Submitted by geodude in History

Dekulakization and forced collectivization in Central Asia and Ukraine turned famines into genocide, fueled by Soviet imperialism, racism, and fundamental non-understanding of the areas and people they were meddling with. The USSR literally took food (as exorbitant taxes) from Kazakh farmers, forced them into squalor with an agricultural plan that was total nonsense, conscripted the men and violently discriminated against the ones that were left. It is no surprise that a severe famine was made exponentially more lethal as a result.

These policies were enacted with the intent of squeezing the imperial subjects of the USSR dry with the knowledge that it would result in cataclysmic death tolls. This was acceptable to them because of the races of the Central Asian people being killed. I cannot in good faith support anyone that argues that Central Asian mountain nomads did anything to deserve this because their land was taken over by an imperial nation that branded them all 'kulaks' for resisting their rule and laid claim to their homeland without even visiting it first.

The idea that even Anarchists would apologize for this feels gross. I think Anarchists would be more interested in leaving mobile pastoralists on their own land the hell alone. Kapalbek the Kulak and his extra horses can wait until we dismantle the state and the vanguard party.

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Potemkin wrote

I've always thought that rural, agricultural people (the peasantry historically), in particular, got a bad wrap from authoritarian communists, who labeled most of them Kulaks and dismissed them as reactionary. Yet history shows that, while rural people are often more conservative (as in the US today), there is a rich history of proud, radical, anarchic sentiments among rural and agricultural people (Makhno's movement is perhaps the most prominent example).

In fact, Murray Bookchin observed that most of the revolutionary agency of the industrial proletariat was a result of first-generation proletarians, whose radicality was the result of having been peasants and being forced (economically, etc) from the fields to the factories. This first generation was always the most radical, because they had direct experience of a different way of life. Fast forward a generation or two and, contrary to Marx's idea that industrial discipline would also discipline workers for revolutionary struggle, it overwhelming broke their spirit and integrated them into the system, rather than set themselves against the system.

Given this, I've always maintained a supportive, rather than dismissive, attitude toward the revolutionary potential of rural, agricultural peoples. They haven't received enough credit historically for carrying the revolutionary torch to the extent that they have.

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