Russians Observe Stalin's 126th Birthday

[cire4]

MOSCOW - Residents of a southern Russian town unveiled a statue Wednesday to Josef Stalin, as Communists and others marked the 126th anniversary of the late Soviet dictator's birth.

More three dozen residents of Digora, in the Caucasus region of North Ossetia, laid carnations at the gold bust topping a granite obelisk, while children in Soviet-style red kerchiefs saluted.

"Under Stalin, every year we waited for improvements and every year there were improvements. It's a fact," sculptor Mikhail Dzboyev said in televised comments.

<snip>

A growing number of Russian towns in recent years have considered erecting monuments to Stalin, a controversial issue for many Russians who say the dictator was responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people.

Others revere him for the Soviet Union's rapid industrialization and his leadership against Nazi Germany during World War II.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051221/ap_on_re_eu/russia_stalin_s_birthday

[smirkymonkey]

1. Hmmm...the 40 Million People who perished under his reign,

mainly in the gulags, might think he was not such a peach of a guy.

What's next - Germans praising Hitler?

[IndianaGreen]

16. That's another capitalist myth!

It began when pro-Hitler publisher William Randolph Hearst began to say that Stalin was personally responsible for murdering 20 million Russians. Over the years, the number has risen to 40 million or even higher. There is no documentary evidence that Stalin killed that many people, not even a million, or even 100,000!

While this does not exonerate Stalin from his own culpability in the liquidation of many good communists, it doesn't rise to the mythological levels that Americans are indoctrinated since kindergarten.

If you want a dictator, you need to see no further than your emperor Bush. If you want to discuss a gulag, you must begin with the ones the Bush has established in Cuba, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

BTW, one thing that Stalin was truly guilty of was in institutionalizing torture. His argument in justifying torture went like this: if you have a prisoner that has vital information that you need, you must torture him in order to get it. This is the same argument that Bush and even some Democrats are making in defending US torture. Now, who is really and truly the evil one?

[smirkymonkey]

18. That wasn't an either or statement.

Why do so many people think that there can only be one tyrant ever to have lived on the planet. Nowhere did I mention Bush (even though I think he is a lying, psychotic, evil, stupid bastard responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands.) To put it simply Bush=Bad, Stalin=Bad, Hitler=Bad. They were all sick fucks who made people's lives miserable and murdered millions (Bush isn't finished yet).

A little tidbit:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/stalin.html

" Under the pretext of constructing `socialism in one country', Stalin terrorized large segments of the Soviet population, such as the Kulaks, a term for prosperous farmers who were disinherited when agriculture was collectivized. He also orchestrated a massive famine in the Ukraine in which an estimated 5 million people died. It is believed that with the purges, forced famines, state terrorism, labor camps, and forced migrations, Stalin was responsible for the death of as many as 40 million people within the borders of the Soviet Union. According to former National Security Advisor to US President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Stalin murdered an estimated 20 million people."

[IndianaGreen]

19. I take it you believe William Randolph Hearst

You American educational indoctrination was successful!

[American Tragedy]

31. False Dilemma

Are you seriously trying to argue that hatred for Stalin and hatred for Bush are mutually exclusive? If one is not a Communist, then they must be a Republican? How pathetically simplistic.

Personally, I oppose authoritarianism in all forms, on either side of the political spectrum.

[IndianaGreen]

34. I am saying that Hearst was the source for the "Stalin killed millions"

Hearst was an enemy of the New Deal, often referring to FDR as Stalin Delano Roosevelt. Hearst was also an anti-Semite (as Walt Disney was) and he was sympathetic to Hitler.

I also argue that Americans are fearful that if they were to allow the possibility that the myths they were taught since kindergarten were to be shown to be false, their entire moral universe will collapse. The "Stalin killed 20-50-60 millions" is one such myth, the other and more powerful myth is the one about Jesus's resurrection. Imagine the horror at the discovery of Jesus' tomb in Nazareth with his body still in it. The explanation for this scenario is not a miracle but a simple practical explanation: the reason the tomb was empty was that Jesus's family had moved his body to his hometown of Nazareth to be buried in the family plot. According to the Gospel of Mark, which is acknowledged as the earliest surviving Gospel, Mary Magdalene found the empty tomb in Jerusalem, and her and other women ran away because they were afraid. There was no resurrection! Will those whose power derive from Christianity will allow any news about the discovery of Jesus's tomb, or will they suppress the science?

Back on point:

In 1935 Hearst published a series of articles in which he used the deaths resulting from a drought in the Ukraine in 1932. Hearst inflated the number of deaths a tenth fold, and then he ascribed to Stalin personal responsibility for the deaths. Hearst did this in order to sabotage any anti-Nazi alliance between FDR and Stalin and, more importantly, to undercut the New Deal by portraying it as an American version of Stalinism.

Lies concerning the history of the Soviet Union

by Mario Sousa

The myth concerning the famine in the Ukraine

One of the first campaigns of the Hearst press against the Soviet Union revolved round the question of the millions alleged to have died as a result of the Ukraine famine. This campaign began on 18 February 1935 with a front-page headline in the Chicago American ‘6 million people die of hunger in the Soviet Union’. Using material supplied by Nazi Germany, William Hearst, the press baron and Nazi sympathiser, began to publish fabricated stories about a genocide which was supposed to have been deliberately perpetrated by the Bolsheviks and had caused several million to die of starvation in the Ukraine. The truth of the matter was altogether different. In fact what took place in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1930s was a major class struggle in which poor landless peasants had risen up against the rich landowners, the kulaks, and had begun a struggle for collectivisation, a struggle to form kolkhozes.

This great class struggle, involving directly or indirectly some 120 million peasants, certainly gave rise to instability in agricultural production and food shortages in some regions. Lack of food did weaken people, which in turn led to an increase in the number falling victim to epidemic diseases. These diseases were at that time regrettably common throughout the world. Between 1918 and 1920 an epidemic of Spanish flu caused the death of 20 million people in the US and Europe, but nobody accused the governments of these countries of killing their own citizens. The fact is that there was nothing these government could do in the face of epidemics of this kind. It was only with the development of penicillin during the second world war, that it became possible for such epidemics to be effectively contained. This did not become generally available until towards the end of the 1940s.

