Legacies of the cold war

[lpm]

Obviously it's appalling and indefensible to have done that.

The combination of racism and nuclear-testing-on-foreign-civilians does seem part of a typical pattern for the US specifically - which isn't to say that other countries don't do bad things, as lpm is trying to suggest with her boring straw man there.

The list of countries I'd be a bit surprised if they'd done something like this is quite long, actually. The list where I'd be like "hmm sounds about right" is a lot shorter: USA, UK (though probably not on its own), China, France, Russia/USSR. Who am I missing? You need places that develop weapons of mass destruction, have overseas territories etc. at all (which is actually pretty unusual, globally speaking) and whose interactions with the world are mediated via a belief in racial/cultural superiority.

I'm sure the Spanish and Portuguese would have done it when they were expanding their empires, for example, but that was a long time ago so their opportunities for biological warfare were much smaller.

Morally, I don't think testing weapons on your 'enemies' - internal or external - is any better, but it is a lot more usual geopolitically AFAICT.

If you narrow it down to just testing nukes, obviously you will only have a very short list of countries.

But only an idiot would do that.

Other countries could - and did - express their belief in their racial/cultural superiority, exert their strategic goals and disregard human lives in other countries using AK-47s and economic extortion.

Here in Britain's 2020, carelessness and outright disregard for human life seems very much alive and well, in everything from drowning Bangladesh to killing old people to drone bombing Middle East enemies. No need to go back to 1956. The only reason to go back to outrages of 1956 is to highlight how eternally sh.t we are when pursuing our own selfish goals.

[Bird on a Fire]

For sure. The trolley problem is relevant here. Most people view it as worse to deliberately harm people by testing weapons on them than to allow them to come to harm by ignoring their suffering. I think it probably does tell you something about the harmer, even if the numerical outcome is broadly similar.

Ditto people being more accepting of killing people during a war than otherwise.

I'm not saying that focussing on those differences is necessarily enormously logical, but they can nevertheless indicate a distinct pattern of behaviour. The bad behaviour of, say, New Zealand or the Nordic countries or Costa Rica seems to follow a different pattern, or may well be genuinely smaller but only due to lack of opportunity.

[secret squirrel]

Two points. First, this is not an issue confined to the mists of the early cold war, because the US is refusing to help the Marshallese with the problem they created for them right now. Second, I agree with lpm that countries with good intentions are, in a manner of speaking, forced to do bad things when threatened by countries with bad intentions, but historically, in most countries the Communists were clearly on the right side of history on most issues. In the popular imagination, the Communists have a revolution and then immediately start killing everyone they disagree with, but outside of someone like Pol Pot, in reality it's more like, the Communists have a revolution, the traditional Imperial powers then fund and arm any opposition they can find, including actual fascists, the country slides into brutal civil war with all the associated atrocities. If the fascists win they get 'brought into the fold' with trade etc. If the Communists win they get isolated and embargoed, with ongoing assassination attempts against their leaders unless they are deemed too dangerous to mess with.

[Martin Y]

People turn into proper c.nts when they feel threatened. Later, if it all turns out okay, they get to feel bad about it.

So, only about ten years after they blew the f.ck out of two actual cities to end a huge war, the US shoved some people aside on a remote island to test the weapons they were going to need for the even bigger war with you-know-who that was coming who-knew-when. Was that bad? Sure. Was it unusually bad? <shrug> About typical for humans. You might compare it to something the Soviets did twenty years before to prepare their own defences: the Winter war against Finland. All they wanted was possession of a few strategic points to protect themselves against a German attack and 150,000+ dead people later they got them.

I mean, people would (presumably will) do the same sort of thing again in similar circumstances, though if they did it now they'd avoid the racist language in official documentation because that's beyond the pale now. So, you know, progress of a kind.

Should the US go back and clear up their sh.t? Yes. How? Don't know.

