WI: Humanitarian Soviet Union

[RousseauX]

Yes, but why starve the peasants in the process?

Taking away the grain needed to feed their families, one seized, would kill off the peasantry and prevent further collection of grain by the state.

The grain was meant not only for export but was also used to feed the urban working-class population. Deliberately starving peasants would eventually cut off the flow of grain, hurting Stalin's plan for further industrialization.

Because collectivization was an utter failure and food production fell off a cliff. At this point you can either not export grain or starve your people to export grain and the Soviets choose the latter. You can argue this was a bad idea on the long run but the Soviets were really convinced that collectivization was going to increase food production on the long run and thus solve the problem (and they were wrong).

why kill ethnic Ukrainians because they weren't allegedly loyal enough to Soviet power?

Because the Bolshevik regime and ideology is explicitly based on liquidizing enemies of the people of which "kulaks" (i.e peasants who were actually good at producing food) tops the list.

If the peasants farming in the breadbasket of Russia are simply killed off, then that stunts agriculture dramatically in that region of the USSR and prevents the flow of grain to the cities and damages the ability of the regime to send grain off as exports.

Basic economics dictates that keeping the peasants alive and merely taking their surplus grain (thereby preventing starvation) rather than the grain needed to feed their families allows for continual exports and the feeding of the cities during the rapid industrialization drive.

So it basically has to be one of the three things:

1) The Communist party was just stupid and kept exporting grain while peasants starved to death because they were too stupid to realize the peasants were starving to death

2) The famine was deliberate man made to kill peasants

3) The Communists just didn't give a shit about peasants starving to death.

There's basically shitloads of evidence contradicting 1) so it basically has be some mixture of 2) and 3)

Basic economics dictates that keeping the peasants alive and merely taking their surplus grain (thereby preventing starvation)

They figured collectivization was going to -increase- production and thus feed the urban population.

 

[LeX]

it basically has to be one of the three things:

1) The Communist party was just stupid and kept exporting grain while peasants starved to death because they were too stupid to realize the peasants were starving to death

2) The famine was deliberate man made to kill peasants

3) The Communists just didn't give a shit about peasants starving to death.

There's basically shitloads of evidence contradicting 1) so it basically has be some mixture of 2) and 3)


They figured collectivization was going to -increase- production and thus feed the urban population.

Not to mention the factor of Soviet functionaries all being in a scramble to outdo each other—collectivization was a bad idea and many people in charge knew it, but had little choice to do anything else if they wanted to keep their positions (and this being Stalin's era, their lives).

 

[Sam R.]

Not to mention the factor of Soviet functionaries all being in a scramble to outdo each other—collectivization was a bad idea and many people in charge knew it, but had little choice to do anything else if they wanted to keep their positions (and this being Stalin's era, their lives).

The thing is, if collectivisation isn't done, two problems will present themselves to the Soviet nomenklatura:

Firstly, urban workers will engage in the Ural-Siberian method of direct forcible grain extraction themselves to solve the recurring crises of food supply to urban workers. This may include forcible collectivisation. More worrying for the nomenklatura, it may involve the reemergence of revolutionary proletarian activity.

Secondly, in any rapid industrialisation scenario, there will be a lack of a "push" of newly "free" labour from the countryside to the urban workplaces. Regardless of the "pull" factors of urban advancement, without a horrific push, the Soviet nomenklatura will not have access to a propertyness mass of subjudgated workers who need to labour.

yours,
Sam R.

 

[LHB]

Not to mention the factor of Soviet functionaries all being in a scramble to outdo each other—collectivization was a bad idea and many people in charge knew it, but had little choice to do anything else if they wanted to keep their positions (and this being Stalin's era, their lives).

It doesn't help that the eventual collectivization policy that Stalin put into place was after three different about-faces by Stalin on the entire question of collectivization purely for the sake of beating the Left and Right Opposition groups. Sausage-making would be paying a high compliment to the result.

 

[BBadolato]

The problem with this you would have to a Soviet Union that actually cares about other human beings. Unfortunately Lenin,Stalin,or Trotsky weren't nice people, so you have a rather violent and harsh system from the start. Khrushchev was energetic but had little foresight and foot in mouth disease and Brezhnev is flat out.

You would have to have Red Victory with a less violent Soviet Union in power, which seems rather difficult.

 

[LHB]

The problem with this you would have to a Soviet Union that actually cares about other human beings. Unfortunately Lenin,Stalin,or Trotsky weren't nice people, so you have a rather violent and harsh system from the start. Khrushchev was energetic but had little foresight and foot in mouth disease and Brezhnev is flat out.

A big part of that was the siege mentality and literal siege situation into which the Russian Revolution found itself born in. At the height of the Civil War Russia saw military interventions from all of the Entente powers, fighting in every region between the Red Army and the spectacularly barbaric Whites, and all kinds of low-level strife that always happens when you have a breakdown of social order on that scale.

It doesn't justify any of their repressive actions but the fact is there was a period where there genuinely were spies, saboteurs, and enemies within working with the many enemies without plus lots of other groups of uncertain loyalties. It's pretty easy to slip into a state like that when that state is the reality and that is what led to stuff like the dissolution of the Workers' Opposition and the bloody betrayal of Kronstadt and the Makhnovists.

The continuation of such policies after, especially by Stalin, is far more a function of Stalin being Stalin than any other factor.

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Humanitarian Soviet Union.

Hmmm... Like the joke?
Vegetarians eat vegetables, what to humanitarians eat?