My grandma and her family came to America from Ukraine during this time. At their house grandma kept a small root cellar filled with food in the basement and grandpa had guns stashed in the attic.
One significant part of US gun culture is that many of the older generations arrived to the country fleeing famine, genocide, goverment mandated lootings and other horrors.
Part of my family are Volga River Germans that had farms in the village of Kautz, near Saratov, since 1767. The Bolsheviks gave them a false choice. Join a commune or continue working their own land. My family chose to work their own land and were forcibly relocated to Siberia with only what they could carry. Some died of cold and starvation. Some family were able to escape to Germany, even though they have not been back for a couple hundred of years. Before World War 2 broke out, a few family were able to flee to the US. That particular side of the family are pro freedom, anti-authoritarian.
My ancestors survived those days because those day only because of one relative who was working in the city and has access to animal bones left over from cutting up animal carcasses. She was able to smuggle a few from time to time. Anyway all my grandmas and grandpas were reluctant for allowing me or my parents to not eat all food they serve to us at family dinners.
“A woman […] whose husband had been given five years in the camp, had managed to keep her family fed in various ways until 1933. Then her four-year-old son died. Even then the brigades did not leave her alone, and suspected that the grave she had dug for the boy was really a grain pit. They dug it up again, found the body, and left her to rebury it.” Robert Conquest (1984) “The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine”
Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Come to Jesus Christ today Jesus Christ is only way to heaven Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today John 3:16-21 16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God. Mark 1.15 15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel. 2 Peter 3:9 The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. Hebrews 11:6 6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. Jesus
Robert Conquest didn't base his works on real data but on rumors instead. After the Soviet archives were opened, a lot of errors and exaggerations were found in his books. So take those stories with a grain of salt.
@@RenamedChannel So anyone can make up anything and you'll believe it? There is a lot of information in the archives, including horrifying stories. The NKVD really monitored the situation, including rumors and conversations in queues in front of groceries. Apart from that, there are orders, instructions, and internal discussions between top members of the party. Those documents weren't supposed to be seen by anyone, so there is some pretty harsh data out there.
This feels like it deserves a part two. Maybe even a part 5. This is not the end of the story, and it gets worse before it gets worse. Edit: I have angered Putins bots.
@@MarkHonea-dx6mvPutin wishes. He’s certainly working on it, although he seems to be skipping the “starving” part for the most part, and going directly to the “Mass Graves”.
@@jimtalbott9535 they are currently paying death benefits to families equivalent to 15 - 30 years of work in rural areas. This is new and its never been as good a time to wars off western aggression than today...
grain was like gold at that times, anyone who have chance get some local storage like savings. My grandma says they have special closet disguisted like part of wall just near oven. Any stranger barely can found it, and it almost always be filled by grain just for case "something bad happens". Such places tend to be in almost any semi-wealth howses, literally serve like gold in more reach class. Prices was extreme carefully controlled by all, as it work almost like current. Usual practice was "hide graiin to rize price to get some advantage".
@@AABB-px8lc Jesus christ. I just don't get it. This was caused because of massive spending on the army because of the war. Of course grain is going to be extremely pricey because of the sheer demand. At this point why not just, cut back on the war?
Tbh, the realities of the Soviet Union are very scattered, most of the Soviet’s social politics weren’t recorded by the soviets nor published by the Russian governments after the Soviet Union felt, this could be a tip of the iceberg.
nah, Stalin smartly used his starvation policies to destroy a rebellious province. Mao did no such thing and his poor performance in 1964 was due to a combination of USSR aid being withdrawn and drought. Yes, the USSR double-dipped on famine as class war.
@@2livenoob jesus i hope you're wrong. look i'm old. the world currently is being stressed massively by wars. however, because of agricultural inventions like new fertilizers and GMOs we are nowhere near famine. let's keep it that way.
It also didn't help that China had to pay for the Korean War, pay back USSR loans with grain, support North Vietnam, while also being unrecognized in the UN thus unofficially sanctioned globally, during the same timeframe.
Not really, there were high point where it got better. The USSR and the other socialist states, for example, incredible increases of quality of life, health, education, childcare, equality. That got often gutted when these states fell back into capitalism.
I wish this was just a history. When I was a Soviet kid, I considered myself lucky, because I lived in the best country of the world. The longer I live, the more I wonder what kind of sin I must have committed to deserve such "luck".
@@kazaddum2448 With less mouths to feed there must be more to go around. Plus, normalcy bias helps out. And as John mentioned, there is the concept of eating the seed crop. The Soviets ate their seed crop in terms of agriculture, manpower, finances, and other resources, and then failed. Afterwards some form of "more free" market capitalism was allowed to emerge. What you're saying is like if someone blaming a doctor for a person's injuries after they are in hospital. Also, the peasants were not that far from being surfs. Some peasants succeeded, but others still were emerging from centuries of serfdom. It takes time to shake off old cultures.
It's insane to think about how the Soviets managed to win the Civil War when basically all they had to offer their populace during the time was different varieties of marauding bandits threatening to slaughter them over staple goods.
(1) They promised everything under the sun, with simple slogans (2) they had the geographic advantage of centrality, while the “White” armies had to operate on a widely scattered basis, making coordination nearly impossible (3) control of the industrial centers made recruitment and resupply infinitely easier for the Reds than trying to recruit across the endlessly vast countryside
@@richardarriaga6271Not really, and I have a bias for disliking commies They were literally protesting food shortages, that's one of the reasons the Bolsheviks even got the initial support they did
The amount of comments in here actively defending famine is actually insane. Internet “ Communists” are of the lowest intellect I think I have ever come across.
That's your family version, but we don't know the state officials version. Were they sharing their surplus with the rest of the people that were starving? Were they refusing to do so repeatedly and/or even became violent?
@@alanywalany6460 You mean like all the people their government murdered for daring to try and have enough of what they produce to literally just not starve.
Small note: I don't know any single word in russian that means both to receive and to understand, except for maybe уловить which is to fish up (you can fish up the truth)
A common thing through history is idiots being placed in charge of farming and thinking that they can do so much better then the people who have done it all their life and then fuck up massively (the British in India and Zimbabwe are two other big examples).
Inversely farmers that refuse to modernize and then cry to the government for subsidies for their unproductive uncompetitive farms once the price drops and they are selling at a loss. It's not as easy as farmers always right, government always wrong. Or that new methods are better, old ways are wasteful. The real way to motivate farmers is by proof doing something better than them and then having them opt into a new system. Like dwarf wheat in Mexico and Pakistan Sadly it seems governments are once again targeting farmers with limits on chemical fertilizers and hard caps on nitrogen emissions. We all know no government elite ever starved or had to do with less. The implosion of farming in Sri Lanka should have been a warning to the EU and Canada, but they are still charging forward with misguided attempts to control the weather by forcing food shortages onto the world.
The Britsh were fucking amazing. Their colonies were generally quite well run. Specially if you compare to the real world alternatives by the other European powers
It was like that since Roman times. Contrary to the Roman belief, soldiers weren't good farmers and large scale retirement of legionaries caused some terrible food shortages
godz@@tf2godz So to what extent did the Brits assume responsibility for organising agriculture in India. I think very little. Southern Rhodesia was a prosperous place when the white farmers ran it. Woke politics got in the way and independence ruined it. Likely to befall South Africa given time. Wouldn't lay bets on it succeeding tho' Kenya doing well with Chinese infrastructural help and Nigeria does its own thing happily. So maybe just maybe there's a chance for SA. I'm thinking radicals like Julius Nyerere could really do a Mugabe on the place given a chance 😝
My great-grandfather experienced soviet repressions, much of his property was confiscated, some of his relatives managed to escape to the Netherlands. Unfortunately, that's all I know about them. The great-grandfather and his family survived, because there were only three of them (only 1 kid during the events, not that big of a family for the rural region). Various grass roots soups were pretty common. Situation in urban areas was even worse, bc it's pretty hard to grow anything in the apartments, as you can understand. Those events took place in the Naddniprianshchyna / Dnieper Ukraine region, early 1930s.
I really felt deep sense of danger and terror while listening to this. Really cruel times, as it was for most of history, but we have forgot. We should respect that default status of world is collapse and decay and that we have is hard work of many centuries, cooperation and technological progression. I feel lucky to have meal that I just ate, nothing abnormal, but many would kill just for small piece of it.
Claiming that the whole world is in decay is a poor and illogical way to deflect from your own perpetual decay. It is a national Russian trait but utterly supid and based on a falsehhod.
I'm going to comment now before I've watched this video. My parents are both Mennonite and my father was a Russian Mennonite who got his farm taken from and given to peasants who didn't know how to farm and people in in that area starved due to stalinist policies. I'm probably going to read comment after I watch this whole video, because I'm going to go and dig through my grandfather's notes and papers even though they're in Russian and I can barely understand it just do realize the whole scope of it. 100 of his friends neighbors and acquaintances died due to starvation
You should get that stuff uploaded somewhere ( i am sure there's a chanel for that) so it can get translated/preserved. So many people have died with nothing said/written that we really need to preserve what we have.
