@randomHydrogen i'd say that, while both scenarios have an equally negative result, the stalinist one is worse because
* the entire point of a socialist society is to make sure people have their basic needs met before other priorities, and there's no ideological justification for refusing to do so, like capitalists do with their "we need to protect property rights above all because that's what makes sure products are made and trade networks are maintained in the first place" ideas
* ukraine in particular was one of the areas which built its own independent socialist and anarchist governments after the russian empire's fall, before being crushed by the bolsheviks, and resisted soviet assimilation harder than others. stalin himself wrote that "we might lose ukraine" (specifically to non-bolsheviks, inspired by ukrainian social democrat symon petliura and polish socialist józef piłsudski).
politics
@devurandom i don’t feel too bad drawing an equivalency bettween someone starving during the holodomor when other countries offered international aid and like, someone dying from no insulin outside a pharmacy with a surplus. they both feel like letting people starve to maintain some societal image.
but also like i don’t know much about soviet history, is there a particular reason that it’s bad to equivocate those two scenarios when performing death counts?