Alright, its been a few hours since the last media storm started over the last tragedy and I'm already tired of watching Anderson Cooper stammering. What I have yet to hear is how this started. Like everything dealing with Russia; let's talk about Muscovy and the Tsar.
Russia as we know it started out as Muscovy. Which was the area around Moscow. This is where the Tsar comes from as well. And over the next several hundred years they expanded to Archangel and then crushed the Swedish Empire and its sheep-slaughtering king to get St. Petersburg.
And Russia expanded etc. etc. etc. By the 19th century Russia had participated in the Partitions of Poland and the Crimea War. Which took place in Crimea. No duh. The Russian Empire was at it's zenith size-wise.
But enough history about the expansion of Russia. Let's talk about why there is a civil war going on in Ukraine. Now we go to GLORIOUS SOVIET UNION time! Which part of that experiment in not-communism are we talking about today?
The collectivization of agriculture. Or, how the Soviet Union showed that it would fail miserably along with its satellite states. In 1929 the Soviets, having rebuilt their economy in the first five year plan, decided to collectivize agriculture.* In it they made several mistakes.
Firstly Lenin's slogan of "peace, land, and bread" meant what you expect. However Lenin was dead so who cares and Stalin didn't give a flying shit about breaking all three of those in this goal. That's not quite true, he threw the shit at the farmers. The farmers didn't want collectivization of land. And so knowing that the government was going to take their farms anyway, the Kulaks; the 'rich' farmers (i.e. owned some amount of livestock, (i.e. more that five chickens as a reference point, not sure on actual cutoff) so not rich by our standards) started killing their livestock. the poor farmers then started killing whatever one or two animals they had as well. And the army came in and started slaughtering the kulaks. Which then caused a famine as the Soviet Union required cereals for export to meet the five year plan costs. In the end most of the death happened in, you guessed it, what is now Ukraine, the bread basket region for Russia and you can see where the Russian separatists and hatred of Russia comes from.
Exporting cereals was a problem most of the Soviet satellites had and you should never do that. This is what happens when you can't accept loans due to ideology. Never stopped catholic kings. Although they would usually expel the Jews afterward. Or just persecute them more.
*The accuracy of the five year plans and their success cannot be verified. Why? Everyone fabricated everything as soon as one problem occurred so the KGB or COMECON or whoever was in charge wouldn't start whacking people. Because the not-communists in Russia had this thing for whacking people. Personally think those eighty years are why Russia has one of the worst declining birth rates in the world.
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