Perhaps their gratitude for food aid faded because "After the Bolshevik government withdrew from World War I, the Allied Powers openly backed the anti-communist White forces in Russia." (Wikipedia)
The food aid came later. Eventually it stopped, once the US realized that the Bolsheviks were simultaneously seizing grain from peasants to sell on the international market. (A trick they repeated in the 1930s, to pay for rapid industrialization, at the cost of ~5 million dead peasants.)
I have a hard time taking this seriously when whoever wrote the abstract doesn't seem to be aware that the Soviet Union was founded in December 1922. Basic historical errors in the abstract make the paywall less appealing, and it's unfortunate if a lot of work went into the actual article.
The article's abstract mentions the Soviet Union explicitly:
> In 1921, the Lenin-led Soviet Union faced one of the worst famines in history. A new book details its horrors and the American effort to combat cannibalism
Remember boys and girls, this is the socialist paradise that wackadoo Bernie Sanders wants for you and your children. When that socialist scumbag and his skulking minions come for you and yours, shove this and many other historical examples in his smug face. Tell him to walk the walk down a street in Venezuela if he loves socialism so much.
"Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine" is a related book, which covers this phenomenon in 1950s China.
It's not a pleasant topic. Some people ate their children to survive. It's interesting though how very well meaning utopian policies can lead to this result. Planting the seed 5 ft beneath the ground will result in great crops because the seed will have to struggle and thus only the best seed will make it to harvest. And of course all that seed buried that far down didn't make it at all. But that is your fault, traitor, not infallible Great Leader's.
It's interesting though how very well meaning utopian policies
The largest tragedy of the 21st century is that people still think these policies and these people were 'well-meaning' or 'it just went a bit wrong'. It seems that only when we defeat murderous totalitarians militarily that we understand them for what they are.
It's useful to distinguish between deaths due to malevolence, neglect, and other factors. Capitalist countries have killed plenty of people through malevolence or neglect. The Bengal Famine if 1943, for example, was caused by a combination of overpopulation, British imposed inter-province trade restrictions, Japanese occupation of Burma, and diversion of shipping capacity by the British for WWII. It was not, however, caused by the means by which agricultural production was arranged in Bangladesh. (Which was more feudal than capitalist anyway.)
Socialist countries saw many deaths due to malevolence because it often took violent authoritarians to institute socialist governments in the first place. One can argue about whether those deaths should be held against "socialism" per se. But what's almost unique about socialism is how many deaths resulted even when the government was not acting malevolently or negligently. Tens of millions of people died in the Soviet Union and China not due to gulags and purges, but because socialism is a bad way to organize an economy. Socialist reforms of agricultural production, in particular, destroyed production.
Those deaths are squarely attributable to socialism per se. It's the result of removing market signals, distorting incentives, and replacing the capital-owning class who knows how to operate the economy, etc. What would happen to say Waymo if you replaced its investors and management with the folks who run the U.S. Digital Service along with "stakeholders" from among the employees and "local community?" You'd destroy it, because that's a terrible way to run a company. That's what socialist countries did with agriculture.
Agricultural output recovered in both Russia and China after massive famine. In fact, there has not since been a famine in China since the last whereas in the century previous famine was commonplace. Is this the part where you say that those countries stopped organizing their agricultural activity in a "socialist" way and that's why they no longer had famines?
Is this the part where you say that those countries stopped organizing their agricultural activity in a "socialist" way and that's why they no longer had famines?
Yes, this is the part[0] and it's worth reading about it at length (I've added paragraph breaks).
The TL;DR, with a Hacker News spin: a small startup of entrepreneurial Chinese hackers working in stealth mode disrupted the existing socialist system of agriculture and changed everything :-)
In more detail:
In December 1978, eighteen of the local farmers, led by Yen Jingchang, met in the largest house in the village. They agreed to break the law at the time by signing a secret agreement to divide the land, a local People's Commune, into family plots. Each plot was to be worked by an individual family who would turn over some of what they grew to the government and the collective whilst at the same time agreeing that they could keep the surplus for themselves.