[lpm]

Two points. First, this is not an issue confined to the mists of the early cold war, because the US is refusing to help the Marshallese with the problem they created for them right now. Second, I agree with lpm that countries with good intentions are, in a manner of speaking, forced to do bad things when threatened by countries with bad intentions, but historically, in most countries the Communists were clearly on the right side of history on most issues. In the popular imagination, the Communists have a revolution and then immediately start killing everyone they disagree with, but outside of someone like Pol Pot, in reality it's more like, the Communists have a revolution, the traditional Imperial powers then fund and arm any opposition they can find, including actual fascists, the country slides into brutal civil war with all the associated atrocities. If the fascists win they get 'brought into the fold' with trade etc. If the Communists win they get isolated and embargoed, with ongoing assassination attempts against their leaders unless they are deemed too dangerous to mess with.

Before any ignorant young people with no memories of the Communist era accidentally believe your nonsense, perhaps you could outline which of the following totalitarian states were "clearly on the right side of history"?

Soviet Union
East Germany
Poland
Hungary
Czechoslovakia
Romania
Bulgaria
Yugoslavia
Albania
Afghanistan
Mongolia
China
North Korea
Cambodia
Laos
Vietnam
Cuba
South Yemen
Congo
Somalia
Ethiopia
Mozambique
Angola
Benin

There was me thinking these were gruesome dictatorships that murdered their own citizens, denied basic human rights and channeled resources to the military and ruling elites instead of the people. I mean, I'd say the collapse of communism in 1990-92 was one of the best progressions in human history - up there with the defeat of fascism in 1945 - and something to celebrate around the world, but for you it was a moment of grief.

Perhaps you console yourself with the thought that North Korea clings on, and China still has its concentration camps, and Laos still tortures its political dissidents.

[secret squirrel]

Before any ignorant young people with no memories of the Communist era accidentally believe your nonsense, perhaps you could outline which of the following totalitarian states were "clearly on the right side of history"?

Soviet Union
East Germany
Poland
Hungary
Czechoslovakia
Romania
Bulgaria
Yugoslavia
Albania
Afghanistan
Mongolia
China
North Korea
Cambodia
Laos
Vietnam
Cuba
South Yemen
Congo
Somalia
Ethiopia
Mozambique
Angola
Benin

There was me thinking these were gruesome dictatorships that murdered their own citizens, denied basic human rights and channeled resources to the military and ruling elites instead of the people. I mean, I'd say the collapse of communism in 1990-92 was one of the best progressions in human history - up there with the defeat of fascism in 1945 - and something to celebrate around the world, but for you it was a moment of grief.

Perhaps you console yourself with the thought that North Korea clings on, and China still has its concentration camps, and Laos still tortures its political dissidents.

Certainly the Bolsheviks were on the right side of history in their aims. The Chinese communists too. They were fighting for rights for impoverished people, rights for women etc. Just look in the history books. It's not a secret. Of course, after brutal civil wars where their enemies (fascist tyrants like Chiang Kai-shek for example) were supported and armed by the West, and in the face of ongoing global hostility and isolation, the regimes went off the rails and ended up doing things as bad as the Imperial powers they opposed to stay afloat. As you say yourself in defense of the West, circumstances compel even well intentioned people to do bad things. But the real question is, why has the West historically been so hostile to Communism? Certainly not because they knew it would fail, but rather because they were worried it might succeed.

Furthermore, if the collapse of Communism was one of the best progressions ever for humanity, why was it a humanitarian disaster in Russia that it took decades to recover from?

[lpm]

Ah, the good old wife beaters excuse. It's your hostility that made me beat the sh.t out of you.

I'd like to think everyone on this forum would try to do their bit of resistance if we were trapped in a Communist regime. It will be a consolation to know, while Secret Squirrel is torturing us in London's Lubyanka, that he's forced to do it due to the meanness of the world's democracies.

[lpm]

Why has the West historically been so hostile to Communism? Because Communist regimes don't get voted out after 5 years - they persist as brutal totalitarian states for decades. Do not let Communists seize power or it'll be your grandchildren who overthrow them. Is democracies opposing totalitarians a bad thing now?

Why was Russia a humanitarian disaster after it freed itself from totalitarianism? Because it became a corrupt dictatorial oligarchy with power struggles over mineral wealth.

Thankfully living standards and human rights have improved hugely in eastern Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania, Mongolia, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola and Benin. However all these former Communist totalitarian states still lag behind comparable western democracies or local neighbours, showing the destructiveness of Communism lasts another generation or two after liberation.

