Images from the Russian Revolution Period

The famine crisis of 1921-1922.

Source: A People's Tragedy, The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

Below: Bolshevik commissars inspect the harvest failure in the Volga region, 1921. The crisis was largely the result of Bolshevik over-requisitioning.

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Below: the victims of the crisis; an overcrowded cemetery in the Buzuluk district, 1921.

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Below: Cannibals with their victims, Samara province, 1921.

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Above: When the Bolsheviks started the civil war they unleashed a wave of violence on a scale the world had rarely seen. Here in Orsha in 1918 a Polish officer is hanged and impaled by soldiers of the newly created Red Army.
© L'illustration/Sygma
Source: Black Book of Communism, Crimes, Terror, Repression, Courtois

The Children of the Soviet Empire

And Now My Soul Is Hardened (Online version)
We will focus primarily on youths who spent all, or at least most, of their time in the street. Our gaze thus takes in juveniles who drifted out of families, as well as the more obvious millions orphaned, discarded, or otherwise separated involuntarily from parents. Those who remained at home will not be included, regardless of the abuse or neglect they may have experienced there. Soviet administrators responsible for raising indigent children inclined toward a similar sense of their mission’s scope, for even the narrowest definition of the besprizornye yielded more candidates than state institutions could absorb. The time when other youths, living with parents in unsatisfactory settings, could be lodged in children’s homes together with the nation’s orphans—a goal often avowed immediately following the Revolution—quickly receded far over the horizon.

Thus defined, the besprizornye represented first and foremost a stubborn challenge remaining to confront the Bolsheviks after their victory in the Civil War. The dismaying presence of countless young beggars and thieves underscored how deeply war and famine plague a society long after guns fall silent and crops return to fields. Even a wealthier and more experienced government than the one newly ensconced in Moscow would have been hard pressed to overcome rapidly the adversity bequeathed by nearly a decade of catastrophes. Later in the 1920s, though the street children’s ranks diminished considerably, factors such as rural poverty and the unraveling of traditional families spawned additional urchins at a rate that frustrated the government’s attempts to rid the country of their misfortune. As a result, in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s estimation, any description of Soviet urban life in this period remains incomplete without attention to abandoned juveniles, so common were they in train stations, markets, and other public places.[7]

Read, And Now My Soul Is Hardened (Online version)

