this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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The word was used in print in the 1930s in Ukrainian diaspora publications in Czechoslovakia as Haladamor
Try again, buddy.
edit: Also, the Holodomor specifically refers to the famine within Ukraine which killed millions, while the "Soviet Famine of the collectivization" (a specific name I can find referenced nowhere else, is that a translation?) is (evidently) the broad famine impacting the USSR of which the Holodomor was a part.
And why exactly did that term stick in the west, only transliterated as Holodomor instead? And why is it overwhelmingly discussed with this term since the 2000s? Maybe because the usage of the word is political in nature as I explained?
As for the name of the famine broadly, in Wikipedia it appears as Soviet famine of 1930-1933.
Because that's the name it was given by the Ukranian peoples that survived it? I'm not sure what your point is here when you agree that it's a transliteration of the name.
It's not exactly a disputed fact that things like the Holodomor didn't gain much traction in western literature until after the fall of the soviet union, because that's when western literature was able to access it.
Add to it that the soviets violently suppressed reporting on it within the USSR, which you can even see reflected in that graph, explains the lack of occurrence in non-western works. That seems, you know, pretty gosh dang basic.
You're seriously arguing the pretty straightforward etymology of this word is some kind of deeply political conspiracy, to deflect from the openly manufactured nature and your weird stalinist apologist thing you've got going on where millions of "lives saved" (pop quiz: how do you measure that?) somehow outweighs millions of deaths. Maybe there is a similarity with the term "holocaust", which would seem kinda fair given the scale of the killing. But you know, there isn't. Like there provably isn't, it was a term coined from the original meaning of the word "holocaust" before "The Holocaust" even happened.
Just come on with this. They share a similar root.
Then why don't we use any Indian names for the very many famines in India due to British occupation? Why do we call them neutral names like "Bengal famine" and not "exterminatron 3000"?
Demographic extrapolations and comparative economics. Example: Brazil between 1930 and 1960 went from 36 years to 52. USSR went from 30 to 65. By comparing the evolution of socialist life metrics with capitalist life metrics at starting equal levels of development, you can find out that socialism massively boosted life metrics. You can also compare with the country itself in pre- and post- socialist times:
Surely you, so concerned with Ukrainians, knew about the horrifying demographic crisis caused by the capitalist restoration? The millions of lives lost and ruined by unemployment, suicide, malnutrition, defunding of healthcare and treatable disease, alcoholism, drug abuse and violent crime. Now, compare the hiccup in the graph in the 1930s, with the unrecoverable drop after 1990. And look at the vertical axis.
Do you mean dramatized names like the Great Bengal Famine? The Bengali name is "Chiẏāttōrēr mônbôntôr (lit. 'Famine of '76')", which is pretty vague given how many famines have happened in the world. Probably it merits the fancier name because it was the first one under british rule. Or did you perhaps mean the Doji bara / Skull Famine (bengali: lit 'many skulls'), which you know, not very dramatic at all and a pretty fair example of us using the indian name.
Hi! I'm a data scientist specializing in public health data modeling and I'm sorry, that was a little mean of me to bait you like that, it's a trick question: proving lives saved is the classic example of bad statistics and proving negatives. The assumptions required to make a definite statement about lives saved in a historical event are easy to make, but are necessarily so restrictive that they render any conclusions valueless unless you have definite conditions within a narrow time scope (like in a vaccine rollout or cholera outbreak). That's why meaningless phrases like "Demographic extrapolations and comparative economics" are such an easy thing to parrot - you're just saying "and then we do statistics, QED" without having to engage with the actual difficult part (the math).
Does comparative economics correlate to deaths? Sure! It correlates to just about everything you could ever want! The most famous example is the hemline index, which has spurred over a century of debate as to the actual causal connections (and if the theory itself even has merit). But proving that causal link to lives saved? Now that's a damn tricky problem, and some really promising methodology has only recently arisen from the management of ventilator shortages during covid in the US (and it's still being developed!) I highly recommend looking into it, it's a fascinating field of research right now.
Edit: Wow, you know what, I'm gonna just point to the entire sections of the wikipedia article you got that graphic from titled "Population Decline" and "Fertility and natalist policies" to address the population decline, instead of just redundantly addressing all the... uh... rigorously cited claims you just laid out.