[Woodchopper]

Certainly the Bolsheviks were on the right side of history in their aims. The Chinese communists too. They were fighting for rights for impoverished people, rights for women etc. Just look in the history books. It's not a secret. Of course, after brutal civil wars where their enemies (fascist tyrants like Chiang Kai-shek for example) were supported and armed by the West, and in the face of ongoing global hostility and isolation, the regimes went off the rails and ended up doing things as bad as the Imperial powers they opposed to stay afloat.

The killing of millions of their own citizens occurred about a decade and more after the Chinese and Russian/Soviet civil wars had ended. See the Great Leap Forward which started in 1958 and the deliberate starvation of Ukraine in 1932, which was followed by the great purges a few years later. The only war being fought was by tyrannical governments against their own people.

[Bird on a Fire]

Mozambique and Angola both had Communist regimes immediately in the aftermath of their struggle for independence against Portuguese imperialism - Portugal itself being under a totalitarian dictatorship, followed by a communist-led revolution, at the time.

Unsurprisingly they didn't transition from armed struggle to peaceful democracies overnight, and both were immediately beset by Western-backed counter-revolutions. I'd put "opposing European colonialism" as the right side of history - which doesn't necessarily mean they were nice. But it's also hard to compare against neighbouring states that had a different colonial experience and gained independence decades earlier etc.

It would certainly be interesting to know how a communist state might behave without external hostility, but I don't think there's a single example.

[Bird on a Fire]

Why has the West historically been so hostile to Communism? Because Communist regimes don't get voted out after 5 years - they persist as brutal totalitarian states for decades. Do not let Communists seize power or it'll be your grandchildren who overthrow them. Is democracies opposing totalitarians a bad thing now?

Yes of course, hence the west's famous hostility towards monarchies.

[lpm]

Good point, the western democracies began opposing absolute monarchies as far back as 1688, with monarchy being largely defeated as a political structure by 1945. Still clings on in odd places, like Eswatini which I only learned yesterday is the new name for Swaziland.

[Bird on a Fire]

If e.g. the house of Saud were communists, the west would be fighting them rather than arming them. The problem isn't brutal totalitarian regimes, but brutal totalitarian regimes that counter western self-interest.

In other words, I'm really not convinced the Cold War was about getting rid of nasty regimes. Especially when you consider things like the CIA's removal of Allende and installation of Pinochet, alongside support for Brazil's brutal military dictatorship etc. Or the west's support for Compaoré after the assassination of Sankara. Etc etc.

[secret squirrel]

Certainly the Bolsheviks were on the right side of history in their aims. The Chinese communists too. They were fighting for rights for impoverished people, rights for women etc. Just look in the history books. It's not a secret. Of course, after brutal civil wars where their enemies (fascist tyrants like Chiang Kai-shek for example) were supported and armed by the West, and in the face of ongoing global hostility and isolation, the regimes went off the rails and ended up doing things as bad as the Imperial powers they opposed to stay afloat.

The killing of millions of their own citizens occurred about a decade and more after the Chinese and Russian/Soviet civil wars had ended. See the Great Leap Forward which started in 1958 and the deliberate starvation of Ukraine in 1932, which was followed by the great purges a few years later. The only war being fought was by tyrannical governments against their own people.

The Great Leap forward was a terrible and avoidable mistake, but it was a mistake. Mao certainly did not want to cause millions of peasants to starve to death. The Holodomor was not a deliberate starvation, even Robert Conquest rejects the genocide theory. You can read e.g. the work of Sheila Fitzpatrick for more about this. See e.g. this book review for a concise version. The Holodomor also has a pretty direct analog in the Bengal famine of 1943.

The purges were certainly indefensible as far as I can see.

[secret squirrel]

Ah, the good old wife beaters excuse. It's your hostility that made me beat the sh.t out of you.

I'd like to think everyone on this forum would try to do their bit of resistance if we were trapped in a Communist regime. It will be a consolation to know, while Secret Squirrel is torturing us in London's Lubyanka, that he's forced to do it due to the meanness of the world's democracies.

