Stan Shebs wrote:
Fred Bauder wrote:
You stand convicted by your own words. This exerpt is an excellent example, no famines, no mass murder, no gulag, no deportations. And most especially, no failure to produce enough to adequately feed the Soviet people.
No, he explains it right there where it's the people's fault for having "poor worker productivity" even though the main agricultural areas had produced surpluses for export since ancient times.
I have to apologize for reacting to the quoted bit out of context; in the next section of [[Economy of the Soviet Union]] the poor productivity is indeed attributed to forced collectivization. Interestingly, that section is so delicately phrased that the average reader won't actually find out what happened; it just says "the human toll was catastrophic", which could mean any number of things. There are details about the famines in WP, I didn't see any links that would explain "human toll" via connections to any of those articles.
Stan