Sarah Cameron is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland
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The Hungry Steppe: Famine,Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan
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Communism and Hunger Conference Sept.26-27, 2014 @ University of Toronto and St.Volodymyr Institute.
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HREC Communism and Hunger Conference 2014 playlist
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Historical publications about Soviet Famine-Genocides
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Famine, controlling and restricting access to food as a basic necessity of life is a typical and frequently used method of control and repression in many communist countries around the world. This has not been widely recognized or researched systematically. This is the first conference ever to explore famine-Holodomors in several places and to make comparisons. Very few publications or documentaries take this position, and usually they look at each famine in isolation as a major national tragedy of a particular country, but they don't look at how Marxism as an ideology and communism in practice was involved and how it is a usual and expected part of the implementation of that totalitarian system, and can be found in many places. Instead of looking at those tragedies in isolation, it would be more appropriate to look at it as a systemic pattern and something inherent in Marxism and its implementation into practice. That way it would be easier to see how that ideology plays a key role in causing those famines across the world in many places, peoples and cultures - many of whom have suffered from similar tragedies.
The Ukrainian community has played an important role in historiography by working hard over generations to preserve the memory of the Holodomor tragedies, which opens the door for other peoples around the world in other communist and ex-communist countries to also study those events in their own countries. Also scholars interested in human rights issues in western countries should pay more attention to those major tragedies and historians should also recognize them and not deny their existence as has been done often - and was the official Soviet position until the end of the USSR to deny that the Holodomor 1932-33 even took place. They did recognize the 1921-23 Holodomor Famine with the official figure of 5 million deaths caused by it. Interestingly it is western academics who now recognize the 1932-33 Holodomor but hardly ever mention the 1921-23 Famine which was not covered up as much and is less controversial to mention, and the 100th anniversary of that famine was barely mentioned anywhere. Some academics claim that the biggest Soviet Holodomor of 1932-33 had only 4 million deaths, however the Holodomor of 1921-23 already was recognized by the Soviets to have 5 million deaths. Some academics narrow the victims to just Ukraine, or certain years for example. It was the worst in Ukraine with the largest number of victims, but it stretched all along the former Russian empire to include Kazakhstan where 3+ million people died as well. The total could be up to 20 million. The Holodomor famine-genocide of 1932-33 is commemorated each year.
One reason why the 1921-23 Famine is misunderstood is because Marxism and the communist revolution are not seen as the main reason for the famines often, but in that context they are completely understandable, since southern Ukraine, the Don and Volga areas were treated by the Soviets like a kind of Vendée after the French Revolution - and punished especially Ukraine and the Don Cossack areas for having resisted the Bolsheviks. The resistance to the French revolution from the Vendée was also by the so-called Whites, and the White Russian movement was based in the south as well which fought against the Bolsheviks. Also Ukraine had declared independence and various groups resisted the Bolsheviks in Ukraine as well. The genocidal aspect of the 1921-23 in Ukraine was therefore a first attempt at making a regional wide deliberate famine, which was scaled up to a much larger extent in the 1928-35 Holodomor, which Stalin admitted to Churchill in Yalta that over 4 years of collectivization there were 10 million deaths caused by it. The worst years were 1932-33.
The 1921-23 Famine in its genocidal aspect of denying the existence of hunger in certain regions, excessive food confiscation from already starving people, denying of food aid, was all like a dress rehearsal for the later 1932-33 Holodomor. Once these methods were well-established they went along with communism to China with Mao's Famine in 1958-1962 with 45 million deaths during their collectivisation period - this number is given by Prof.Frank Dikötter based on an estimate of an unpublished official internal investigation by the CCP into the famine.
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