The world's democracies are really mean though. I mean, you may choose to ignore it but we commit and support atrocities on the regular. Just read some 20th century history.

[secret squirrel]

If e.g. the house of Saud were communists, the west would be fighting them rather than arming them. The problem isn't brutal totalitarian regimes, but brutal totalitarian regimes that counter western self-interest.

In other words, I'm really not convinced the Cold War was about getting rid of nasty regimes. Especially when you consider things like the CIA's removal of Allende and installation of Pinochet, alongside support for Brazil's brutal military dictatorship etc. Or the west's support for Compaoré after the assassination of Sankara. Etc etc.

Yes. This is so obviously true that anyone who pretends not to understand it is being disingenuous. The West opposed Communism before there were any Communist regimes to speak of, even when it meant supporting the White Army and their pogroms. The West supported Chiang Kai-shek. The West supported mass murder of Communists in places like Indonesia. And so on.

[lpm]

In other words, I'm really not convinced the Cold War was about getting rid of nasty regimes. Especially when you consider things like the CIA's removal of Allende and installation of Pinochet, alongside support for Brazil's brutal military dictatorship etc. Or the west's support for Compaoré after the assassination of Sankara. Etc etc.

You are confused, which is probably why you did a silly both-sidesing earlier in the thread, criticising both the USSR's and USA's foreign policy as if they were equivalent.

The west's Cold War policy was not to get rid of nasty regimes. It was to prevent nasty totalitarian regimes from seizing power.

The Soviet's Cold War policy was to spread nasty totalitarian regimes to as many countries as they could.

In their zeal to prevent murderous Communist totalitarian states from seizing power the west certainly installed a few murderous military dictatorships, along with supporting many more lasting democracies. However dictatorship is less severe than totalitarianism. History shows the west's dictators were shorter lasting, and generally less murderous, than the Communist regimes.

[Martin Y]

I'm really not convinced the Cold War was about getting rid of nasty regimes.

No, it absolutely wasn't. It was about a world which had moved (in a frenzy of killing) from having multiple great powers vying for control of things to having two superpowers. Moments ago they were allies. Now what happens? Both want to save each other's population from their dreadful oppression. Neither trusts the other an inch.

It wasn't about who were the baddies. (Obviously those guys are the baddies and we're the goodies. Stands to reason. Everyone agrees about that.)

[Woodchopper]

Certainly the Bolsheviks were on the right side of history in their aims. The Chinese communists too. They were fighting for rights for impoverished people, rights for women etc. Just look in the history books. It's not a secret. Of course, after brutal civil wars where their enemies (fascist tyrants like Chiang Kai-shek for example) were supported and armed by the West, and in the face of ongoing global hostility and isolation, the regimes went off the rails and ended up doing things as bad as the Imperial powers they opposed to stay afloat.

The killing of millions of their own citizens occurred about a decade and more after the Chinese and Russian/Soviet civil wars had ended. See the Great Leap Forward which started in 1958 and the deliberate starvation of Ukraine in 1932, which was followed by the great purges a few years later. The only war being fought was by tyrannical governments against their own people.

The Great Leap forward was a terrible and avoidable mistake, but it was a mistake. Mao certainly did not want to cause millions of peasants to starve to death. The Holodomor was not a deliberate starvation, even Robert Conquest rejects the genocide theory. You can read e.g. the work of Sheila Fitzpatrick for more about this. See e.g. this book review for a concise version. The Holodomor also has a pretty direct analog in the Bengal famine of 1943.

The purges were certainly indefensible as far as I can see.

Nor is it the case that the famine, or the excessive grain targets, were imposed on the most productive grain-producing areas as such, as a - mistaken or vicious - economic policy merely. There was no famine in the rich Russian 'Central Agricultural Region'; and on the other hand the grain-poor Ukranian provinces of Volhynia and Podilia suffered along with the rest of the country.

But perhaps the most conclusive point in establishing the deliberate nature of the famine lies in the fact that the Ukranian-Russian border was in effect blockaded to prevent entry of grain into Ukraine.
[...]
For over in Russia, as became widely known, things were different. 'One had only to cross the border and outside Ukraine the conditions were right away better'.

