In late 1929, the US Stock Market crashed, marking the beginning of the Great Depression. This “market failure” has often been used as the prime example of capitalism’s failings. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and American leftists would continue to trot it out as an excuse to increase government control of the economy for decades to come.
Simultaneous with US events, Joseph Stalin (as head of the socialist USSR) was ordering Ukrainian peasants to give up their farms to the government. This government confiscation of private property would lead to more catastrophic consequences in economic loss and death than anything that would occur during the Great Depression .
It should be remembered that what happened with the stock market was not the intentional decision of any one person whereas the starvation in Stalin’s government controlled economy was intentionally and ruthlessly ordered by a believer in economic equality. The consequence of his economic decisions was that five million people would be starved to death in Soviet controlled Ukraine. A common sight during the famine was for women to be seen lying on the ground dead from starvation with their malnourished babies attempting to nurse at their dead mother’s breast. The sight of lifeless women with the last trickles of milk being consumed by a dying infant was so common that Ukrainians had a phrase for it. They would say that these were the “buds of the socialist spring”.
Based on insights from Modern Times by Paul Johnson and Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder
