Russia removes Holodomor memorial in Mariupol

So the Holodomor is bullshit right?

It's complicated. It's really complicated. The idea that the Holodomor was a deliberate attempt to kill as many Ukrainians as possible is almost certainly anti-capitalist :brainworms:. There's simply no evidence that anyone in the Soviet administration was trying to accomplish this, and there are big, obvious problems with the theory. The simplest problem is; The people on the ground actually enforcing agricultural policies, grain requisition policies, quotas, distribution of aid and supplies, and so forth were mostly Ukrainians themselves. The Holodomor narrative asks you to believe, essentially, that Stalin ordered Ukrainians to genocide themselves and the Ukrainians went along with it. This is part of a wider trend in right-wing Ukrainian Nationalism of pretending that somehow all Ukrainians were oppressed freedom fighters and no Ukrainians were actually part of the Soviet government or the communist party. If that sounds ridiculous to you, it is.

Anti-Communists also use the Holodomor, including the name, to essentially steal valor from the Holocaust in order to frame the Soviets as equivalent to (if not worse than) the Nazis. It's an important component of the "Double Holocaust" narrative that is both used to exaggerate the crimes and violence of the Soviet Union, while also diminishing or outright denying the Holocaust.

There's also the ideological factor - The Soviets were purging kulaks, expropriating property, and collectivizing property. Capitalists being capitalists purging the kulaks was bad, but expropriating property is pure evil. They don't care much about mass murder, or theft, or human experimentation, or really any other violence against humans but boy howdy do they get upset if you interfere with the sacred private property.

As to what actually happened - There was a huge, probably criminal, amount of mismanagement and bureaucratic fuck up occuring at all levels of government. Stalin and the Moscow administration were too far away from the problem. Communication was slow. Record keeping was spotty and records were often falsified, which lead to situations where the grain quotas were far higher than a given village could afford. When the Soviet administration finally grasped the size of the problem relief was delivered unevenly. It was bad enough that one can reasonably say that the Soviet administration's failure to alleviate the famine was probably criminal, equivalent to manslaughter on a vast scale. They weren't trying to kill anyone, but they could reasonably be held responsible for the deaths that occurred.

Other factors include a very serious drought that probably (numbers are in contention) seriously lowered the grain yields from those years, a problem which was compounded because grain quotas were not correctly adjusted to reflect the new yields.

There were serious logistical infrastructure problems. Limited transport capability, poor logistical record keeping.

The sum up, though, is that the Soviet Administration could have and should have done better, to the point where the results can reasonably be considered criminal, but the crime is manslaughter rather than genocide. There's no real evidence that the famine was intentional and the "intentional genocide" narrative has a number of very serious problems ranging from lack of evidence to asking you to believe that the Ukrainians voluntarily genocided themselves.

In addition to being a famine that was, at most, mismanaged, the term itself is amplified because it sounds a bit like holocaust. In those senses, the discourse that treats it like a genocide is also dabbling in Holocaust denial.

here is a good book on the subject