First of all, famines were common prior to the revolution and were in fact one of the major driving factors behind it, and it’s also worth noting that kulaks slaughtered livestock in protest against collectivization which played a major role in the famine.
And here’s a paper that I recommend reading about the famine. USSR actually sent aid to affected regions in an attempt to alleviate the famine. According to Mark Tauger in his article, The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933:
While the leadership did not stop exports, they did try to alleviate the famine. A 25 February 1933 Central Committee decree allotted seed loans of 320,000 tons to Ukraine and 240,000 tons to the northern Caucasus. Seed loans were also made to the Lower Volga and may have been made to other regions as well. Kul’chyts’kyy cites Ukrainian party archives showing that total aid to Ukraine by April 1933 actually exceeded 560,000 tons, including more than 80,000 tons of food
Some bring up massive grain exports during the famine to show that the Soviet Union exported food while Ukraine starved. This is fallacious for a number of reasons, but most importantly of all the amount of aid that was sent to Ukraine alone actually exceeded the amount that was exported at the time.
Aid to Ukraine alone was 60 percent greater than the amount exported during the same period. Total aid to famine regions was more than double exports for the first half of 1933.
According to Tauger, the reason why more aid was not provided was because of the low harvest
It appears to have been another consequence of the low 1932 harvest that more aid was not provided: After the low 1931, 1934, and 1936 harvests procured grain was transferred back to peasants at the expense of exports.
Tauger is not a communist, and ultimately this specific article takes the view that the low harvest was caused by collectivization (he factors in the natural causes of the famine in later articles, based on how he completely neglects to mention weather in this article at all its clear that his position shifted over the years). However, it’s clear that the Soviets really did try to alleviate the famine as best as they could.
The famine of 1931-1933 was not limited to Ukraine, but also affected the Russian Central Black Earth region, Volga Valley, North Caucasus, and Kazakhstan. This map from page xxii in Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 will give some sense of the geographic extent of the famine. In fact, while most of the famine victims were in Ukraine (some 3.5 million out of a population of 33 million), some 5-7 million died from the famine across the Union, and Ukraine was not the worst hit republic in relative terms - that misfortune befell Kazakhstan (then the Kazakh ASSR), where some 1.2 to 1.4 million of the over 4 million ethnic Kazakh population died through “denomadization” and the resulting famine. At least ten million people across the Union suffered severe malnutrition and starvation without dying, and food was scarce even in major cities like Leningrad and Moscow (although on the other hand, they did not face mass mortality). Kotkin very clearly states: “there was no ‘Ukrainian’ famine; the famine was Soviet.”
Some bring up massive grain exports during the famine to show that the Soviet Union exported food while Ukraine starved. This is fallacious for a number of reasons, but most importantly of all the amount of aid that was sent to Ukraine alone actually exceeded the amount that was exported at the time.
could you provide a source on that?
like yeah, there was a lower harvest at the time, but the blame is still put on the ussr planners for overextracting food supplies from sovhozes as well as rejection of foreign aid
To be clear, the famine was a huge tragedy that resulted in massive loss of life. And poor planning did play a role in this crisis. However, it was by no means an engineered crisis or a an inevitable outcome of the soviet system.
so uuuh, i’ve been going through the sources in the study you’ve linked, which is an interesting study btw, it relies in many places on Iztestiia (which is a CPSS run newspaper btw, so idk how much we can rely on it to truthfully convey whatever happened if it painted them in a bad way) and also Spravochnik partiinogo rabotnika
i’ve searched for these online, and i can’t really find free archived versions of, i could probably go to the local library and possibly find the necessary exerpts there, but before that i wanted to see if i could get it online :)
do you by any chance have access to archives of them?
While the leadership did not stop exports, they did try to alleviate the famine.
So they “tried” but without trying the actual way to reach the goal. Funny. Also very important to note that “the leadership” is precisely what caused the situation in the first place: the new red bourgeoisie in their palaces were eating more than comfortably while the common people were starving.
I didn’t go very far down the Wikipedia page to find information contradicting your simple worldview:
The first five-year plan changed the output expected from Ukrainian farms, from the familiar crop of grain to unfamiliar crops like sugar beets and cotton. In addition, the situation was exacerbated by poor administration of the plan and the lack of relevant general management. Significant amounts of grain remained unharvested, and—even when harvested—a significant percentage was lost during processing, transportation, or storage.[citation needed]
In the summer of 1930, the government instituted a program of food requisitioning, ostensibly to increase grain exports. Food theft was made punishable by death or 10 years imprisonment.[53] Food exports continued during the famine, albeit at a reduced rate.[54]
Under the collectivism policy, for example, farmers were not only deprived of their properties but a large swath of these were also exiled in Siberia with no means of survival.[61] Those who were left behind and attempted to escape the zones of famine were ordered shot.