@pietersteenkamp5241 I gave some of it to the Mennonite archive Society in the Fraser Valley years ago. They can do a better job figuring out what it is than me
The Germans must have really regretted sending Lennon back to Russia lol. The only that surprises me is it managed to hang around for 70 year's before collapsing.
Uh, they survived 70 years because the US propped them up and sold or gave them our grain. If the Soviets had not gotten Western aid they wouldn't have lasted.
Considering that I've seen your videos linked on soviet simping media bubbles, I can already imagine how they'll view this "betrayal" of the revolution.
really notable that the Tsarist government was essentially also following a measure characteristic of central planning with their requisitioning process and quota declarations. probably the only difference between them and the Soviets was the use of force in the requisitioning by the latter. really solid video, as always!
No, there was always force and the difference with the Soviet Union is that the mistakes were corrected as the leaders didn't actually want to keep their citizens in perpetual suffering while the Tsar basically had to to keep the royals/elites happy. The suffering in the SU was temporary but eternal with the Tsar's.
@pietersteenkamp5241 sure. but my comment was primarily about the central planning characteristic common to both of them. extreme top-down command where corrections were also dependent on such command.
@@pranavmanie1479 The Tsar's system was not nearly as centralized which is why it was much less effective at supplying the food needs of the country. Well that's what i remember and yes most of the world experienced famines as result as war/ upheaval and climatic changes and it it was communism ( or whatever you want to call it ) in Russia and China that finally put and end to thousand/thousands of years of suffering. Capitalism achieved the same feat in the imperial core ( where it was subservient to ever more centralized power just like in the USSR and China) but in most of the rest of the world people still eat much less than they would like with tens of millions still starving to death every year and a billion or eating too little to maintain good health & shorten lifespans.
Who? Kremlin? They were directing it all and got NO mercy to norm They were directing it all and got NO mercy for normal citizens... Red army soldiers were skinning people alive for being against the revolution -> why do you think author of the fideo is not mentioning? Who whitewashed the history like that? Kulaks and millions on their way to gulags and other "happy places"? Lenin told his direct subordinates to lie outright and promised people what they wanted to hear, and later with power "we gonna do it our way"... and that was exactly "their way".
This isn't a story about price controls. It's about Russia being a nightmare of unending trauma for it's entire historical existence. (edit) price controls isn't the problem, it wouldn't fix anything and is just a symptom. Geography is destiny and Russia's geography just sucks. Constant invasions from all directions, no geographical barriers and famine. A market economy can never be established in Russia security concerns dominate everything.
@@Broken_robot1986Price controls never seem to work very well, and I can't think of an example where they haven't made things worse, at least over the long run. The big problem is that market conditions don't move fast enough to accomplish short-term goals. The easiest way to alleviate a shortage is to leave the price unchecked and everybody who has whatever it is you're looking for, say bottled water, jacks the price up to insane levels. This means everybody outside of the affected area who has bottled water does cartwheels trying to get their bottled water into the affected area to sell, thus vastly and quickly increasing the supply. With supply, the price drops, and there's plenty of bottled water. The only problem is that between the price rise and the price drop, everybody was beating each other with baseball bats trying to get a hold of a drink of water.
@@taco7043This is a textbook example of price controls. And if you'll go to your local university and pick an economics textbook, you will probably find it.
The USSR was anything but a horror story. Those first years were extremely hard, 14 nations invaded while WW1 had just ended, the white armies got extermal funding which extended the civil war by a lot. Afterwards the young soviet experiment had not international recognition, the only thing it was allowed to export was grain. Then the black fungus hit, which with a general draught lead to a massive famine. What saved the USSR at that time was the world economic crisis, it resulted in any further invasion plans of western powers pushed back into the drawer while it did not further affect the USSR - because it was cut off from international markets. Allowing it to industrialize and increase it's production capacities by several 100%.
Stalins rule surely was a horrorstory, after destalinization it really wasn't that bad. Not nearly as good as in western europe/USA, but still decent. Especially in in the Baltic, Caucasian, Russian, belarusian and ukrainian soviet republics. Central Asia always was a rough place.
@@machinedude9386if you look at the big picture, and ignore the 70s and later, sure. But for the average person? It really wasn't good at all. You are only able to say this because you are aware of the propaganda, and not what we actually had to live through. Please educate yourself before promoting such views. It is not just dishonest, but harmful. I see so many young people these days asking to bring back this painful system, having no idea what it really means. No, you will not implement it better. It's a human problem. The socialism phase never ends and communism cannot be achieved. Because humans are greedy and will abuse power. It's just how this works. Thus system only brings sociopaths to power, and it's not just he nomenklatura, it's the institutions of force, bureaucracy, etc.
I thought the same. It was enough to leave the traders alone and they would solve the problem. But communists had their marxist ideas and any opportunity that someone can make a profit was terrifying for them.
Searched up the photos of the 1921 russian famine and wow I’m shocked by what happened but also amazed at the sheer will of the Russian people to survive. Very interesting.
Has there been any time in Russia's recent history when it could legitimately be considered "great" for the Russian people? The last hundred plus years seems like a series of self-inflicted miseries, interjected by brief periods when the ruling class did okay.
Don't think so. They feed on imperialist pride and believe every civilizational leap needs human sacrifice. It's doubly sad considering how many talented individuals they brought into the world.
@@drsunshineaod2023 post war SU was a moment of relative peace for them. in the brezhnev stagnation everyone basically cruised along even if it felt like life and the country itself was going nowhere.
@@Idelacio Lysenko only came to prominence after the last famine, not counting the one after the war since it was caused by the war, so his ideas can't have been implemented on any large scale. Maybe they were in China
@@alanywalany6460the chief “scientist” they put in charge didn’t believe in science. If you can’t be _unburdened by the past,_ you will never see the future utopia; so stop apologizing for people who were wrong.
This is a nice bookend to your video: How Oil Ate the Soviet Economy. Now we have descriptions of economic mismanagement at both ends of the Soviet Era. Thanks for your really intense research.
I am very fascinated. You present the very details of the ASML Lithography machines, show how technology and markets developed. But also you show us a very deep knowledge especially about the start and the development of criminal Soviet system and even about places like Yugoslavia. Romania after WW2, then under Ceaucescu but also the Hungarian Priest who brought the system down would be interesting. Don't change your plans. I can wait.
Another propaganda crp (previous was "here is terrible atomic russian bomb picture, similar as dropped on Japan" ), it seems he must insert it to continue. Sad times. I was liked this channel.
@@cinnamon4183 so you think sophisticating propaganda crp like show picture of Russian atomic bomb and intentionally use double meaning phrase "similar used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki" is good content ? In same video - Alliance bomb Japan. Alliance. Not USA. Not Pentagon. not America. Not Oppenheimer, Teller, US ARMY. Abstract Alliance. Tell me he is not aware what happens actually.
14:44 if you go to that place on Google street view almost all of the buildings in that photo are still there today. That spot is just below the corner of Ulitsa Kommunarov and Ulitsa Mira looking east towards the Voznesenskiy Cathedral.
The real problem was that Russia just should have stayed out of WWI if at all possible. They just didn't have enough food to mobilize an army in such a way. It was really just a cascade of effects after that. Truthfully there is a chance that if Russia didn't declare war on Austria-Hungary there would have just been a localized war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. Though I do suspect a larger war would have eventually happened. Perhaps Russia could have increased its industrial base before that.
The soviet union is an insane place in history, it was so brutal even extremely illiterate people felt something was wrong. Would be a fascinating pace to explore with time travel ngl lol
... USSR in what year? 1918? 1939? 1980? If you mean the Stalin era USSR, illiterate peasants served as both oppressed farmers and oppressive soldiers.
@@NameRiioz Little kid would never want to visit Soviet Union after watching this video... and this video is not telling the truth, you are right about it, as there is NO mention of for example Red army soldiers that were skining alive people that were fighting with them... and yea i get it, you are communist by heart, so you lying -> and that is why there is so little truth here -> it was based on whitewashed history as all people responsible for writing documents about situation were lying even more than you. From comparison of population of Russia and other European countries we can see lack of 100 millions of people... where did they go? are you hiding them in your cellar as you are NOT like little kid?
@@ChordonblueRespectively, I think you might be listening to too much Eric Weinstein. Kamala isn't secretly dropping Marx quotes to foreshadow her Communist takeover of the USA.
@@ChordonblueHaving survived 2020, not being burdened by mass idiocy of taking quack treatments in the face of the worst epidemiological crisis since the Spanish Flu would be wonderful. Instead, RFK, Jr. is ranting about fluoride in the water like he popped out of Dr. Strangelove.