The Hearst press articles asserting that millions were dying of famine in the Ukraine – a famine supposedly deliberately provoked by the communists – went into graphic and lurid detail. The Hearst press used every means possible to make their lies seem like the truth, and succeeded in causing public opinion in the capitalist countries to turn sharply against the Soviet Union. This was the origin of the first giant myth manufactured alleging millions were dying in the Soviet Union. In the wave of protests against the supposedly communist-provoked famine which the Western press unleashed, nobody was interested in listening to the Soviet Union’s denials and complete exposure of the Hearst press lies, a situation which prevailed from 1934 until 1987! For more than 50 years several generations of people the world over were brought up on a diet of these slanders to harbour a negative view of socialism in the Soviet Union.

<snip>

Nevertheless the millions said to have died of starvation in the Ukraine according to the Hearst press in America, parroted in books and films, was completely false information. The Canadian journalist, Douglas Tottle, meticulously exposed the falsifications in his book ‘Fraud, famine and fascism – the Ukrainian genocide myth from Hitler to Harvard’, published in Toronto in 1987. Among other things, Tottle proved that the photographic material used, horrifying photographs of starving children, had been taken from 1922 publications at a time when millions of people did die from hunger and war conditions because eight foreign armies had invaded the Soviet Union during the Civil War of 1918-1921. Douglas Tottle gives the facts surrounding the reporting of the famine of 1934 and exposes the assorted lies published in the Hearst press. One journalist who had over a long period of time sent reports and photographs from supposed famine areas was Thomas Walter, a man who never set foot in the Ukraine and even in Moscow had spent but a bare five days. This fact was revealed by the journalist Louis Fisher, Moscow Correspondent of The Nation, an American newspaper. Fisher also revealed that the journalist M Parrott, the real Hearst press correspondent in Moscow, had sent Hearst reports that were never published concerning the excellent harvest achieved by the Soviet Union in 1933 and on the Ukraine’s advancement. Tottle proves as well that the journalist who wrote the reports on the alleged Ukrainian famine, ‘Thomas Walker’, was really called Robert Green and was a convict who had escaped from a state prison in Colorado! This Walker, or Green, was arrested when he returned to the US and when he appeared in court, he admitted that he had never been to the Ukraine. All the lies concerning millions dead of starvation in the Ukraine in the 1930s, in a famine supposedly engineered by Stalin only came to be unmasked in 1987! Hearst, the Nazi, the police agent Conquest and others had conned millions of people with their lies and fake reports. Even today the Nazi Hearst’s stories are still being repeated in newly-published books written by authors in the pay of right-wing interests.

The Hearst press, having a monopolist position in many States of the US, and having news agencies all over the world, was the great megaphone of the Gestapo. In a world dominated by monopoly capital, it was possible for the Hearst press to transform Gestapo lies into ‘truths’ emitted from dozens of newspapers, radio stations and, later on, TV channels, the world over. When the Gestapo disappeared, this dirty propaganda war against socialism in the Soviet Union carried on regardless, albeit with the CIA as its new patron. The anti-communist campaigns of the American press were not scaled down in the slightest. Business continued as usual, first at the bidding of the Gestapo and then at the bidding of the CIA. (Note: The CIA, it has come out, had as their main informants SD and SS personnel under Reinhard Gehlen. See Stalin and Yezhov, An Exra-Paradigmatic View Philip E. Panaggio).

http://www.davidicke.net/tellthetruth/history/hearst.html

http://www.geocities.com/redcomrades/lies.html

The Ukrainian famine-genocide myth

by John Puntis
July 2002

Journalistic fraud in the 1930s

In the autumn of 1934, an American using the name of Thomas Walker entered the Soviet Union. After less than a week in Moscow, the remainder of his 13 day stay was spent in transit to the Manchurian border, at which point he left the USSR never to return. Four months later a series of articles began in the Hearst press in America, by Thomas Walker, “noted journalist, traveller and student of Russian affairs who has spent several years touring the Union of Soviet Russia”. The articles described a famine in the Ukraine that had claimed six million lives, and was illustrated with photographs of corpses and starving children. Walker was said to have smuggled in a camera under “the most difficult and dangerous circumstances”.

Louis Fischer, an American writer living in Moscow at the time was suspicious. Why had the Hearst press sat on these sensational stories for ten months before publication? He established that Walker’s short visit to the Soviet Union could not possibly have allowed him to even visit the areas he described and photographed. He also pointed out that Walker’s photographic evidence was distinctly odd: not only were the pictures suggestive of an earlier decade (Fischer thought probably of the 1921 Volga famine) but contained a mixture of scenes taken in both summer and winter. Fischer also noted that the 1933 harvest in the Ukraine had been good.

Some of the pictures were subsequently identified as showing scenes from the Austro-Hungarian empire and World War 1, and it was known that Hearst newspapers were digging up old pictures and retouching them for use as propaganda. Pictures some times appeared labelled as having been taken in Russia, and at other times the same picture is relocated to the Ukraine for obviously political reasons. Not only were the photographs a fraud, and the trip to the Ukraine a fraud, but Thomas Walker himself was a fraud, turning out to be an escaped convict by the name of Robert Green who had served time for forgery. At his subsequent trial following recapture he admitted that his series of pictures used in the Hearst newspaper articles were fakes and were not taken in the Ukraine as stated. Despite these facts, the same photos are still those used in commemoration posters, on web sites and in the film ‘Harvest of Despair’.

http://www.stalinsociety.org.uk/ukrainian.html#fraud

[JVS]

20. Zbigniew Brzezinski= Polish hawk with an axe to grind

[blindpig]

33. Like it or not

without Stalin's ruthlessness and iron will Russia probably would have lost WWII on the first onslaught. Yes, he was an evil motherfucker but the fact still remains. That Russia's weakness was to a good degree Stalin's own doing because of the purges of the military appears to be not so important in the popular memory. He beat Hitler and that's what is remembered.

[Fenris]

36. Does your Soviet apologism know no bounds?

So have all reputable historians of the Stalin era fabricated their evidence to fit with some ridiculous myth you believe Hearst invented? The purges, are they all a fabrication? The starvation of the Ukranian peasantry? The deportations to the Gulags? Stalin and the Politburo may have not pulled the the triggers that silenced so many of the party members, but they certainly were the ones who orchestrated the show trials and the subsequent liquidations. Hitler didn't personally gas millions, but he is regarded as one of the greatest monsters in history for allowing and approving. genocide and mass murder to take place. Stalin should share that distinction.

