Nice myth. Food wasn't quite provided for free. You did not get quite even basic rations enough to survive even if you were able to get them, further, due to mass exodus from farming to city, buildings were built there, and you had to wait a really long time, sometimes forever, to get a living space by lot.
Similar with a car - it all operated under severe scarcity.
All countries involved, even East Germany, had these problems.
Workers got either in priority to farmers and further others. Except politicians and connected people got theirs first beyond workers.
And some were able to buy it ahead of the queue.
The magical development in the West was driven by really heavy handed subsidies industrial development on already richer area, which USSR just could not afford, and especially not after funding the high military spending.
That notwithstanding some completely broken experiments done in large scale like attempts to farm the steppes in the middle of nowhere, a lot of which was funded by export from the few basket countries which would have otherwise had enough food.
And after a relatively short while, the industrialization effort stalled, a variety of farming related problems appeared due to both mismanagement, bad weather and plagues, countries involved got indebted on bad terms...
I didn't vote but I guess the downvotes are because it calls the parent claim a "myth" and then goes on to agree with it.
The scarcity that made food and housing not free in practice is why monetization (capitalism) ended up being better, which I assume was MikePlacid's point.
Capitalism has problems for sure, but it eliminates scarcity more efficiently than any other system we have tried so far.
Capitalism may share the abundance unevenly, but it still creates it in the first place, which is key.
The problem is not monetization of basic needs, the problem is putting the controlling interest in the hands of a few who do not care about the lives of the many.
This famine happened from the concentration of power, not because food costs money. Democratic land reform solves it, keeping the monetary impetus in play.
The Holodomor was a very similar genocide where farms were collectivized. That didn't stop millions of people from dying from hunger as their own food was taken at gunpoint and exported to other countries.
>That didn't stop millions of people from dying from hunger as their own food was taken at gunpoint and exported to other countries.
The problem was not exactly that, there wasn't food export when there was famine. Communists are not that stupid. All they wanted was to overcome the corporate greed of the peasantry, who often sold food to workers at 2, 3, or 5 times the price, so they fought price gouging on food, determining fair prices, that would allow all the country to be well-fed.
But for some unknown reason in response to that beautiful and righteous policy the peasantry reduced food production, which caused the famine.
I'm not sure if you are mocking the absurdity of the false communist narrative or just repeating it uncritically.
So to be clear: Communists exported food, stolen from the people who grew it, which is very well known, here's one citation from Wikipedia:
> In regard to exports, Michael Ellman states that the 1932–1933 grain exports amounted to 1.8 million tonnes, which would have been enough to feed 5 million people for one year.[16]
Further it wasn't "stupidity" of Communists but rather a deliberate genocide of those considered inferior. They sent groups of soldiers around the countryside to steal more grain as children starved in the streets. It is one of the more horrific acts of brutality in the 20th century, all in service of authoritarianism.
>In regard to exports, Michael Ellman states that the 1932–1933 grain exports amounted to 1.8 million tonnes
That is blatant manipulation. Most of those grain de facto didn't left the country and were used to fight famine. From 1930 there was massive grain import. Moreover, import was considered by Stalin from 1928, but at that time all the statistics showed, that food situation will be fully fixed by fair share from upper parts of peasantry.
>deliberate genocide of those considered inferior
This is literally a conspiracy theory on the level of the Jews starting World War II to exterminate the Europeans.
>They sent groups of soldiers around the countryside to steal more grain as children starved in the streets.
Yeas, and they did that exactly to give that grain to those children.
The fact is, communists with all honesty tried to achieve a fair distribution of necessities to the poorest. But as always leftist's "fair" implies market incentive distortion and as a result hindered production.
The cause of the famine is not the evil communists who took grain from hungry peasants, communists simply tried to take excess food from the rich and give it to the poor. The cause of the famine is the 7-fold drop in food production. And when you have that drop - there inevitable will be mass famine.