Hmmm. Fair enough. Now let's do an exercise: let's go to lemmy.world search, and look for the words "skull famine", see how many results we get. Oh, we get exactly 2 results containing the words "skull famine", two copypastas from 2 years ago which are simply a list of western atrocities. I wonder why a famine in India with 10+ million deaths has only 2 results in lemmy.world... Compare that to the search of the word "holodomor". My point stands, doesn't it?
Good that you're a data scientist specializing in public health data modeling! Will be interesting. The thing is, you can easily do these studies for the particular case of the transition to capitalism, because you can use many metrics: alcohol consumption, violent crime statistics, drug use, deaths from certain diseases, expenditure in healthcare, number of suicides... etc. You can take all of those metrics and see how they all vastly increase in the transition to capitalism. Sure, if it were just one of those metrics, then you maybe would be able to say it's because of another reason, but when all of these metrics consistently rise sharply during a horrifying economic crisis byproduct of capitalism in several post-soviet republics at the same time, you can quite confidently both calculate numbers, and blame them on capitalism. As a matter of fact, this has been done widely for modern capitalist Russia, with this study talking of 3.5 million probable deaths between 1990 and 1998 alone, and this other study by Paul Cockshott reaching the figure of 12 million excess deaths between 1986 and 2008, though this latter one using much simpler methodology. Similar studies can be carried out for Ukraine, which suffered even harder since the crisis took longer to recover, and either way the numbers point towards the millions. And this is only excess deaths, not including lack of childbirth and economic migrations, both also counting in the millions.
Your point was that we don't use big scary names taken from the native language for other famines like the ones that happened under british indian rule thus "Holodomor" must clearly be a politicized name. Except you were flat wrong and we totally do the exact thing you said we didn't. Prior to that, your point was that Holodomor sounded like "Holocaust" so clearly it must be a politicized name. And then you were dead wrong, because despite it being obviously true that the two share a common lingusitic root, Holodomor was coined a good twenty years before "The Holocaust" happened, so it can't have been a reference.
Now your point is that it must be a politicized name because it's more talked about than a different famine, one which wasn't ever punishable with death to be discussed, which there is no active effort to deny it's severity or cause, which has no relevancy in the broad political climate, on a tiny website, and even using the world's most arbitrary and cherry-picked metric you got the number wrong (there's 11 results, including my comment above, but for some reason (possibly related to LW's search indexing being notoriously unreliable - which is true across pretty much all of lemmy) excluding your comment. So, we can chalk it up to 12 and also question the reliability of the methodology as a whole.
Here: Yes, the Holodomor is political - it was absolutely the result of political actions, and is the subject of a great many conspiracy theories and weirdo apologist movements today. No, the name Holodomor was not made up just to be scarier by association with The Holocaust to discredit the Soviets who caused it like you're implying - the word existed twenty years before the coining of the term Holocaust as we know it today. You're just plain flat out wrong in the particulars you're claiming. How many more variations on this theme are we going to have to sit through, because I am getting -so- bored with you trying to justify this narrative by shifting it around.
Can you please move on?
Okay, next topic:
Cockshott's (great name) paper is just pretty awful in general (which is probably why it's in a self-described magazine and not a journal (yes, I know the name is a reference)) and his methodology for calculating excess deaths is, as he acknowledges in the text, extremely dubious (which is fine, he does that to illustrate a tangential concept). but it does make some good points towards the end and I agree with his overall thesis about planned economies (once I figured out that was his thesis, it's kinda unclear). Rosefielde's (great name) paper is excellent, and breaks down his calculations in an extremely easily digested manner. I might even use it as an example of decent demographic calculation at some point, it's just a really good overview of the process and details the factors effecting (hehe) the
However: Both of those papers answer show examples of addressing death rates, and make no attempt at the problem of calculating lives saved. Lives saved is the metric in question, not death rate. They're terrible examples for your point, because they make no attempt to address your point whatsoever.
If the claim "you can easily do these studies for the particular case of the transition to capitalism" has merit, which we can assume you consider it does, why did you choose to cite these papers instead of ones that, idk, actually support your argument?
^edit:^ ^clarity^