1. Volga?
2. I can agree with that, which I pointed out by mentioning that cities (with industrial population) were favored.
3. It is true, but the exports were curtailed in an attempt to combat the famine.
I made the mistake before freshening up on soviet foreign trade, which basically consisted of grain only. I can see why they exported it even during the famine -- without selling grain there would be no fuel, no spare parts, the whole economy would halt.
I didn't say that was an 'innocent mistake' -- mistakes can still be brutal and criminal, yet if it was a deliberate genocide of Ukrainians, tell me, why did 2 to 3 millions of Russians and the same amount of Kasakhs died?
And the point about comparison with the great depression is not about time, but about damage control -- in the case of great depression they did none, due to ideological reasons, while in the soviet case they did, although limited it.
It was more of a bureaucracy/management problem combined with Stalin's disregard of life: administration was trying to get the ridicilous KPIs (while manufacturing illicit statistics) at the cost of the people at hand.
Well, the article misses just a couple of things:
1) First and foremost, the famine was USSR-wide and hit both RSFSR and Kazakhstan, the latter one had even worse population consequences.
2) When it became apparent that there is not enough grain, USSR started rapidly importing it and giving out - still in a brutal city-favouring way, but it was not a deliberate politics of starvation.
3) The whole story started due to western nations banning gold trade with the USSR, forcing it to gamble on grain yields to buy equipment for industrialisation
The famine still was a terrible mistake, but trying to paint it as deliberate killing is unfair -- it is more akin to great depression (typical forced move to the city and machine agriculture). Except it didn't last 10 years and they tried to fix it as soon as it happened.
I didn't say that was an 'innocent mistake' -- mistakes can still be brutal and criminal, yet if it was a deliberate genocide of Ukrainians, tell me, why did 2 to 3 millions of Russians and the same amount of Kasakhs died?
And the point about comparison with the great depression is not about time, but about damage control -- in the case of great depression they did none, due to ideological reasons, while in the soviet case they did, although limited it.
It was more of a bureaucracy/management problem combined with Stalin's disregard of life: administration was trying to get the ridicilous KPIs (while manufacturing illicit statistics) at the cost of the people at hand.