[IndianaGreen]

38. The Russian Gulags were a creation of the Tsars!

As to show trials, we need to look no further than Saddam's trial.

As to the facts, we can look at what was found when the old Soviet archives were opened to Western historians and compare those findings to the anti-Soviet myths taught in American classrooms:

Gorbachev opens the archives

The opening up of the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party is really the central issue in this tangled tale, this for two reasons: partly because in the archives can be found the facts that can shed light on the truth. But even more important is the fact that those speculating wildly on the number of people killed and imprisoned in the Soviet Union had all been claiming for years that the day the archives were opened up the figures they were citing would be confirmed. Every one of these speculators in the dead and incarcerated claimed that this would be the case: Conquest, Sakharov, Medvedev, and all the rest. But when the archives were opened up and research reports based on the actual documents began to be published a very strange thing happened. Suddenly both Gorbachev's free press and the speculators in dead and incarcerated completely lost interest in the archives.

The results of the research carried out on the archives of the Central Committee by Russian historians Zemskov, Dougin and Xlevnjuk, which began to appear in scientific journals as from 1990, went entirely unremarked. The reports containing the results of this historical research went completely against the inflationary current as regards the numbers who were being claimed by the 'free press' to have died or been incarcerated. Therefore their contents remained unpublicised. The reports were published in low-circulation scientific journals practically unknown to the public at large. Reports of the results of scientific research could hardly compete with the press hysteria, so the lies of Conquest and Solzhenitsyn continued to gain the support of many sectors of the former Soviet Union's population. In the West also, the reports of the Russian researchers on the penal system under Stalin were totally ignored on the front pages of newspapers, and by TV news broadcasts. Why?

What the Russian research shows

The research on the Soviet penal system is set out in a report nearly 9,000 pages long. The authors of this report are many, but the best-known of them are the Russian historians V.N. Zemskov, A.N. Dougin and O.V. Xlevnjuk. Their work began to be published in 1990 and by 1993 had nearly been finished and published almost in its entirety. The reports came to the knowledge of the West as a result of collaboration between researchers of different Western countries. The two works with which the present author is familiar are: the one which appeared in the French journal l'Histoire in September 1993, written by Nicholas Werth, the chief researcher of the French scientific research centre, CNRS (Centre National de Ia Recherche Scientifique), and the work published in the US journal American Historical Review by J. Arch Getty, a professor of history at the University of California, Riverside, in collaboration with G.T. Rettersporn, a CNRS researcher, and the Russian researcher, V.A.N. Zemskov, from the Institute of Russian History (part of the Russian Academy of Science). Today books have appeared on the matter written by the above-named researchers or by others from the same research team. Before going any further, I want to make clear, so that no confusion arises in the future, that none of the scientists involved in this research has a socialist world outlook. On the contrary their outlook is bourgeois and anti-socialist. Indeed many of them are quite reactionary. This is said so that the reader should not imagine that what is to be set out below is the product of some 'communist conspiracy'. What has happened is that the above-named researchers have thoroughly exposed the lies of Conquest, Solzhenitsyn, Medvedev and others, which they have done purely by reason of the fact that they place their professional integrity in first place and will not allow themselves to be bought for propaganda purposes.

The results of the Russian research answer a very large number of questions about the Soviet penal system. For us it is the Stalin era that is of greatest interest, and it is there we find cause for debate. We will pose a number of very specific questions and we will seek out our replies in the journals l'Histoire and the American Historical Review. This will be the best way of bringing into the debate some of the most important aspects of the Soviet penal system. The questions are the following:

1. What did the Soviet penal system consist of?
2. How many prisoners were there - both political and non-political?
3. How many people died in the labour camps?
4. How many people were condemned to death in the years before 1953, especially in the purges of 1937-38?
5. How long, on average, were the prison sentences?

http://www.northstarcompass.org/nsc9912/lies.htm

[manic expression]

60. Yes, but he ran them as well

Just because the Czars created them didn't make it justified for him to continue their despicable use.

Look, even if the purges of Russia were greatly overexaggerated (I'm not sure if they are, but I'm sure that they happened), you should not deny the very terrible nature of them. Even if you are not denying this, it seems like you are, so perhaps you should clarify your position.

[nodehopper]

70. oh PLEASE

there is PLENTY of evidence that Stalin killed between 15 and 20 million people either through execution or imprisonment in gulags under Article 58. This is a fact accepted by Soviet and Russian and foreign historians, documented in many since-declassified archival documents, personal histories and prison records. What are you even talking about? Wow, now I have seen it all on DU. Mao apologists, Mugabe apologists, but never Stalin apologists before.

[Rhiannon12866]

26. It's the Georgians who revere Stalin, not the Russians.

Stalin was born in what was formerly Soviet Georgia, until the fall of the USSR. I've visited the city of his birth and there were statues of him all over the place. And I was told that the Georgians love Stalin because he killed so many Russians.

[Crunchy Frog]

2. The whole world

really is going down the crapper isn't it?:hurts:

[pop goes the weasel]

3. No surprise

Teacher I had once told of his visit to Russia in the mid-1980s. People had pictures of Stalin in their homes, cars, wallets. Whatever he really was didn't matter--he had become for the common people of symbol of stability and pride.

It's nothing new that people would come to lionize a monster. After all, Vlad the Impaler is still considered a great hero in Transylvania.

[David__77]

4. Stalin was immeasurably better than Hitler... or Bush.

That's just my opinion. Stalin led the Soviet people in liberating Europe from barbaric fascism. There's absolutely no comparison between the two things.

[Roaming]

5. Hitler built roads and improved Germany's economy

And Stalin helped defeat Hitler. So what?

Stalin is believed to be responsible for 20 to 30 million deaths. Russian officials admit that at least 20 million were victims of Stalin's purges. Some 5 to 10 million died as a direct result of famines caused by Stalin's collectivization of agriculture.

Direct quotes from Stalin: "The death of a single individual is a tragedy," and "The death of a million is a statistic." "Death solves all problem. No man, no problem."

You are right about one thing -- there is no comparison between Stalin and Hitler--they were both immeasurably evil and rotten to the core.