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From Stalin and his lover aged 13
The story was too shocking to believe. But now that Stalin was dead, his successor Nikita Khrushchev decided he had to investigate the astonishing rumour about the monster's sexual depravity.
It was claimed that when he was in his 30s and before he became leader, Stalin had raped or seduced, even fathered a child with, a girl who was just 13 years old - and had been indicted for the under-age seduction by the police.
The tale had long been dismissed as just another piece of Western anti-Stalin propaganda[...] It had first surfaced soon after he took over from Lenin as Soviet dictator in 1924, appearing in the "scurrilous" tabloids and emigre journals in the West that were banned in the newly-formed Soviet Union.[...]during his reign of terror the rumour had all but disappeared - no one dared breathe a critical word about the tyrant in those years.
But on his death in 1953 it had resurfaced. And now Khrushchev, having heard the story of the under-age girl, had commissioned his KGB boss General Ivan Serov to investigate in great secrecy.
As Stalin's biographer, I had heard the story but it seemed so outrageous as to be incredible: like most historians, I simply believed that it was mere propaganda.
It did not sound like the Stalin we knew: he was married twice but usually he was portrayed, somewhat like Hitler, as a freakish inhuman monster, so unnaturally obsessed with power that he was uninterested in sex.
Yet more than 80 years on from when the rumours first appeared, I found myself examining a most extraordinary document among Stalin's papers in the so-called Presidential archives in Moscow, while researching for my new book on the young Stalin.
Marked top secret and signed by the KGB boss Serov, it was addressed to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and the Politburo.
It was dated 1956 - three years after Stalin's death - and spelt out the results of General Serov's investigation.
Serov reported back to Khrushchev that, amazingly, the entire story of Stalin's affair with a 13-year-old was true. Khrushchev showed it to the Politburo (including Stalin's long-serving henchman Molotov), who all signed it and then filed it in the deepest recesses of the archives where it has remained until now.
I was also able to find in the archives the memoirs of the girl herself, who was called Lidia. She wrote them during Stalin's reign, which is why they make no mention of any sex or the children she had by Stalin - that would have been suicidal.
Using all these and other archive documents, I constructed an astonishing picture of an unknown Stalin - one that painted him as a promiscuous and faithless serial seducer and libertine.
The picture was confirmed by the reminiscences of villagers who lived in the isolated hamlet that was the 13-year-old girl's home in Siberia.
This, then, is the true story of the under-age affair - the most shocking of many conducted during Stalin's mysterious life in the run-up to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.
In March 1914 Josef Stalin - a Georgian cobbler's son known to friends as Soso and comrades as Koba - was sentenced for his revolutionary activities by the Tsar to exile close to the Arctic Circle in a tiny hamlet named Kureika.
The place was a freezing hellhole, an isolated twilight world cut off from humanity in winter by the daylong darkness.
In Kureika, only the reindeer, snowfoxes and Tungus indigenous tribesmen could really function in deep midwinter. Everyone wore reindeer fur.
The hamlet contained 67 villagers - 38 men and 29 women - all packed into just eight ramshackle izbas or wooden peasant shacks.
Among them were seven orphans from the same family - the Pereprygins - of whom the youngest was 13-year-old Lidia.
She immediately noticed Stalin, not just because of his good looks but also because he was hopelessly underdressed with only a light coat.
Before long, he was sporting the full local outfit - from boots to hat - of reindeer fur, all of it provided by Lidia Pereprygina.
Stalin in those days was slim, attractive, charming, an accomplished poet and educated in the priesthood, but also a pitiless Marxist terrorist and brutal gangster boss - a Red Godfather who had funded Lenin's Bolsheviks with a series of audaciously bloody acts of bank robbery, piracy and racketeering.
Lidia was a schoolgirl orphan living on the remote frontier where girls matured early.
Some time in the early summer of 1914, the 35-year-old Stalin embarked on an affair with Lidia.
While not admitting to anything explicit in her memoirs, we catch a glimpse in them of Stalin and Lidia together staggering from drinking bout to drinking bout, because she writes of their drunken dancing and singsongs: "In his spare time, Stalin like to go to evening dances - he could be very jolly too. He loved to sing and dance."
These memoirs of Stalin's 13-year-old mistress - recorded 20 years later at the height of his dictatorship, while she remained a Siberian housewife - were clearly constrained.

Some of the Death Tolls Under Communist Regimes

Images of the Ukrainian Famine

Holodomor: Genocide by Famine
May 27 through January 11, 2009 (extended)
An exhibition that details the horrors and magnitude of the Holodomor – the little-known Ukrainian genocide that resulted in the deaths of some 10 million people – opens at The Ukrainian Museum on Tuesday evening, May 27 at 5:30 p.m.
The exhibition, Holodomor: Genocide by Famine, is one of a series of events taking place around the world to commemorate the 75th anniversary of what James Mace, the director of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine (1988), referred to as "the crime of the century that nobody's ever heard of."
The horrific event, known in Ukrainian as the Holodomor (literally, murder by starvation), took place in 1932-1933, less than twenty years after Ukraine was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union. Determined to force all Ukrainian farmers onto collective farms, to crush the burgeoning national revival, and to forestall any calls for Ukraine's independence, the brutal Communist regime of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin embarked on a campaign to starve the Ukrainian people into submission.
The Soviet government confiscated all the grain produced by Ukrainian farmers, withheld other foodstuffs, executed anyone trying to obtain food, and punished those who attempted to flee. As a result, in the land called the Breadbasket of Europe, millions of men, women, and children were starved to death.
Stalin boasted privately that 10 million people – 25% of Ukraine's population – had perished during the Holodomor. At least 3 million of the victims were children.
Despite the magnitude of the atrocity, the Soviet regime, behind its Iron Curtain, denied the existence of the Holodomor for decades, denouncing any reports as "anti-Soviet propaganda." It was not until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent establishment of an independent Ukraine that the contents of many sealed government archives were uncovered, exposing a wealth of gruesome information.
(ukrainianmuseum.org) "Genocide by Famine"

The Holodomor, Manmade Ukrainian Famine

Source: Stalin's Lies, "Big Lies of the 20th Century"

Chicago-American newspaper, from the Holodomor. Famine used as a weapon to starve 7 million, in effort to break Ukrainian Nationalism during the period between 1932-1933. See leftwing distortions of history on encyclopedia sites such as Wikipedia and Answers.com minimizing the evil of Communism.