So, you shift production, exile/shoot the people with the know-how to cultivate the lands, nominate managers who let food rot, make food theft a death offense… and you wonder why there would be a famine? Better call Sherlock Holmes…
So, you’re blaming Ukrainians for causing their own famine? Sounds stupid.
The only stupid part here is equating Ukranians with kulaks.
I mean, if millions of Ukrainians were starving to death, why didn’t Soviets reduce the amount exported food to zero percent and gave it to the starving Ukrainians instead?
I mean, they literally imported net more food than they exported. Did you miss the part that the famine wasn’t restricted to Ukraine?
In 1930, Stalin declared: “In order to oust the ‘kulaks’ as a class, the resistance of this class must be smashed in open battle and it must be deprived of the productive sources of its existence and development. … That is a turn towards the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class.”
This statement is very much in line with a Marxist framework. Note also that he just stated this – he did not have the power to make his word become law and I tracked the quote to an article Stalin wrote for a newspaper to correct an earlier article. It was literally an analysis and not party policy on kulaks.
Nevertheless, eliminating a class is entirely different from eliminating the people that make up that class. As social classes are a reflection of the material conditions and specifically the relationship to the means of production, if you change these relationships you will inevitably change the classes. Like how some nobles in feudal France became bourgeois and proto-capitalists around the time of the 1789 revolution.
Ukraine in 2021 should care more about their declining population (1/5th of it lost in total since 1990) than trying to keep alive the myth of a genocide 100 years ago from a country that does not exist any more.
They should have stopped exporting food entirely, I mean, their own people were literally dying! And you’re right, my bad, I meant people across the whole Soviet Union.
So, you’re saying they should’ve just let people in other parts of USSR die, instead of trying to alleviate the famine across the country the best they could by redistributing food where it was most needed?
What I meant was proof that weather was the only factor that caused that specific famine. Tauger says it played an important role in the famine, but the government was also responsible for it:
It wasn’t the only factor, and I never made that claim. What’s being said is that there is no evidence for the famine being any sort of intentional genocide on the part of the Soviets.
Also, note that most of the famines in that article took place during the USSR era.
Revolutionary period was an incredibly turbulent period. There was a civil war and western powers invaded USSR in 1918. They did the best they could under the circumstances. Note that USSR never had a famine after WW2 when it was finally able to develop in relative peace.
So, you’re saying they should’ve just let people in other parts of USSR die, instead of trying to alleviate the famine across the country the best they could by redistributing food where it was most needed?
That’s not how it works. Having a central authority to “redistribute” resources has shown time and time again that it leads to injustice and corruption. Don’t worry that Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were very well fed all through the famine.
You’re woefully ignorant on the subject you’re attempting to debate. Perhaps at least read the study I provided in the earlier comment to get an idea of what you’re talking bout.
No, that’s not what I said. I said exports to outside the USSR should have been halted.
Which would result in people starving in other parts of USSR. So, yes that is what you’re actually advocating for here without having the intellectual honesty to admit it.
Okay, there’s no consensus on whether the famine was an intentional genocide or not, but there’s some evidence that it was caused by failed policies of the USSR.
There is literally no evidence to suggest that the famine was in any way intentional. However, nobody is disputing the fact that failure of policy contributed to the famine.
Maybe because a lot of advances were made on food production (outside of the USSR) and a lot of reforms were made within the USSR that introduced market-economy elements (perestroika) and increased government transparency (glasnost)?
You’re incredibly historically ignorant. Much has been written on the subject and you should try to at least minimally educate yourself on the subject you’re attempting to debate. Also, go look up when perestroika and glasnost happened to see just how utterly absurd you’re being. Here are some starting resources for you.
USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960’s, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and even CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:
The Soviet Union had the highest physician/patient ratio in the world. USSR had 42 doctors per 10,000 population compared to 24 in Denmark and Sweden, and 19 in US:
Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth that made the achievements listed above possilbe:
Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:
A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:
This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.