[JVS]

21. Until Hitler got the country completly destroyed.

[bleedingheart]

6. tell that to the families who had loved ones murdered by him

my one uncle in Lithuania is the only surviving member of his family after Stalin's agents took his parents and two sisters off to die in the labor camps of Siberia...

Stalin was a psychotic beast.

[LisaL]

7. Well, to be PC, poor guy was most likely a paranoid

schizophrenic. Which means we all should feel sorry for him. He wasn't responsible for any of his crimes.

[bleedingheart]

8. gets no sympathy from me

he and Beria were sickos...

[brentspeak]

12. Paranoid, yes. Schizophrenic, no.

He never suffered from psychotic delusions or hallucinations of any sort.

[LisaL]

13. And you would know that how?

[Hypatia82]

59. Those around him get no excuse either...

and from his own letters Stalin knew exactly what he was doing. And were he mentally unfit to be in charge it was the duty of those around him to get him out of control. There is simply no excuse for what happened under his rule. And all evidence points to him being fully aware of his actions.

[LisaL]

63. Get him out of control? It wouldn't be an easy thing to do,

considering he was paranoid and would destroy anyone who he suspected was out to get him-even if it wasn't true.

[nodehopper]

72. are you being sarcastic?

[6th Borough]

56. Lithuania was one of the more poorly treated populations...

by Stalin. All the more so during the post WWII-European realignment.

That was a rather unfortunate time to be a resident of a country/territory in the vicinity of the former East Prussia.

At least he didn't live in Koenigsberg.

[IndianaGreen]

68. Now that the Baltic Republics are "free," what do you think they are doing

with their "freedoms"?

How about persecuting gays?

Latvian Gay Marriage Ban Signed Into Law

by Malcolm Thornberry, 365Gay.com European Bureau Chief

Posted: December 21, 2005 3:00 pm ET

(Riga) Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga on Wednesday signed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

The amendment was passed by the Parliament last week, making the country the only member of the European Union to ban gay marriage in its constitution. (story)

The act defines marriage as only between a man and a woman.

Vike-Freiberga won praise from social conservatives but harsh criticism from LGBT leaders.

“We believe our President missed a unique opportunity to stop the development of homophobia and hate within Latvian politics," said Imants Kozlovskis, the executive director of the International Lesbian and Gay Association - Latvia in a statement.

"It is pitiful that the President of Latvia did not notice the nature of the amendment – a single political party’s pre-election populist campaign when LGBT people were used as a target for hate, humiliation and harassment"

http://www.365gay.com/Newscon05/12/122105Latvia.htm

[6th Borough]

69. Better to be persecuted by your own then by outside forces.

At the least you can hold those responsible in account...or, at the very least, it isn't as difficult as fighting a decentralized hegemony.

OTOH, it's easier to face the truth; that you live within a country who;s values you don't share.

Historically, you can accept the truth; Latvia (or Livonia), with it's capitol of Riga, is culturally much closer aligned with Russia than Lithuania (capitol Vilnius/Wilna, former Grand Duchy in union w/ Poland).

...and Poland-Lithuania was a more free entity to live in for landless; more receptive to cultural (especially religious) diversity; in the 15th century than Russia has been....probably at any time in its history. From Novgorod until now.

[brentspeak]

11. In between enslaving and killing the Soviet people, you mean

You forgot to add that.

[LisaL]

17. LOL. Stalin either killed his own wife, or made her life

so miserable that she killed herself. His son was captured by the Germans, but Stalin refused to exchange him, so the son died too.
Mrs. Bush is very much alive. The kiddies too. I think Stalin takes the cake.

[nodehopper]

71. oh really?

Bush is an imperialist and unlawful president. However, he hasn't offed 20 million people yet. That number of victims makes Stalin pretty much equivalent to Hitler. And while the Bush administration certainly exhibits all the conventional marks of emerging fascism, you can't compare the murder of 20 million people with anything except...another murder of 20 million people.

Stalin led the Soviet people in liberating Europe from barbaric fascism? Are you familiar with history from that time period at all? You should read up on the Molotov-Ribberntropp act. Then you should read up about how Europe was provisionally divided between Stalin and Hitler before Germany broke the pact and attacked the USSR, after which Soviet Ally Germany was Despicable Fascist Germany.

[David Zephyr]

9. Stalin was a monster, a murderer and he betrayed the Russian Revolution.

There is nothing redeeming about Josef Stalin. Nothing.

Stalin betrayed the Russian Revolution. He hunted down Leon Trotsky and his children and ordered their murders.

He is solely responsible for the cruel murder of tens of millions of innocent people during his reign of terror including some of Russia's greatest revolutionary heroes.

And just as bad, his reprehensible actions enabled the oligarchies of this world and the uber- corporatists to make him the poster boy of "socialism" for decades and decades.

[JVS]

22. Trotsky would have fucked up even worse.

[Rhiannon12866]

29. Stalin was Georgian, not Russian.

I visited Soviet Georgia, shortly before the fall of the USSR. Stalin is still revered there and there are numerous statues of him, as there were statues of Lenin in Russia. I was told that the Georgians love Stalin because he killed so many Russians.

[fujiyama]

10. Stalin was a psychopath, but showed "strength"

I suppose in times of economic difficulty, people look to past leaders for symbols of strength, even if that strength was shown not by great leadership, but by pure violence.

[LisaL]

67. You couldn't do it any other way.

Soviet Union had 15 republics. Different religion, different nationalities. Many hated each other, and had long history of fighting. You couldn't hold it together, except by force.
The minute there wasn't enough force, it all fallen apart.

[UTUSN]

14. Why? n/t

[LisaL]

15. Probably for the same reason many support Bush.

People are nuts.

[JVS]

24. Probably because the last 14 years have sucked ass for many of them

I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they think this democracy thing is over-rated. Even in East Germany where things have gone much better than the former USSR, there are many people who think that the dismantling of the East German state was not a great thing

[liberalpragmatist]

25. When people are unhappy, they always get nostalgic about the past

The soviet state was not a pretty one. But the last decade and a half in Russia has been AWFUL. People have no economic or personal security. The country's economy has crashed, all social protections are gone, and even the "democracy" they've gotten is pretty rotten, run by corrupt bureaucrats and self-serving politicians who are rapidly making the country more authoritarian.

People were unhappy in Soviet times, but now that they're even MORE unhappy - and hungry, too - they get all nostalgic about the past. And with Stalin, many will deny that he killed that many and they'll talk about how people "respected Russia" when he was in charge.

