brezhnevite posted:

i like that he is dead

that part gets me every tiem

getfiscal posted:

walkinginonit posted:

I remember reading an old thread that link to a letter where Conquest conceded the Ukrainian famine was unintentional. Anyone got a link? Or just any "Robert Conquest sucks" would be appreciated

i think he said something about that in a review or response to davies and wheatcroft, but i forget where.

''Our study of the famine has led us to very different conclusions from Dr Conquest’s. He holds that Stalin ‘wanted a famine’,142 that ‘the Soviets did not want the famine to be coped with successfully’,143 and that the Ukrainian famine was ‘deliberately inflicted for its own sake’.144 This leads him to the sweeping conclusion: ‘The main lesson seems to be that the Communist ideology provided the motivation for an unprecedented massacre of men, women and children.’145

We do not at all absolve Stalin from responsibility for the famine. His policies towards the peasants were ruthless and brutal. But the story which has emerged in this book is of a Soviet leadership which was struggling with a famine crisis which had been caused partly by their wrongheaded policies, but was unexpected and undesirable. The background to the famine is not simply that Soviet agricultural policies were derived from Bolshevik ideology, though ideology played its part. They were also shaped by the Russian pre-revolutionary past, the experiences of the civil war, the international situation, the intransigent circumstances of geography and the weather, and the modus operandi of the Soviet system as it was established under Stalin. They were formulated by men with little formal education and limited knowledge of agriculture. Above all, they were a consequence of the decision to industrialise this peasant country at breakneck speed.

142 Hearing (1984), 45 (seminar at American Enterprise Institute).
143 Hearing (1984), 61.
144 Conquest (1986), 196.
145 Conquest (1986), 344. In correspondence Dr Conquest has stated that it is 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’ (September 2003)."

"It is regrettable that many of the advocates of the genocide thesis continue to claim Conquest to justify their position, despite his clearly expressed views on this matter. See the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Conference on Holodomor on November 18, 2008, http://www.huri.harvard.edu/na/2008_11_17-18_famine_conf/2008_11_18_werth-graziosi-flier.html (accessed May 18, 2009). At the conference Nicolas Werth was asked by a participant in the conference, who had attended a lecture given by Wheatcroft, whether Conquest accepted the view that the famine was genocide. Werth strangely replied that ‘we all know in scientific circles the very complicated relations between Conquest and Wheatcroft’; he repeated this several times, but declined to reply to the question. Kul’chitskii more straightforwardly has explained that in June 2006 a Ukrainian delegation of experts on the Holocaust and the Golodomor met Robert Conquest in Stanford University and enquired about his views, and were told directly by him that he preferred not to use the term genocide (Kul’chitskii (2007), 176)."

R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft - The Years of Hunger, Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933

Superabound posted:

Holocaust

Holodomor

Hologram


what do all these things have in common

were they all the product of german ingenuity?