The villagers also agreed that should one of them be caught and sentenced to death that the other villagers would raise their children until they were eighteen years old. At the time, the villagers were worried that another famine might strike the village after a particularly bad harvest and more people might die of hunger.
After this secret capitalist reform, Xiaogang village produced a harvest that was larger than the previous five years combined. Per capita income in the village increase from 22 yuan to 400 yuan with grain output increasing to 90,000 kg in 1979.
This attracted significant attention from surrounding villages and before long the government in Beijing had found out. The villagers were fortunate in that at the time China had just changed leadership after Mao Zedong had died. The new leadership under Deng Xiaoping was looking for ways to reform China's economy and the discovery of Xiaogang's innovation was held up as a model to other villages across the country.
This led to the abandonment of collectivised farming across China and a large increase in agricultural production. The secret signing of the contract in Xiaogang is widely regarded as the beginning of the period of rapid economic growth and industrialisation that mainland China has experienced in the thirty years since.
The Irish potato famine, or the famines in India were absolutely caused by malevolence. You don't 'accidentally' have a famine in a country that is, in the middle of the famine, is a net exporter of food.
The Irish famine is in particular awful as the British wrapped themselves up in heart-wrenching moral concerns. They wouldn't want the poor Irish wretches becoming dependent on charity -- so what if the pig eats better than the farmer.
I didn't say it wasn't caused by malevolence. But it wasn't caused by "capitalism" as an organizational structure for the economy. My point is simply that while capitalist countries often kill people through malevolence or negligence, socialist countries do both of those things, and are also uniquely adept at killing their own people by destroying previously functional production systems.
people still think these policies and these people were 'well-meaning' or 'it just went a bit wrong'
They are taught to think that by people who want to have another go. Of course those people won’t be joining you in the fields, they see themselves as card-carrying Party members.
We have a General Election coming up in the UK and millions of people are going to vote for the party that thinks Mao’s massacres are a hilarious joke.
This is the equivalent of a Tory saying Hitler did more good than harm
Can you imagine the backlash if any Tory even hinted at that, his or her career would be over. But Abbott and the rest of the Inner Party are untouchable.
For 'mysterious reasons' the above post has been flagged.
It doesn't make any sense to me why some people try to rehabilitate Stalin, Mao and company. There is absolutely nothing to be gained in doing so. In truth, modern Socialism is far removed from Soviet Communism and modern Socialists need to recognize that "but Stalin" is a trite bad-faith argument and the people who employ it should be ridiculed.
Stalinism killed many people for several reasons that probably aren't relevant to "modern socialists." But some of the main reasons are still relevant. "Modern socialists" are still advocating the nationalization of industries, having vast amounts of economic activity being directed by the government, etc. (Ironically for Corbyn, some of his ideas will only be possible if the U.K. brexits, because of the E.U.'s deregulatory posture.) Those ideas are bad for the same reason Mao's collectivized farms killed tens of millions of people. Central planning is a bad way of running the economy. Businesspeople are better at running industries than government bureaucrats or political scientists.
2019 manifestos are not yet available. So I guess you are thinking of the Labour policies in the 2017 election. Which policy was only possible after Brexit? The IFS (Institute for Fiscal Studies who fact check all public finance here) were critical of both 2017 manifestos, but were far more directly critical of the Tory one as being damaging to the UK economy.
It is a very long time since the Tory party could be considered a safe pair of hands economically.
> still think these policies and these people were 'well-meaning'
It’s awfully hard to imagine that Mao actually was hoping that people would die, and that they would die en masse of starvation: even if he was strictly self-serving and heartless, he must have known in the back of his mind that huge populations of starving people are unpredictable and difficult to govern. The only way I can picture this taking place is that he (like all dictators) successfully instilled such fear in his direct reports that they never gave him bad news or challenged what he thought sounded like good ideas at the time.
Mao was focused on re-imagining the state and purging old ways of thinking, governance, etc. The insanity of the cultural revolution is a testament to that.
