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History’s Most Catastrophic Man-made Errors

Khalid Elhassan December 9, 2020 34 min

Wanggongchang Explosion - Beijing — The Wanggongchang Explosion devastated Beijing. Pintrest

23. This Disaster Was Predictable, and Had Been Predicted Years in Advance

A peasant mother and child forcibly evicted from their in the winter of 1932-1933. Wikimedia

The man-made disaster that came to be known as the Terror Famine was predictable. It had actually had been predicted years earlier by objective observers who had witnessed collectivization’s early trial runs in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

They sounded the alarm about the expected chaos and turmoil, and the negative impact on the harvests and the distribution networks that took produce from the fields to consumers. As early as 1930, academics and advisers to the authorities in the Ukrainian SSR predicted that famine was inevitable if collectivization was continued at its current pace. Their warnings were ignored by the authorities.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.