You see the same thing in a lot of segments of Iran - people will get nostalgic about the Shah. And the same thing with Milosevich and the Serbs. It's a pretty common thread throughout.

I also think it's silly when people say, "well, the Russians just like authoritarianism." I'm personally quite skeptical of that view. People talk about how Russia has never known democracy, but that's true of most of the world. And if they were so prone towards authoritarianism, the revolution wouldn't have occurred in the first place. Russians current skepticism of democracy and self-censorship is a product of years of being taught not to say what they think, and of the chaos and uncertainty of the past few years, which for a lot of people makes dictatorship look quite good.

[wickerwoman]

27. A friend of mine teaches in Siberia.

She told me that in a recent survey of middle school kids in the area, 80% of the girls listed "prostitute" as the job to which they aspire. 80% of the boys listed "contract killer".

When you're facing that level of hopelessness, I guess stability at any cost looks comparatively good.

It sucks on a personal level because I've been dying to live in Russia ever since I was a kid but with this level of instability it's looking increasingly unlikely.

[LiberteToujours]

28. Do you have any evidence for that claim?

That sounds absurd to me.

[IndianaGreen]

35. Evidence? Did you even read what the poster wrote?

bezdomny said that he/she has a friend that teaches in Siberia and that she was the source!

She told me that in a recent survey of middle school kids in the area, 80% of the girls listed "prostitute" as the job to which they aspire. 80% of the boys listed "contract killer".

Such social conditions would have been unheard of during the Soviet era! Perhaps it is easier for Americans to believe that capitalism has brought peace and prosperity to the former USSR, it has not, and that people are singing and dancing in the streets in gratitude to Ronald Reagan.

[LiberteToujours]

50. Of course I read it

But I don't believe it. There is nowhere in the world where 80% of children aspire to be prostitutes or contract killers. That's just absurd, use some common sense.

[wickerwoman]

54. I have some support.

As I said, I'm going on what my friend told me. But here's some corroboration from a different report on human trafficking in Russia.

"In surveys of high schools and vocational schools at the end of the Soviet period, many indicated prostitution as a favored career choice"(Sanjian, 1991 270-295)

http://www.american.edu/traccc/resources/publications/shelle56.pdf

The survey my friend was referencing was done on younger children, but still 14 or 15 year olds. Is it so hard to believe that there are places in the world where the majority of 14 or 15 year olds aren't children any more? If you think it's absurd, I would suggest you either have lived a very sheltered existence or you haven't talked to a 14 year old for a long time. I'm sure many of them are saying it for shock value or because it's "cool" to act tough. But on the other hand, I can barely imagine the kind of hopelessness of being young, Russian and living in a decaying concrete ghetto in Siberia with no chance of ever getting a job or moving away, watching even the civil liberties that your parents traded in social stability for being stripped away one by one.

[LisaL]

55. Sorry, I am not buying that at all.

Prostitution as an admirable career choice? Especially back in 1991? I think not.

[Rhiannon12866]

32. I can't speak for the aspirations of young Siberians, but Russia

is so large that it is comprised of many separate cultures. I visited the USSR shortly before it fell and met numerous Russians. Because I am a child of the Cold War, I was apprehensive at visiting the "Evil Empire," but joined my grandmother, as part of a peace group, traveling to several different parts of the country, including Soviet Georgia and our "sister city," a small town high in the Caucasus Mountains. It truly was a trip of a lifetime, since I found the people to be warm and friendly, very pleased to meet Americans. And they are no different than we are, want the same things, a nice place to live, a job that they like and, most of all, a better life for their children and a lasting peace, since they experienced the horrors of WWII on their own soil and haven't forgotten. But you are absolutely right, the current instability of the country makes it a much more dangerous place. I felt very safe when I was in the USSR, but would not feel safe in Russia, today.:-(

[Jed Dilligan]

23. It takes a Stalin to beat a Hitler nt

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

30. I wonder if W baked a cake today? nt

[Boojatta]

37. what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache

"He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Joseph Stalin."

[Doctor_J]

39. I have a Russian friend

who tells me that the previous generation of school History books mentioned nothing but the good that Stalin did (beating back Shicklegruber and such). The CURRENT set discusses only the bad. HOw will Smirky be viewed in 60 years?

[Endangered Specie]

40. personally I think Stalin was worse than Hitler.

edit: and the fact that a number of people still celebrate him (as opposed to Hitlers admirers) is so high is a testament to his ability to brainwash and his personality cult.

[IndianaGreen]

41. Based on what?

I have a couple of posts in this thread in which I bring attention to evidence that contradicts the popular anti-Soviet myths that are taught in US schools. Some of that evidence is based on information found in the Soviet archives when they were opened to Western historians by President Gorbachev. There is no evidence that Stalin killed 6-10-20-30-40-60 millions, as the anti-Soviet propaganda claimed since Hearst first published such stories in the mid 1930s.

Hitler wanted to exterminate all inferior races, beginning with the European Jews and the Roma. Stalin never did such a thing!

How could you say that Stalin was worse, or even comparable to Hitler?

[Endangered Specie]

42. you actually believe that?

your 'links' prove nothing, other than that you wouldnt know a credible source if it hit you in the face.

stalinsociety.org come on! I bet if there was a hitlersociety.org you'd find a damn holocaust denial archive.

In any event, the vast majority of credible historians both see Stalin's purges and gulags, as well as rampant starvation are just as credible and true as that the Holocaust happened.

And dont think for one second that Stalin didnt have his own ideas about wiping out Jewish populations.

[IndianaGreen]

43. So you prefer to believe in the myths you were taught

rather than allow for the possibility that there is another side to the story. In religion that is called fundamentalism.

I am not defending, or condemning, Stalin and Stalinism. What I am saying is an incontrovertible fact: Publisher William Randolph Hearst was the source for the "Stalin killed millions" myth.

[Endangered Specie]

44. Ill give you the same answer I give to creationists and holocaustdeniers

NO

[IndianaGreen]

45. Hearst was the source for the "Stalin killed millions"

Apparently you are unable to even look into that!