@@richardarriaga6271 Is he wrong? That's not an argument for repeatedly quoting from an author who's ideas have killed MILLIONS of people every time it's tried.
Well, they did said that the peasants should have the means of production, no one said anything about the means of distribution. Jokes aside, the abysmal quality of life in collective farms is something that rarely brought up when it comes down to the soviet era farming, when it is something that very much impacted soviet union throughout their lifespan and very largely contributed towards their collapse due to the inherent innefecticveness of their farming.
@@robertoskoka the country with the largest landmass in the world were forced to imports a very huge amount of it's grain from US and Canada, countries like NK and failing Pakistan can do all the things you've already mentioned yet still failed at the basic.
In the 1930s (After 1933) the collective farm system produced at least as much, and more, grain annually than the former serfdom system. It was only the German invasion in 1941 and then Kruschev's virgin soil/corn policy which made the collective farms unviable.
@@4grammaton 1) There are at least 2 different numbers of collected grain. What you might be referring to is "biological harvest" which is a bogus number invented solely for taxation purposes and sometimes exceeded the real harvest by one third. 2) Collective farm peasants received less in return for their grain than during so called "serfdom system". I.e. production did not increase, only taxation did. Actual agricultural productivity started systematically exceed 1913 harvest only few years after Stalin's death.
@@briantarigan7685The USSR was the largest grain producer in the world and imported as much grain as it exported. The increased grain imports in tge late 60s and early 70s was due to a shift towards livestock agriculture. Same reason Khrushchov wanted go grow corn.
this is very interesting topic. iam never know this before you made this content. i hope you make this topic more deep again. need part 2 or more for this topic. excellent job
All these Russian/Soviet stories create a long and unbroken chain of historical failures. A continuous bad/poor situation that lasts centuries. All of it is very much prioritized in Poland's program of learning history. It allows us to understand our neighbours. It also makes us remember this "entity" character from the East called the federation of states. A very large country which never went out of our "not hostile" category. We know what's out there at the age of primary school.
All of this is also included in Russia's history classes. Even mention of the food aid from USA. But in a neutral less antagonizing way than in Poland I guess.
@@petyavodolaz The history of my family is the history of fighting against the Soviets and Nazis. From the time my grand-grandfather fought in the Great War ending up getting back the Polish independence. He later fought in the Polish-Soviet War - in 1920. His son (my grandfather) fought against the Soviets in 1939. After WWII he was persecuted by the Polish political apparatus and then kept in prison because he defended Poland in 1939. During the time of 1981-1983, my father printed and released an illegal anti-communist newspaper. "Less antagonized" than Polish education? 😆 That's why you have children at the age of 12 wearing Russian army uniforms in your elementary schools? Or a 9-year-old boy pretending with his cardboard tank he "releases" Ukraine? Or maybe that's the reason Putin and the Russian people want to strike Poland with the nukes? WE ARE NOT SCARED. You can only make us more angry. You will think about Nazi occupation as "good times". You know how much I care about Russian lessons of history. Fcuk all. I have all the reasons to not take any "possible denial" from Russia as a lie. If you think Russia will come back to Europe in the future - forget about it. You are done in Europe. You made yourself the Europe's biggest enemy. Pray. Also, Polish schools are "Lightweight" compared to the history of each Polish family.
@@petyavodolaz The red army at that time was skinning people alive... this whole movie is a very truncated version of events and the author is clearly trying not to tell the truth about Lenin and what the hell he was doing there and how he was sending millions to the grave just to stay in power. NKVD when they came to Poland in 1945 they digged out Antoni Ferdynand Ossendowski coffin out of his grave to just be 100% sure that he was in it -> Because he was there in Russia and saw it on his own eyes and described it in his book 'Lenin'. What percentage of what is in this book is taught in schools in Russia? 20%? 25%?
Adam Tooze argues that Best-Litovsk was more important in leading to WWII than Versailles. He has important work done on that, btw. You can find some 3 lectures at Stanford (I think) from some 9 years ago.
Amazing video! Having read the gulag archipelago, I am still somehow surprised at the absolute depravity of the Soviet Communists. The top level comments here are interesting but about what you'd expect. The replies are something else. Comment: "My great grandpa died by soviet grain gangs because he didn't want to let grandma starve" replies: "He probably deserved it lmao". Commies really are among the most vile batch all the world and time over.
Commies tend to be losers from upper and middle class background. They have a lot of resentment against their more successful peers and use peasants and lower class workers to get back at them.
I've seen many similar comments to this and they all sound as if you're all bots or something. Can you not offer deeper levels of analysis because I swear it feels like the median demographic of this channel is 70 all of a sudden. Sure the Soviet experiment was terrible but a lot of these responses fail to conceptualize that failure coherently.
This video doesn't explain how the countryside was organised, and that in reality the peasants didn't own the land nor the production which was in the hands off a few rich landlords. Bolsheviks were right that those landlords we're hiding the grain.
1:37 Russian Mennonites, although I would hesitate to call them peasants as they took care to educate themselves. After my dad's family moved to Northern Alberta in 1930, he harvested grain and saw the low prices of it and he also started bootlegging with it cuz he could earn more money that way and spent two months in jail over it My dad's mother lived until 1977, and she talked about a fire so bad that the moon took on a bluish hue from all the suspended smoke. My dad was reminded of this when he went up to Alaska once and reported a similar thing when there was huge fires burning up in Alaska
The Holodomor broad incredible suffering to Ukraine brought on by the Soviet state the people there have never forgotten even to this day nearly a hundred years later
I want to add something. Newborn Turkey did sell a lot grain and fruit to Russia for weapons during Independence War and after it. Actually most of the industry established by Russian engineers at young Turkish Republic.
Instead of robbing the villages, they should have sent people in to live with them, to ask them what they needed to increase production, and provide it. Killing the people who produced the food was incredibly short sighted, as well as being cruel.
The people were starving, in response the farmers planted less and sent less to the cities. It is understandable that violence occurred. I mean the video has an obvious anti-communist anti-authoritarian slant but even it acknowledges that the farmers simply decided to not grow enough. It wasn't a matter of technology or resources. The farmers didn't believe it was their duty to feed people. Its similar to today. Farmers only feed people because they are paid to. But if you reduce their profits through regulations or free trade they will simply stop doing it. Even if they would still make enough to live comfortably. This also occurred during the medieval era. Farms were very unproductive partly because peasants only produced a small excess.
This seems exactly like the narrative of the history of Portugal from my childhood days! I'm in the middle of my eighties; What this gentleman says was exactly what happened in Portugal when I was a child. At that time, the Portuguese authorities accused the Soviets of doing exactly what the Portuguese authorities did.
Every society has a group of people in the city that produce nothing useful for humanity. Even though they don't pay taxes or employ people, they are mad that other people work hard and don't pay enough taxes.
How would this guy rate the Romanovs I wonder. Revolutions don't just happen for no reason. For most of time and in most if not all places, the world has massive famines. Preventing hoarding and food distribution is often handled badly - - see opening scenes of Blackhawk Down 😊 Russia had taken a reall battering in WW1 under inept and careless leadership. Bled dry really. The emergent Russian state was under attack from within by czarist loyalists and from without by the US in Kamchatka and most of western Europe in the western border regions. Several of these attackers were intent on protecting the institution of monarchy (yeah, cos they were run by kings themselves - the KingsClub) or they were bitterly anti socialist Kings again?? So. its pretty much inevitable that critical shortages ensued. Another consequence is that Russia needed and still needs some kind of buffer on its borders whether by allued states (Warsaw Pact?) or armed lines (Iron Curtain) Certainly Russia has every reason NOT to trust foreign powers. Communism isnt the cause of famine. India had regular devastating famine under British and Indian Rule. China had nothing but famines and hardship under the warlords part of which now are Americas proxies and favorite sons in the East. History is usually far more complicated than banner slogans make out. Often people are in so much dislike of political parties or personalities they lose objectivity. Just Sayin' 😂.
How astonishing is to listen to the history of your country that you obviously knew fairly well, but from a perspective of some asian guy trying to explain what продразвёрстка means
It's pathetic how poor the Soviet Union was. They literally went bankrupt because they were trading valuable resources for food. Then as soon as they abandoned Communism Russia alone began producing enormous grain surpluses. You can't have a very successful society composed entirely of slaves.
@alanywalany6460 okay, the USSR was a massive grain exporter with an internal surplus every year and post Soviet Russia had lower grain exports. Canada wasn't selling massive quantities of wheat to the USSR.
actually, according to IndexMundi on Russian grain exports, for a 10 year period (1987-1997), their peak grain export was 1200 Mtons in 1990. In 1992 "as soon as they abandoned Communism" it was only 900 Mtons. It took till 1998 to finally hit a 1652 Mton export year. for Russian grain production, from 1987 to 2000 peak grain production was 49569 Mtons in 1990. In 1992 "as soon as they abandoned Communism" it was 46170 Mtons, and continued shrinking to a minimum of 30100 in 1995. It took till 2002 to produce 50609 Mtons.
