I did not say there was no popular opposition to Stalinism!!!!!!!!!! What I said was that it was wrong to act as if it had no popular support, which it did. It was not "the bureaucracy" against "the masses": it was "the bureaucracy" with the support of one part of the masses (the majority, by most accounts, except in rural Ukraine, the Volga region and the Cossack districts of course) against another part of the masses. (We're also ahistorically amalgamating the Stalin era and the Brezhnev era a bit here.)
You are right about Ukraine; I do not believe you are correct about Belarus. Belarus, IIRC, had one (1) "prisoner of conscience" during the entire Brezhnev era. I do not believe Belarus was hit by the famine. What it was hit by was the Nazis, who killed a quarter of the population and then were driven off by the Soviet Army, providing a great deal of support in Belarus for the Russian-Belarussian Union today (which has been sabotaged by Lukashenko, but that's another story).
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And Chris is being soft on Stalinism in denying popular opposition to the regime while it existed. Collectivization was a civil war from above, so horrific and so delegitimating to the USSR that many in Belurus and Ukraine initially welcomed the Nazis as liberators. As Chris well knows. This was followed post GPW (WWII to you ignorant westerners) by a seven year insurrection in Ukraine that required the Red Army to suppress it. It was CIA-financed, but obviously based in real popular discontent. Moreover there were workers' revolts, a number of them socialist in character, that were savagely suppressed throughout the 50s and early 60s, details widely available. Chris knows this too.
Lyubo, bratsy, lyubo, lyubo, bratsy, zhit!
ËÞÁÎ, ÁÐÀÒÖÛ, ËÞÁÎ, ËÞÁÎ, ÁÐÀÒÖÛ, ÆÈÒÜ!
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