Was Stalin great?

[whipback]

[Elena]

[whipback]

[Elena]

Whipback,
it could be better for me not to mention sins here as it distracts from the question you asked. I mixed the thing that can't be mixed. By the way your thoughts seem to me as strange as mine to you.

[Martina]

Moral sins and crimes are quite different. And they are treated very differently, fortunately.
ONe is a subjective sin: you can be regarded as a good or a bad person, depending on how you behave sentimentally, but that's all.
And even in a Christian moral viewpoint, I doubt very much that a murderer and an adulterer would take the same place in hell!

[Elena]

[whipback]

Thank you for answering my questions Elena. Here is were my discussion ends for we share very different opinions and if anything more is said the discussion will become a heated arguement and we could end up greatly disliking each other for things of the past.

[ArcticDevil]

Если воспользоваться здравым смыслом и знанием истории, то понятно, что россказни о "десятках миллионах убитых" — ложь и полная глупость.
Легко повторять чужие штампы. Думать своей головой — сложно.

[Reagan Republican]

[alys]

[Hangernaid]

That is not true, first, by defination, there is not any Stalin or Reagan Cult.

Second, Who exactly was Reagan responsible for having killed?

In the old USSR, there was not freedom of the press, what information you have read is what ever information was approved for press by the government. The evils that Stalin committed, namely the purges, are well known and it seems that among Russians under 40 years old, the positive economic impact outweighs the murders. Or perhaps the mass killings are simply not well known among younger Russians, who is going to publish the news?

Actually, that is another similiarity between Hitler and Stalin. In 1933 infleation in Germany was very bad, and unemployment was 22%. When I was living in Germany in 1977, I was drinking with a couple young Germans, and they pointed out to me that even though the war was bad, Hitler saved the German economy.

It seems that Germans and Hitler, and Russians and Stalin, mass murder is forgiven is it makes your life better. I simply could not be that cold blooded.

Here are a couple text I found on the Stalin Purges easily in a search on Google:

Case Study:
Stalin's Purges
Summary

Under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, tens of millions of ordinary individuals were executed or imprisoned in labour camps that were little more than death camps. Perceived political orientation was the key variable in these mass atrocities. But gender played an important role, and in many respects the Purge period of Soviet history can be considered the worst gendercide of the twentieth century.

The background

According to the historian Robert Conquest, Joseph Stalin "gives the impression of a large and crude claylike figure, a golem, into which a demonic spark has been instilled." He was nonetheless "a man who perhaps more than any other determined the course of the twentieth century."

Joseph Stalin
Stalin was born Joseph Dzhugashvili in the Georgian town of Gori in 1879. In his youth he imbibed both the seminary training and the Great Russian nationalism that many would later link to his tyrannical exercise of power. He was an early activist in the Bolshevik movement, where he first assumed the pseudonym Stalin (which means "man of steel"), and was twice exiled to Siberia by the Tsarist authorities. When the Russian Revolution triumphed in October 1917, Stalin returned from exile, and was named General Secretary in 1922. The post was largely an undistinguished administrative one, but Stalin used it to fortify his power base and control over the bureaucracy of the ruling Communist Party. When the communist leader, Vladimir Lenin, died in 1924, a struggle for control broke out that pitted Stalin against his nemesis, Leon Trotsky, and a host of lesser party figures. Stalin's victory was slow and hard-fought, but by 1927 he had succeeded in having Trotsky expelled from the party and, in 1929, from the country (Trotsky was tracked down and killed by Stalin's agents in Mexico City in 1940).

By 1928, Stalin was entrenched as supreme Soviet leader, and he wasted little time in launching a series of national campaigns (the so-called Five-Year Plans) aimed at "collectivizing" the peasantry and turning the USSR into a powerful industrial state. Both campaigns featured murder on a massive scale. Collectivization especially targeted Ukraine, "the breadbasket of the Soviet Union," which clung stubbornly to its own national identity and preference for village-level communal landholdings. In 1932-33, Stalin engineered a famine (by massively raising the grain quota that the peasantry had to turn over to the state); this killed between six and seven million people and broke the back of Ukrainian resistance. The Ukrainian famine has only recently been recognized as one of the most destructive genocides of the twentieth century (see Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, and the Web resources compiled by The Ukrainian Weekly). The Five-Year Plans for industry, too, were implemented in an extraordinarily brutal fashion, leading to the deaths of millions of convict labourers, overwhelmingly men. These atrocities are described in the corvée (forced) labour case study. The millions of deaths in Stalin's "Gulag Archipelago" (the network of labour camps [gulags] scattered across the length and breath of Russia) are dealt with in the incarceration/death penalty case study.