@@jasperlim8319 The 90s were a tough transition to go from a command economy to a more capitalistic one. While I agree it wasn't "as soon as they abandoned Communism", when they transitioned away a centrally planned economy and collective farms, their agriculture production increased significantly. For consumers, look at a 1980s Soviet grocery store and a modern-day Russian one to see the massive difference in quantity and varieties of food. Even under sanctions, a modern Russian grocery store is far superior to anything from the Soviet days.
@FlintIronstag23 just looking at the output tells you very little, I mean was there even a market for all that grain to be sold to back then, also technology developed
the succes of the communist revolution was caused by the incompetence of the government after the Tsar was deposed not the skills of the former. and the sad part is that communist could have worked if the state only controlled the urban industry while allowing capitalism in agriculture in the countryside. the defeat of Soviet Union was caused by its own ideoogy.
I am looking for books mentioning agrarian overpopulation as a reason for the Russian Revolution. Supposedly, even John Maynard Keynes wrote about this subject. Please help me find sources. I cannot get full text of many books that come up and many of them are not searchable by keyword. Thank you.
@@VladimirTolskiy What examples of this have you found in "The Development of Capitalism in Russia", "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism", "The Impending Catastrophe and How To Combat It", "The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government", "Economics And Politics In The Era Of The Dictatorship Of The Proletariat", or other his works?
People in this comment section need to remember this isn’t about red communism or white “liberalism” or capitalism. This period of Russian history was one of anarchy, and civil war following a world war which already decimated the Russian economy. Soviet controlled territories and those controlled by the whites, struggled to find food for soldiers and factory workers in the cities. Urban peoples don’t grow grain or any food. When the link between countryside and city was destroyed, hunger set in, peasants hoarding food to sell at high prices or peasants unable to meet the increased demands fell victim to the situation in the same way the urban population did. The decision to seize grain was made by both sides, and in many instances as this video shows by more or less autonomous bands of armed people. The civil war has up to 8 million combatants and millions of industrial workers producing the materials for war. That’s millions of mouths to feed, when world war 1, had already decimated the link between food supply and distribution. The Bolsheviks knew that such a demand was risky and would cause major unrest- a policy they wish they didn’t have to make- the necessity of the situation, holding onto power and fighting a civil war on the magnitude of a world war, necessitated brutalist measures. That’s not a moral analysis or judgement but a hard and cold realism that the situation required. Imagine a civil war broke out in America. And the country side stopped or could no longer supply food to New York City or Washington DC or any other urban centre. The powers in those cities on either side of the war, would without doubt seize produce or acquire it at the disadvantage of the producers. That’s not a political decision based on ideological consideration- but one based on the brutality that hunger brings!
Finally, an honest insight into what Soviet Russia had been in reality. Although I am afraid, that many people still won't be convinced about this truth.
My grandma and her family came to America from Ukraine during this time. At their house grandma kept a small root cellar filled with food in the basement and grandpa had guns stashed in the attic.
It seems they learned not to trust the government, stock food an keep strapped. Good.
Zelenki is destroying Ukraine
One significant part of US gun culture is that many of the older generations arrived to the country fleeing famine, genocide, goverment mandated lootings and other horrors.
Part of my family are Volga River Germans that had farms in the village of Kautz, near Saratov, since 1767. The Bolsheviks gave them a false choice. Join a commune or continue working their own land. My family chose to work their own land and were forcibly relocated to Siberia with only what they could carry. Some died of cold and starvation. Some family were able to escape to Germany, even though they have not been back for a couple hundred of years. Before World War 2 broke out, a few family were able to flee to the US. That particular side of the family are pro freedom, anti-authoritarian.
My ancestors survived those days because those day only because of one relative who was working in the city and has access to animal bones left over from cutting up animal carcasses. She was able to smuggle a few from time to time. Anyway all my grandmas and grandpas were reluctant for allowing me or my parents to not eat all food they serve to us at family dinners.
“A woman […] whose husband had been given five years in the camp, had managed to keep her family fed in various ways until 1933. Then her four-year-old son died. Even then the brigades did not leave her alone, and suspected that the grave she had dug for the boy was really a grain pit. They dug it up again, found the body, and left her to rebury it.”
Robert Conquest (1984) “The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine”
Romans 6:23
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Come to Jesus Christ today
Jesus Christ is only way to heaven
Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void
Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today
Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today
John 3:16-21
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.
Mark 1.15
15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.
2 Peter 3:9
The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
Hebrews 11:6
6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
Jesus
Just to be clear that didn't actually happen. He was a UK anti-communist propagandist.
Robert Conquest didn't base his works on real data but on rumors instead. After the Soviet archives were opened, a lot of errors and exaggerations were found in his books. So take those stories with a grain of salt.
@@superdingo9741 You are implying something like that would be recorded in the official documents. Don't be the 2nd Koltsov.
@@RenamedChannel So anyone can make up anything and you'll believe it? There is a lot of information in the archives, including horrifying stories. The NKVD really monitored the situation, including rumors and conversations in queues in front of groceries. Apart from that, there are orders, instructions, and internal discussions between top members of the party. Those documents weren't supposed to be seen by anyone, so there is some pretty harsh data out there.
@13:40 "Officials in Kursk sent a Telegram" could be describing a story from today lol
Underrated comment lol
This feels like it deserves a part two. Maybe even a part 5. This is not the end of the story, and it gets worse before it gets worse.
Edit: I have angered Putins bots.
That's the story of Russian history - "...and then, it got worse"
You can check all other Soviet Union videos on this channel as substitutes for now.
Lenin, Stalin, Putin. More of the same.
@@MarkHonea-dx6mvPutin wishes. He’s certainly working on it, although he seems to be skipping the “starving” part for the most part, and going directly to the “Mass Graves”.
@@jimtalbott9535 they are currently paying death benefits to families equivalent to 15 - 30 years of work in rural areas. This is new and its never been as good a time to wars off western aggression than today...
my family escaped this shitshow in 1919 from Lithuania. Incredibly lucky they did, cause their entire extended family starved in the 1921 famine...
There was a famine in lithuania?
@@LTUDovydasNo
Сбежали в 1919-ом году, а потом умерли в 1921-ом. Я Вам верю!
@@karlwalther читать разучились?
extended family - т.е. те, кто не уехал
@@ebabobaboba Проблема в том, что Литва получила независимость и не входила в состав Советской России. То есть это бот, и их здесь много.
the poorly educated urban poor of Soviet russia were misled into thinking that the rural poor peasents were hoarding grain? that's just sad
grain was like gold at that times, anyone who have chance get some local storage like savings. My grandma says they have special closet disguisted like part of wall just near oven. Any stranger barely can found it, and it almost always be filled by grain just for case "something bad happens". Such places tend to be in almost any semi-wealth howses, literally serve like gold in more reach class. Prices was extreme carefully controlled by all, as it work almost like current. Usual practice was "hide graiin to rize price to get some advantage".
Yeah, they believed their mainstream media..
@@AABB-px8lc Jesus christ. I just don't get it. This was caused because of massive spending on the army because of the war. Of course grain is going to be extremely pricey because of the sheer demand. At this point why not just, cut back on the war?
Wait you mean those in power set various factions of the working class against each other? Gosh. Imagine that. :/
@PrincessKushana chaos, conflict, discord, and mistrust are tools of the socialist
The numbers of people who have no idea about these events is wow.
Thank you for your service.
It's one of the points of understanding who the Russians/Soviets are and why they have not changed at all.
@@DogmaticAtheist The Soviets and Russians suppressed knowledge of the famines triggered by Moscow policy.
"Holo-Mordor"
Tbh, the realities of the Soviet Union are very scattered, most of the Soviet’s social politics weren’t recorded by the soviets nor published by the Russian governments after the Soviet Union felt, this could be a tip of the iceberg.
You would think Russia would remember these events since they’re going back to their Soviet past
Unironically, one of my favorite Soviet history channels.
Stalin. "We may have lost a few people to bad agricultural practices" - Mao 'Hold my maotai"
nah, Stalin smartly used his starvation policies to destroy a rebellious province. Mao did no such thing and his poor performance in 1964 was due to a combination of USSR aid being withdrawn and drought.
Yes, the USSR double-dipped on famine as class war.
BRICS has entered the chat
@@2livenoob The economic power of the future, and always will be.
@@2livenoob jesus i hope you're wrong.
look i'm old. the world currently is being stressed massively by wars. however, because of agricultural inventions like new fertilizers and GMOs we are nowhere near famine. let's keep it that way.
It also didn't help that China had to pay for the Korean War, pay back USSR loans with grain, support North Vietnam, while also being unrecognized in the UN thus unofficially sanctioned globally, during the same timeframe.
The more and more history you learn, the more you realize how fucked up everything has been up to this point.