From page 327 of The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine by Robert Conquest.

Anyway, I can't be bothered with the rest of squirrel's nonsense except to point out that his account of the Great Leap Forward is contrary to what I was taught when I studied it at university.

Time and time again Squirrel just posts stuff that has been made up. Either by him or where he gets his 'facts' from. It took him a minute to write the above nonsense and me far longer to look up what Robert Conquest actually wrote and type out the above quotes by hand. I can't be arsed with the rest.

[secret squirrel]

Nor is it the case that the famine, or the excessive grain targets, were imposed on the most productive grain-producing areas as such, as a - mistaken or vicious - economic policy merely. There was no famine in the rich Russian 'Central Agricultural Region'; and on the other hand the grain-poor Ukranian provinces of Volhynia and Podilia suffered along with the rest of the country.

But perhaps the most conclusive point in establishing the deliberate nature of the famine lies in the fact that the Ukranian-Russian border was in effect blockaded to prevent entry of grain into Ukraine.
[...]
For over in Russia, as became widely known, things were different. 'One had only to cross the border and outside Ukraine the conditions were right away better'.

From page 327 of The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine by Robert Conquest.

Anyway, I can't be bothered with the rest of squirrel's nonsense except to point out that his account of the Great Leap Forward is contrary to what I was taught when I studied it at university.

Time and time again Squirrel just posts stuff that has been made up. Either by him or where he gets his 'facts' from. It took him a minute to write the above nonsense and me far longer to look up what Robert Conquest actually wrote and type out the above quotes by hand. I can't be arsed with the rest.

Yes, Conquest did write that, but he moved away from that position. You can read this article for more context. The most relevant passage is this:

Later, as the charge of genocide became ever more firmly embedded as the cornerstone of contemporary Ukraine’s national identity, Conquest seemed to back off. ‘I don’t think the word “genocide” as such is a very useful one,’ he said to Radio Free Europe’s Ukrainian correspondent in 2006. ‘What I say is if you want to use it you can, but it was invented for rather different purposes.’ Later in the same interview he noted that ‘Andrei Sakharov said that Stalin was anti-Ukrainian, and other people have said the same. But he was anti-Ukrainian because they gave him trouble. He was also anti a lot of other people.’ Three years earlier, Conquest had told the demographic historian Stephen Wheatcroft – co-author with Robert Davies of Years of Hunger, a study of Soviet agriculture in the famine era – that it was not his opinion that ‘Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine. No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it, but put “Soviet interest” other than feeding the starving first – thus consciously abetting it.’

I mean, I'm genuinely hurt by what you've written here, but I will continue getting my information from sources such as the one cited above by one of the world's leading experts on Soviet history.

[Woodchopper]

Yes, Conquest did write that, but he moved away from that position. You can read this article for more context. The most relevant passage is this:

Later, as the charge of genocide became ever more firmly embedded as the cornerstone of contemporary Ukraine’s national identity, Conquest seemed to back off. ‘I don’t think the word “genocide” as such is a very useful one,’ he said to Radio Free Europe’s Ukrainian correspondent in 2006. ‘What I say is if you want to use it you can, but it was invented for rather different purposes.’ Later in the same interview he noted that ‘Andrei Sakharov said that Stalin was anti-Ukrainian, and other people have said the same. But he was anti-Ukrainian because they gave him trouble. He was also anti a lot of other people.’ Three years earlier, Conquest had told the demographic historian Stephen Wheatcroft – co-author with Robert Davies of Years of Hunger, a study of Soviet agriculture in the famine era – that it was not his opinion that ‘Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine. No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it, but put “Soviet interest” other than feeding the starving first – thus consciously abetting it.’

I mean, I'm genuinely hurt by what you've written here, but I will continue getting my information from sources such as the one cited above by one of the world's leading experts on Soviet history.

Here's the Radio Free Europe interview which contains the quote in your quote.

In it he states this:

I think the famine now is pretty fully established. Nobody will deny it anymore. I mean, only a very few people would deny it. There is a tendency not to know some of the actual orders given from above, from Moscow, to blockade Ukraine, to keep the famine in the Ukraine and in the Kuban. There were other areas -- there's Kazakhstan, of course, up on the Volga. There were other similar acts used again other areas.

