I think there is apologism in this thread discussion, which seems to have drifted from talk of East Germany and the wall to a specific period in Ukrainian history. The wall didn't exist in the 1930's to be clear.
Sineed, if you want to call me an apologist for Stalin, that's fine. It's not true but that's besides the point. But I refuse to call you an apologist for western world fascism. Because you have not attempted to apologize for any of the atrocities and deliberate mass murders perpetrated by democratic western world governments both before and after the Ukraine famine and continuing today as in the here and now. No I will not. I don't think you would tolerate that.
I had to go back atya about when you said Keynes found positive things in Stalinist USSR. I totally don't think you're an apologists for Stalin, but if you say there were good things about the USSR under Stalin, people are going to find it hard to take. And before you know it, we'll be neck-deep in Godwins.
Without wanting to be written off as an apologist, I will say that I think there was a difference between the mass starvation that occurred in Ukraine and what happened during the Holocaust in several European countries and Russia. Without intending to make excuses for Stalin, I think there is a difference between deliberate mass murder and a plan to physically eliminate people by insidious planning of mass murder, and that of historical controversy concerning who caused a famine or whether there were avoidable circumstances surrounding one particular famine in Ukraine at a time when famines raged across Asia both before and after 1930. Hunger and malnutrition was nothing new in Asian countries and cut-down millions on an almost routine basis in imperialist Russia and China and especially British occupied India. I don't think Stalin set out to plan a famine as his legacy to the FSU. I think that the Leninist new economic plan giving a green light to farmers to profit from their efforts wasn't working to prevent food shortages in Russia, nor was it working very well for peasant farmers in Ukraine who were taken advantage of by better off farmers namely the Kulaks. There was child labour under the NEP, and Kulaks took advantage of it yes they did. Destroying farm tractors sent from Russia and wobbling to refuse to plant crops also didn't work well in the end for millions of people involved.
However, given 20/20 hindsight of today, there are economists who've done their homework and state that Stalin's farm collectives contributed very little to the 500 percent overall increase in steel production necessary for rebuilding Russia's defences. And as 20-20 hindsight reveals today, Stalin was exactly right about western aggression against Russia part two. But I don't wish to be viewed as an apologist for Stalin's intentional crimes. Ordering 2 million farmers and kulaks be shipped east was plainly a violation of their basic human rights. And everyone has a right to food and water and to exist. Those basic human rights were not guaranteed in the early Stalinist years, and they are still not guaranteed today for far too many millions of people around the world, even in these modern times with advances in agricultural technology. That 56 million human beings starve to death every year today - and that there are now one billion chronically hungry people in the world is a human tragedy of colossal proportions allowed to happen in an age of computers. I think it's more than just bad arithmetic today in an age of unprecedented literacy and world-wide communications with infornation transmitted around the world at near speed of light. We have no alternative but to believe that these famines and this extent of hunger today is deliberate. Ignorance of these terrible things happening today is not a valid excuse for richest country leaders and our capitalist institutions foisting rules for market efficiency and fiscal austerity on poor countries that continue to be unable to feed masses of starving people, even with the luxury of 21st century hindsight.
56, 000, 000 human beings every year! That's like all the organized mass murder during WW II compressed into a one year time frame every trip around the sun as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow and every day that 35,000 innocent children are sacrificed on the altar of a merciless free market god.
It's an insult to humanity. They know things about starvation today that were not known at turn of the last century. It's an agonizing death that no human being should ever have to suffer. Hunger is a sharp thorn for an even an animal. What can we say for ourselves today? Come on baby don't fear the reaper? And I know that you are an educated person, and that that number is especially mind-boggling for you as it would be for any thinking, feeling human being capable of regret and remorse.
If there was anything positive that resulted from the crises of laissez-faire capitalism in the west and first economic plans of the former Soviet Union, it's that governments pledged to subsidize farming on a massive scale. Food production was once considered a national priority for governments until about the 1980s-1990's when globalization of the new liberal financial regime began. Food security is not considered a priority for neoliberal ideologues and their capitalist institutions forcing free market rules on developing countries. For a country to keep food reserves today is considered trade distorting by an illegitimate trade organization of appointed and hand-picked ideologues and thundering nit-wits who've never carried brown paper bags or lunchpails to work in all their lives. 25 years ago there were half a billion chronically hungry human beings. Today the number is estimated to be over one billion. It's a crime against humanity today just as much as it was in 1930's Ukraine except the numbers are much larger today and occurring every year on time every time. Today it really is planned and enforced genocide.