Not really, there were high point where it got better. The USSR and the other socialist states, for example, incredible increases of quality of life, health, education, childcare, equality. That got often gutted when these states fell back into capitalism.
I wish this was just a history. When I was a Soviet kid, I considered myself lucky, because I lived in the best country of the world. The longer I live, the more I wonder what kind of sin I must have committed to deserve such "luck".
@@kazaddum2448"we had a life so good we had to quit".
@@kazaddum2448 With less mouths to feed there must be more to go around. Plus, normalcy bias helps out. And as John mentioned, there is the concept of eating the seed crop. The Soviets ate their seed crop in terms of agriculture, manpower, finances, and other resources, and then failed. Afterwards some form of "more free" market capitalism was allowed to emerge. What you're saying is like if someone blaming a doctor for a person's injuries after they are in hospital. Also, the peasants were not that far from being surfs. Some peasants succeeded, but others still were emerging from centuries of serfdom. It takes time to shake off old cultures.
@@kazaddum2448 Oh look! Another anti-capitalism dude using a computer on a website.
It's insane to think about how the Soviets managed to win the Civil War when basically all they had to offer their populace during the time was different varieties of marauding bandits threatening to slaughter them over staple goods.
They had a better "narrative"; "You (meaning the State) will own the land vs going back to being serfs."
@@obsidianjane4413They were better off as serfs. They didn't starve.
(1) They promised everything under the sun, with simple slogans (2) they had the geographic advantage of centrality, while the “White” armies had to operate on a widely scattered basis, making coordination nearly impossible (3) control of the industrial centers made recruitment and resupply infinitely easier for the Reds than trying to recruit across the endlessly vast countryside
@@richardarriaga6271 Mistakes were made.
However, no. Check your sociopathy.
@@richardarriaga6271Not really, and I have a bias for disliking commies
They were literally protesting food shortages, that's one of the reasons the Bolsheviks even got the initial support they did
My favorite part is that exporting less grain was never even considered an option
During the Irish potato famine, they exported tons and tons of food. Modern famine is always a political problem.
During the Irish potato famine, they exported tons and tons of food. Modern famine is always a political problem.
@@marktaylor2645the British government was stupid then or more cynically completely tyrannical. They denied imports. It was purposeful
@@TheWizardGamez It's not cynical to say the British gov was tyrannical. The entire purpose of that famine was to hurt the Irish.
This video is definitely going to have a completely sane and well-adjusted comment section.
When someone defends something that was objectively bad, you know ideological capture is strong.
I mean, who doesn't love Vatniks and Tankies?
Actually, it won't be sane and well-adjusted. Not at all. Most are dumb as sh!t.
Oh look! My comment was erased by the al go rythm. I was just commenting on the 'high' level of intelligence here.
You're account has probably been flagged, and anything the algo thinks has a whiff of an insult will get deleted/never posted.
The amount of comments in here actively defending famine is actually insane. Internet “ Communists” are of the lowest intellect I think I have ever come across.
How would you describe the $1.15 trillion paid to bankers in 2024 for interest on the national debt in the US? High intellect?
@bentonja668
No one would acuse democrats and Biden-Harris of high intellect.
Pretty dark topic but good that it gets attention. A stark reminder of what happens when there are troubles with a nations' agriculture.
The Soviets were the first country to realize that you can't feed a country with steel mills.
Two of my great grandfathers were murdered by the Soviet state for being somewhat successful farmers
That's your family version, but we don't know the state officials version. Were they sharing their surplus with the rest of the people that were starving? Were they refusing to do so repeatedly and/or even became violent?
@@m.x.wow, really?
@@viledeg2569 mx is def stealing peoples grains rn
@@viledeg2569 Yes, really. Actions have consequences. Don't be a pos
@@alanywalany6460 You mean like all the people their government murdered for daring to try and have enough of what they produce to literally just not starve.
Stalin said "Dark humor is like food. Not everyone gets it. "
It was Einstein moron
Stalin is murder, worst than Hitler.
Small note: I don't know any single word in russian that means both to receive and to understand, except for maybe уловить which is to fish up (you can fish up the truth)
ur a real one for uploading this. appreciate you
no wonder so many literary master pieces came from Russia, such extreme human suffering and appalling atrocities.
The variety of topics you cover is epic.
You offer a brief view into topics myself a Canadian can hardly fathom.
Thank you
@@successfullguy Try books instead of U-Tube
A common thing through history is idiots being placed in charge of farming and thinking that they can do so much better then the people who have done it all their life and then fuck up massively (the British in India and Zimbabwe are two other big examples).
Idk but id assume the british applied practices that worked in other areas
Inversely farmers that refuse to modernize and then cry to the government for subsidies for their unproductive uncompetitive farms once the price drops and they are selling at a loss.
It's not as easy as farmers always right, government always wrong. Or that new methods are better, old ways are wasteful.
The real way to motivate farmers is by proof doing something better than them and then having them opt into a new system. Like dwarf wheat in Mexico and Pakistan
Sadly it seems governments are once again targeting farmers with limits on chemical fertilizers and hard caps on nitrogen emissions. We all know no government elite ever starved or had to do with less. The implosion of farming in Sri Lanka should have been a warning to the EU and Canada, but they are still charging forward with misguided attempts to control the weather by forcing food shortages onto the world.
The Britsh were fucking amazing. Their colonies were generally quite well run. Specially if you compare to the real world alternatives by the other European powers
It was like that since Roman times. Contrary to the Roman belief, soldiers weren't good farmers and large scale retirement of legionaries caused some terrible food shortages
godz@@tf2godz So to what extent did the Brits assume responsibility for organising agriculture in India. I think very little.
Southern Rhodesia was a prosperous place when the white farmers ran it.
Woke politics got in the way and independence ruined it. Likely to befall South Africa given time. Wouldn't lay bets on it succeeding tho' Kenya doing well with Chinese infrastructural help and Nigeria does its own thing happily. So maybe just maybe there's a chance for SA.
I'm thinking radicals like Julius Nyerere could really do a Mugabe on the place given a chance 😝
My great-grandfather experienced soviet repressions, much of his property was confiscated, some of his relatives managed to escape to the Netherlands. Unfortunately, that's all I know about them. The great-grandfather and his family survived, because there were only three of them (only 1 kid during the events, not that big of a family for the rural region). Various grass roots soups were pretty common. Situation in urban areas was even worse, bc it's pretty hard to grow anything in the apartments, as you can understand. Those events took place in the Naddniprianshchyna / Dnieper Ukraine region, early 1930s.
you're doing some of your best work - please keep going!
I really felt deep sense of danger and terror while listening to this. Really cruel times, as it was for most of history, but we have forgot. We should respect that default status of world is collapse and decay and that we have is hard work of many centuries, cooperation and technological progression. I feel lucky to have meal that I just ate, nothing abnormal, but many would kill just for small piece of it.
Claiming that the whole world is in decay is a poor and illogical way to deflect from your own perpetual decay. It is a national Russian trait but utterly supid and based on a falsehhod.
I'm going to comment now before I've watched this video. My parents are both Mennonite and my father was a Russian Mennonite who got his farm taken from and given to peasants who didn't know how to farm and people in in that area starved due to stalinist policies.
I'm probably going to read comment after I watch this whole video, because I'm going to go and dig through my grandfather's notes and papers even though they're in Russian and I can barely understand it just do realize the whole scope of it. 100 of his friends neighbors and acquaintances died due to starvation
You should get that stuff uploaded somewhere ( i am sure there's a chanel for that) so it can get translated/preserved. So many people have died with nothing said/written that we really need to preserve what we have.
@pietersteenkamp5241 I gave some of it to the Mennonite archive Society in the Fraser Valley years ago. They can do a better job figuring out what it is than me
The Germans must have really regretted sending Lennon back to Russia lol.
The only that surprises me is it managed to hang around for 70 year's before collapsing.
Uh, they survived 70 years because the US propped them up and sold or gave them our grain. If the Soviets had not gotten Western aid they wouldn't have lasted.
Considering that I've seen your videos linked on soviet simping media bubbles, I can already imagine how they'll view this "betrayal" of the revolution.
Lmaooo
really notable that the Tsarist government was essentially also following a measure characteristic of central planning with their requisitioning process and quota declarations. probably the only difference between them and the Soviets was the use of force in the requisitioning by the latter.
really solid video, as always!
No, there was always force and the difference with the Soviet Union is that the mistakes were corrected as the leaders didn't actually want to keep their citizens in perpetual suffering while the Tsar basically had to to keep the royals/elites happy. The suffering in the SU was temporary but eternal with the Tsar's.
@pietersteenkamp5241 sure. but my comment was primarily about the central planning characteristic common to both of them. extreme top-down command where corrections were also dependent on such command.
