Except itās pretty obvious that famine is a tool of your Stalinist / Leninist heroes. You didnāt know that Ukraine declared its independence from Russia after the Russian revolution of 1917?Except there's no evidence that these famines were calculated. In fact, quite the opposite.
Take the 1958-1962 famine. The one which made all parents of Boomer blurt out, "They're starving in China, finish what you got!"
Well, what were the causes?
The first was popular demand for land redistribution, promised but hadn't happened at that point. It happened too fast.
The second was there were droughts and floods in various parts of the country.
Another was the "Four Pests" campaign ,which targeted swallows. Swallows didn't eat bugs, and you had an explosion of insect pests.
Fourth, a lot of lower level officials overreported rice production, making the central government think it had surpluses, which they sold for hard cash.
But the main problem is the nature of China herself. China also had serious famines in Sichuan in 1936, (Killed 6 million), in the north in 1928 (about 6 million) and the Great Famine of 1906 that contributed to the fall of the Qing dynasty.
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List of famines in China - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Incidentally, a common Chinese greeting is "NĒ chÄ«guĆ²le ma?" = Have you eaten? It took me about a month to realize that my girlfriend was sending me a greeting and not asking me if I had dinner yet.
Um, yeah. Following the end of WWI, Ukraine was divided between Poland and Bolshevik Russia as a result of the Treaty of Riga. In 1922, the nation became part of the new Soviet Union and that never sat well with the Ukrainians. During the Soviet famine of 1932ā33, an estimated 6ā8 million Ukrainians starved or were killed as a result of Stalin's punitive actions.