Was Stalin really that bad

[jimbob]

"Was the Holodomor intentional genocide, or merely an unintentional side effect of Stalin's policies" could have led to an interesting historical discussion.

"Was Stalin really that bad" was not a good way to lead to that conversation, IMO.

Coming back to this - I was thinking about this sketch in Not the Nine O'Clock News

 

[Craig B]

It's only a matter of degree, and you may well be right, I tend to think that he wanted to destroy the Kulaks as a group, and the destruction of them as a group was more important than their survival as slaves, whilst my understanding of your view is that he merely wanted to take over their only means of support and would have preferred to have them as living slaves although without doing anything to help them.

Either way, given the 1,803,392 people deported to the labour colonies between 1930-31 (according to Soviet archives) I think we both agree that it is a bit of a moot point as to Stalin's motives.

These is an important distinction. The term Kulak refers to a (real or imagined) social category. So an attack on them might conceivably be explicable as a result of a social revolution, like French peasants dispossessing feudal aristocrats during the French Revolution, or the Union abolishing slaveowning after the Civil War. Such activity, however violent it may be, is by definition not "genocide". If it is a crime, it is another category of crime.

It is not in doubt that Stalin killed people and committed crimes in Ukraine. The point in dispute is whether the crimes were genocide. If Stalin killed Kulaks as such, or exiled peasants as such, he was certainly committing crimes, but only if he specifically committed these crimes against victims on account of their ethnicity did the crime count specifically as genocide.

 

[jimbob]

These is an important distinction. The term Kulak refers to a (real or imagined) social category. So an attack on them might conceivably be explicable as a result of a social revolution, like French peasants dispossessing feudal aristocrats during the French Revolution, or the Union abolishing slaveowning after the Civil War. Such activity, however violent it may be, is by definition not "genocide". If it is a crime, it is another category of crime.

It is not in doubt that Stalin killed people and committed crimes in Ukraine. The point in dispute is whether the crimes were genocide. If Stalin killed Kulaks as such, or exiled peasants as such, he was certainly committing crimes, but only if he specifically committed these crimes against victims on account of their ethnicity did the crime count specifically as genocide.

I was careful not to mention genocide... although if you are destroying a group by repatriation or killing, then I think the definition might need widening. The obvious one would be the Nazi attempts to exterminate gays.

 

[caveman1917]

I see that because I referred to your repetition as being disagreeable, you're going to use it as your major trolling methodology. About half the Kazakhs survived the two famines, of 1921 and 1932, and about half were lost. Just under 40% died in the collectivisation famine. Russians living in Kazakhstan did better, if this table is accurate. But perhaps it has been fabricated by fascists to discredit generic leftists. Who knows?

Yes, who knows indeed. More importantly, can you give the table for internal migration, deportations and other factors during that timespan so that we can distinguish what changes in the census were caused by what?

For example, at least in the Ukrainian SSR, kulaks were deported and people in general emigrated during those years (hence the passport laws attempting to stop people from leaving).

It is consistent with the basic behaviour of imperial states, believe you me.

Breaking the laws of physics is consistent with the basic behaviour of "imperial states"?

Something which is consistent with having a lot of starving people around is animals being eaten, not just "simply disappearing".

I will not respond to any more of these foolish posts from you, as I don't want to be further distracted from rational thinking about important historical issues.

 

[caveman1917]

Actually, Russians living in Kazakhstan did not just "do better" but got pumped so full of grain that their population grew by over 100% over the same time period as the Russians in Russia only managed to grow by about 10%. But talking about internal migration as a cause for this observation would be leading us too far from a nice ethno-nationalist narrative, I suppose...

 

[Craig B]

I was careful not to mention genocide... although if you are destroying a group by repatriation or killing, then I think the definition might need widening. The obvious one would be the Nazi attempts to exterminate gays.

It is not always considered reprehensible to eliminate a social group, and that's what Stalin's propaganda relied on. He spoke of "destroying the Kulaks as a class". That terminology doesn't necessarily imply killing them all; in the same way that dispossessing slaveowners or feudal aristocrats removes them as social classes, but doesn't necessarily mean that any or all of them should be killed. (Although such revolutions are usually attended by violence. The American Civil War is an example of that violence.) So if Stalin said, "the Kulaks are being driven from the peasant communes in Ukraine", that might sound not entirely outrageous to foreign socialists learning of the event in these terms.