A leader whose callous disregard for human life was matched only by his consuming paranoia, Stalin next turned his attention to the Communist Party itself. Various factions and networks opposed to his rule had managed to survive into the early 1930s; many in the party were now calling for reconciliation with the peasantry, a de-emphasizing of industrial production, and greater internal democracy. For Stalin, these dissident viewpoints represented an unacceptable threat. Anyone not unquestioningly loyal to him -- and many hundreds of thousands who were -- had to be "weeded out." The Communist Party would be rebuilt in the image of the "Great Leader." This was the origin of the "cult of personality" that permeated Soviet politics and culture, depicting Stalin as infallible, almost deity-like. (The cult lasted until his death in 1953, and provided George Orwell with the fuel for his satire Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which a Stalin-like figure appears as "Big Brother.") Stalin's drive for total control, and his pressing need for convict labour to fuel rapid industrialization, next spawned the series of immense internal purges -- beginning in 1935 -- that sent millions of party members and ordinary individuals to their deaths, either through summary executions or in the atrocious conditions of the "Gulag Archipelago."

By 1938, Conquest estimates that about 7 million Purge victims were in the labour/death camps, on top of the hundreds of thousands who had been slaughtered outright.[/color] In the worst camps, such as those of the Kolyma gold-mining region in the Arctic, the survival rate was just 2 or 3 percent (see the incarceration/death penalty case study). Alexander Solzhenitsyn calls the prison colonies in the Solovetsky Islands "the Arctic Auschwitz," and cites the edict of their commander, Naftaly Frenkel, which "became the supreme law of the Archipelago: 'We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months -- after that we don't need him anymore.'" (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, p. 49.)

[alys]

[Hangernaid]

Conquest is only one source, in the limited confines of a forum, to cite literally hundreds of other books, papers, and case studies would take more room than would be proper forum etiquette.

Actually, many of the sources were declassified files from Moscow after the USSR transitioned into the CIS. So these are USSR records, was the NKVD lying about itself, or did the US and England bribe the NKVD in the 1930's to write propaganda and then make it part of the secret records?

I do not mean to stir up a hornets nest, but the fact that Stalin was responsible for the death of 7 to 20 million people is fact. Believe what you wish, but the proof is readily available. It is too well documented.

How anyone responsible for that many deaths can be considered to be a great person is a concept that I cannot understand.

To be in denial about the millions murdered paves the path for a repeat of history. If you do not learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it.

The millions killed were your countrymen, not mine. In an American slang term, I don't have a horse in that race.

[alys]

[Hangernaid]

I think this will be my final post in this thread, because it is not productive.

Stalin and Hitler were friends before WW2, because of treaty limitations after WW1, Germany could not build tanks. The German Pkfw Mark 1, Pkfw Mark 2, and Pkfw Mark 3 were built IN RUSSIA!

When Hitler attacked Poland in 1939 from their western border, Russia attacked from the east. Until Germany attacked the USSR, the two countries were great friends.

When the USSR needed help, the US sent many ship loads of supplies on the deadly Murmansk run, American ships had to get thru German U-Boats and the Luftwaffe to get supplies to the USSR to aid the USSR in their defense against their former friend, Hitler.

When I stated early in this thread that the USSR was a police state, in 1935, my grandfather could have called FDR an idoit and nothing would have happened.

In 1935 if your grandfather had called Stalin an idoit, he would have been in one of the death camps.

In 1962, my father could have called President Kennedy a moron, and nothing would have happened.

In 1962, if your father called the head of the USSR an moron, the KGB would have arrested him

Yesterday I called President Bush and President Obama weak, and not good leaders, and I have no fear of the FBI arresting me.

Even though the USSR is no more, you still cannot say anything bad about Stalin.

Given that background, who would you believe state sponsored views provided by your government over history books that are written by a free press that is free to criticize our leaders.

We can, and often do critize our leaders, and your leaders too. Politicians are like a baby's diaper, they need to get changed often and for the same reason. They are full of .....