The industrialization of Ukraine occurred under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, in the 1930s, when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. In order to rapidly industrialize the region, Stalin implemented farm collectivization, in which formerly independent peasant farmers would work for government-operated farms known as kholkozy. This was bitterly resented by Ukrainian peasants, many of whom flatly refused to contribute their crops. Stalin ordered their surplus crops confiscated, a decision that deliberately starved millions of peasants. Collectivization was seen as necessary to provide the food needed for Soviet workers to begin working in industry, and large factories were constructed in cities like Kiev and modern-day Donetsk. As for the effects of this horrific event on the West, it largely did not register with most people in the United States. While the American government was seemingly aware of the mass starvation of Ukrainian peasants, it made no concerted effort to help them. The nation and the West in general was, of course, in the midst of the Great Depression when the Ukrainian genocide occurred in 1932–33, and many intellectuals in both the United States and Great Britain took a fairly benign view of the Soviet Union and Stalin. The Soviets took great care to avoid popular awareness of the incident, with some collusion by Western media and diplomats, in any case. The context for much of this apathy was that many American and Western investors hoped to profit from Ukrainian (and Soviet more broadly) industrialization. Soviet planners purchased Western technology to industrialize the Ukraine and elsewhere. But the main effect of industrialization—the horrific starvation resulting from Stalin's collectivization policy that was deemed necessary to bring it about—had little effect on the West.
https://www.history.com/news/ukrainian-famine-stalin
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/red-famine-anne-applebaum-ukraine-soviet-union/542610/
Friday, May 5, 2017
How did the industrial revolution in the Ukraine affect the American West?
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