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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

17. Was This Man-made Disaster an Accident or Deliberate Genocide?

ukrainian refugees during holodomor — Ukrainian refugees during Holodomor. Holodomor Museum.

Stalin’s Terror Famine is a bone of contention to this day between the Ukraine, where it is known as the Holodomor, derived from a term meaning “to kill by starvation”, and Russia. Kiev views the disaster as a deliberate genocide against the Ukrainian people. It contends that industrialization was implemented despite the knowledge that it would lead to famine, and that Stalin had used famine as a weapon against Ukraine’s peasants. Moscow denies that the famine had been artificial, and counters that other Soviet republics suffered from famine as well.

Depending on how one defines “genocide”, a credible argument could be made for either position. Either way, Stalin’s industrialization and forced collectivization policies set the stage for catastrophe. Then once the famine began, Soviet actions made things worse. Confiscating food from peasants who hardly had enough to feed themselves, turning down international humanitarian aid, and preventing people in the starving regions from leaving, led to many avoidable deaths.

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.