Remembering Stalin's Mass Murders

Mara D. Bellaby's brief AP article was picked up in my local Rochester paper. She describes a recent gathering in Kiev, Ukraine to mourn the 10 million Ukrainians "killed by a famine orchestrated by Soviet leader Josef Stalin" in 1932-33. As she describes it: "Stalin provoked the famine to coerce peasants into giving up their private farms and joining agriculture collectives being formed across the Soviet Union. Villages were ordered to provide the state with set amounts of grain, but the demands typically exceeded crop yields. As village after village failed to meet their quotas, officials seized all food and residents were barred from leaving -- condemning them to starve. Farmers in Ukraine, which was the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, fiercely resisted and bore the brunt of the human-caused disaster."

It is bad enough when, centuries ago, bad weather caused famine and starvation. Or today, in poor countries, when bad weather in conjunction with poor government policies, corruption, and/or cultural/societal mistakes lead to famine and starvation. But when it is entirely orchestrated as it was by Stalin and his regime... the evil of that is barely fathomable.

There is debate in the Ukraine about whether to call this horrible part of their history "genocide" or not. Some there are siding with Russian leaders who don't want to "politicize" it, saying that it should instead be termed "a tragedy". But calling it merely a "tragedy" would -- I think intentionally by some -- obscure moral responsibility (by Stalin and those in his regime) for what occurred.

One dictionary definition of tragedy -- "a lamentable, dreadful, or fatal event or affair, a disaster" -- is certainly accurate, but doesn't imply anything about whether it is a natural disaster (and hence not open to moral evaluation) or a man-made disaster (and hence open to moral evaluation).

Another definition of tragedy identifies the ancient Greek genre of play: "a dramatic composition, often in verse, dealing with a serious or somber theme, typically that of a great person destined through a flaw of character or conflict with some overpowering force, as fate or society, to downfall or destruction." So again, this sense of the word (while obviously used metaphorically in this case, since the slaughter was all to real and not merely a play) would obscure moral responsiblility because it leaves open that Stalin simply had a character flaw, or that the 10 million Ukranian dead was just fate, or caused by a complex societal conflict, and not something that can be blamed on the choices of Stalin and those in his regime.

That said, I'm not sure that "genocide" really applies either. The article notes that Stalin didn't specifically target Ukranians, and that numerous Russians and Kazakhs were also affected.

But the description that clearly does apply is "murder", in fact, "mass murder".

I'll note further that I don't see what is gained by classifying a mass murder as genocide or not. This is often politically motivated, and it usually seems to at least implicitly give merit to some form of collectivism -- as though membership in a group of some kind or other (race, religion, ethnicity, etc.), and being targeted because of that group membership, is somehow worse than simply being killed as individuals. In reality of course, only individuals exist and all forms of collectivism and collectivist thinking are, in the end, damaging and often deadly. Regardless of the intentions of the muderer, the act of murder is the murder of an individual person -- not the murder of a unit of some sort of collective entity. Individuals are alive and have the right to live, collective entities of this sort don't "live" and have no rights as such in this context.

So I say, lets just call it what it was -- what its essence was -- mass murder of individuals by evil people who had evil ideas.

And finally, while reading this article I couldn't help but think of the various people in the US in the 20th century, who argued (including while the mass murder was occuring) that communism, including the Soviet Union in particular, was the morally superior system to capitalism. From Hollywood to Academia to Politicians, that sentiment was widespread and argued for time and again. How horrible!