Quote:
Originally Posted by Lucem Ferre
They didn't have the supply to feed their people so they had to beg the US to give them some food.
If they had the food to feed people why wouldn't they? How would collectivizing, in it's self, prevent them from having enough food to feed people?
NOW I understand that it's because they exported food, but that's not collectivization in it's self causing the famine it's what they did with it.
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It sounds like you're conflating the reasons why they didn't have enough food in the 1921 famine with the reasons why they didn't have enough food in the 1931 famine. These were different situations with different causes.
In a perfect utopia where farmers simply willingly gave up their owership of property to the government, that would only solve one problem (successful kulak peasants burning their fields and slaughtering their livestock in revolt) - another problem is that of distribution. With the USSR being a centrally planned economy, that is one of the cruxes of the issues.
With the five year plan, the government came up with projections and figures based on current agricultural productivity that were optimistic, to put it generously. They indeed expected their policies of collectivization would increase agricultural productivity and result in a surplus, which would be used to pay for industrialization while maintaining the crop yields the people have had in recent times. Instead, the policy was a failure and resulted in much less agricultural productivity. The Soviet Union still used much of what they had to pay for industrialization, at the expense of human lives. So contrary to your point there, even if they hadn't decided to export the yields they got, the extremely diminished agricultural productivity (caused in large part by collectivization) would've still resulted in famine.