Mao had an awareness of what was going on. For example, like the Soviets during the Ukraine famine, Mao's government intentionally outlawed starvation being listed as a cause of death. He was also so utterly convinced of the correctness of his ideologically informed ideas about farming (e.g., he was under the spell of Lysenko's ideas about unproductively close spacing because crops of the same "class" would never compete with each other) that he would choose to blame failures on people's lack of purity for correctly following his ideas and on imagined conspiracies of deposed landlords.
However, what you're saying is also true; there are documented historical examples of local officials, terrified of Mao, setting up faked fields with scarce crops from the neighboring area being transplanted into a single field specifically to "impress" Mao during his visits and avoid his ire.
Im not sure if I understand what you are trying to say they were. Are you claiming that Mao and Stalin were sadists? I think it is more plausible they were altruistically motivated (greater good, ect).
Two times this video has been posted, and two times it's been flagged. Politician in center left UK party saying historys greatest mass murderer "did more good than harm".
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They're all the same, which makes them tedious and off topic, and they lead to flamewars, which we don't want.
What would an HN guidelines compliant post have looked like? Genuine question. This was an event that might have killed as many people as the holocaust, and someone said it was "well meaning". I thought I made a polite and non flamebaity response. Am I unable to disagree with that, or start a discussion about it? If I am, how would I do it?
You're misrepresenting the comment - they didn't call the event itself 'well-meaning', never said the policy itself went 'a little bit wrong'. Then you pile on with the "largest tragedy of the 21st century" bombast. This isn't polite disagreement over phrasing or substance and it's rude as fuck.
In case people don't understand the reference you're making, Terentiy Maltsev (a colleague of Lysenko) convinced the Chinese leadership to mandate a theoretical planting technique called "deep plowing" -- sowing seeds 1 to 2 meters deep -- which was one of the multitude of causes of the Chinese famine.
The history of Lysenko and his circle's influence on Soviet and Chinese farming, and the triumph of political influence peddling and ideology over reality, seems almost unfathomable, but was very real.
I think the main point of the story should be the famine rather than the supposed cases of cannibalism. I don't think it's that unheard of for people to resort to eating human flesh (usually already dead) when starving.
And we're talking about millions of people starving to death. I'd be shocked if there were no cases of cannibalism.
Of course it does make for a pretty sensational title and probably better book sales.
It's hard to get an emotional reaction out of bare numbers and facts. If you tell people "x million people starved to death in a famine", we all intellectually agree that it's horrible, but it doesn't seem shocking. If you tell people, "no seriously, here are some stories about people cannibalizing each other because they were starving from a famine", it gives you an emotional gut punch because you get a stronger grasp of the utter despair and suffering involved.
I believe the following quote (which is, supposedly, attributed to Stalin) exemplifies what you're saying: "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic".
Also sickening is the understanding that the massive horror of the famine (in large part a result of the policies of confiscation of goods) was seized upon as an opportunity to punish the suffering peasants and diminish the authority of the Orthodox Church. I'm troubled there wasn't there an ounce of humanity among leaders, those who would rather grab power than alleviate the suffering. But then, to admit the scale of the suffering and/or to ask for international aid is to admit that the central planning model is inefficient, and the embarrassment of the food aid provided by the United States must have deepened the insult to the (well fed) leadership. A disgusting low-point in human history, for certain.
It's not just a question of ego and power. It's fundamentally based in the ideological belief that the ends justify the means--though that belief is very useful for laundering motivations of ego and power into self-perceived righteousness.
These people didn't necessarily want to alleviate immediate material suffering in the here and now. They wanted to Achieve Communism, which would supposedly alleviate material suffering forever. If that meant tens of millions had to be sacrificed on that altar, so be it.
Beside everything else (like massive loss of work capable men and horses (there were no tractors back then) due to WWI and the Civil War), the important point here is that usually everything was taken away, including that grain, potatoes, etc. that would otherwise be used as seeds next year. Not having anything to plant next year naturally amplified the situation into such a severe famine. In general dominance of such short-term approaches were the hallmark of USSR through all its existence.
