Quote Originally Posted by Hanna View Post
As for the that whole starvation-in-Ukraine episode; it was one of the many things that came to the light in the 90s, wasn't it? We will never know about the "what if" speculation.
Well, actually, a bit earlier than that. Welsh journalist Gareth Jones was able to visit Ukraine in 1933, and after returning to the West, he published the following on 29 March:

I walked along through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, 'There is no bread. We are dying'. This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. I tramped through the black earth region because that was once the richest farmland in Russia and because the correspondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves what is happening.

In the train a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it and devoured it. The Communist subsided. I stayed overnight in a village where there used to be two hundred oxen and where there now are six. The peasants were eating the cattle fodder and had only a month's supply left. They told me that many had already died of hunger. Two soldiers came to arrest a thief. They warned me against travel by night, as there were too many 'starving' desperate men.
This very quickly got the Kremlin's attention, because just two days later, Stalinist жополиз extraordinaire Walter Duranty (then the New York Times' correspondent in Moscow) attempted to rebut Jones' account of a developing famine as an exaggeration, and implied that Jones was deliberately trying to discredit the USSR.

And Jones responded to Duranty:

"My final evidence is based on my talks with hundreds of peasants. They were not the “kulaks”- those mythical scapegoats for the hunger in Russia-but ordinary peasants. I talked with them alone in Russian and jotted down their conversations, which are an unanswerable indictment of Soviet agricultural policy. The peasants said emphatically that the famine was worse than in 1921 and that fellow-villagers had died or were dying.
So, knowledge of this "episode" is not something that became known to the world only in the 1990s, after the Soviet period -- though it was nearly impossible to discuss it within the USSR until the period of glasnost in the 1980s.

I find it hard to believe that somebody would have triggered starvation on purpose. Most people simply wouldn't want to be that cruel, plus there is no realistic motivation.
It seems quite believable to me that Stalin wanted to starve SOME towns/villages "on purpose" -- namely, those areas that he considered to be pockets of anti-Soviet resistance in Ukraine and elsewhere -- but that the final number of deaths may have been a lot higher than he deliberately planned. (Farmers and their families who have died from starvation can't be forced to work digging coal or laying railroads, after all.)

I agree, though, that the famine (and the overall misery caused by the forced collectivization) should not be generally counted as "intentional genocide" of a people.