Death by suicide was the most common, as we're seeing now in the more recent economic troubles. Starvation and job security is certainly a motivating factor in any crisis where that becomes a problem.
I'm trying to draw parallels here, that sometimes shit happens. Russia's mismanagement of agriculture notwithstanding, sometimes you're up against forces you can't control.
There's a hell of a big difference between an inadvertent result of ill-considered agricultural practices and a deliberate campaign of genocide by starvation.
If there was a "deliberate campaign of genocide by starvation" happening, I'm sure I could look in the New York Times archives of the period and read about that. If I consult the archives, the reporters going through the Ukraine said reports of that were false.
Also, all of Europe had a bad crop that year, I guess the Soviets were controlling the weather?
There's a lot of hyperbole on both sides here. The Soviets at the time claimed Americans were starving by the millions, and of course Americans claimed the Soviets were starving by the millions.
Of course this is a point too subtle to work on Hacker News.
The data on both sides is wobbly to the point of being undependable. Until modern social security systems kicked in the number of people living in the US was largely a hypothetical quantity, especially in far-flung rural areas, the very sort of which were impacted by the Dust Bowl.
The 1930 census https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1930_United_States_Census seems to be fairly comprehensive, but you have to wonder how far into the wilderness these people were willing to go to tabulate who was living in the extreme edges of the American frontier.
The Soviets claimed a lot of things. Of course, so did, and still do, the United States. But it's not for nothing, I think, that you find no shortage of contemporary Soviet and Ukrainian, and modern Russian, attestations of the Holodomor - whereas on the other side of things, not even the furthest right-wing anti-FDR John Birchers ever made even the slightest attempt to claim that any such thing happened in the United States. No one denies the Dust Bowl was bad. No one in the US, as far as I've ever been able to determine, has ever even tried to claim the Dust Bowl was that bad.
Except there is a consensus that millions of people of people died in the USSR during that famine, Ukranians were hit hardest.
I haven't seen much talk of large scale deaths(>10,000)due to the dust bowl. In fact I can't really find much on dust bowl deaths (other then an uptick in the suicide rate) except in places that seem to be excusing the Holodomor.
No-true-Scotsmanism about the Soviet Union and communism is a hell of a hill to pick to die on in 2016. I don't envy you. But my sympathy is strictly limited by the fact that your choice of ideology causes you to bring it on yourself.
Note that a crop failure is not the same thing as a famine.
People and nations can buy and beg food, its political and economic systems which turn crop failure into famine. Hell sometimes you don't even need a crop failure.
> If there was a "deliberate campaign of genocide by starvation" happening, I'm sure I could look in the New York Times archives of the period and read about that. If I consult the archives, the reporters going through the Ukraine said reports of that were false.
> "Lying was Duranty's stock in trade," commented Alsop. In his memoirs British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, then The Manchester Guardian's correspondent in Moscow, talked of Duranty's "persistent lying" [20] and elsewhere called him "the greatest liar I ever knew.".[21]
> It was clear, meanwhile, from Duranty's personal exchanges that he was fully aware at the time of the scale of the calamity. In 1934 he privately reported to the British embassy in Moscow that as many as 10 million people may have died, directly or indirectly, from famine in the Soviet Union in the previous year. Both British intelligence[22][clarification needed] and American engineer Zara Witkin (1900–1940),[23] who worked in the USSR from 1932 to 1934,[24] confirmed that Duranty knowingly misrepresented information about the nature and scale of the famine.
> he travelled to the Soviet Union and eluded authorities to slip into Ukraine, where he kept diaries of the man-made starvation he witnessed
> > I walked along through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, 'There is no bread. We are dying'. This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. I tramped through the black earth region because that was once the richest farmland in Russia and because the correspondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves what is happening.
> > In the train a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it and devoured it. The Communist subsided. I stayed overnight in a village where there used to be two hundred oxen and where there now are six. The peasants were eating the cattle fodder and had only a month's supply left. They told me that many had already died of hunger. Two soldiers came to arrest a thief. They warned me against travel by night, as there were too many 'starving' desperate men.
> > 'We are waiting for death' was my welcome, but see, we still, have our cattle fodder. Go farther south. There they have nothing. Many houses are empty of people already dead,' they cried.
Jones: (from your link) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gareth_Jones_(journalist)#Life...
"In 1931 he was offered employment in New York City by Dr Ivy Lee, public relations advisor to organisations such as the Rockefeller Institute, the Chrysler Foundation, and Standard Oil, to research a book about the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1931 he toured the Soviet Union with H. J. Heinz II of the food company dynasty, producing a diary published by Heinz as Experiences in Russia 1931, a diary which probably contains the first usage of the word "starve" in relation to the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture. In 1932 Jones returned to work for Lloyd George and helped the wartime Prime Minister write his War Memoirs.
During the 1930s, he was a reporter for the Western Mail.[2] In late January and early February 1933 Jones was in Germany covering the accession to power of the Nazi Party, and was in Leipzig on the day Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor. A few days later on February 23 in the Richthofen, the fastest and most powerful three-motored aeroplane in Germany, he became the first foreign journalist to fly with Hitler as Jones accompanied Hitler and Joseph Goebbels to Frankfurt where Jones reported for the Western Mail on the new Chancellor's tumultuous acclamation in that city."
It's called the Cold War. Liars lied about liars. All of your sources are committed anti-communists willing to do whatever it took to bring down the USSR. Do you really think they wouldn't lie about this stuff?
Do you have a shred of evidence to suggest that they did? I mean, I realize that's a higher bar to clear than throwing around shitty implications and trying for the "well there really aren't any good guys here" schtick, but you're really going to have to come up with at least a little bit of substance if you want to be taken seriously here.
There's no good evidence for a massive famine due to the dust bowl people lost their saving but few people died.
A famine is different from a crop failure. Crop failures can help cause famines,but typically famines happen because political and/or economic failures. For example in cases of extreme authoritarianism(like the USSR and China - PRC) and colonialism(Ireland, Nepal).
