Do you agree that the grain requisitions and movement restrictions of starving peasants continued even though the leadership was aware of the conditions?
It’s hard to say definitively - one of the issues in the Stalinist USSR was information feedback. There were strong incentives to exaggerating production numbers, and strong disincentives to reporting shortfalls. Basically, everyone in a position of power was terrified and covering their ass at all times.
What it ultimately comes down to, I think, is crash-industrialization. Stalin believed that the USSR needed to industrialize as soon as possible, with all other concerns (i.e. lives) being secondary. To his credit, this ended up being a spot-on assessment. Supposing they had a kinder leader rather than Stalin with his heart of steel, and they industrialized more slowly, collectivized agriculture more slowly and voluntarily, how would they have fared in WW2? It’s possible that the USSR would have been unprepared for an industrial war and the Germans would have won, in which case there would have been hundreds of millions of deaths.
Yes, you may proceed.
Do you agree that the grain requisitions and movement restrictions of starving peasants continued even though the leadership was aware of the conditions?
It’s hard to say definitively - one of the issues in the Stalinist USSR was information feedback. There were strong incentives to exaggerating production numbers, and strong disincentives to reporting shortfalls. Basically, everyone in a position of power was terrified and covering their ass at all times.
What it ultimately comes down to, I think, is crash-industrialization. Stalin believed that the USSR needed to industrialize as soon as possible, with all other concerns (i.e. lives) being secondary. To his credit, this ended up being a spot-on assessment. Supposing they had a kinder leader rather than Stalin with his heart of steel, and they industrialized more slowly, collectivized agriculture more slowly and voluntarily, how would they have fared in WW2? It’s possible that the USSR would have been unprepared for an industrial war and the Germans would have won, in which case there would have been hundreds of millions of deaths.