@@pranavmanie1479 The Tsar's system was not nearly as centralized which is why it was much less effective at supplying the food needs of the country. Well that's what i remember and yes most of the world experienced famines as result as war/ upheaval and climatic changes and it it was communism ( or whatever you want to call it ) in Russia and China that finally put and end to thousand/thousands of years of suffering. Capitalism achieved the same feat in the imperial core ( where it was subservient to ever more centralized power just like in the USSR and China) but in most of the rest of the world people still eat much less than they would like with tens of millions still starving to death every year and a billion or eating too little to maintain good health & shorten lifespans.
Wow. Fascinating. They really had no god damned idea what the hell was going on.
Who? Kremlin? They were directing it all and got NO mercy to norm They were directing it all and got NO mercy for normal citizens...
Red army soldiers were skinning people alive for being against the revolution -> why do you think author of the fideo is not mentioning? Who whitewashed the history like that? Kulaks and millions on their way to gulags and other "happy places"?
Lenin told his direct subordinates to lie outright and promised people what they wanted to hear, and later with power "we gonna do it our way"... and that was exactly "their way".
If they knew what was going on, they wouldn't be Marxists
Price controls they always work well
Sometimes they do. You have to use the right tool for the task, not use one tool for everything.
This isn't a story about price controls. It's about Russia being a nightmare of unending trauma for it's entire historical existence. (edit) price controls isn't the problem, it wouldn't fix anything and is just a symptom. Geography is destiny and Russia's geography just sucks. Constant invasions from all directions, no geographical barriers and famine. A market economy can never be established in Russia security concerns dominate everything.
@@Broken_robot1986Price controls never seem to work very well, and I can't think of an example where they haven't made things worse, at least over the long run.
The big problem is that market conditions don't move fast enough to accomplish short-term goals.
The easiest way to alleviate a shortage is to leave the price unchecked and everybody who has whatever it is you're looking for, say bottled water, jacks the price up to insane levels. This means everybody outside of the affected area who has bottled water does cartwheels trying to get their bottled water into the affected area to sell, thus vastly and quickly increasing the supply. With supply, the price drops, and there's plenty of bottled water.
The only problem is that between the price rise and the price drop, everybody was beating each other with baseball bats trying to get a hold of a drink of water.
@@taco7043This is a textbook example of price controls. And if you'll go to your local university and pick an economics textbook, you will probably find it.
@@taco7043it make russia stronk
And that's just the first years of that horror story that was USSR.
The USSR was anything but a horror story. Those first years were extremely hard, 14 nations invaded while WW1 had just ended, the white armies got extermal funding which extended the civil war by a lot. Afterwards the young soviet experiment had not international recognition, the only thing it was allowed to export was grain. Then the black fungus hit, which with a general draught lead to a massive famine.
What saved the USSR at that time was the world economic crisis, it resulted in any further invasion plans of western powers pushed back into the drawer while it did not further affect the USSR - because it was cut off from international markets. Allowing it to industrialize and increase it's production capacities by several 100%.
@@kazaddum2448 go bot anywhere else
Stalins rule surely was a horrorstory, after destalinization it really wasn't that bad. Not nearly as good as in western europe/USA, but still decent. Especially in in the Baltic, Caucasian, Russian, belarusian and ukrainian soviet republics. Central Asia always was a rough place.
@@kazaddum2448 The Soviets literally taxed their citizens to death.
@@machinedude9386if you look at the big picture, and ignore the 70s and later, sure. But for the average person? It really wasn't good at all. You are only able to say this because you are aware of the propaganda, and not what we actually had to live through. Please educate yourself before promoting such views. It is not just dishonest, but harmful. I see so many young people these days asking to bring back this painful system, having no idea what it really means. No, you will not implement it better. It's a human problem. The socialism phase never ends and communism cannot be achieved. Because humans are greedy and will abuse power. It's just how this works. Thus system only brings sociopaths to power, and it's not just he nomenklatura, it's the institutions of force, bureaucracy, etc.
whenever you upload a video I think about the (Latinoamerican) meme: "Not now mom, my soap opera just started"
Neither peace, nor bread nor land.
😅 I'm sure the Bag Men/Barter Traders made more contribution towards famine alleviation in the cities than did the government.
I thought the same. It was enough to leave the traders alone and they would solve the problem. But communists had their marxist ideas and any opportunity that someone can make a profit was terrifying for them.
It’s astounding to me how many people in modern america and on the internet are quick to suck up to this wicked and wacky system.
meanwhile neo communists, tankies and streamers - between sips of gamersupps - say these are imperialist lies.
@@GoatOfTheWoods I feel like you watched a different video to everyone else or something.
@@racheddar ok.
Searched up the photos of the 1921 russian famine and wow I’m shocked by what happened but also amazed at the sheer will of the Russian people to survive. Very interesting.
those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
Has there been any time in Russia's recent history when it could legitimately be considered "great" for the Russian people? The last hundred plus years seems like a series of self-inflicted miseries, interjected by brief periods when the ruling class did okay.
Not sense the mongols conquered them. Ever since Russian culture has been based on ruthless domination and exploitation of the weak by the strong.
Maybe the sixties?
Don't think so. They feed on imperialist pride and believe every civilizational leap needs human sacrifice. It's doubly sad considering how many talented individuals they brought into the world.
@@drsunshineaod2023 late 60s early 70s and maybe the mid 2000s.
@@drsunshineaod2023 post war SU was a moment of relative peace for them. in the brezhnev stagnation everyone basically cruised along even if it felt like life and the country itself was going nowhere.
"One of the main problems of price control is to define the appropriate price of what is being controlled."- Thomas Sowell
Most people in the west don’t know this happened.
Some people are so ideologically captured they will defend this and claim it was good.
It was a civil war, both sides seized grain.
It was bad.
Then later along came a man called Lysenko.
And somehow things got worse.
@@Idelacio Lysenko only came to prominence after the last famine, not counting the one after the war since it was caused by the war, so his ideas can't have been implemented on any large scale.
Maybe they were in China
@@alanywalany6460the chief “scientist” they put in charge didn’t believe in science. If you can’t be _unburdened by the past,_ you will never see the future utopia; so stop apologizing for people who were wrong.
holy crap, just reading the name made me recoil.
He is a big dark spot on the Soviet scientific achievements
@@Orandu 🤦the comment I was replying to claimed that Lysenko made the food situation worse
@@alanywalany6460 and he did! Don’t defend him! You should be unburdened by the past.
Great video again, well researched as always. thank you!
babe wake up new Merciless War for Grain just dropped
This is a nice bookend to your video: How Oil Ate the Soviet Economy. Now we have descriptions of economic mismanagement at both ends of the Soviet Era. Thanks for your really intense research.
This video's footage is really grainy!
😂😊
Corn is a grain and this joke is corny
I am very fascinated. You present the very details of the ASML Lithography machines, show how technology and markets developed. But also you show us a very deep knowledge especially about the start and the development of criminal Soviet system and even about places like Yugoslavia. Romania after WW2, then under Ceaucescu but also the Hungarian Priest who brought the system down would be interesting. Don't change your plans. I can wait.
what effect did this have on the semiconductor industry
The Soviet Union invented the (Light Emitting) Diode based on semiconductor. The first step on the road to the transistor.
@@lorsheckmolseh3345and law of squares. Петя Горас did that.
Another propaganda crp (previous was "here is terrible atomic russian bomb picture, similar as dropped on Japan" ), it seems he must insert it to continue. Sad times. I was liked this channel.
@@AABB-px8lc what? this is still interesting and good content just im here from the semiconductor stuff they do haha. love their content
@@cinnamon4183 so you think sophisticating propaganda crp like show picture of Russian atomic bomb and intentionally use double meaning phrase "similar used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki" is good content ? In same video - Alliance bomb Japan. Alliance. Not USA. Not Pentagon. not America. Not Oppenheimer, Teller, US ARMY. Abstract Alliance. Tell me he is not aware what happens actually.
14:44 if you go to that place on Google street view almost all of the buildings in that photo are still there today. That spot is just below the corner of Ulitsa Kommunarov and Ulitsa Mira looking east towards the Voznesenskiy Cathedral.
What bothers me the most is communism is on the rise here in my country...
Great video, thanks for uploading
And then Stalin took notes and would do what Lenin did under War Communism and dial it up to 11, especially in Ukraine.
The real problem was that Russia just should have stayed out of WWI if at all possible. They just didn't have enough food to mobilize an army in such a way. It was really just a cascade of effects after that. Truthfully there is a chance that if Russia didn't declare war on Austria-Hungary there would have just been a localized war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. Though I do suspect a larger war would have eventually happened. Perhaps Russia could have increased its industrial base before that.
The soviet union is an insane place in history, it was so brutal even extremely illiterate people felt something was wrong. Would be a fascinating pace to explore with time travel ngl lol
You're like a little kid who believes everything you're told.😅
... USSR in what year? 1918? 1939? 1980? If you mean the Stalin era USSR, illiterate peasants served as both oppressed farmers and oppressive soldiers.