Holodomor to Break Ukrainian Nationalism

"I have registered an article on the English Wikipedia to restore balance to the article about the soviet enigneered famine in Ukraine, conducted as a genocide against the Ukrainians. This article has been heavily assaulted by a small group of mostly Russian users, some of them openly declaring they're support for the criminal soviet system. I have made extensive explanations in my edit summaries (eg.: [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11]) as well as explained the situation and pointed out sepcific issues ([12], [13]) to which haven't gotten any reasonable reply. --Vernyhora 10:34, 20 December 2006 (UTC)"

Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Vernyhora

"Stalin replaced the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s with Five-Year Plans in 1928 and collective farming at roughly the same time. The Soviet Union was transformed from a predominantly peasant society to a major world industrial power by the end of the 1930s. Confiscations of grain and other food by the Soviet authorities under his orders contributed to a famine between 1932 and 1934, especially in the key agricultural regions of the Soviet Union, Ukraine Holodomor, Kazakhstan and North Caucasus that resulted in millions of deaths. Many peasants resisted collectivization and grain confiscations, but were repressed, most notably well-off peasants deemed "kulaks".
In the first years of collectivization it was estimated that industrial production would rise by 200% and and agricultural production by 50%[21], but these estimates were not met. Stalin blamed this unanticipated failure on kulaks (rich peasants), who resisted collectivization. (However, kulaks proper made up only 4% of the peasant population; the "kulaks" that Stalin targeted included the slightly better-off peasants who took the brunt of violence from the OGPU and the Komsomol. These peasants were about 60% of the population). Those officially defined as "kulaks," "kulak helpers," and later "ex-kulaks" were to be shot, placed into Gulag labor camps, or deported to remote areas of the country, depending on the charge.
The two-stage progress of collectivization—interrupted for a year by Stalin's famous editorial, "Dizzy with success" (Pravda, March 2, 1930), and "Reply to Collective Farm Comrades" (Pravda, April 3, 1930)—is a prime example of his capacity for tactical political withdrawal followed by intensification of initial strategies.

Many historians assert that the disruption caused by collectivization was largely responsible for major famines.
The 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine and the Kuban regions has been termed the Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор).

According to Alan Bullock, "the total Soviet grain crop was no worse than that of 1931 … it was not a crop failure but the excessive demands of the state, ruthlessly enforced, that cost the lives of as many as five million Ukrainian peasants." Stalin refused to release large grain reserves that could have alleviated the famine, while continuing to export grain; he was convinced that the Ukrainian peasants had hidden grain away, and strictly enforced draconian new collective-farm theft laws in response.
Other historians hold that it was largely the insufficient harvests of 1931 and 1932 caused by a variety of natural disasters that resulted in famine, with the successful harvest of 1933 ending the famine.
Famine affected other parts of the USSR. The death toll from famine in the Soviet Union at this time is estimated at between five and ten million people. The worst crop failure of late tsarist Russia, in 1892, had caused 375,000 to 400,000 deaths.)
Soviet and other historians have argued that the rapid collectivization of agriculture was necessary in order to achieve an equally rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union[citation needed] and ultimately win World War II. This is disputed by other historians; Alec Nove claims that the Soviet Union industrialized in spite of, rather than because of, its collectivized agriculture.
Retrieved from Soviet democracy

http://www.answers.com/topic/joseph-stalin

"...Other historians..." (questionable credentials) "...the insufficient harvests of 1931 and 1932 caused by a variety of natural disasters that resulted in famine..."

Can anyone say, "Communist Propaganda?!?"

Those who make ongoing excuses for this man-made famine holocaust have dealt a blow to every person who has suffered directly or indirectly from Communist policies. Leftwing apologists, Atheists, obviously have no shame or human empathy when they create such blatant distortions of history.