To coin an old cliché, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” So, if you assume that the revolution that overthrew 1000 years of grinding poverty for peasants in Eastern Europe was going to “end nicely”, then you live in a different universe and there will be no chance that you can have a rational perspective on history.
Revolutions came with a cost. Ideally, the cost is borne by the oppressor, but, “shit happens” and a lot of people get caught in the crossfire. Their “innocence” or otherwise is not relevant. Innocence is for a properly convened court and legal process to determine. Likewise guilt.
If you think that the peasants willingly participated in their grinding poverty, then, once again, there’s little to redeem you. You probably have lived such a privileged life that empathy with the poor is impossible. They always want something better.
If you think that oppressors willingly give up their privilege, once again, good luck with your life and its concomitant opioids, but “fuck off out of my face”.
So, since oppressors don’t have super-powers – they still die in plagues and get gout or stabbed in the back – we can arrive at a scientifically based conclusion that a structure holds the oppressor up and the peasant down. Yes, a structure, not some kind of personality flaw or accidental event. Revolutions are about busting the structure.
Fundamental to the power of the oppressors of Eastern Europe through centuries before 1900 was a mechanism that held peasants in eternal servitude. Of course, Western Europe was not a whole lot better, but, notionally, feudalism had been replaced by industrial capitalism.
In Eastern Europe, especially in Ukraine, this was the kulaks. Kulaks were land-owners who arrived at their station either by theft, inheritance or corruption. As a kulak, you got to screw the peasantry for wealth which you could use to earn favour with the oppressor. It’s not really complicated.
So, apart from the very select few who are the oppressors, the class with the most to lose in any revolution were the kulaks.
Overthrowing some aristocracy and the attendant military is the easy part – violent, bloody, but relatively straightforward. Not so easy is to overthrow a large class of people who really, really don’t want their cushioned existence interrupted. Marx, Lenin and Stalin all knew this was the challenge.
Russia had a problem. Centuries of oppression made re-shaping the quasi-feudal arrangements to be an industrial society was going to be up-hill driving. Most problematic was that capital required to create industry at a scale that would give enough power for the state to make people’s lives better didn’t grow on trees, nor was it arriving from obliging neighbours, nor was it going to be a product of farming that did little more than make kulaks capable of purchasing trinkets.
Of course, you could go bowing and scraping to the established money-moguls of the Anglosphere, but this would mean selling your soul.
So, industrialisation was urgent, but capital was scarce. This was hardly a new situation. Unless you were a colonial power and could simply steal the resources to make capital, you had to do it the hard way. Raise it locally.
Kulaks didn’t want industrialisation. Industry would draw valuable labour to cities, leaving them without their subservient peasants. Industrialists would challenge the status quo. So, kulaks were primed to make a mess of Stalin’s collectivisation imperative. Which they did. By going ‘on strike’.
At the same time, labour was drawn to cities and away from peasant subservience – makes sense for any peasant kid – head to the ‘big smoke’. This was the mode of every industrialisation throughout the world. Since agriculture did not have the requisite structures for a decreased labour force, it failed, dramatically. Failed, because feudalism had prevented change that might have made the partial industrialisation of agriculture possible. Where the world was experimenting with tractors, places like Ukraine languished in a feudal parallel universe.
Stalin stomached no resistance – nor should he have. Kulaks were wholesale posted off to gulags – too nice a punishment for a class that had kept people poor for centuries and who were fomenting a counter-revolution to reinstate their power.
Stalin’s mistake was to imagine that sufficient capital would be generated by agriculture to support industrialisation, an absolutely vital pre-requisite for the transformation of the status of the people. It may have, had that agriculture been successful. But it failed.
The myth around collectivisation is that it doesn’t work and is a causal factor in the failure. Trying telling generations of kibbutzniks that collectivisation is ineffective. The problem is with poverty, not social structure.
If you have always survived by skimming of a little before your grain gets to the kulak, then this corrupt but life-saving practice will persist if it is now the state who demands the produce. So, get it out of your head that collectivism is a causal factor and understand the function of poverty in the frustration of revolution.
Of course, it was in the interests of kulaks to see collectivisation fail, so the state, the collective and communism became the new ‘bogeymen’ that kulaks could invoke. Already in positions of power, influence and money, kulaks set about destroying the collectives ensuring they could not have excess produce to be sold.
There’s a great deal of other detail that can be said about the famine later renamed Holodomor. You simply cannot do justice to all of it here.
What you can ‘get a handle on’ is an equation that might help your thinking.
Drought + de-ruralification + poor agricultural development + need for capital (for everyone) + natural corruption + resistance from crooks = famine = mass deaths.
“Stalin starved Ukrainians”. If that is the extent of your understanding of history and how it really works, then I can only pity you when history finally collides with you.