@@NameRiioz Little kid would never want to visit Soviet Union after watching this video...
and this video is not telling the truth, you are right about it, as there is NO mention of for example Red army soldiers that were skining alive people that were fighting with them...
and yea i get it, you are communist by heart, so you lying -> and that is why there is so little truth here -> it was based on whitewashed history as all people responsible for writing documents about situation were lying even more than you.
From comparison of population of Russia and other European countries we can see lack of 100 millions of people... where did they go? are you hiding them in your cellar as you are NOT like little kid?
@@NameRiioz You know absolutely nothing. Be gone from this educated place, and back to Nizhny Novgorod or whatever godforsaken place you're from.
So, Ukrainian farmers don't be illiterate
I'm pretty sure that if none of this happened and this were an alternate history no one would believe it.
They're eating the Cats and they're eating the Dogs!
Remember how funny famine is when you have a US political candidate DIRECTLY quoting Marx who was 'unburdened by what has been'...
@@Chordonbluelast words are for fools who havent said enough
@@ChordonblueRespectively, I think you might be listening to too much Eric Weinstein. Kamala isn't secretly dropping Marx quotes to foreshadow her Communist takeover of the USA.
@@ChordonblueHaving survived 2020, not being burdened by mass idiocy of taking quack treatments in the face of the worst epidemiological crisis since the Spanish Flu would be wonderful. Instead, RFK, Jr. is ranting about fluoride in the water like he popped out of Dr. Strangelove.
@@richardarriaga6271 Is he wrong? That's not an argument for repeatedly quoting from an author who's ideas have killed MILLIONS of people every time it's tried.
that was a dark one, but appreciated non the less
Well, they did said that the peasants should have the means of production, no one said anything about the means of distribution.
Jokes aside, the abysmal quality of life in collective farms is something that rarely brought up when it comes down to the soviet era farming, when it is something that very much impacted soviet union throughout their lifespan and very largely contributed towards their collapse due to the inherent innefecticveness of their farming.
-can defeat germany in ww2
-can make nuclear weapons
-can send a man to space
-can't farm effectively
-what
@@robertoskoka the country with the largest landmass in the world were forced to imports a very huge amount of it's grain from US and Canada, countries like NK and failing Pakistan can do all the things you've already mentioned yet still failed at the basic.
In the 1930s (After 1933) the collective farm system produced at least as much, and more, grain annually than the former serfdom system. It was only the German invasion in 1941 and then Kruschev's virgin soil/corn policy which made the collective farms unviable.
@@4grammaton 1) There are at least 2 different numbers of collected grain. What you might be referring to is "biological harvest" which is a bogus number invented solely for taxation purposes and sometimes exceeded the real harvest by one third. 2) Collective farm peasants received less in return for their grain than during so called "serfdom system". I.e. production did not increase, only taxation did. Actual agricultural productivity started systematically exceed 1913 harvest only few years after Stalin's death.
@@briantarigan7685The USSR was the largest grain producer in the world and imported as much grain as it exported. The increased grain imports in tge late 60s and early 70s was due to a shift towards livestock agriculture. Same reason Khrushchov wanted go grow corn.
I assume the extensive use of the word "bandit" in this is a result of reading Russian source texts
Lenin became what he despised
this is very interesting topic. iam never know this before you made this content. i hope you make this topic more deep again. need part 2 or more for this topic. excellent job
All these Russian/Soviet stories create a long and unbroken chain of historical failures. A continuous bad/poor situation that lasts centuries.
All of it is very much prioritized in Poland's program of learning history. It allows us to understand our neighbours. It also makes us remember this "entity" character from the East called the federation of states. A very large country which never went out of our "not hostile" category. We know what's out there at the age of primary school.
Poland did their part in trying to destroy the Russian people. Look at what they did during the Time of Troubles.
@@Panzer1337 Based Poland
All of this is also included in Russia's history classes. Even mention of the food aid from USA.
But in a neutral less antagonizing way than in Poland I guess.
@@petyavodolaz The history of my family is the history of fighting against the Soviets and Nazis. From the time my grand-grandfather fought in the Great War ending up getting back the Polish independence. He later fought in the Polish-Soviet War - in 1920.
His son (my grandfather) fought against the Soviets in 1939. After WWII he was persecuted by the Polish political apparatus and then kept in prison because he defended Poland in 1939.
During the time of 1981-1983, my father printed and released an illegal anti-communist newspaper.
"Less antagonized" than Polish education? 😆
That's why you have children at the age of 12 wearing Russian army uniforms in your elementary schools? Or a 9-year-old boy pretending with his cardboard tank he "releases" Ukraine? Or maybe that's the reason Putin and the Russian people want to strike Poland with the nukes? WE ARE NOT SCARED. You can only make us more angry. You will think about Nazi occupation as "good times". You know how much I care about Russian lessons of history. Fcuk all.
I have all the reasons to not take any "possible denial" from Russia as a lie. If you think Russia will come back to Europe in the future - forget about it. You are done in Europe. You made yourself the Europe's biggest enemy. Pray.
Also, Polish schools are "Lightweight" compared to the history of each Polish family.
@@petyavodolaz The red army at that time was skinning people alive... this whole movie is a very truncated version of events and the author is clearly trying not to tell the truth about Lenin and what the hell he was doing there and how he was sending millions to the grave just to stay in power.
NKVD when they came to Poland in 1945 they digged out Antoni Ferdynand Ossendowski coffin out of his grave to just be 100% sure that he was in it -> Because he was there in Russia and saw it on his own eyes and described it in his book 'Lenin'.
What percentage of what is in this book is taught in schools in Russia? 20%? 25%?
thank you for the detailed and accurate video
Adam Tooze argues that Best-Litovsk was more important in leading to WWII than Versailles. He has important work done on that, btw. You can find some 3 lectures at Stanford (I think) from some 9 years ago.
th-cam.com/play/PLW3D5Edk9GfghV6NLZYWesYZdSXEhQKYV.html&si=QmkUyW_RVKNqz8v-
I believe this is what you refer to
Tooze is great, found this easily enough.
th-cam.com/video/EDlRKl3XGoM/w-d-xo.html
9:27 Are you sure that photo isn't "Lenin sneezing"?
Lmfaooo
Amazing video! Having read the gulag archipelago, I am still somehow surprised at the absolute depravity of the Soviet Communists.
The top level comments here are interesting but about what you'd expect. The replies are something else. Comment: "My great grandpa died by soviet grain gangs because he didn't want to let grandma starve" replies: "He probably deserved it lmao". Commies really are among the most vile batch all the world and time over.
Huffing your own farts a bit much there guy take a chill pill
Commies tend to be losers from upper and middle class background. They have a lot of resentment against their more successful peers and use peasants and lower class workers to get back at them.
I didn't know or expect that abandoned children would have such a fate... heavy...
Then Stalin comes to power and it gets worse.
A classic soviet tale
I've seen many similar comments to this and they all sound as if you're all bots or something. Can you not offer deeper levels of analysis because I swear it feels like the median demographic of this channel is 70 all of a sudden. Sure the Soviet experiment was terrible but a lot of these responses fail to conceptualize that failure coherently.
@@ReclusiveExtrovert Truth only hurt people with biases.
Not really, it never got as bad as that. The famine of 32-33 was bad, very bad, but it was not as widespread, long, and violent
@ReclusiveExtrovert an estimated 9 to 60 million people died as a result of Stalin's policies. Is that conceptualized enough for ya?
This video doesn't explain how the countryside was organised, and that in reality the peasants didn't own the land nor the production which was in the hands off a few rich landlords.
Bolsheviks were right that those landlords we're hiding the grain.
May want to keep the word "Russia" out of vid titles so the RU-bots don't instantly start jumping and making up crap in the comments.
Everyone who doesn't agree with my 3 brain cells, the CIA, the CIA's media and the Military Industrial Complex is a Russian bot.
Sadly that did not help 🤷♂️
@@wisemann_ , it also doesn't help in Bandera-Yankee-Ukraine.
1:37 Russian Mennonites, although I would hesitate to call them peasants as they took care to educate themselves.
After my dad's family moved to Northern Alberta in 1930, he harvested grain and saw the low prices of it and he also started bootlegging with it cuz he could earn more money that way and spent two months in jail over it
My dad's mother lived until 1977, and she talked about a fire so bad that the moon took on a bluish hue from all the suspended smoke. My dad was reminded of this when he went up to Alaska once and reported a similar thing when there was huge fires burning up in Alaska
The Holodomor broad incredible suffering to Ukraine brought on by the Soviet state the people there have never forgotten even to this day nearly a hundred years later
@@weedmanwestvancouverbc9266 Fraud, Famine and Fascism: Thomas Walker, the man who never existed.
It happened in all communist countries.
Turns out all of them were invaded and devastated by imperialist countries just before...
