There's also a well-known fact that photographs which are used routinely to demonstrate the terrible consequences of Ukrainian "golodomor" to Western public in books and media (starving children, skeletal-looking corpses, etc.) are in fact photos of Russian peasants, starved to death near Volga.
I think the word is supposed to be spelled "holodomor" (?) in English.
But I have to admit, I never actually heard about it until quite recently. Don't know why really.

When I think about Ukrainian peasants, all that would come to mind is "black earth" and a Soviet era miniseries from TV about some peasants in Ukraine, forgotten what it was called.

I would not presume to have any opinion or view about holodomor, since it seems to be controversial and no substantial proof about the underlying reason for the starvation. It does seem like a bit of a conspiracy theory to think that a country that claims to look out for the working class and peasants would set out to deliberately starve them to death... It is equally hard to imagine that a civilised person who was a convinced communist from an ideological perspective would support this. On the other hand, some people were indeed treated despiccably in the USSR, so to me this is hard to form a clear view about. And in light of what the Germans got up to at around the same time, perhaps it is not any harder to understand than the holocaust.


On the executions from the videoclip - yes, gruesome! But were they enemy sympathisers? If so, any country would have pretty much done the same thing back in those days. Remember the incredibly high death tolls of Soviet civilians as well as troops. These particular executions do not surprise me much. The main thing that Stalin did, that I find very repulsive, is allowing regular people to be labelled "enemies of the state" and similar based on hearsay, gossip among neighbours and reading private correspondence, then sending them to labour camps that were so harsh that many died. As I understand, this only happened to a very small percentage of the population but it is still awful. Anyone can have a bad day and slag off the state a bit. Even say things they later regret! Either way people must be allowed to have a personal opinion about things and be able to discuss it with their friends without fear, regardless whether they live in a state that is trying to build communism etc, etc.