There was a positive correlation between collectivization and crop output in Ukraine during this time, and the famine began before collectivization started. This discounts the idea that collectivization caused the famine. Instead, collectivization was introduced to help deal with the famine.
Also, collectivization is not some communist ideal. It is a revolution in production that every modern country has undergone at some point in time. In America, farms are heavily collectivized with heavy subsidies from the US government. The chicken industry, for example, is an oligopoly of four major corporations.
This mode of farming where everyone owns their own subsistence farm cannot support an urbanizing population. In early 1930s USSR, farming was still done with ox and plow. Individual farmers could not afford tractors and other equipment for their small plots of land. But with pooled resources, it is possible over larger tracts of land.
You’re rewriting history. Ukraine had soviets long before Stalin. In fact, it had reached such a level of collectivization/expropriation that Lenin/Trostky had to send the Red Army to massacre the population (and the anarchist uprising).
You should do some reading about the Makhnovtchina and the anarchist communes of Ukraine.
You should do some reading about the Makhnovtchina
Okay.
forced conscription & summary executions
Kontrrazvedka
“Alexander Skirda acknowledges: “The idyllic dream of ‘cooperative enterprise’ was to dissolve in discord and bitterness, or even in ‘dismal despair,’ with commune workers quitting one after another.””
“Volin, one of the leaders of the Makhnovists, explained that there developed “a kind of military clique or camarilla about Makhno. This clique sometimes made decisions and committed acts without taking account of the Council or of other institutions. It lost its sense of proportion, showed contempt towards all those who were outside it, and detached itself more and more from the mass of the combatants and the working population.””
“The Makhnovists never developed any serious working class following in the towns they occupied. Even most anarchist supporters of Makhno, including his close collaborator Arshinov, acknowledge this reality.”
“A greater source of discontent was that the Makhnovists refused to pay workers wages. In Ekaterinoslav Makhno insisted that the workers accept payment in kind and engage in barter with the peasants. Workers in Olexandrivske also demanded wages and as Malet puts it “were not very keen” on Makhno’s proposals “to restart production under their own control, and establish direct relations with the peasants””
Some interesting critiques in there (don’t hesitate to link sources), but the interpretation is vastly exaggerated. That some people abused positions of power does not invalidate the existence of free Communes, and does not invalidate their criticism of power structures that should be dismantled (on the contrary).
That’s a big difference between anarchists and marxist-leninists: in anarchist discourse, a critical look is always welcome and encouraged, and there is no binary interpretation of “good” vs “evil”. In particular, the question of the Kontrrazvedka is an interesting one: how to protect a people’s revolution without creating an authoritarian State? From what i read about it, it seems the Kontrrazvedka’s main (sole?) purpose was to prevent authoritarians from seizing and abusing power. If that requires to shoot power-hungry psychopaths like Lenin, i can’t say that makes me happy but that’s a much happier outcome than a bolshevik Nation-State.
The question is still an open debate for example in Rojava where intelligence gathering is practiced for the struggle against ISIS and the Turkish State who try to colonize/destroy the lands. Collaborating with foreign intelligence services (eg. USA/FR) has in fact saved many lives and helped the revolution last. As much as i’m against any form of such activity, i can’t say from my comfortable village in the Global North that i can judge that line of action. I honestly don’t know how i would react in case of a civil war in my neighborhood.
Although it has a weird trot bias, the biggest condemnation is that Makhno did not understand the working class. His army was that of peasants, and what did they do? Rolled into towns, claimed to have liberated the people, and left them at the mercy of whatever happened next. They had no plans apart from preventing authority structures from emerging. But what worked for the peasantry did not work the workers of the cities, as they did not have the same material conditions. How could notaries and administrators accept payment in kind? Why did he tell rail workers they could accept payment, except for military purposes (the majority of rail traffic)?
And you could not form an organisation that Makhno disapproved of or the kontrra would shoot you (because prisons are authoritarian). He disallowed parties because of a fear of authority creeping in again, but in the process disallowed workers to band together to represent their interests – as if parties were only going to come from external, sabotaging forces. Who exactly did they liberate then, and from whom? As we saw with the workers of Olexandrivske, he ignored their concerns about being paid real wages (and not barter for food for survival, a clear step back). What exactly did he achieve, then? Is this what freedom looks like? Is it any wonder the workers then abandoned his experiment, when they firstly had no choice in joining it? Is it any surprise they were much more keen to follow the bolsheviks, who actually had answers for them?
