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Congratulations! You have successfully navigated to Inherently Interesting Fall 2025, the most wonderful, most interesting, and most important blog at this particular URL. Your comments and questions on this blog will help make the class even more wonderful and interesting--and occasionally earn you a bit of extra credit!

 To add your comments, click on the "comments" link immediately below. You may leave your comments as an "anonymous" blogger so that you don't have to set up an account. On extra credit assignments, be sure to include your name at the end of the post so I know who to give credit to.

To get started, here's a test of the History 122 extra credit system. Click the "comments" link below and tell me what historical figure or event you think most interesting or important.

Harvest of Despair--Holodomor (extra credit)

Communism is one of the three "flavors" of totalitarianism we talk about in class.  It is the most widespread and, in a certain sense, most "successful" flavor of totalitarianism--and probably the most important for you to understand.

For many years, I showed in class a video called "Harvest of Despair" an excellent film on "Holodomor," the Ukrainian famine. I haven't had time for this in recent years, but I'd very much like you to see the video. 

You can watch this online version of The Harvest of Despair. There is a better quality DVD version in the NSU library.  A group of you might want to check the DVD out and watch it together.  

A very good alternative is to watch the "Great War" episode on  Holodomor. 

I'll give you extra credit for your response to the prompt here:

Which Holodomor video did you watch?  What did the video teach you about Soviet Communism that you didn't know before? What insights did you gain on the motivations and methods of those who supported the movement? Did anything here help you understand why this particular flavor of totalitarianism survived longer (and did more damage) than other totalitarian systems?