However, destroying people because of their ethnicity is an entirely different matter, and if Stalin was doing that, he would be concerned to keep it completely secret. There is no ideological excuse that can be presented to justify or mitigate it. So it is reasonable to ask whether Stalin was in reality attacking an ethnic group, in the guise of social reforms. Such an accusation should be carefully examined. On the whole, however, I think he was attacking Ukrainian peasants as peasants, and not specifically as Ukrainians.

He had other ways of suppressing ethnic particularism in Ukraine, and he used them lavishly. The leadership of the Ukrainian SSR was obliterated, not merely decimated, in the Terror purge of 1937/38.

in 1937 Stalin decided to liquidate the entire leadership of the Ukrainian Soviet government and the CPU. […] By June 1938 the top seventeen ministers of the Ukrainian Soviet government were arrested and executed. The prime minister, Liubchenko, committed suicide. Almost the entire Central Committee and Politburo of Ukraine perished. An estimated 37% of the Communist party members in Ukraine - about 170,000 people - were purged​

 

[Pacal]

Actually the literature on Collectivization is plentiful. For a start there is Lewin's classic study Russian Peasants and Soviet Power published in 1968.

The book goes through the process by which the Soviet authorities decided to collectivize the Russian peasantry. Basically in an all out effort to subordinate the peasantry to the Russian state.

There is also Nove's An Economic History of the USSR 1917-1991. Where you can read about Stalin's violent assault on the peasantry and his attempt to subordinate them to the state. Stalin's assault provoked fierce peasant resistance including the mass destruction of livestock. And Stalin then deported the so-called Kulaks en-mass and thus deported the section of the peasantry that was most productive. Nove says regarding the famine on pp. 178-179 of his book the following regarding the famine and it's causes:

Furthermore, the 1932 harvest seems to have been substantially
overstated in official claims. According to evidence collected by
M. Tauger,45 it was perhaps barely 50 million tons, against the
published 69.7, so that even the reduced procurement quotas left
little for the peasants and their animals, especially in areas of
traditional grain-surpluses, such as the Ukraine, the North Caucasus
and the Lower Volga. So the reduced procurement targets
proved too high.

This led to severe counter-measures, which in turn led to the
great tragedy: the famine of 1933. 'All forces were directed to
procurements.' The law of 7 April 1932, which, as we have seen,
provided for the death penalty for pilfering foodstuffs in
kolkhozes, was used against those who 'with evil intent refused to
deliver grain for [state] procurements. This particularly affected
socially alien groups. Organizers of sabotage in kolkhozy were
handed over to the courts, including degenerate communists and
kulak-supporters among the kolkhoz leadership. In accordance
with the central committee directives, regions which did not
satisfactorily fulfil procurement plans ceased to be supplied with
commodities . . . Illegally distributed or pilfered grain was confiscated.
Several thousands of counter-revolutionaries, kulaks and
saboteurs were deported .. .,46 The party was purged. In the
North Caucasus 43 per cent of all investigated party members
were expelled. There were some appalling excesses. Stalin declared,
in a speech to the politbureau on 27 November 1932, that
coercion was justified against 'certain groups of kolkhozes and
peasants', that they had to be dealt a 'devastating blow'. Kaganovich
announced that rural communists were guilty of being
'pro-kulak, of bourgeois degeneration'.47 Mass arrests went
beyond all bounds; half of local party secretaries in the North
Caucasus were expelled on the orders of Kaganovich. 'All grain
without exception was removed, including seed and fodder, and
even that already issued to peasants as an advance [payment for
workdays].'48 The result was 'an extremely grave food shortage
in many southern areas', and a 'heavy loss of livestock', which
took a long time to repair. Much the same happened in the
Ukraine.

