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[EarthNSky <erthnsky AT bellsouth.net>]

All true.
I was searching for the right word-opposite wasn't it.  'Additional' 
might have been better.

It went further than just food deprivation, too.  Even today, as we saw 
a few months ago when Russia invaded, Moscow has little respect for 
Georgia and Georgians.  I'd wager that it is the same throughout the 
former Soviet states.  The USSR operated as a collective in a lot of 
ways, taking the best from certain regions(food, fuel, etc.) and 
redistributing it as it saw fit.  Unfortunately, it was never fair or 
equal.

Clansgian AT wmconnect.com wrote:
> > > You mention the support of the USSR, so I will present the opposite view.
>
> Good post and good points, Bev, but it is not an 'opposite' view.
>
> The soviets used agriculture to punish some people.  For example, in Russia 
> before the revolution, the pople were under a patronage system of the Czarist 
> plutarchy.  When they went to collective farms it was simply substituting one 
> taskmaster for an other.  But in Belarus and the Ukraine the land had been held 
> for centuries by individual farmers, most of them small-holders.  
>
> The Soviets wanted all farms to be collective (coming to a country near you 
> soon) and so instituted policies which rewarded the farmers for selling their 
> holdings to the collective and economically punished those who resisted.  By 
> taking all collectively produced food and shipping it out of counry, denying 
> farmers equipment, feed, seeds, etc. and other policies,. the Soviets hoped to 
> starve the people into submission.  The result was the 'holodomor' [Ukrainian 
> for 'death by starvation'] and by the mid 1930's they had managed to starve 
> eight million people to death.
>
> But in the case of Cuba the Soviets did not want the communist country so 
> close to hte US to fail, so they shipped them farm equipment, chemical 
> fertilizer, and fuel to grow sugar cane and then bought all they produced at as much as 
> ten times the word's going rate for sugar.  When the USSR collapsed, the 
> Cubans had to offer their sugar on a world market at going prices with predictable 
> results.  They had been used to selling the overpriced sugar and buying almost 
> all their food ... and why not?  If you could grow a commodity for a 
> guaranteed buyer at ten times the going price, why waste your effort growing food 
> which you can buy cheaply?
>
> I would submit to you that it's not an opposite view, it is simply a 
> recounting of how the Soviets treated one people differently than another for their 
> own purposes.  But I would say that in the end the results aren't all that 
> different.  Never is with socialism.
>
>
> James
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--
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public 
debt  should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered 
and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed 
lest Rome become bankrupt.  People must again learn to work, instead of 
living on public assistance."

--Cicero, 55 BC
http://erthnsky.blogspot.com/