I was most intrigued by the official Soviet response to the crisis in Ukraine. The position appeared to be contradictory. Sometimes officials simply denied that mass starvation was occurring, and when such starvation was acknowledged, it was described as an anti-Communist plot. Both positions were fascinating. It was hard for me to understand how denial could occur with such evidence surrounding the starvation. Starvation leaves bodies on a mass scale, and bodies are hard to hide. Yet even Soviet officials working directly in these reasons followed the party line and would deny the scale of the crisis. The proposed explanation appeared to be one of fear. When higher ups denied the deaths of millions in Ukraine as a gross exaggeration, one’s best course of action would be to parrot this position or risk being purged.
Furthermore, the latter course of describing mass starvation as an anti-Communist plot left me incredulous. The idea that people would be willing to believe that millions individuals would be willing to sacrifice their health (and in many cases, their lives) to undermine Communist success seems entirely illogical. Yet many people, including Stalin, appeared to embrace this. Why? I would point to a form of rationalization. Soviet-style communism under Stalin did not allow for the possibility of failure. Communism had to succeed, and many staked their careers and lives on it. Therefore, it became much easier to believe that an apparent failure was the deliberate work of others to undermine one’s success. In other words, victim-blaming occurred on a massive scale. It also provided an additional reason to not intervene. Snyder explains that many of these deaths were preventable had government officials changed policy. But labeling victims as anti-Communist made it much easier to deny these courses of action. While in some cases, this blindness was probably malicious, I believe that others were self-imposed as a way to cope. It was one of the few ways to explain away the great tragedy that many officials were witnessing.