"By December 1942 the NKVD had arrested 2,105 cannibals – dividing them into two legal categories: corpse-eating (trupoyedstvo) and person-eating (lyudoyedstvo). The latter were usually shot while the former were sent to prison. The Soviet Criminal Code had no provision for cannibalism, so all convictions were carried out under Code Article 59–3, "special category banditry".[72] Instances of person-eating were significantly lower than that of corpse-eating; of the 300 people arrested in April 1942 for cannibalism, only 44 were murderers.[73] 64% of cannibals were female, 44% were unemployed, 90% were illiterate, 15% were rooted inhabitants, and only 2% had any criminal records. More cases occurred in the outlying districts than in the city itself. Cannibals were often unsupported women with dependent children and no previous convictions, which allowed for a certain level of clemency in legal proceedings.[74]
Given the scope of mass starvation, cannibalism was relatively rare.[75] Far more common was murder for ration cards. In the first six months of 1942, Leningrad witnessed 1,216 such murders. At the same time, Leningrad was experiencing its highest mortality rate, as high as 100,000 people per month. Lisa Kirschenbaum notes that rates "of cannibalism provided an opportunity for emphasizing that the majority of Leningraders managed to maintain their cultural norms in the most unimaginable circumstances."[75] "
If anyone wonders why Russia 'cares' so deeply about surrounding itself with aligned buffer states, the horrors it experienced during the second World War may serve as a bit of a hint.
I'd like to remind those who say that socialism/communism "wasn't so bad", that this was a mere 4 years after the socialist revolution. _Before_ the revolution it wasn't uncommon for folks to move from the US or Western Europe to Russia in search of a job, from which I conclude things were all right. I'll be downvoted for this, but I don't care. If you want communism in the US, I suggest you read some of the historical accounts from a hundred years ago, and consider that just 4 years after you "win" this could happen here. And you, dear bourgeois, will be the first one to appear in front of the firing squad, no matter how woke you are. The rich will flee (like they did in 1917 or shortly before), the poor will be doing the firing, the middle class will be stripped of its property and slaughtered en masse as "counterrevolutionaries". The stripped property will then be promptly run into the ground by people who can't own it and therefore don't give a shit. This has happened in every single case thus far.
Sure, but do you seriously think a socialist revolution can happen without a civil war? How do you get rid of those who don't want it? This wasn't the only famine BTW. My great-grandma witnessed cannibalism in the south of Russia (the "bread basket" region) in early 30s. This is the same famine as Holodomor, many people don't know but it affected some regions in Russia too. I heard her first-hand account of it before she died. No civil war, no drought, just communist authoritarian rule. Basically all food supplies were diverted to the cities. NKVD would literally shoot starving people for stealing a handful of grain: worse than Waffen SS ~10 years after that.
Some would argue that a Socialist state cannot be realized through the currently established democratic processes, even with majority popular support. Wealth has simply far too much influence.
However there is still the good old general strike.
Socialist states can't be realized through democracy because it's almost impossible to get the majority of people to vote away their agency and embrace suicide.
The onus is therefore on us to convince them that "voting away their agency and embracing suicide" is red scare nonsense, and to show them who perpetuates those myths and why.
American socialists have been making amazing progress in that regard, as of late.
It was only a few years ago that all the major thought leaders were promoting Venezuela as the epitome of modern socialism. Now, like every other example of socialism, we're being told it isn't "real" socialism.
The data is in, when the state (in the name of the people) controls the means of production, lots of people die, votes don't count, and Cuban mercenaries will be brought in to quell the dissent.
The year before, in 1920, Poland was actually invaded by 4 some million Red Army (lucikly for Poland and rest of Europe, they beat them off). So yeah, the actually had the commies on their land at that time.
> this was a mere 4 years after the socialist revolution
Also in 1970s in Kampuchea, the 4 years from 1975 to 1979 when the Communist Party of Kampuchea was in power, they managed to get 21% to 24% of the country's population killed.