Almost as if the glorious western world really hates them...
Not all, this wasn't common in states which had industrialized before they were conquered by the Soviets.
@@XandateOfHeavenlike who?
@@AKK5I
Maybe Poland,but Poland was occupied by Soviets only after WW2.
I want to add something. Newborn Turkey did sell a lot grain and fruit to Russia for weapons during Independence War and after it. Actually most of the industry established by Russian engineers at young Turkish Republic.
Instead of robbing the villages, they should have sent people in to live with them, to ask them what they needed to increase production, and provide it.
Killing the people who produced the food was incredibly short sighted, as well as being cruel.
The people were starving, in response the farmers planted less and sent less to the cities. It is understandable that violence occurred. I mean the video has an obvious anti-communist anti-authoritarian slant but even it acknowledges that the farmers simply decided to not grow enough. It wasn't a matter of technology or resources. The farmers didn't believe it was their duty to feed people. Its similar to today. Farmers only feed people because they are paid to. But if you reduce their profits through regulations or free trade they will simply stop doing it. Even if they would still make enough to live comfortably. This also occurred during the medieval era. Farms were very unproductive partly because peasants only produced a small excess.
@Imaboss8ball well, why didn't the Communist party produce more bullshit to fertilize the fields?
Typical socialist..
@@Imaboss8ballmaking excuses for your murdering socialist masters huh
Ah, the perfect thing to watch while eating breakfast and baking
Your most important work yet
A story about how failing to trust causes horrible consequences
This seems exactly like the narrative of the history of Portugal from my childhood days! I'm in the middle of my eighties; What this gentleman says was exactly what happened in Portugal when I was a child. At that time, the Portuguese authorities accused the Soviets of doing exactly what the Portuguese authorities did.
Every society has a group of people in the city that produce nothing useful for humanity. Even though they don't pay taxes or employ people, they are mad that other people work hard and don't pay enough taxes.
Proof that political zealots should be kept far from power.
You missed the point entirely.
Am I the only one that shows two months ago on their comment?
@@DrJ-hx7wv sounds to me like you did.
@@quantuminfinity4260 How did this person post 2 months ago when this was posted 25 minutes ago??
How would this guy rate the Romanovs I wonder. Revolutions don't just happen for no reason.
For most of time and in most if not all places, the world has massive famines. Preventing hoarding and food distribution is often handled badly - - see opening scenes of Blackhawk Down 😊
Russia had taken a reall battering in WW1 under inept and careless leadership. Bled dry really.
The emergent Russian state was under attack from within by czarist loyalists and from without by the US in Kamchatka and most of western Europe in the western border regions. Several of these attackers were intent on protecting the institution of monarchy (yeah, cos they were run by kings themselves - the KingsClub) or they were bitterly anti socialist Kings again??
So. its pretty much inevitable that critical shortages ensued.
Another consequence is that Russia needed and still needs some kind of buffer on its borders whether by allued states (Warsaw Pact?) or armed lines (Iron Curtain)
Certainly Russia has every reason NOT to trust foreign powers.
Communism isnt the cause of famine. India had regular devastating famine under British and Indian Rule. China had nothing but famines and hardship under the warlords part of which now are Americas proxies and favorite sons in the East. History is usually far more complicated than banner slogans make out. Often people are in so much dislike of political parties or personalities they lose objectivity. Just Sayin' 😂.
How astonishing is to listen to the history of your country that you obviously knew fairly well, but from a perspective of some asian guy trying to explain what продразвёрстка means
lets eat the seed corn to prove socialism!
Can you do history of keyboard? Why are there F1-12 keys and so on.
It's pathetic how poor the Soviet Union was. They literally went bankrupt because they were trading valuable resources for food. Then as soon as they abandoned Communism Russia alone began producing enormous grain surpluses. You can't have a very successful society composed entirely of slaves.
@@Merle1987 None of that is true >_>
@alanywalany6460 okay, the USSR was a massive grain exporter with an internal surplus every year and post Soviet Russia had lower grain exports. Canada wasn't selling massive quantities of wheat to the USSR.
actually, according to IndexMundi on Russian grain exports, for a 10 year period (1987-1997), their peak grain export was 1200 Mtons in 1990. In 1992 "as soon as they abandoned Communism" it was only 900 Mtons. It took till 1998 to finally hit a 1652 Mton export year.
for Russian grain production, from 1987 to 2000 peak grain production was 49569 Mtons in 1990. In 1992 "as soon as they abandoned Communism" it was 46170 Mtons, and continued shrinking to a minimum of 30100 in 1995. It took till 2002 to produce 50609 Mtons.
@@jasperlim8319 The 90s were a tough transition to go from a command economy to a more capitalistic one. While I agree it wasn't "as soon as they abandoned Communism", when they transitioned away a centrally planned economy and collective farms, their agriculture production increased significantly. For consumers, look at a 1980s Soviet grocery store and a modern-day Russian one to see the massive difference in quantity and varieties of food. Even under sanctions, a modern Russian grocery store is far superior to anything from the Soviet days.
@FlintIronstag23 just looking at the output tells you very little, I mean was there even a market for all that grain to be sold to back then, also technology developed
the succes of the communist revolution was caused by the incompetence of the government after the Tsar was deposed not the skills of the former. and the sad part is that communist could have worked if the state only controlled the urban industry while allowing capitalism in agriculture in the countryside. the defeat of Soviet Union was caused by its own ideoogy.
If anybody wants a 60 times longer version of this you can listen to Red Famine as an audiobook.
RICE. IS. NICE. (But it's just a grain!!!!)
I used to have a co-worker that would go to missions and get free food and the nuns would say '' beans and rice and Jesus Christ"
I am looking for books mentioning agrarian overpopulation as a reason for the Russian Revolution.
Supposedly, even John Maynard Keynes wrote about this subject.
Please help me find sources.
I cannot get full text of many books that come up and many of them are not searchable by keyword.
Thank you.
Why don't just read Lenin's books? He wrote thoroughly on all the events were happening that time.
@@roman_le Marxists would never write truthfully about ratio of people to assets and the neomalthusian viewpoint.
@@roman_le Lenin was not always honest.
@@VladimirTolskiy What examples of this have you found in "The Development of Capitalism in Russia", "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism", "The Impending Catastrophe and How To Combat It", "The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government", "Economics And Politics In The Era Of The Dictatorship Of The Proletariat", or other his works?
Ohhh, so it was in Russia that they were eating the dogs, they're eating the cats.
People in this comment section need to remember this isn’t about red communism or white “liberalism” or capitalism.
This period of Russian history was one of anarchy, and civil war following a world war which already decimated the Russian economy.
Soviet controlled territories and those controlled by the whites, struggled to find food for soldiers and factory workers in the cities.
Urban peoples don’t grow grain or any food. When the link between countryside and city was destroyed, hunger set in, peasants hoarding food to sell at high prices or peasants unable to meet the increased demands fell victim to the situation in the same way the urban population did.
The decision to seize grain was made by both sides, and in many instances as this video shows by more or less autonomous bands of armed people. The civil war has up to 8 million combatants and millions of industrial workers producing the materials for war. That’s millions of mouths to feed, when world war 1, had already decimated the link between food supply and distribution.
The Bolsheviks knew that such a demand was risky and would cause major unrest- a policy they wish they didn’t have to make- the necessity of the situation, holding onto power and fighting a civil war on the magnitude of a world war, necessitated brutalist measures. That’s not a moral analysis or judgement but a hard and cold realism that the situation required.
Imagine a civil war broke out in America. And the country side stopped or could no longer supply food to New York City or Washington DC or any other urban centre. The powers in those cities on either side of the war, would without doubt seize produce or acquire it at the disadvantage of the producers. That’s not a political decision based on ideological consideration- but one based on the brutality that hunger brings!
Pasternik has resurrected.
exchangin your child's body parts for food is just insane
Well, I mean you can't just eat your own children, think of the... oh never mind.
In the Soviet Union that's called a Tuesday.
Who were the Bolsheviks?
And by who, I mean qui.
Yep
Prod-otryads, not proto Triads 😂
Short for "prodovolstvenny otryad" - food detachment.
Waiting for part 2 as well as similar coverage on the bengal famine in India!
My Mom's family came to Canada from the Ukraine in the late 1800's because the Russians expropriated the grain to Moscow. Ukrainian people starved .
No, russian people in ukraine starved.
@@markobucevic8991 yes they did
@@amatuer2 there were no ukranians, only russians
@@markobucevic8991ok, Russian or Ukrainian, either way _people_ starved to death. Russia was in charge.
Ergo Russia is bad.
Wow, Tsar was bad?
Certainly a better story about grain than Rebel Moon. Also a terrible reminder how much communism sucks.
Lessons to remember when the government asks for more power to fix their mistakes.
Finally, an honest insight into what Soviet Russia had been in reality. Although I am afraid, that many people still won't be convinced about this truth.