I was with the neocons– (Then I went to the Middle East)

[Martinghoul]

Quote from Tresor:
Stalin for obvious reasons could not be the only decision-making body on everything in a country populated by 140 million people. Even managing a company with 1,000 employees requires delegating powers.

Stalin managed the country strategically to some extend and in some rare cases operationally (whom of his opponents to kill). Cheka was right after Stalin. They e.g. could decide whom to kill wthout trial. NKVD were responsible for thousands of innocent deaths in Warsaw Pact countries. NKVD was a crime organisation.

True, but surely you would agree that an event of Holodomor proportions couldn't have been based on operational decisions? A famine that kills millions over a huge expanse of fertile land surely requires a strategic decision. In my view (and, as I understand it, most serious historians share it), Holodomor was caused by specific economic and political policies of the Soviet government. In the 1930s Comrade Stalin was the Soviet government.

Holodomor happened in 1932 - 1933. At that time (statistics for 1934 are available) the Jews represented 38.5% of the NKVD leaders (Jews were only 2% of the population), which consitutes an over-representation of 19 times. NKVD was implementing operationally the ideas from Moscow.

Agreed... I never said Jews were not involved in carrying out the orders from the top. I said their significance at the top of the hierarchy was growing ever smaller throughout the 30s, as Stalin kept "phasing out" the Old Guard.

The importance of the Party was insignificant. The role of the Party was just to give the people the illusion that they have a representation in Moscow. In fact people did not matter in Communism. Secret police and secret agents rulled the country (Cheka and NKVD) and to some extend military.

That's not correct, but it doesn't matter. Again, my point was that throughout the 30s Stalin slowly but surely got rid of the people of Jewish ethnicity in his apparatus, both the enforcement and ideology parts of it.

I never was in Ukraine. Since you are half Russian/half Ukrainian for sure you know a lot more about Jewish-Ukrainians relations and the background. And of course you know something about ''current political climate where all sorts of populist points can be earned by blaming the Russians and the Jews'' - just curious: if not the Russians and the Jews are to blame, then who is? Do you think it is a propaganda? Did Ukrainians cause the famine for themselves and try to blame others?

Well, I don't live in the Ukraine, so I don't know enough to be an authority on the subject.

At any rate, that's not important. What's important is that in one of your earlier post you said that you don't think it's right to blame an entire ethnic group for the sins of some of its more heinous representatives. Why then do you suggest the Ukrainians need a people to blame, whether it be the Russians or the Jews or the Latvians or whatever? If you have to blame someone, blame the Soviet government and Stalin. And yes, it is propaganda by populist politicians trying to use the history of anti-Semitism in the Ukraine, as well as the current Ukrainian-Russian tensions. It's a no-brainer in this climate to point a finger at the Jews and the Russians and say "Here go the zhidy and the moskali... At it again, screwing the honest Ukrainian peasant, just like they did in the 1930s". As to your last question, I assume that was sarcasm.

BTW, I just thought I'd mention that I don't see a lot of Jews blaming all Ukrainians for what people like John Demjanjuk did at Sobibor and Majdanek. However, that's sorta tangential.