Generally speaking, again: I don’t know who you’ve been talking to or what they’ve said, the push against holodomor isn’t to downplay the extent of death, depravation or suffering. The only thing people are trying to say is that it wasn’t a genocide because it wasn’t a series of decisions that explicitly targeted the ukranian population for eradication.

Just so we can stop retreading this ground: there is no downplaying happening here. A bunch of scholars say that there isn’t evidence for a genocide. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t absolute desolation. In some ways the extent is expanded because we can now include the rest of the volga and kazakhstan, which is the real nightmare but never got the kind of traction ukrane did.

No one thinks it’s a win to have a famine where millions died.

The argument for a trans genocide is based on systemic targeting for eradication and shouldn’t be compared to the famine because one is an event that happened nearly a hundred years ago with an extensive (and evolving) historical context and understanding and the other is something happening right now.

Without equal levels of applied scholarship and a precise framework for analysis, comparing the two ends up being that sort of suffering Olympics vernacular that classier people call crass and I tend to just call shitty.

Another book worth checking out is stalins world. It’s not written sympathetically by any means.