Was Stalin really that bad

Considering the documented willingness of the political commissars to summarily execute Russian soldiers and civilians during and immediately after WWII, I don't see much of a case for any benevolence on the part of the Soviet central government.

During the battle for Stalingrad, the Soviets own records documented a sentence of death in absentia for a woman that refused orders to stop fighting and retreat, and a case where the sentence of death that was carried out on a Soviet soldier in an anti-aircraft artillery unit that in a letter home described how difficult it was to shoot down attacking German aircraft.

In those years, life was cheap in the Soviet.
 
BStrong said:
Stalin was definitely in Hitlers league when it comes to his genocidal intentions.
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He was also, from 1939 to 1941,the most effective ally Der Fuehrer ever had, something the Stalin fanboys hate to see brought up.
 
BStrong said:
Considering the documented willingness of the political commissars to summarily execute Russian soldiers and civilians during and immediately after WWII, I don't see much of a case for any benevolence on the part of the Soviet central government.

During the battle for Stalingrad, the Soviets own records documented a sentence of death in absentia for a woman that refused orders to stop fighting and retreat, and a case where the sentence of death that was carried out on a Soviet soldier in an anti-aircraft artillery unit that in a letter home described how difficult it was to shoot down attacking German aircraft.

In those years, life was cheap in the Soviet.
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BTW,the opening scenes of "Enemy At The Gates",showing Unarmed Russian Soldiers being made to charge German entrenched positions at the point of NKVD Machine Guns is 100% accurate.
 
BStrong said:
I think that if we'd have access to real numbers, Mao's numbers would be ahead of Hitler or Stalin.

As long as we're talking about murdering tyrants:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idi_Amin

Amin "only" notched a half-million or so victims, but it wasn't for a lack of enthusiasm.
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Hey, man, Idi did his best.....
I recommend "The Last King Of Scotland" for a good look at the Kingdom of Idi.Forrester Whittiker richly deserved his Oscar as Amin.
Genocidal dictators come in all races, colors and creeds.
 
caveman1917 said:
I'm not. Which you could see by me not going into your question about how many millions died.



Nothing, It was all I needed to refute that Nazi myth about Stalin having master-minded the famine, hence it was all I used.

Again, though, feel free to present any theory you like and back it up.
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The supposition that Stalin engineered the famine is not confined to Nazi mythographers, but anyway I don't accept it. He didn't mastermind the famine. He merely caused it.

Like you he wasn't interested in mortality figures, but he preferred to have a larger number of subjects, so for instance he was irritated when the Soviet Census (1937)WP found a smaller population than he had predicted in public speeches. He had the chief statisticians bumped off, and the results of the Census were suppressed until recently.
 
dudalb said:
BTW,the opening scenes of "Enemy At The Gates",showing Unarmed Russian Soldiers being made to charge German entrenched positions at the point of NKVD Machine Guns is 100% accurate.
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The Sovs were not in any way considerate of human life, even in the aftermath of the war:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victims_of_Yalta

An individual that served in Europe when the war ended told me that some Soviet POWS committed suicide rather than go through reparation back to Russia.
 
dudalb said:
He was also, from 1939 to 1941,the most effective ally Der Fuehrer ever had, something the Stalin fanboys hate to see brought up.
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It was a strange affair. Stalin wanted Hitler to have a hard time in France, and was annoyed when his "Ally" defeated the Entente at such a small cost in men and equipment. He hoped to postpone a showdown with Hitler, and hoped also that both the Nazis and the Western Allies would be weakened by mutual attrition, so that they would be in no position to confront the USSR. The Nazi-Soviet Pact was an entirely cynical relationship on both sides.
 
dudalb said:
He was also, from 1939 to 1941,the most effective ally Der Fuehrer ever had, something the Stalin fanboys hate to see brought up.
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And after 1941 his most effective enemy.

But since you seem so interested in Hitler, Stalin and the period from 1939 to 1941, let me tell you a story about a city near where I live, Liège. On 10 may 1940 the Nazis invaded, and quickly occupied, Belgium. Exactly one year later, on 10 may 1941 a strike broke out in the Cockerill Steel factory in Liège. The "official" reason given was for wage increase, but it was mostly an act of resistance on the first year anniversary of the Nazi occupation. It was led by one of those "Stalin fanboys" as you call them. The strike quickly spread through the province and eventually country and into other industries, and little over a week later the Nazis were forced to give in to the demands. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was broken, that "Stalin fanboy" was deported to a concentration camp.

And that is exactly why your right-wing so-called "anti-Stalinism" will never be taken seriously, because it is nothing but an obvious cover for "anti-working class".
 
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Craig B said:
The supposition that Stalin engineered the famine is not confined to Nazi mythographers, but anyway I don't accept it. He didn't mastermind the famine. He merely caused it.