Pol Pot and his regime were brutal. To minimize the possibility of dissent, they went after the educated class. Sometimes, simply wearing glasses would be enough to get you killed.
I wouldn't argue with that assertion. The US provided material aid to Khmer Rouge insurgents at various times and encouraged them in other ways too, I believe the idea was to have some kind of bulwark to North Vietnam. In addition, Operation Menu, which was a military operation ordered by Richard Nixon, resulted in the bombing of large sections of Cambodia and of course resulted in civilian deaths. This, as is not hard to believe, increased Cambodian support for the Khmer Rouge and revealed the inefficacy of the then ruling Cambodian government.
Of course, this wasn't the first or last time US foreign policy would see its 'chickens coming home to roost', so to say. During the Soviet-Afghan war, US forces trained and materially aided the Mujahideen (Osama bin Laden was once involved with this group) in an effort to stymie the Soviet's forces and keep them enveloped in a financially-draining quagmire that would eventually prove to be the Soviet Union's own "Vietnam".
While that is techically correct, the best kind of correct, it is bit misleading not to mention that it was Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic that existed for some years during the Russian civil war and formed the Soviet Union in 1922.
For all intents and purposes it is the same political entity.
For a simple (but imperfect, as all are) analogy that should be familiar to HNers, the pre-USSR RSFSR is like the pre-Alphabet Google, the USSR-era RSFSR is like the Alphabet-era Google, and the USSR is to the RSFSR as Alphabet is to Google.
And “Soviet” as an adjective describes organs of the RSFSR, those of any of the other soviet republics that came to constitute the USSR, or of the USSR itself.
A soviet is a local official (elected, I think) in Communism. It is not necessarily tied to the USSR. The soviet system was in place at this time, as is mentioned throughout the article.
What's frightening about the future is that we are on track to a 4-5C rise in temperatures which is estimated the earth could only support a billion people (we have 7 billion now). We may face the biggest mass starvation in human history if nothing is done.
This kind of knee jerk criticism of cannibalism is just over the top. Real cannibalism is nothing like this. Only reactionaries who haven't read the latest in cannibalism theory from Zydoniek, Foucariname and Chompsky would possibly put this sort of cannibalism in the same class as modern cannibalism.
Not to mention that many people in the west have had more than a nibble on a fingernail when it's presented itself. Yet again there is a failure to mention that.
Knee jerk acceptance of cannibalism is far worse, which is what acceptance of it must be. Because anyone who's read about modern accounts of cannibalism would realize that any loosening of the moral restrictions of murder leads the state to killing millions in the name of some lie - who's only purpose is the furtherance of unrestricted power.
This is usually called the Russian famine as Soviet Union wasn't established yet. The one in 1932 is called Soviet famine and even more people died that time, some 10 millions. There was also 1919-1922 famine in Kazakhstan, and in these two events combined Kazakhstan lost more than half of its population.
It always amazes me when cannibals describe human flesh as tasting like pork or chicken, yet most people read that and still don't question why it's OK to eat animals. These poor people needed to eat human flesh to survive. We don't need animal flesh to survive.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadAlong with human flesh, cannibals had feasted upon the brains of their victims.
> In 1921, the Lenin-led Soviet Union faced one of the worst famines in history. A new book details its horrors and the American effort to combat cannibalism
It's not a pleasant topic. Some people ate their children to survive. It's interesting though how very well meaning utopian policies can lead to this result. Planting the seed 5 ft beneath the ground will result in great crops because the seed will have to struggle and thus only the best seed will make it to harvest. And of course all that seed buried that far down didn't make it at all. But that is your fault, traitor, not infallible Great Leader's.
The largest tragedy of the 21st century is that people still think these policies and these people were 'well-meaning' or 'it just went a bit wrong'. It seems that only when we defeat murderous totalitarians militarily that we understand them for what they are.
