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Film about the Holodomor — 15 Comments

1. Pity that the film is a flop.

   Timothy Snyder’s book “Bloodlands” is a chilling must-read.

2. But if only Stalin knew.

3. Robert Conquest, Historian Who Documented Soviet Horrors, Dies at 98
   By WILLIAM GRIMES
   AUG. 4, 2015

   Robert Conquest, a historian whose landmark studies of the Stalinist purges and the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s documented the horrors perpetrated by the Soviet regime against its own citizens, died on Monday in Stanford, Calif. He was 98. [snip]

   https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/05/arts/international/robert-conquest-historian-who-documented-soviet-horrors-dies-at-98.html?_r=0

   — — — — — — — —

   Hey: why not get Conquest at neo’s Amazon portal! . . .

   https://www.amazon.com/Great-Terror-Reassessment-Robert-Conquest/dp/0195317009/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1488670900&sr=8-1&keywords=robert+conquest

4. The fact that Hitler is the benchmark for all evil while Stalin is but a footnote to many is really interesting to me.

5. Griffin: Stalin had Walter Duranty and the NYTimes doing PR work for him.

6. Each regime/ country having his own Stalin-engineered Ukrainian famine (known as the Holodomor). but given diffrent nake like this one THE MARKED WOMAN

7. My grandfather came from volkovysk, a town in the Russian empire now in Belarus. When I searched the internet to see if anyone of prominence came from there I found that Raphael Lemkin was born near there. Lemkin is known for coining the word “genocide”. I was quite pleased to find out that before his death in 1959 Lemkin was working to bring attention to the Holodomor.

8. Extraordinarily good. Wise beyond her years. A role model at 12? Beautiful.

9. n.n:

   I think you meant to put that comment on the Alma Deutscher thread.

10. The documentary film RUSSIA’S WAR – BLOOD UPON THE SNOW – The History of the Stalin Years covers the Holodomor as well as the rest of the Stalin years. The documentary of this seemingly endless and brutal period was brought to my attention by an immigrant from Ukraine.

11. Check out The Promise on IMDB, a film about the Armenian genocide. 100k mostly negative votes, but it’s only been screened three times. Set for release in April,

    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4776998/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

12. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/ukra.html

    The dreadful famine that engulfed Ukraine, the northern Caucasus, and the lower Volga River area in 1932—1933 was the result of Joseph Stalin’s policy of forced collectivization. The heaviest losses occurred in Ukraine, which had been the most productive agricultural area of the Soviet Union. Stalin was determined to crush all vestiges of Ukrainian nationalism. Thus, the famine was accompanied by a devastating purge of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and the Ukrainian Communist party itself. The famine broke the peasants’ will to resist collectivization and left Ukraine politically, socially, and psychologically traumatized.

    The policy of all-out collectivization instituted by Stalin in 1929 to finance industrialization had a disastrous effect on agricultural productivity. Nevertheless, in 1932 Stalin raised Ukraine’s grain procurement quotas by forty-four percent. This meant that there would not be enough grain to feed the peasants, since Soviet law required that no grain from a collective farm could be given to the members of the farm until the government’s quota was met.

    Stalin’s decision and the methods used to implement it condemned millions of peasants to death by starvation. Party officials, with the aid of regular troops and secret police units, waged a merciless war of attrition against peasants who refused to give up their grain.

    Even indispensable seed grain was forcibly confiscated from peasant households.

    Any man, woman, or child caught taking even a handful of grain from a collective farm could be, and often was, executed or deported. Those who did not appear to be starving were often suspected of hoarding grain.

    Peasants were prevented from leaving their villages by the NKVD and a system of internal passports.

    The death toll from the 1932—33 famine in Ukraine has been estimated between six million and seven million. According to a Soviet author, “Before they died, people often lost their senses and ceased to be human beings.”

    Yet one of Stalin’s lieutenants in Ukraine stated in 1933 that the famine was a great success. It showed the peasants “who is the master here. It cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay.”

    or, how to turn a society into sociopaths end to end..

13. a system of internal passports.

    Why would Homeland Security hire former Stasi chief Markus Wolfe and former head of the KGB General Yevgeni Primakov?

    They were hired to develop a system of internal passports and such that was to be a new federal ID system… msot of that ended up changing passports which require biometric information, wich the public is not all that knwolegelable about compared to old passports and border crossings.

    you travel, then any countryyou go to, has your perosnal biometric information on file after you come in.

    in case you dont know the names..
    Primikov was a high up man in KGB when it was KGB
    Marcus Wolfe created the East German STASI

    Lots of great books related directly and indirectly to these events and others… but not all that popular with the public who woudl rather pretend that the state organs are bumbling or dont even exist despite they are one of the largest budget items with almost no oversight of the public…

    so much to know, so little attention paid…

    Dont think that REAL ID was dead, Hillary had it in her pocket for her presedency… though with the news, how woudl have it been in the fore for people to think about?

    DHS announced recently that it will refuse Americans’ access to federal facilities beginning on Jan. 30, 2017, if they carry drivers’ licenses or IDs from states that don’t comply with the Real ID Act. This hardball tactic will be carried out in the new president’s name.

    Congress passed Real ID in 2005. It seeks to coerce states into issuing ID cards and licenses with nationally standardized data elements. It also requires states to share their databases of driver information across a national data network. This national ID system would be run by the states for the federal government. The law calls on federal agencies led by DHS to refuse IDs and drivers’ licenses from non-compliant states.

    what happened?

    Other elements of DHS’s enforcement plan include turning travelers from non-compliant states away at airports starting in 2018. By 2020, DHS expects every domestic air traveler to present a Real ID-compliant license or some other federal or federally-approved identification. This will make the next president the national-ID president.

    Though more than 10 years old, the Real ID law has not been fully implemented because of the original, firm refusal of many states.

    they bitch about the lie that russia works with the anti communist pro capitalist republicans and not the leftist socialist communist worked with before democrat party….

    make it so bad the people want the solution they didnt want before it was so bad
    How do you think Mussolini got the power to make the trains run on time? by making them run late…

14. I use IMDB and not RottenT and the IMDB rating for Bitter Harvest is 7.3 which isn’t too bad. Looking at RT’s system, it seems quite weird. The rating is binary, either thumbs up or down. Then it is segregated with a critic’s average and a user’s average. For Bitter Harvest, the 1st av. is 10% and the second av. is 77%. Isn’t that something?

    I love the RT critic’s complaint. It uses a cliche’d romance against a tragic or horrific backdrop. You mean like Romeo and Juliet, or Cameron’s Titanic, or the recent film Allied? Allied gets a 62% from the RT critics.

    The only value I’ve ever gotten from the “critics” is when you follow one or two decent critics over a period of time so as to become familiar with their biases.

    Setting aside the specifics of Bitter Harvest, I think it is huge shame that the massive atrocities of the Soviet and PRC regimes have not received more cinematic treatments. An older friend of mine apparently thinks that everything the 20th century communists did was fine. But when I mentioned the Kremer Rouge he admitted that it was really bad, because he had seen “The Killing Fields.” I’m not sure he knew that Pol Pot and the KR were communists. And this is from a guy who served in Viet Nam (and thought the NVA were OK) and thinks himself super knowledgeable because he reads The New Yorker.

15. If Republicans really had a clue about transforming American culture, they would have started funding anti cultural and anti communist movies sometime ago. Trum is the proof of what happens when they do not. Somebody else always grabs the populist nut, if nobody else has the nuts to do so.

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