[Endangered Specie]

46. you could start with some books

(check your local bookstore)

or you can ask damn near any credible historian


or if you prefer the internet:
http://www.gendercide.org/case_stalin.html
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE4.HTM
http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/stalin.htm

[IndianaGreen]

47. It is those "credible" historians whose credibility are in question

It is interesting to see how Western propaganda, via Robert Conquest, has lied about the purges of the Red Army. Conquest says in his book The Great Terror that in 1937 there were 70,000 officers and political commissars in the Red Army and that 50% of them (i.e., 15,000 officers and 20,000 commissars) were arrested by the political police and were either executed or imprisoned for life in labour camps. In this allegation of Conquest's, as in his whole book, there is not one word of truth. The historian Roger Reese, in his work The Red Army and the Great Purges, gives the facts which show the real significance of the 1937-38 purges for the army. The number of people in the leadership of the Red Army and air force, i.e., officers and political commissars, was 144,300 in 1937, increasing to 282,300 by 1939. During the 1937-38 purges, 34,300 officers and political commissars were expelled for political reasons. By May 1940, however, 11,596 had already been rehabilitated and restored to their posts. This meant that during the 1937-38 purges, 22,705 officers and political commissars were dismissed (close to 13,000 army officers, 4,700 air force officers and 5,000 political commissars), which amounts to 7.7% of all officers and commissars - not 50% as Conquest alleges. Of this 7.7%, some were convicted as traitors, but the great majority of them, it would appear from historical material available, simply returned to civilian life.

One last question. Were the 1937-38 trials fair to the accused? Let us examine, for example, the trial of Bukharin, the highest party functionary to work for the secret opposition. According to the American ambassador in Moscow at the time, a well-known lawyer called Joseph Davies, who attended the whole trial, Bukharin was permitted to speak freely throughout the trial and put forward his case without impediment of any kind. Joseph Davies wrote to Washington that during the trial it was proved that the accused were guilty of the crimes of which they were charged and that the general opinion among diplomats attending the trial was that the existence of a very serious conspiracy had been proved.

http://www.northstarcompass.org/nsc9912/lies.htm

Conquest's book "Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror famine" has emerged as the best attempt of the famine-genocidists at legitimacy. Conquest's right wing affiliations and his holocaust denials are now well known. At one time he was employed by the British Secret Service's disinformation project, the Information Research Department, key targets being 'the third world' and the 'Russians'. Conquest's earlier work "The Great Terror" had alleged that only 5-6 million perished in the 1932/3 period and only half of them in the Ukraine. By 1983 Conquest, however, had upped his estimates to 14 million and extended famine conditions to 1937! Such revisions coincided handily with the 50th anniversary commemorations of the famine.

Conquest presents the various nationalist cliques who held parts of the Ukraine during the Russian civil war and foreign intervention as bona fide governments. The mass slaughter of Ukrainian Jews carried out under nationalist 'independence' in 1918-19 is dismissed in 3 words. The Nazi occupation of the Ukraine is presented implicitly as a breakdown between periods of Soviet 'terror' and the liberation from the Nazis as Soviet 'reoccupation'. There are many examples in the book of Conquest's lack of scholarship. One example is him quoting from accounts by a foreign correspondent who turns out to be none other than Thomas Walker, the man who never was. In his reference note for the quote he even moves the date of the Hearst article from 1935 to February 1933. It is worth repeating the observations of American historian J Arch Getty on the quality of this kind of historical research:

"Grand analytical generalisations have come from second hand bits of overheard corridor gossip. Prison camp stories ("my friend met Bukharin's wife in a camp and she said...") have become primary sources on Soviet central political decision making .... the need to generalise from isolated and unverified particulars has transformed rumours into sources and has equated repetition of stories with confirmation".

Whereas serious historians do not accept hearsay and rumour as historical fact, contrast this with Conquest's stated position that "Truth can only percolate in the form of hearsay" and "on political matters basically the best, though not infallible source is rumour".

http://www.stalinsociety.org.uk/ukrainian.html#fraud

[Codeine]

49. Has it occured to you

that facts from the Stalin Society and from a website seeking to re-establish communism in Russia may not be reliable either?

[IndianaGreen]

51. We were better off when there was a Soviet Union

The USSR would have never allowed Bush to invade Iraq, and cost the lives of over 2,100 GIs and 100,000 Iraqi civilians, as reported in the Johns Hopkins's Lancet Report.

Russians are far worse today than they were under the Soviets. For the first time since the Tsars, there is poverty and unemployment in Russia. Perhaps this is why the May Day celebrations which were reduced to a few hundred elderly marchers during Yeltsin era, now command tens of thousands of people from all ages.

Russians are longing for the safety and security of the Stalin years, just as we long for the days of Bill Clinton. Neither Stalin nor Clinton were perfect, and we had legitimate issues with them, but they are preferable to what we got now.

[Codeine]

52. No.

Stalin is not preferable to what we have now. That's an awful statement.

[Endangered Specie]

53. if youre such a communist

why dont you go to North Korea, still got it there.


:eyes: people like you make the rest of us look bad.

[IndianaGreen]

66. There is nothing communist or socialist about North Korea

It is a cult of personality run by a corrupt and insane family. There is nothing Marxist or Leninist about it. The red flags they fly are nothing but empty symbols, just like the Christian crosses that people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson wear.

[doubleplusgood]

75. and renaming a city after yourself (STALINgrad)

is NOT evidence of a cult of personality ?

[nodehopper]

74. WORD. eom.

[Hypatia82]

58. There has always been poverty in Russia...

and as for unemployment, I wouldn't call standing around directing non-existant traffic employment. Nevermind press consorship, forbidding to freely move about and travel, forbiding free association and banning the means by which someone could better themselves. None of that is good stuff.

[nodehopper]

73. no, I am sure it has not occurred to him

I have concluded that none of us should waste time arguing with him. Just my two cents.

[LisaL]

65. Well, that might have something to do with the fact that Hitler

lost the war.

[IndianaGreen]

48. On the Stalin Mythology

Stalin murdered twenty million Russians. That is what we're told. What we do know--because U.S. Ambassador Strauss testified before Congress-- is that the "U.S. spent trillions of dollars to roll back communism," that is, the Soviet workers state. So if destroying the world's first socialist state meant that much to U.S. capitalism, don’t you think that they would work day and night to demonize Stalin, the symbol of that successful working class state? Stalin did make the USSR a superpower, destroyed Hitler, opened up the space age and brought socialism to eastern Europe. So what better weapon to make Americans hate Communism and never bring it here than to say STALIN MURDERED 20 MILLION OF HIS OWN PEOPLE. The "Big Lie" is more powerful than the "Big Gun."