I also really can’t understand how the kontrra is justified hierarchy but the cheka isn’t; just because the former wasn’t a state? (highly debatable also. Makhno’s armies certainly had the monopoly on violence)
That’s a big difference between anarchists and marxist-leninists: in anarchist discourse, a critical look is always welcome and encouraged, and there is no binary interpretation of “good” vs “evil”.
There is that in marxism-leninism. Self-criticism is one of the foundations of Mao Zedong Thought and has been vastly adopted by communist parties around the world. I have also literally never met an anarchist that did not long for Makhnovia. Some even told me that any struggle against authority is inherently just, even if it replaces it with another authority.
That some people abused positions of power does not invalidate the existence of free Communes, and does not invalidate their criticism of power structures that should be dismantled (on the contrary).
Why don’t you make the same good faith observation about “power-hungry psycopath … Lenin” (your words)? Makhnovia was a failed state that only survived due to a power vacuum, and it’s no wonder it lasted a couple of years while the soviet union outlived it by over 70 years.
That Makhno tried his hand at being a warlord is not an indictment on anarchism. That anarchists think he somehow is an example to follow is.
That’s sort of off topic though. Sure there were anarchists in Ukraine during the civil war putting their own plans into action, but by 1921, these factions did not exist anymore, and the soviet policy was then put into place.
What I meant by collectivization here was the specific policy enacted in 1929 while Stalin was leader, because that’s the topic of discussion.
Soviets were the foundation of the revolution in 1917, long before Lenin and his friends stole it. And yes, after Lenin and Trotsky shot all the revolutionaries (anarchists and libertarian communists), you can say with confidence they “did not exist anymore”.
What I meant by collectivization here was the specific policy enacted in 1929
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First of all, famines were common prior to the revolution and were in fact one of the major driving factors behind it, and it’s also worth noting that kulaks slaughtered livestock in protest against collectivization which played a major role in the famine.
And here’s a paper that I recommend reading about the famine. USSR actually sent aid to affected regions in an attempt to alleviate the famine. According to Mark Tauger in his article, The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933:
Some bring up massive grain exports during the famine to show that the Soviet Union exported food while Ukraine starved. This is fallacious for a number of reasons, but most importantly of all the amount of aid that was sent to Ukraine alone actually exceeded the amount that was exported at the time.
According to Tauger, the reason why more aid was not provided was because of the low harvest
Tauger is not a communist, and ultimately this specific article takes the view that the low harvest was caused by collectivization (he factors in the natural causes of the famine in later articles, based on how he completely neglects to mention weather in this article at all its clear that his position shifted over the years). However, it’s clear that the Soviets really did try to alleviate the famine as best as they could.
The famine of 1931-1933 was not limited to Ukraine, but also affected the Russian Central Black Earth region, Volga Valley, North Caucasus, and Kazakhstan. This map from page xxii in Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 will give some sense of the geographic extent of the famine. In fact, while most of the famine victims were in Ukraine (some 3.5 million out of a population of 33 million), some 5-7 million died from the famine across the Union, and Ukraine was not the worst hit republic in relative terms - that misfortune befell Kazakhstan (then the Kazakh ASSR), where some 1.2 to 1.4 million of the over 4 million ethnic Kazakh population died through “denomadization” and the resulting famine. At least ten million people across the Union suffered severe malnutrition and starvation without dying, and food was scarce even in major cities like Leningrad and Moscow (although on the other hand, they did not face mass mortality). Kotkin very clearly states: “there was no ‘Ukrainian’ famine; the famine was Soviet.”
could you provide a source on that?
like yeah, there was a lower harvest at the time, but the blame is still put on the ussr planners for overextracting food supplies from sovhozes as well as rejection of foreign aid
I literally linked the source in my comment https://www.jstor.org/stable/2500600
oops, i didn’t realize this quote was also from that link 😬
To be clear, the famine was a huge tragedy that resulted in massive loss of life. And poor planning did play a role in this crisis. However, it was by no means an engineered crisis or a an inevitable outcome of the soviet system.
so uuuh, i’ve been going through the sources in the study you’ve linked, which is an interesting study btw, it relies in many places on Iztestiia (which is a CPSS run newspaper btw, so idk how much we can rely on it to truthfully convey whatever happened if it painted them in a bad way) and also Spravochnik partiinogo rabotnika
i’ve searched for these online, and i can’t really find free archived versions of, i could probably go to the local library and possibly find the necessary exerpts there, but before that i wanted to see if i could get it online :)
do you by any chance have access to archives of them?
