I guess the Soviets initially blamed the Nazis for the massacre but when the archives opened in the 90s it proved the Soviets committed it. With the famine the death toll was between 5 and 8 million, he also calls it “man made” so thats cool. At the end of this slide he states that there is a case to be made that these deaths were genocide. He also calls Stalin a mass murderer.
We learned in this class that genocide occurs during times of rapid change and societal upheaval, which is what the Soviet Union was going through beginning with the Bolshevik revolution. He said that the Soviets saw people as plants in a garden, some were to be cultivated while others were to be exterminated. He said the Bolshevik revolution happened in the wrong country as, according to Marx, it was supposed to happen in industrialized countries. Later he states the Soviets had an inferiority complex as they were constantly paranoid of enemy infiltrators because they considered Russia incredibly weak, he compares this with the Nazis and the Ottomans. The Nazis thought Jewish people controlled everything, that they were incredibly powerful, and the Soviets shared this attitude but with a social class rather than an ethnicity. Is he fucking for real?
Stalin portrayed Russia as a continuous victim throughout history, being conquered and losing to many different enemies. Everyone beat down on Russia because of her backwardness. The 5 year plan would try to achieve 50 years of progress that she missed out on. 1984 (because of course this cursed book was brought up) satirizes the Soviet slogan 2+2=5, which was a real slogan that was supposed to breed exceptionalism, the idea that “anything is possible.” This is a common sentiment in “totalitarian” regimes. He then makes fun of Stalin for trying to grow oranges in Siberia, because apparently Stalin thought genetic engineering was “capitalist” and that the Soviet science of gene cooperation would yield results better. Stalin had lemon trees in his yard that his servants would bring into a secret greenhouse during the winter. This is implying that Stalin was an idiot. Cool. A student brings up how Stalin once bragged about having tea time with Machiavelli (or someone), this was said to further dunk on him. A girl then asked about how “wasn’t there an incident where Soviet scientists accidentally released a bunch of anthrax?”, my professor couldn’t answer this but he did say it wouldn’t surprise him. The agriculture yields in the Soviet Union were very bad due to Soviet bunk science. According to Stalin, suffering was okay, because the ends justified the means.
The Soviet Union is a peculiar case study as all of the ones we want over so far have a nostalgia for the past, a cult of antiquity. But the Soviet Union was the exact opposite, it focused on an ideal future. A girl then says that left wing genocides are the opposite of what we know (what we learned in class) as with the Nazis, they wanted to revert back to the ideal German past, progress was bad. With the Soviets and left wingers in general the past is seen as bad while the future is good. The idea of the “good old days” does not apply to this case. My professor then brought up the family structure: Nazis idealized the nuclear family while the Soviets sought to break up the individual family unit because it was a bourgeoisie concept. This, of course, misses all of the analysis of the idea of family but okay, let’s just say the Soviets broke families up. Stalin also wanted to destroy peasant culture/communes, he did not want that life to be admired. He brings up an NKVD guy being killed (exterminated) as an example of the revolution eating its own people, which the Soviet Union did I guess. The Nazis had one target (Jewish people, and while they did have many victims they focused on one group), the Soviets, however, had many targets. A girl, who is actually from Ukraine, said that it was like the “freedom from religion” thing in France but in this case it was “freedom from culture.” The Soviets (mainly intellectuals) looked down on the peasantry and they themselves had very little support from the countryside. The 5 year plan was a war on the countryside, to steal agriculture to build cities. The ideal Soviet man was a factory worker, not a farmer. The Soviets had a cult of modernity rather than a cult of antiquity.
Next we moved on to “imperial expansion.” The Soviet Union is considered an empire but i did not have colonies to exploit like western nations. He brings up a Stalin quote about how the West exploited the people of their colonies to industrialize themselves, he asked if that was true. I nodded my head explicitly but everyone seemed hesitant to agree with big bad Stalin. Even my professor awkwardly conceded that Stalin was kind of right about that. Instead of doing imperialism outwards the Soviet Union turned its imperialism inward, it exploited its own people, the peasants would be subjugated by the proletariat. My professor said that Stalin did not see the peasants as people. There was settler colonialism in the far east, the Indigenous nomads of that end were forced to settle in the region and people who were purged were forcefully deported to Siberia.
Racism was complicated in the USSR. It initially cultivated ethnic and cultural difference, supporting the regional languages and cultures while they could live relatively autonomously. Social class differences were placed above ethnicity. This all changed coming up to WWII when xenophobia and Russia chauvinism reared its ugly head. This was the last two minutes of class, he briefly brought up the tartars in Crimea but not much was said except purges.
Next class we will dive into the holodomor, which he says some historians argue that it was a purposeful targeting of Ukrainians.
You raised a good point. ‘Progress’ is a pretty broad term; I initially judged the conclusion as ‘mostly true’ anyway because I assumed that the student had freedoms for the oppressed in mind. I thought that she couldn’t have meant the term literally because then that would have been obviously false: nothing can be done without progress, so in that sense the Fascists clearly weren’t against progress, but that could be said for almost anybody.
The main problem is that it’s just a poor choice of words, really.