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Pastimes : The Boxing Ring Revived -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gao seng who wrote (2492)	2/19/2002 1:24:24 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7720

Some of it did, but mostly the gulags were just prison camps. Some survived (like Solzhenitsyn) and some didn't. Usually, people died from hardship or disease. Anyway, few knew the magnitude of the gulag system itself until Solzhenitsyn came along. The biggest cause of death that Stalin was responsible for (apart from the war) was the Terror Famine, which was deliberately created to break the resistance of farmers to collectivization......Let me see if I can get some figures......

To: gao seng who wrote (2492)	2/19/2002 1:30:48 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7720

1932-33 The massive famine which struck the Soviet Union in 1932-33 was, like the 1921 famine, caused by government actions but unlike that famine appears to have been at least partially intentional as part of Stalin's efforts to further his political goals. Following the disastrous famine of 1921 and similar failures of central planning, the New Economic Policy liberalized agricultural policy in the Soviet Union and the country experienced a recovery. That all changed in 1928 when uncertainty caused by Soviet central planning schemes created disequilibrium in agricultural products (farmers had grain which they held in reserve due to artificially low prices created by the Soviet regime) (8). Rather than rectify those problems, the Bolsheviks exacerbated the problem by ordering the seizing of grain from peasants. This soon gave way to dekulakizaton -- the liquidating of "rich" peasants -- and collectivization of agriculture. Combined with agricultural quotas that left peasants with almost nothing to eat, the results were predictably tragic. So predictable in fact that historians such as Robert Conquest believe Stalin intentionally inflicted the 1932-3 famine as part of a general assault on the Ukraine. Conquest notes, for example, that in an unprecedented move in the autumn of 1932, seed grain was removed from the Ukraine and put in storage in cities -- a move which Conquest suggests shows authorities were concerned at protecting seed grain from hungry peasants who surely would have eaten it had they access to it at the height of the famine (9). More ominously, Conquest reports that beyond merely withholding food aid from the Ukraine, the Soviets stationed troops on the Ukrainian-Russian border to ensure neither food nor people went in or out of the Ukraine during the famine (Russia was spared the worst of the famine). As Conquest writes, The essential point is that, in fact, clear orders existed to stop Ukrainian peasants entering Russia where food was available and, when they had succeeded in evading these blocks, to confiscate any food they were carrying when intercepted on their return. This can only have been a decree from the highest level and it can only have had one motive (10). Regardless of the motives, the death toll was staggering. Conquest estimated 7 million people died from famine in 1932-3, with 5 million of those being Ukrainian victims. An additional 7.5 million died from dekulakization and other state violence from 1930-7 (11). In other words, about 14 or 15 million people died, either of starvation, direct violence, or deportation. overpopulation.com