Socialist countries saw many deaths due to malevolence because it often took violent authoritarians to institute socialist governments in the first place. One can argue about whether those deaths should be held against "socialism" per se. But what's almost unique about socialism is how many deaths resulted even when the government was not acting malevolently or negligently. Tens of millions of people died in the Soviet Union and China not due to gulags and purges, but because socialism is a bad way to organize an economy. Socialist reforms of agricultural production, in particular, destroyed production.
Those deaths are squarely attributable to socialism per se. It's the result of removing market signals, distorting incentives, and replacing the capital-owning class who knows how to operate the economy, etc. What would happen to say Waymo if you replaced its investors and management with the folks who run the U.S. Digital Service along with "stakeholders" from among the employees and "local community?" You'd destroy it, because that's a terrible way to run a company. That's what socialist countries did with agriculture.
Yes, this is the part[0] and it's worth reading about it at length (I've added paragraph breaks).
The TL;DR, with a Hacker News spin: a small startup of entrepreneurial Chinese hackers working in stealth mode disrupted the existing socialist system of agriculture and changed everything :-)
In more detail:
In December 1978, eighteen of the local farmers, led by Yen Jingchang, met in the largest house in the village. They agreed to break the law at the time by signing a secret agreement to divide the land, a local People's Commune, into family plots. Each plot was to be worked by an individual family who would turn over some of what they grew to the government and the collective whilst at the same time agreeing that they could keep the surplus for themselves.
The villagers also agreed that should one of them be caught and sentenced to death that the other villagers would raise their children until they were eighteen years old. At the time, the villagers were worried that another famine might strike the village after a particularly bad harvest and more people might die of hunger.
After this secret capitalist reform, Xiaogang village produced a harvest that was larger than the previous five years combined. Per capita income in the village increase from 22 yuan to 400 yuan with grain output increasing to 90,000 kg in 1979.
This attracted significant attention from surrounding villages and before long the government in Beijing had found out. The villagers were fortunate in that at the time China had just changed leadership after Mao Zedong had died. The new leadership under Deng Xiaoping was looking for ways to reform China's economy and the discovery of Xiaogang's innovation was held up as a model to other villages across the country.
This led to the abandonment of collectivised farming across China and a large increase in agricultural production. The secret signing of the contract in Xiaogang is widely regarded as the beginning of the period of rapid economic growth and industrialisation that mainland China has experienced in the thirty years since.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaogang,_Anhui
They are taught to think that by people who want to have another go. Of course those people won’t be joining you in the fields, they see themselves as card-carrying Party members.
Think I’m kidding? https://mobile.twitter.com/bbcthisweek/status/67003748693718...
We have a General Election coming up in the UK and millions of people are going to vote for the party that thinks Mao’s massacres are a hilarious joke.
EDIT: For 'mysterious reasons' the above post has been flagged. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB4o5n2EGyA
UK Labour politician saying 'Mao did more good than harm'
Can you imagine the backlash if any Tory even hinted at that, his or her career would be over. But Abbott and the rest of the Inner Party are untouchable.
For 'mysterious reasons' the above post has been flagged.
I think there is no mystery there!
Here it is again. UK labour politician saying Mao did more good than harm. Why does this continually get flagged?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Too many power-hungry zealots; too little competent governance. Too much destruction of the old order; too little creation of a decent new one.
[Edit: But Xi. No, he hasn't destroyed the economy. I look at the Uighurs, though, and put him in the "murderous power-hungry zealot" category.]
It is a very long time since the Tory party could be considered a safe pair of hands economically.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It’s awfully hard to imagine that Mao actually was hoping that people would die, and that they would die en masse of starvation: even if he was strictly self-serving and heartless, he must have known in the back of his mind that huge populations of starving people are unpredictable and difficult to govern. The only way I can picture this taking place is that he (like all dictators) successfully instilled such fear in his direct reports that they never gave him bad news or challenged what he thought sounded like good ideas at the time.
Mao was focused on re-imagining the state and purging old ways of thinking, governance, etc. The insanity of the cultural revolution is a testament to that.
However, what you're saying is also true; there are documented historical examples of local officials, terrified of Mao, setting up faked fields with scarce crops from the neighboring area being transplanted into a single field specifically to "impress" Mao during his visits and avoid his ire.