Like you he wasn't interested in mortality figures, but he preferred to have a larger number of subjects, so for instance he was irritated when the Soviet Census (1937)WP found a smaller population than he had predicted in public speeches. He had the chief statisticians bumped off, and the results of the Census were suppressed until recently.
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Wait a second, the Soviet government had different secret and public statistics therefor Stalin caused a famine?
 
caveman1917 said:
And after 1941 his most effective enemy.

But since you seem so interested in Hitler, Stalin and the period from 1939 to 1941, let me tell you a story about a city near where I live, Liège. On 10 may 1940 the Nazis invaded, and quickly occupied, Belgium. Exactly one year later, on 10 may 1941 a strike broke out in the Cockerill Steel factory. The "official" reason given was for wage increase, but it was mostly an act of resistance on the first year anniversary of the Nazi occupation. It was led by one of those "Stalin fanboys" as you call them.

The strike quickly spread through the province and into other industries, and little over a week later the Nazis were forced to give into the demands. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was broken, that "Stalin fanboy" was deported to a concentration camp.

And that is exactly why your right-wing so-called "anti-Stalinism" will never be taken seriously, because it is nothing but an obvious cover for "anti-working class".
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Stalin was most certainly not "pro-working class" in the period prior to the Nazi invasion, as one may see here
 
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caveman1917 said:
Wait a second, the Soviet government had different secret and public statistics therefor Stalin caused a famine?
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No, he caused the famine by messing about with the prevailing system of agricultural land tenure. The 1937 Census was a public operation. Once the data had been acquired it was clear that Stalin's predictions about the population of the USSR had been falsified. Another census was arranged two years later, and it found a population figure the same as the one Stalin's had announced. So there was not a public figure and a secret figure. There was a true public figure, suppressed, and a false one, publicised.
 
Craig B said:
No, he caused the famine by messing about with the prevailing system of agricultural land tenure.
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Do you have any evidence for this?

Besides, seems to me that the prevailing system was producing famines and food shortages all the time, and it stopped doing so after he was done messing with it. Some people would call that an improvement.
 
caveman1917 said:
Do you have any evidence for this?

Besides, seems to me that the prevailing system was producing famines and food shortages all the time, and it stopped doing so after he was done messing with it. Some people would call that an improvement.
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If you don't have enough (whatever) to meet the demand, having a smaller demand load through population control might be a viable solution...if the individual making the decision was a sociopath.
 
BStrong said:
If you don't have enough (whatever) to meet the demand, having a smaller demand load through population control might be a viable solution...if the individual making the decision was a sociopath.
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I'm tired of repeating this, so I'm going to bold the important part: feel free to present any theory you like and back it up.
 
caveman1917 said:
And after 1941 his most effective enemy.

But since you seem so interested in Hitler, Stalin and the period from 1939 to 1941, let me tell you a story about a city near where I live, Liège. On 10 may 1940 the Nazis invaded, and quickly occupied, Belgium. Exactly one year later, on 10 may 1941 a strike broke out in the Cockerill Steel factory in Liège. The "official" reason given was for wage increase, but it was mostly an act of resistance on the first year anniversary of the Nazi occupation. It was led by one of those "Stalin fanboys" as you call them. The strike quickly spread through the province and eventually country and into other industries, and little over a week later the Nazis were forced to give in to the demands. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was broken, that "Stalin fanboy" was deported to a concentration camp.

And that is exactly why your right-wing so-called "anti-Stalinism" will never be taken seriously, because it is nothing but an obvious cover for "anti-working class".
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Stalin really loved the working class:

http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/stalin/

Concentration camps were created in the Soviet Union shortly after the 1917 revolution, but the system grew to tremendous proportions during the course of Stalin’s campaign to turn the Soviet Union into a modern industrial power and to collectivize agriculture in the early 1930s.

Gulag camps existed throughout the Soviet Union, but the largest camps lay in the most extreme geographical and climatic regions of the country from the Arctic north to the Siberian east and the Central Asian south. Prisoners were engaged in a variety of economic activities, but their work was typically unskilled, manual, and economically inefficient. The combination of endemic violence, extreme climate, hard labor, meager food rations and unsanitary conditions led to extremely high death rates in the camps.
 
As far as relations vis-a-vis the Nazis went, other than that "Stalin fanboy" leading that strike, the "liberal fanboys" seem to have been mostly busy voting - quite enthusiastically so - for the Enabling Act, giving Hitler dictatorial powers to repress the social democrats with (the communists and anarchists had already been repressed at that point, which they also supported IIRC).
 
caveman1917 said:
...And that is exactly why your right-wing so-called "anti-Stalinism" will never be taken seriously, because it is nothing but an obvious cover for "anti-working class".
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Nice Black and White world you created. Is it possible that not everyone critical of Stalin was a fascist?

 
Elagabalus said:
Nice Black and White world you created. Is it possible that not everyone critical of Stalin was a fascist?
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It's truly amazing, isn't it? The term "fascist" doesn't even occur in my post, but why let such simple facts stand in the way of some apparently random remarks, which also happen to be non-sequiturs as well.

And yes, Khrushchev didn't like Stalin, is there some point here?
 
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