Its absurd on its face that Stalin killed 20 million. That would mean one person out of every other Soviet family dead by Stalin's hand. Would such a population have fought successfully to save the USSR and defeat German Fascism? Ridiculous. It would have laid down arms and revolted as did the Czar's army in 1917.

They tried bringing communism down many times. Fourteen capitalist countries sent armies in 1919 to, as Churchill said "TO STRANGLE THE COMMUNIST INFANT IN ITS CRADLE." They failed. Then, in 1937-38, they spread the Big Lie of the "Show Trials." That is the traitors being tried by Stalin were innocent, being framed in his mad quest for power. This was a story spread throughout the world by William Randolph Hearst, the yellow journalist and one of the richest men in the world. He wasn’t anywhere near the trials.

However Joseph Davies, the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, attended all of the trials and reported back to Secretary of State Cordell Hull that "he heard all the testimony, watched all the body language," and that in his opinion "the defendants were guilty as charged" (i.e. plotting to overthrow the U.S.S.R.).

So yes, Stalin "killed" if you will, not 20 million but quite a few traitors who were intent on bringing down the U.S.S.R. And if he were alive today there would have been no traitorous Gorbachevs, Yeltsins and born again Russian capitalists who have turned the Soviet union into a Mafia run third world country with a return to prostitution, drugs, crime, homelessness, unemployment and millionaires and all the other ills of capitalism. (thanks to the counter revolution, aided and abetted by imperialist destabilization). It's no longer a state run for the interest of the working class but rather for the International Monetary Fund. All brought about by the kind of traitors Joseph Stalin smelled out. tried and liquidated in his time.

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/63/093.html

[Hypatia82]

57. So it's ok to kill those who disagree with things...

just take them out and kill them for not going along with someone else's wisdom. If you believe that, you are one sorry person.

[manic expression]

61. A few very important things

Sure, he may not have killed 20 million, but he killed quite a few. The simple fact that he pursued Trotsky around the world to kill him should tell you something. Also, just because an idiot like Hearst exaggerates something doesn't make it minor or change what it was.

Yes, things like life expectancy dropped with the collapse of the USSR in former USSR countries, but the USSR formally denounced Stalin after his death. Also, just because rampant capitalism is terrible doesn't make anything else better. Communism (as practiced by the USSR) did A FEW things somewhat well, but it also did many things very badly, and people need to recognize both (as well as the fact that capitalism has not been a great experience for those countries at all).

[IndianaGreen]

62. And we cannot have a rational discussion about the points you just made

for as long as people adhere to the myths they were indoctrinated with. It is those myths, and the ideologies that they give rise, that have brought us such disasters such as the Domino Theory which was our justification for getting involved in Vietnam.

A rational person would have looked at the facts. The Vietnamese were nationalists. Ho Chi Minh was the most nationalist of all for he wanted Vietnam to be free from foreign domination, be it French, Japanese, Chinese, or American.

We must de-mythologize the Stalin era to better understand the errors that were made, and to appreciate why his successors wanted to avoid a return to the "bad old days." It was not accident that Stalin and Trotsky both served under Lenin. It was after Lenin's death that Stalin did away with the Soviets, the workers' committees, and abolished collective leadership. For those of you that are concerned about Bush's power grab, it is sobering to recognize that the path of tyranny always begins in small steps, and that once embarked in such a course, only a revolution can reverse course.

[manic expression]

64. Why not?

People do adhere to myths, and it clouds their view of reality.

However, we can have a rational discussion, can we not? Do not let delusion restrict the expression of our own views.

By the way, I agree with you on what you've said here.

[Lithos]

76. Not quite true

Much of the pieces cited in that article here had political motives for hiding what they were doing. These were show trials driven by an extreme political agenda.

First the issue of the show trials has absolutely NOTHING to do with the bulk of the mass deaths caused by Stalin. Unlike the Gulags, the Famine of 1932/33, and the terror of the KGB/NKVD, these trials were conducted well above board and to conflate them is to do a grave disservice to those who died at the hands of Stalin genocidal indifference (the Famines of 32/33 and the de-Kulakization effort) and the directed efforts of his secret police. People forget that Stalin's rise post Lenin was thru the raw use of power including murder and execution of his rivals. This was not a "natural" transition of power from Lenin. I'm often confused as to why Marxists defend Stalin as he represents to me the opposite - a personality driven leadership (top down) as opposed to the bottom up leadership espoused by Marx. I do understand the misplaced nostalgia of the Russian people for a time when they had world respect and some stability (pensions, food, etc.), but they also make little differentiation between Kruschev and his successors than any real legacy left by Stalin who represents more of a blip than continuum.

Back to the main point; the audience of the show trials was not the Soviet Union, but were played out purely for those in the West. The tools he used were those most sympathetic to the Soviet Union including people like Duranty and Ambassador Davies. The show trials accomplished two things:

1) The renouncement and repudiation of the remaining elements of the 1917 revolution to curry favor with the Western Powers for the upcoming fight against Hitler. Why? There were many in the West who were fearful of the "Communist" menace. By eliminating these remaining "Reds" including Trotsky in Mexico (1940), Stalin showed that the Soviet Union had destroyed it's ideologues who had caused the most fear for those in the West. Stalin's control was not an extension of Bolshivism which saw in it concern for the commoner, but rather a bureaucratic machine (a bureaucracy represented by Stalin) that attempted to separate itself over the common person and do whatever it took to self-perputate itself.
2) It served as a way for Stalin to demonstrate his firm control as dictator of the political machine. (He was in charge). Plus it removed once and for all the influence of his last possible rival, Trotsky.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/nov2003/nyt-n01.shtml

Duranty's reaction to these events, as the Times has noted, was the infamous phrase, "you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." At the same time he mocked the right-wing critics of the Soviet Union, asserting that their concern for the loss of life in the collectivization drive stood in sharp contrast to their indifference to the slaughter of the World War of 1914-1918.

The disaster unleashed by forced collectivization, combined with the historic defeat of the working class that resulted from Stalinism's policies in Germany, set the stage for a lurch to the right and the advent of "popular frontism." Faced with a Hitlerite regime committed to the Soviet Union's destruction, the Kremlin pursued diplomatic alliances with "democratic" imperialism in exchange for an explicit renunciation of revolutionary goals and a commitment to defend the international status quo.

