Thread by @mykola

I want to talk a bit more about Stalin’s crimes, the artificial famine in Ukraine and the complex legacy of post-WW2 historical analysis.

Yesterday some folks got mad at me for saying Stalin was genocidal. I now understand why: because many people make a very different claim.

Many people, when I was growing up in a broader culture of Ukrainian Americans who came to the US after ww2, told me about surviving the famine.

Some would take this further: “Stalin killed more people than Hitler! We suffered more than the Jews but they get all the attention!”

I want to be very clear that THAT shit was explicitly antisemitic. And I believe that numbers were likely fudged in order to support that claim.

BUT: that doesn’t mean the holodomer didn’t happen. It means that it was, of course, politicized.

And I get it; everything is politicized today, I can see how different people would have very different narratives for the same historical events.

I can also watch in real-time as today’s events are narrativized in problematic ways.

So sussing out what “really” happened is hard

Ultimately we have to fall back on personal accounts, some written at the time and some remembered, and that’s fundamentally unreliable and subject to ideological drift.

But it’s what we have. So we have to be responsible with it.

So like, I am happy to admit that there’s zero reason to compare the Holodomer to the Holocaust. It was a different kind of thing at a different scale.

And also: it was a genocide. An ethnic group was wiped out and they speak Russian in Ukraine today.

To acknowledge that isn’t to buy into every racist comparison with the holocaust.

To see the suffering of my grandparents and their families as real doesn’t detract from the suffering of others.

But the historical context is muddy, and antisemitism is painfully real. So, care.

I want to thank everyone who helped me to better contextualize this stuff, your perspectives were really valuable. Thanks!