I don’t have the archives either unfortunately, let me know if you do manage to track them down though.
So they “tried” but without trying the actual way to reach the goal. Funny. Also very important to note that “the leadership” is precisely what caused the situation in the first place: the new red bourgeoisie in their palaces were eating more than comfortably while the common people were starving.
The only funny part here is that you evidently lack basic reading comprehension. The famine wasn’t just happening in Ukraine.
What does that change, deeply? Ukraine is a fertile region which bolshevik colonizers turned upside down until it starved.
Ah yes, bolsheviks famously controlled the climate to starve Ukraine. 🤦♂️
I didn’t go very far down the Wikipedia page to find information contradicting your simple worldview:
So, you shift production, exile/shoot the people with the know-how to cultivate the lands, nominate managers who let food rot, make food theft a death offense… and you wonder why there would be a famine? Better call Sherlock Holmes…
This is what happens when you get all your education from wikipedia. 😂
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🤦
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The only stupid part here is equating Ukranians with kulaks.
I mean, they literally imported net more food than they exported. Did you miss the part that the famine wasn’t restricted to Ukraine?
You mean proof of a well documented fact? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_and_famines_in_Russia_and_the_Soviet_Union#List_of_post-1900_droughts_and_famines
Because the soviets controlled the weather obviously.
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This statement is very much in line with a Marxist framework. Note also that he just stated this – he did not have the power to make his word become law and I tracked the quote to an article Stalin wrote for a newspaper to correct an earlier article. It was literally an analysis and not party policy on kulaks.
Nevertheless, eliminating a class is entirely different from eliminating the people that make up that class. As social classes are a reflection of the material conditions and specifically the relationship to the means of production, if you change these relationships you will inevitably change the classes. Like how some nobles in feudal France became bourgeois and proto-capitalists around the time of the 1789 revolution.
Ukraine in 2021 should care more about their declining population (1/5th of it lost in total since 1990) than trying to keep alive the myth of a genocide 100 years ago from a country that does not exist any more.
So, you’re saying they should’ve just let people in other parts of USSR die, instead of trying to alleviate the famine across the country the best they could by redistributing food where it was most needed?
It wasn’t the only factor, and I never made that claim. What’s being said is that there is no evidence for the famine being any sort of intentional genocide on the part of the Soviets.
Revolutionary period was an incredibly turbulent period. There was a civil war and western powers invaded USSR in 1918. They did the best they could under the circumstances. Note that USSR never had a famine after WW2 when it was finally able to develop in relative peace.
That’s not how it works. Having a central authority to “redistribute” resources has shown time and time again that it leads to injustice and corruption. Don’t worry that Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were very well fed all through the famine.
You’re woefully ignorant on the subject you’re attempting to debate. Perhaps at least read the study I provided in the earlier comment to get an idea of what you’re talking bout.
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Which would result in people starving in other parts of USSR. So, yes that is what you’re actually advocating for here without having the intellectual honesty to admit it.
There is literally no evidence to suggest that the famine was in any way intentional. However, nobody is disputing the fact that failure of policy contributed to the famine.
You’re incredibly historically ignorant. Much has been written on the subject and you should try to at least minimally educate yourself on the subject you’re attempting to debate. Also, go look up when perestroika and glasnost happened to see just how utterly absurd you’re being. Here are some starting resources for you.
USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960’s, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and even CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:
GDP took off after socialism was established and then collapsed with the reintroduction of capitalism:
The Soviet Union had the highest physician/patient ratio in the world. USSR had 42 doctors per 10,000 population compared to 24 in Denmark and Sweden, and 19 in US:
Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth that made the achievements listed above possilbe:
Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:
A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:
This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.
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There was a positive correlation between collectivization and crop output in Ukraine during this time, and the famine began before collectivization started. This discounts the idea that collectivization caused the famine. Instead, collectivization was introduced to help deal with the famine.
Also, collectivization is not some communist ideal. It is a revolution in production that every modern country has undergone at some point in time. In America, farms are heavily collectivized with heavy subsidies from the US government. The chicken industry, for example, is an oligopoly of four major corporations.
This mode of farming where everyone owns their own subsistence farm cannot support an urbanizing population. In early 1930s USSR, farming was still done with ox and plow. Individual farmers could not afford tractors and other equipment for their small plots of land. But with pooled resources, it is possible over larger tracts of land.
