Should not be surprising, since this is already a widely acknowledged historical fact. I recommend Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust, an autobiographical account of this time, and how it hit common society. Adults hung themselves dressed up in their best clothing besides the recently deceased bodies of their children. A whole population, cities and countryside, condemned to death.
It's indeed the fact that Ukrainians suffered from man-made famine, but it's incorrect statement that they were targeted as ethnicity or that they were only victims.
Red kommisars didn't care too much about ethnicity, their conducted class war and their battlefield of food expropriations by food squads was whole south of USSR with fertile lands where peasants produced main volume of crops in country: that's Ukraine, Russia south of Moscow (e.g. Kuban), north-west of Kazahstan and some regions of Caucasus - so called Black Earth region.
It should be called genocide too, but communists pushed UN to exclude class as criteria from official genocide definition (because oppressing "bad" classes was core soviet doctrine during it's whole existence). So "officially" it was not genocide because it was not ethnically motivated or targeted, but practically it was.
It's important to remember what real socialism/communism is about (world revolution and class war), and not be deceived by talks about "wrong communists" who targeted ethnicities instead of "right communists" who don't do that.
If you want to get into the semantics without outright denying the atrocities of Stalinism, I don’t know if the Holodomor was specifically motivated by any specific animus towards the Ukrainian people. Maybe it was! But my understanding is that the causes were more around attempting to exert control over the agricultural economy, punish the “kulaks” (who tended to be the most productive farmers) and ship more and more grain into the rapidly industrializing cities even though there wouldn’t be enough left to feed the people who grew it in the first place.
Local Russian officials seized grain and other foodstuffs from farmers, including the last reserves of food from people's pantries and cupboards. It certainly seemed they wanted the people starved.
They also did this to farmers in parts of Russia and IIRC Kazakhstan though. What I’m saying is that it wasn’t, to my knowledge, motivated by any particular nationalistic hatred for Ukrainians in particular. Everybody in the Soviet system knew they would end up in gulag or killed if they didn’t go along with whatever Stalin demanded, and what he demanded was unreasonable grain quotas and the liquidation of “kulaks” (interpreted to mean, any farmer who didn’t deliver the quota must be a reactionary sabotaging the great communist revolution). This is what happened as a consequence. It was horrible and it is one of the reasons I am one of the most anticommunist people you will ever meet. But was it motivated by ethnic hatred? Not that I am aware of, but I’d be open to learning any evidence that it was.
They made it illegal to glean, which certainly goes beyond farmers (farmers traditionally being the word for the people who owned the land not so much the people that worked it)
There is a dead post on this page which contains a hope for a time that being a communist is seen in the same light as being a national socialist. The post is from a 'green' account - either a temp account or a troll - and has been flagged to death.
I consider communism to be on the same level as national socialism and I do want schools - which, at least where I live (Sweden) do spend a lot of time in learning out the evils of national socialism and fascism - to teach children that these ideologies are to be seen in the same light, that the death count for communist regimes is even higher than that for national socialist and fascist regimes and point out that in the end there are more similarities than differences between these three. The hammer and sickle, swastika and fascine-bound axe should be treated similarly, as symbols for authoritarian ideologies instead of fashion statements.
Why? "Communism" seems more akin to the word "dictatorship" in terms of "how evil is it", in that it is a broader category of politics with high correlation to evil things, but not by definition, whereas the Nazi ideology is more specific and by definition evil. Why not want people to be educated about the reality of both, independently, without requiring that people consider them equal? That's usually petty whataboutism as a proxy for identity politics anyway.
If Naziism survived, maybe whoever came after Hitler would have been more moderate and we could just write off the evils of the Hitler era as being the personal excesses of an especially brutal man, just like we do with Stalin. No, I don’t buy it. Communism always starts with mass murder and ends in economic stagnation. China seemed to turn it around but then they started back up with the genocide again.
> That's usually petty whataboutism as a proxy for identity politics anyway.
If people “identify” as communist, Nazi, or ISIS, I would prefer to exclude them from politics entirely (by custom, not by force at least to start) without getting sucked into the academic exercise of stack-ranking exactly which of these is worst.
