> I was born and educated in the USSR. I was in middle school at the height of one of the many Russification campaigns, which went as far as forbidding us, the students, from speaking our native language among ourselves even during recess.

I guess it's naive for me to assume there was a common situation throughout the entire SU.

My Grandpa was a German living along the Danube and then dragged off by the Communists to a remote village in Uzbekistan, because his dad was pressed into the Wehrmacht.

They were taught in German, Russian and the local language in school. And that was under the definitively very kind hearted but bit austere communist scholar Stalin /s. When Stalin finally made his greatest contribution to mankind (fueled by paranoia, wiping out the Extremists in the Party around him and then going to hell), Gramps got a chance to become a German teacher.

And I guess, after thinking about it for a bit, that might be where our differences in accounts are coming from. Gramps obviously wouldn't ever have seen a school from the inside, that didn't teach multiple languages. Also he despised anything Russian to the point, he refused to talk to any of his own children in anything but German.

And his favorite joke was:

> A war veteran was applying to join the Communist Party. The examiners were greatly pleased by his many achievements to further the people's causes during the war. The only problem were his rather poor educational credentials, which was also shown by the misspelling of the Party: KPS.

> So the examiners told him: "You'd be a great fit and your rapid advancement would be assured, but you need to learn how to spell the name of our Party. Not S, but SS."

> Veteran: "Nein, I've already been in the SS."

Apparently got detained several times over it, so I guess he wasn't holding back. Also applied for travel to Germany every single year, which "surprisingly" wasn't even granted once. Not sure why the Communists kept him around as a teacher...

> We were ordered to "speak like humans"

Apparently that was the attitude of the Russians living in the major cities all over the SU. Never been told any more about it, tho.

Dragging ears, beatings and sending students to the back of the food line during cotton harvest was definitely encouraged for all kinds of disobedience.

> why Germans gassed millions of Jews

The Nazis blamed the Jews for the German Revolution in 1918.

I really dont know the leadup to this claim, the strong dislike of Jews at this point in time in general or how it was managed to sell this to the German people.

It's just not being taught, which is s huge mistake in my opinion. There is very little understanding among Germans on how this situation could have escalated to this absurd degree and therefore also absolutely 0 awareness for potential trends in a similar direction.

Nowadays "Nazis" and "Fascists" are just whoever the left currently intends to purge the most and people can't name a single of the Nazis' policies except "Hitler killed Jews" and "Hitler built the Autobahn." Which is a very sad and, tbh, dangerous state.

I've thought of just reading Hitler's (and his associates') books, speeches and laws myself, but they're ... not very pleasant to read and of questionable value, since the Nazi leadership did seem to believe very little about their own drivel and just spouted whatever they thought would get them in power.

> Why are Russians destroying Ukrainian libraries in occupied territories?

Havent heard about this, but they're emptying museums with the excuse of protecting historic artifacts. Can't really judge this until the war is over, Ukraine asks Russia to return these objects and makes preparations to receive and store them. Then we'll see how much there is to Russia's clakms on this.

> Why would a sane, rational person burn books?

Not a good look if done by Russians, it'd be different if done by the LPR/DPR militias. Same situation as Ukraine getting rid of Russian books. These two sides have been killing each other over a language dispute for quite some time.

Also, it's less about the destruction of knowledge and culture, rather than symbolic. People will just download an ebook nowadays.

> a) Stalin and other top-ranking officials were aware of the food shortages in Ukraine, b) they knew that their policies were going to make things worse, c) they still adopted those policies, and d) they expressed satisfaction with the outcome. They deliberately allowed millions of people to die of starvation to suppress Ukrainian national identity and punish them for perceived disloyalty.

a) Yes, but the information they received was often falsified (due to people not daring to admit the failures of collective policies, I guess) and delayed through the process. They still knew, but very convinced of being sabotaged.

b) I dont know of any evidence they intended to worsen the situation for the general population. They certainly intended to make the situation much worse for anyone they thought of trying to sabotage Communism. But that's just a matter of ideology. Germany nowadays arrests anyone showing any Nazi affiliated symbolism, Communists shot everyone showing a slightly furrowed eyebrows during the Party's declarations.

c) It's a death cult. Of course a Communist would never spare a perceived opponent.

d) actually never heard about this. I know they declared the agricultural revolution a great success, trying to brush the holodomor under the carpet (replacing dead population with Russians, preventing people from fleeing, rejecting foreign aid under the pretense that everything is ok, suppressing the release of any details, ...) in pursuit of Communist ideological perfection, but that'd be important to know about. Do you have any links saved? Otherwise I just go digging myself

> to suppress Ukrainian national identity and punish them for perceived disloyalty.

For some the latter is certainly true and Stalin was indeed worried about Ukrainian nationalism (since the only major difference between the leftist ideologies of the Second International, Nazism, Fascism and Communism, was their disagreement on whether nationalism (Engels) or internationalism (Marx) was more suited to overthrow capitalism).

But mass starvation generally wasn't how the Communists tried to impose "the dictatorship of the people". They usually relied on violent mobs, kidnappings and assassinations where they weren't already in power and executing people, disappearing people into internment camps and informers among the population where they already took over.

In fact I'd highly doubt they would deliberately sabotage their collectivization pilot project.

Communists are aweful people with 0 respect for human life, but they'd never risk any information on Communist collectivization being anything but a great success spreading.

> [...] then how would you call it if not deliberate mass murder?

A Communist pilot project, resulting in an apocalyptic famine, combined with ensuring the angelic purity of Communism.

If I build a bridge, it collapses with many people on it and I open a dam upstream to flood away all the people and evidence, I didn't intent to kill these people, nor did I try to specifically target the population of this town. The people might survive the flood or not, all I would have cared about is getting rid of the evidence.

What I would have been, is an awful bridge designer, bottom of the barrel human and a severe ideological narcissist with 0 regard a for human life. There might be many mass-murderers with a much more superior moral compass, but all that would be important to me is successfully having saved the reputation of my bridges being the utmost superior and infallible.

> How is it any different from Germans locking Jews up in ghettos and letting them starve to death?

The Nazis desired the utter destruction of the Jewish population in Europe and deliberately designed an efficient system to pull off their genocide.

The Communists desired the best future for the future of their population, designed their perfect system and graciously bestowed it upon the agrcultural regions at gunpoint, unsurprisingly killed millions, and then were concerned about other regions not entirely embracing Communist dictates anymore if they became aware of potential minor flaws in the Party's interpretation of Marxism.

It's not entirely clear which of these two sides of the coin is worse, the Nazis, who would have killed entire population subgroups ever so often, or the Communists, who would have observed their ideology killing millions of people ever so often and would have started reflecting on additional writings of various Marxist authors to devine up the perfect adjustment to their ideology, which sadly wasn't real Communism before, but now it definitively is and if you got any questions about it, the execution wall is right over there.

> that's why the Holodomor has seen gradual international recognition as genocide, most notably by the European Parliament, which represents 450 million Europeans from 27 countries.

Sadly the resolution of the EU is loaded up with ideological drivel and opportunism.

Furthermore, it just barely recognizes that the holodomor affected many other regions and calls to crack down on anything perceived as historical revisionism.

I have no problem with people widening the definition of a genocide in order to fit the atrocity that is the holodomor, and leftist collectivism in general, into it. What I dislike is people actively revising history or misrepresenting it by projecting modern or temporally or spatially separated concepts in general onto it.