You’re rewriting history. Ukraine had soviets long before Stalin. In fact, it had reached such a level of collectivization/expropriation that Lenin/Trostky had to send the Red Army to massacre the population (and the anarchist uprising).
You should do some reading about the Makhnovtchina and the anarchist communes of Ukraine.
Okay.
Oh :/
Some interesting critiques in there (don’t hesitate to link sources), but the interpretation is vastly exaggerated. That some people abused positions of power does not invalidate the existence of free Communes, and does not invalidate their criticism of power structures that should be dismantled (on the contrary).
That’s a big difference between anarchists and marxist-leninists: in anarchist discourse, a critical look is always welcome and encouraged, and there is no binary interpretation of “good” vs “evil”. In particular, the question of the Kontrrazvedka is an interesting one: how to protect a people’s revolution without creating an authoritarian State? From what i read about it, it seems the Kontrrazvedka’s main (sole?) purpose was to prevent authoritarians from seizing and abusing power. If that requires to shoot power-hungry psychopaths like Lenin, i can’t say that makes me happy but that’s a much happier outcome than a bolshevik Nation-State.
The question is still an open debate for example in Rojava where intelligence gathering is practiced for the struggle against ISIS and the Turkish State who try to colonize/destroy the lands. Collaborating with foreign intelligence services (eg. USA/FR) has in fact saved many lives and helped the revolution last. As much as i’m against any form of such activity, i can’t say from my comfortable village in the Global North that i can judge that line of action. I honestly don’t know how i would react in case of a civil war in my neighborhood.
The source is mostly here: https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/nestor-makhno-the-failure-of-anarchism/, and they cite their own in the footnotes.
Although it has a weird trot bias, the biggest condemnation is that Makhno did not understand the working class. His army was that of peasants, and what did they do? Rolled into towns, claimed to have liberated the people, and left them at the mercy of whatever happened next. They had no plans apart from preventing authority structures from emerging. But what worked for the peasantry did not work the workers of the cities, as they did not have the same material conditions. How could notaries and administrators accept payment in kind? Why did he tell rail workers they could accept payment, except for military purposes (the majority of rail traffic)?
And you could not form an organisation that Makhno disapproved of or the kontrra would shoot you (because prisons are authoritarian). He disallowed parties because of a fear of authority creeping in again, but in the process disallowed workers to band together to represent their interests – as if parties were only going to come from external, sabotaging forces. Who exactly did they liberate then, and from whom? As we saw with the workers of Olexandrivske, he ignored their concerns about being paid real wages (and not barter for food for survival, a clear step back). What exactly did he achieve, then? Is this what freedom looks like? Is it any wonder the workers then abandoned his experiment, when they firstly had no choice in joining it? Is it any surprise they were much more keen to follow the bolsheviks, who actually had answers for them?
I also really can’t understand how the kontrra is justified hierarchy but the cheka isn’t; just because the former wasn’t a state? (highly debatable also. Makhno’s armies certainly had the monopoly on violence)
There is that in marxism-leninism. Self-criticism is one of the foundations of Mao Zedong Thought and has been vastly adopted by communist parties around the world. I have also literally never met an anarchist that did not long for Makhnovia. Some even told me that any struggle against authority is inherently just, even if it replaces it with another authority.
Why don’t you make the same good faith observation about “power-hungry psycopath … Lenin” (your words)? Makhnovia was a failed state that only survived due to a power vacuum, and it’s no wonder it lasted a couple of years while the soviet union outlived it by over 70 years.
That Makhno tried his hand at being a warlord is not an indictment on anarchism. That anarchists think he somehow is an example to follow is.
That’s sort of off topic though. Sure there were anarchists in Ukraine during the civil war putting their own plans into action, but by 1921, these factions did not exist anymore, and the soviet policy was then put into place.
What I meant by collectivization here was the specific policy enacted in 1929 while Stalin was leader, because that’s the topic of discussion.
Soviets were the foundation of the revolution in 1917, long before Lenin and his friends stole it. And yes, after Lenin and Trotsky shot all the revolutionaries (anarchists and libertarian communists), you can say with confidence they “did not exist anymore”.
Thanks for clarifying.
Did the Soviet Union manufacture a famine in Ukraine? What about the Holodomor?, 2,3,4,5, 6, A podcast on Stalin, Holodomor, and the purges.