Yeah the Christman thesis swayed me on that years ago. USSR committed atrocities, many more died to mismanagement, resulting in millions of total unnecessary deaths… through crash industrialization and defeudalization, which in the west took hundreds of years and cost tens of millions of lives.
Also like yeah holodomor was really fucking horrible. Also, the holodomor was a consequence of rapid agricultural industrialization, and without that millions would have died anyway. If you’re honest about the deaths it becomes really difficult to talk about because it sounds so callous.
But like, that just goes to show the power of propaganda that we’d see a famine as an unacceptable overwhelming evil but 300 years of chattel slavery as “hey y’know it was a long time ago”
also people still died of famine prior to the formation of the USSR. USSR was likely the first country to ever get serious blame for a famine.
Absolutely lol they had feudal modes of production and therefore the same cyclical famines that basically defined feudalism in the latter half of the Middle Ages. they had to change that entirely within a few decades and *largely succeeded*, tbh another one of those astounding feats of communism.