But the fact that Ukraine and the Kuban were blocked off, and quite clearly that was partly due to make sure that the death roll was localized, not the nationality, exactly, but to the inhabitants -- and, in practice, meaning the nationality too. But Stalin would not call himself [anti-Ukrainian]. Andrei Sakharov said that Stalin was anti-Ukrainian, and other people have said the same. But he was anti-Ukrainian because they gave him trouble. But he was also anti a lot of other people. Because even when he was anti-Jewish in his great purges in 1953, he said: "No, I'm not being anti Semitic. We're killing only 10 Jews and four or five non-Jews in the doctor's plot. So I'm not anti-Semitic."

So he hasn't changed his position. He's still saying that the famine in Ukraine was deliberate (though not caused because Stalin actually hated Ukrainians. I don't disagree, Stalin didn't need to hate people in order to kill them).

As for whether it should be called a genocide, in the interview he states:

I don't know much about the internal politics and what caused people to vote one way or the other and things like that. But in my book on the famine, "The Harvest of Sorrow," I go into the question of genocide and note that by the definition of genocide at the time it was put to the United Nations, it covered a much broader field than the Jewish one.

It included partial attempts on nationality. I don't think the word genocide as such is a very useful one. When I say if you want to use it you can, but it was invented for rather different purposes. I can see that the trouble is it implies that somebody, some other nation, or a large part of it were doing it, that the Nazis are more or less implicated, they are Germans. But I don't think this is true -- it wasn't a Russian exercise, the attack on the Ukrainian people. But it was a definite attack on them as they were discriminated against as far as death went. But it didn't mean if you were a Russian you were doing very well in Stalin's time either.

But I think it's a good thing that the famine should be recognized. It's an odd thing but I was asked by the Holocaust Foundation -- they asked me to speak on the famine, on the Ukrainian famine some years ago and it's still on the record. They asked the Armenians to do the same. At that time the Ukrainian ambassador in Washington came to the Holocaust Museum. So the Jews were not forcing it as the same thing at all. That's the other danger. Once you start using these terms, you have to be not only just as bad, but just the same as the Jewish genocide. And it's not the same. As long as that's recognized. And I think there are guilty people, but they aren't the Russian nation or anybody else. They're a particular group of particularly horrible people.

So his concern about the term 'genocide' is not about whether or not the famine was deliberate, but about whether use of the word risks implied equivalence to the Holocaust. Incidentally he concluded in Harvest of Sorrow that:

But whether these events are to be formally defined as genocide is scarcely the point.

No time to type out the rest of the paragraph.

So it doesn't appear that Conquest has changed his position. He's consistently described the famine as deliberate.

And yes, I don't know why I bothered to look up the original sources when earlier I said a wouldn't. More fool me.

[secret squirrel]

Thank you for posting longer extracts from the interviews. Surely the most relevant quote about the deliberate nature of the Holodomor is this one ‘...Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine. No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it, but put “Soviet interest” other than feeding the starving first – thus consciously abetting it.’. Unfortunately I haven't seen an expanded version of this, so I am not sure whether there is something in there that completely changes the meaning.

Whether and in what manner Conquest felt the Holodomor was deliberate is also to some extend besides the point, though of course I am responsible for bringing his name into the conversation. Lots of serious historians argue it was not deliberate. You don't have to agree with me, but the idea that I'm 'just making things up' is clearly not correct either.

[Woodchopper]

Thank you for posting longer extracts from the interviews. Surely the most relevant quote about the deliberate nature of the Holodomor is this one ‘...Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine. No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it, but put “Soviet interest” other than feeding the starving first – thus consciously abetting it.’. Unfortunately I haven't seen an expanded version of this, so I am not sure whether there is something in there that completely changes the meaning.

The original source for that sentence is a footnote in which you can read in this book.