Remember the Nazis were brought before an international court. The CCP never had a Nuremberg.
Im not sure if I understand what you are trying to say they were. Are you claiming that Mao and Stalin were sadists? I think it is more plausible they were altruistically motivated (greater good, ect).
Two times this video has been posted, and two times it's been flagged. Politician in center left UK party saying historys greatest mass murderer "did more good than harm".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The history of Lysenko and his circle's influence on Soviet and Chinese farming, and the triumph of political influence peddling and ideology over reality, seems almost unfathomable, but was very real.
Of course it does make for a pretty sensational title and probably better book sales.
These people didn't necessarily want to alleviate immediate material suffering in the here and now. They wanted to Achieve Communism, which would supposedly alleviate material suffering forever. If that meant tens of millions had to be sacrificed on that altar, so be it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodrazvyorstka#Soviet_prodraz...
Beside everything else (like massive loss of work capable men and horses (there were no tractors back then) due to WWI and the Civil War), the important point here is that usually everything was taken away, including that grain, potatoes, etc. that would otherwise be used as seeds next year. Not having anything to plant next year naturally amplified the situation into such a severe famine. In general dominance of such short-term approaches were the hallmark of USSR through all its existence.
Another situation of famine and related cannibalism - 2 and half year siege of Leningrad during WWII by Germans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Leningrad#Cannibalism
and some stats :
"By December 1942 the NKVD had arrested 2,105 cannibals – dividing them into two legal categories: corpse-eating (trupoyedstvo) and person-eating (lyudoyedstvo). The latter were usually shot while the former were sent to prison. The Soviet Criminal Code had no provision for cannibalism, so all convictions were carried out under Code Article 59–3, "special category banditry".[72] Instances of person-eating were significantly lower than that of corpse-eating; of the 300 people arrested in April 1942 for cannibalism, only 44 were murderers.[73] 64% of cannibals were female, 44% were unemployed, 90% were illiterate, 15% were rooted inhabitants, and only 2% had any criminal records. More cases occurred in the outlying districts than in the city itself. Cannibals were often unsupported women with dependent children and no previous convictions, which allowed for a certain level of clemency in legal proceedings.[74]
Given the scope of mass starvation, cannibalism was relatively rare.[75] Far more common was murder for ration cards. In the first six months of 1942, Leningrad witnessed 1,216 such murders. At the same time, Leningrad was experiencing its highest mortality rate, as high as 100,000 people per month. Lisa Kirschenbaum notes that rates "of cannibalism provided an opportunity for emphasizing that the majority of Leningraders managed to maintain their cultural norms in the most unimaginable circumstances."[75] "
And WWI, and a civil war, and a drought. Poland had its own famine the year before, even without commies.
However there is still the good old general strike.
American socialists have been making amazing progress in that regard, as of late.
The data is in, when the state (in the name of the people) controls the means of production, lots of people die, votes don't count, and Cuban mercenaries will be brought in to quell the dissent.
Also in 1970s in Kampuchea, the 4 years from 1975 to 1979 when the Communist Party of Kampuchea was in power, they managed to get 21% to 24% of the country's population killed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge_rule_of_Cambodia
Of course, this wasn't the first or last time US foreign policy would see its 'chickens coming home to roost', so to say. During the Soviet-Afghan war, US forces trained and materially aided the Mujahideen (Osama bin Laden was once involved with this group) in an effort to stymie the Soviet's forces and keep them enveloped in a financially-draining quagmire that would eventually prove to be the Soviet Union's own "Vietnam".
https://www.dw.com/en/how-germany-got-the-russian-revolution...
For all intents and purposes it is the same political entity.
And “Soviet” as an adjective describes organs of the RSFSR, those of any of the other soviet republics that came to constitute the USSR, or of the USSR itself.
The Soviet Union managed to kill millions in the 1930s as well.
Not to mention that many people in the west have had more than a nibble on a fingernail when it's presented itself. Yet again there is a failure to mention that.
https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001379.htm