Eastern Europe: German Lawmakers Rewrite History
On the 30th November 2022 the German parliament adopted a resolution defining the starvation in Ukraine in 1932–1933 as a genocide. A government member, Robin Wagener, justified this:
“This horror had its cause in the Kremlin — there, the dictator [Stalin] took the cruel decision to push through collectivization by force and cause hunger,”
No-one could disagree with that but the real motivation of the German government is made clear by a second sentence:
“And the killing by hunger also had as its aim the political repression of Ukrainian national identity, Ukrainian culture and language…the parallels with today are unmissable.”
Soviet Policy was not Constant
History does not support the latter remark. The Ukrainian Internet Encyclopedia gives a fair summary of the big picture from which it is clear that Soviet policy in Ukraine, as everywhere in the USSR was not constant but followed a path away from the Bolshevik’s Socialist aims and towards a rapid industrial revolution accompanied by extreme violence. In Ukraine it meant “Ukrainization” in the 1920s. A policy of encouraging Ukrainian culture, language and identity which was so successful and broad that many Soviet politicians complained that it was encouraging anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalism gave way to forced collectivisation of agriculture in the 1930s in order to force the pace of urban industrialization. When opposition to this emerged in the very Ukrainian cultural body that had been hitherto encouraged, this too was targeted for repression.
History: the order matters
This is history and logic; the order of events is important. What the german parliamentarians have tried to paint as an eternal truth is in fact a twist in the complex history of the Soviet Union. Historians now agree that Stalin achieved an industrial revolution at an impressive pace through extreme violence. This happened all over the USSR and the end result can be seen in the large industrial cities; Kiev, Kramatorsk and Kharkiv are just as much the modern beneficiaries of Stalin’s violence as Ekaterinburg, Volgograd and, for that matter, Tbilisi. The Ukrainian oligarchs who scooped up the collective capital accumulated by Stalin’s industrial revolution and created today’s Ukrainian enterprises owe their wealth to the horrors of the 1930s just as much as Russian oligarchs do.
Stalin was not driven by an insane, irrational hatred of an imagined racial enemy; that was Hitler
Stalin’s motivation at every turn was the strengthening of the Soviet state and, as a necessary corollary, the strengthening of the Soviet bureaucracy, the new ruling class. In pursuit of this he revealed himself to be a ruthless psychopath who saw individual human life as expendable and of no consequence. He was not driven by an insane, irrational hatred of an imagined racial enemy; that was Hitler. On the contrary, he had the pure, monstrous rationality of someone without human empathy. The irony here is that if it had not been for the violence of the British ruling class during their own industrial revolution which inspired Marx and Engels to study and analyse Capitalism we would never have heard of Stalin.
Whitewashing Fascism
To filter out of this historically unique complexity a Russian chauvinism that planned genocide against one group of people is a dishonest distortion on a grand scale. To explicitly declare that a callous, inhuman disregard for human life during a forced industrialization is equivalent to the Nazi racial ideology with its intent of permanent destruction of entire ethnic groups and the genetic “cleansing” of those remaining is nothing short of an attempt to whitewash Fascism.
