Just a small footnote to this particular post on Stalin but related…the Koch empire started with Stephen Koch – the Patriarch of Koch Industries – working for Joseph Stalin.  So – while all of this was happening to the peasants in the Stalin led Soviet Union – Stephen Koch was making a fortune building refineries for his comrades (Source).  This is the father of the same Koch Brothers who are going to spend $400 billion this year to ensure the defeat of politicians who have a pro-middle class policy agenda.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder writes about communism under Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union and the genocide that he created in the Ukraine.  You can read directly from his book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin HERE pages 42 – 47:

1. From 18 November 1932 peasants from Ukraine were required to return extra grain they had previously earned for meeting their targets. State police and party brigades were sent into these regions to root out any food they could find.
2. Two days later, a law was passed forcing peasants who could not meet their grain quotas to surrender any livestock they had.
3. Eight days later, collective farms that failed to meet their quotas were placed on “blacklists” in which they were forced to surrender 15 times their quota. These farms were picked apart for any possible food by party activists. Blacklisted communes had no right to trade or to receive deliveries of any kind, and became death zones.
4. On 5 December 1932, Stalin’s security chief presented the justification for terrorizing Ukrainian party officials to collect the grain. It was considered treason if anyone refused to do their part in grain requisitions for the state.
5. In November 1932 Ukraine was required to provide 1/3 of the grain collection of the entire Soviet Union. As Lazar Kaganovich put it, the Soviet state would fight “ferociously” to fulfill the plan.
6. In January 1933 Ukraine’s borders were sealed in order to prevent Ukrainian peasants from fleeing to other republics. By the end of February 1933 approximately 190,000 Ukrainian peasants had been caught trying to flee Ukraine and were forced to return to their villages to starve.
7. The collection of grain continued even after the annual requisition target for 1932 was met in late January 1933

Hat tip to Brad Delong

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