However in his 2001 book Reflections on a Ravaged Century he states this:

The immediate result of these measures was a catastrophic decline in agricultural output across the USSR as a whole over the 1930s. The government’s reaction was to base its requirements for delivery of grain from the collective farms not on actual production but rather on what became the basis of Soviet agricultural statistics until 1953—the “bio¬logical yield.” This was based on the estimated size of the crop in the Fields before harvesting; it was more than 40 percent higher than the reality. And in 1932 even this tenuous link to the facts failed; the figure was distorted by merely multiplying acreage by optimum yield. The grain requisitions made on this basis were ruthlessly enforced by activist squads (and, in Bukharin’s view, this experience contributed greatly to the brutalization of the Party).

Such action left the peasant with a notional but nonexistent surplus on which to live. As a result, over the winter of 1932—33 major famine swept
the grain-growing areas. Some 4 to 5 million died in Ukraine, and another 2 to 3 million in the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga area. During
this period about 1.7 million tons (1.5 million metric tons) of grain was exported, enough to have provided about a kilogram a head a day to 15
million people over three months; and this apart from millions of tons held in state reserves supposedly in case of war. We now have full docu¬
mentation that the Stalin leadership knew exactly what was happening and used famine as a means of terror, and of revenge, against the peasantry.

Full text available here.

So its unclear what was going on. Conquest appears to have stated that it was deliberate a few years before and after. Anyway, a sentence in a footnote, stripped of everything else that he wrote, isn't much to go on.

[secret squirrel]

That's great. Thank you. I retract my earlier claim that Conquest did not view the famines as deliberate on Stalin's part.

[Bird on a Fire]

I'm really not convinced the Cold War was about getting rid of nasty regimes.

No, it absolutely wasn't. It was about a world which had moved (in a frenzy of killing) from having multiple great powers vying for control of things to having two superpowers. Moments ago they were allies. Now what happens? Both want to save each other's population from their dreadful oppression. Neither trusts the other an inch.

It wasn't about who were the baddies. (Obviously those guys are the baddies and we're the goodies. Stands to reason. Everyone agrees about that.)

That was my impression - basically a global struggle over which system should replace the collapsing colonial powers of Europe, their capitalist successors or newfangled communism. While the focus was ostensibly on foreign policy around the globe, I think a large part of western powers' motivation was putting their own populace off demanding a greater share. The "healthcare is communism" trope still beloved of the GOP is one such legacy of cold war propagandising.

I certainly would have preferred to live in the west in the 1950s than in the USSR. But I would also have preferred to have lived in the west during the 1850s than in tsarist Russia. It seems that having a superfluity of wealth derived from centuries of robbing and murdering and slaving around the world affords a country a greater degree of liberalism domestically, and a higher standard of living.

Obviously exacerbating a famine for political ends is inexcusable, be it in Ukraine or Bengal. The sad thing is that I'm not convinced the USA wouldn't have done something similar given the opportunity (whereas Russia is prone to famine, averaging one a decade even during the Empire, the only example I can find from the USA was on a small island in Alaska). Given that the USA spent a huge amount of effort through the 20th Century oppressing black people, through enforced segregation, disenfranchisement, disinformation, assassinating civil rights leaders &c, not to mention letting undesirables die from HIV infection and so on, had a famine arisen in, say, Georgia (the USA one), would the US government definitely have responded equitably or would they have taken the opportunity to suppress trouble makers? Think Bush in New Orleans, or Trump in Puerto Rico, but with a far more serious disaster and added active mendacity.

Even today, 10% of households in the richest country in the history of the world are food insecure (though usually not to the point of starvation), so letting people go hungry for political reasons is certainly a feature of modern western politics too - albeit on a different scale (more people affected, but affected to a lesser extent, but over a longer time: chronic undernourishment rather than acute, lethal starvation). For the avoidance of doubt I do think starving people to death is worse than merely starving them to the point of malnutrition. In the case of the USSR it's also far easier to find the handful of individuals responsible, whereas famine in the west is more of a systemic issue.

But yes, lots of nasty totalitarian regimes were communist, except for the ones that weren't like in Spain and Portugal which also brutalised their populaces and which were tolerated throughout the cold war. Which is a bit odd, when you think about it, because by far the biggest death toll from totalitarianism in the west had come from the right not the left only a decade or so earlier. I'd love to think there was some guiding moral principle behind 20th century politics, but it does seem that much of it was more about power and resources.