Within the USSR, it turned to the physical liquidation of all those who had been associated with the October 1917 revolution.

It was in this period that Duranty's writings took on a qualitatively different character. In the face of monstrous acts of wholesale judicial murder, the Times did more than remain silent. It published Duranty's apologetics and support for the frame-ups.

The Moscow Trials indicted the principal leaders of the October 1917 revolution-the exiled Trotsky being the foremost defendant-as fascist collaborators supposedly guilty of crimes ranging from industrial sabotage to plots to poison the population's water supply and assassinate Stalin.

The only evidence presented to substantiate these fantastic charges were the confessions of the accused, extracted through the method personally recommended by Stalin of "beat, beat and beat again." The Soviet prosecutors ' tales of secret meetings and conspiratorial intrigue, supposedly confirmed by confessions extracted from the defendants, were subsequently exposed as crude fabrications.

For example: at the first trial, held in August of 1936, a supposed 1932 meeting in Copenhagen of an alleged conspirator with Trotsky's son, Leon Sedov, was said to have taken place at the Hotel Bristol. The Hotel Bristol, it was pointed out soon after the frame-up, had been torn down in 1917.

At the second trial, held in January of 1937, one of the accused, former head of Soviet industry Yuri Piatakov, was said to have flown to Oslo in December 1935. It was soon revealed, however, that no planes had been able to land in Norway for the entire month of December 1935 because of foul weather.

None of this gave pause to the Times and its Moscow correspondent in their favorable coverage of the frame-ups. Reporting on the first of the Moscow Trials in 1936, Duranty wrote: "It is inconceivable that a public trial of such men would be held unless the authorities had full proofs of their guilt."

In January 1937, after the second trial, Duranty wrote: "It is a pity from the Soviet viewpoint that no documentary evidence was produced in open court." Nevertheless, he concluded, "taken all in all, the trial did stand up."

Behind this coverage lay definite political motives, and not merely the personal predilections of Duranty. Joining the Times in defending the trials was the US Ambassador to Moscow, Joseph Davies. What were then the leading journals of American liberalism, the Nation and the New Republic, lauded these frame-ups as models of fairness. Within ruling circles in both Europe and America, the three-year blood purge was recognized-and welcomed-as an irrevocable break with the revolutionary perspective of 1917.

Trotsky pointed to the political source of this liberal defense of the Moscow Trials. In his Their Morals and Ours, written in 1939, he commented that "the big bourgeoisie of the democratic countries, not without pleasure, though blanketed with fastidiousness, watched the execution of the revolutionists in the USSR. In this sense, the Nation and the New Republic, not to speak of Duranty, Louis Fischer, and their kindred prostitutes of the pen, fully responded to the interests of 'democratic' imperialism."

Trotsky described Duranty as the "correspondent of the New York Times, whom the Kremlin has always entrusted with the dirtiest journalistic tasks." ("Toward a Balance Sheet of the Purges," published in Socialist Appeal June 30, 1939 and included in Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1938-39, Pathfinder Press). Duranty's record on the Moscow Trials remained an issue of active controversy for decades to come.

The publishers and editors of the Times have never expressed any remorse about this aspect of Duranty's reporting. On the contrary, they have proven impervious to any protest from the left over their falsification of history in relation to the Soviet Union.

While the newspaper distanced itself from the Stalinist bureaucracy-first in response to the 1939 Stalin-Hitler pact and then by joining the anti-communist witch-hunt of the post-World War II years-it has never bothered to reexamine its role as an apologist for the Stalinist terror. On the contrary, the former "friends of the Soviet Union" at the Times passed over easily to vulgar anti-communism. Where they once put a plus, they merely substituted a minus.

Among those interviewed in last week's Times story on Duranty was the newspaper's editor, Bill Keller. "It's absolutely true that the work Duranty did...was credulous, uncritical parroting of propaganda," Keller declared. He added, however, "As someone who spent time in the Soviet Union while it existed, the notion of airbrushing history kind of gives me the creeps."

Keller was the Times correspondent in Moscow from 1986 to 1991. While the Times' distortion of the situation in the Soviet Union during this period may not have reached the grotesque levels set by Duranty, its version of events was hardly free of the influence of the US government. Keller's lionizing of Mikhail Gorbachev dovetailed neatly with the official policy of Washington, which then backed the Soviet leader as the most consistent proponent of capitalist restoration within the bureaucracy.

Since then, the Times editor has actively contributed to the new and officially sanctioned falsification of history-the slandering of the October 1917 revolution and the facile equation of Stalinism and fascism.

Keller's remark last week about his supposed distaste for "airbrushing history" is cynical, given that this was precisely the method used by the Stalinist bureaucracy against its Marxist opponents, led by Trotsky-a method supported by Duranty and continued in its own fashion by the Times to this day.

So what were the deaths attributed to Stalin? I will of course not only attribute those who were killed directly under his orders, but those who were placed in institutions designed to cause deaths as well as deaths which occured by Stalin's ill-conceived efforts to remodel the country under his form of bureaucracy.

You've got the handful (apx. 50) who were tried in the show trials, all of whom were executed. You also have their immediate families who were also arrested and killed (save one who survived the labor camp).

You've also got the apx. 1.5mm people who were arrested in the Great Purge of which 700,000 were executed.

And then of course you have the de-Kulakization and collectivation efforts. Defenders or Stalin such as Ludo Martens feel that these people were problems. However, it is overlooked, but these Kulaks (ie the peasants) were often the very workers who the state was supposed to be defending not attacking. Best estimates range at around 7mm Kulak deaths as well as 12mm deaths in the Gulags. Yes there may be more, but these numbers are the most "conservative" estimates available. There are those who cite upwards of 50-60mm deaths due to Stalin.

One of Stalin's favorite historical figures was aptly Ivan the Terrible. Like Ivan IV, Stalin did quite a bit for the Soviet Union during a critical time - his strong personality was necessary to defeat Hitler, but that does not excuse the massive amount of destruction and deaths he caused in his quest for personal power just as it did not excuse the founding of the Oprichnina by Ivan IV and the resulting reign of terror and deaths caused by this organization.

[maddezmom]

77. locking

looks like this thread has run it's course.