Stalin Killed 25 Million Peasants, Mostly Ukrainians, During His Disastrous Collectivization Campaign In The 1930’s

[johnkarls]

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I will cover this topic in this month’s Short Quiz which we have studied on numerous occasions --

• Stalin killed 25 million peasants, mostly Ukrainians, during his disastrous collectivization campaign in the 1930’s – principally via starvation.

• BTW, Stalin admitted to Churchill at Yalta that he had killed 10 million peasants in the collectivization effort.

• But “actions speak louder than words” – as the classic “central planner,” Stalin’s solution to the disaster was to forcibly re-locate more than 25 million city dwellers to Kazakhstan to become farmers to make up production for the 25 million farmers he had killed.

• BTW, Stalin grew up in Soviet Georgia and he remembered that when Turkey was engaged 1915-1917 in ethnic cleansing of some of its minorities (most famously, the Armenians), Turkey also ethnically cleansed its millions of Greeks who had continued to live in Constantinople which was the ancient capital of the Greek Empire (aka the Eastern Roman Empire and aka the Byzantine Empire) – Constantinople was renamed Istanbul in 1930. Greece closed its borders to the millions of Constantinople Greeks, as a result of which they were forced to flee to Soviet Georgia. Stalin remembered that Georgians hated the Constantinople Greeks. Accordingly, he added them to the list of people forcibly re-located to Kazakhstan to become farmers. [The Constantinople Greeks maintained their language and culture while in Kazakhstan and, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, many (if not most) moved to Greece where they were treated as second-class citizens because they spoke Greek with thick Russian accents.]

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But Help Wanted!!!

I would be curious whether modern-day Ukrainians are aware of how many Ukrainian farmers were killed by Stalin in the 1930’s.

[I suspect that with so much censorship, the answer is that nearly a century later, there is little awareness.]

But I do NOT have time to “chase that rabbit” whether there is, for example, any polling on the subject.