An important cause of the famine was the far to high procurement quotas and the ruthless way the procurements were carried out. Apparently Stalin and of the people around him were convinced the peasants were hiding grain when in fact too much had been taken. It does appear the eventually the Soviet authorities realized that a real crisis was happening but their efforts at relief were ham fisted and brutal.

if Nove is anything to go on Soviet agriculture was badly damaged by this ham fisted collectivization and remained probably the weakest and in many respects most inefficient area of the Soviet economy. Further collectivization created a situation of permanent scarcity in the countryside with the peasants heavily dependent on their small private plots in order to get enough sustenance for survival.

Soviet agriculture remained right to the end of the regime a black hole of inefficiency and waste swallowing up huge amounts of investment but characterized by low productivity, mass waste etc. Oh and the Soviet Union became a grain importing nation rather than a grain exporting one.

The argument that Stalin solved the agricultural problem is nonsense he in effect created one.

 

[Pacal]

Actually, Russians living in Kazakhstan did not just "do better" but got pumped so full of grain that their population grew by over 100% over the same time period as the Russians in Russia only managed to grow by about 10%. But talking about internal migration as a cause for this observation would be leading us too far from a nice ethno-nationalist narrative, I suppose...

Well one could also discuss what happened to the Kazakhs between 1926-1939. The Census of 1926 gave the number of Kazakhs in Kazakhstan has 3,627,612 and in 1939 the number of Kazakhs in Kazakhstan has 2,327,625. Meanwhile the Russians in Kazakhstan had more than doubled until by 1939 they outnumbered the Kazakhs.

The effects of collectivization upon the Kazakhs and the brutal way it was carried out were if not actual genocide genocidal in effect. With large numbers of Kazakhs dying and other fleeing the country.

 

[dudalb]

BTW Anne Applebaum, who has written excellent books on the Soviet regime (like the Pulitizer Prize Winning "Gulag" a history of the Soviet Prison camp system) has a book coming out next Month called "Red Famine:Stalin's War On The Ukraine".

 

[Border Reiver]

Professor Luciuk has published several papers on the Holodomor.

 

[Allen773]

I mean, he was very good at killing people.

 

[theprestige]

In terms of percentages, Pol Pot was clearly the worst.



In terms of the total number murdered, then Stalin was much more of a killer than Pot.

It's tough to have a definitive ranking, since we're talking about the intersection of ambition and opportunity.

I'm going with Adolf Hitler. It's pretty clear that his ambition, given the opportunity, would have resulted in multiple genocides on a global scale.

Josef Stalin (and Ghengis Khan) would probably have been satisfied with a global empire, and conducted no more mass killings than necessary to establish that empire and keep it subservient.

Pol Pot I don't know much about. I assume, provisionally, that his ambition extended no further than Cambodia.

 

[Wolrab]

Stalin was good. He even had Gulags so he could re-educate all those silly wrong thinking people. They were even paid the same as the right thinking people. A little schooling never hurt anyone, right? It must be true as I read about how wonderful these schools were right here on these forums.

 

[caveman1917]

Stalin was good. He even had Gulags so he could re-educate all those silly wrong thinking people. They were even paid the same as the right thinking people. A little schooling never hurt anyone, right? It must be true as I read about how wonderful these schools were right here on these forums.

It sure beats a little schooling to re-educate all those silly wrong thinking people while keeping them in school longer and paying them next to nothing.

 

[jimbob]

It sure beats a little schooling to re-educate all those silly wrong thinking people while keeping them in school longer and paying them next to nothing.

Bad as the US prison system is, the death rate has never been at 15% a month, which is what was claimed was the rate in Soviet Uzbekistan for 1933.

This was not accidental, but a deliberate ploy to work and starve people to death - 300-Calories a day, with extra for working, but not enough to account for the extra energy expenditure of the work. They were often designed to be death camps.

Pretending that the US is as bad is hysteria

 

[caveman1917]

Bad as the US prison system is, the death rate has never been at 15% a month, which is what was claimed was the rate in Soviet Uzbekistan for 1933.

This was not accidental, but a deliberate ploy to work and starve people to death - 300-Calories a day, with extra for working, but not enough to account for the extra energy expenditure of the work. They were often designed to be death camps.

Pretending that the US is as bad is hysteria

People starved during a major famine? Who'd have thunk... This must be the first time in history that people died during a famine. So you managed to cherry-pick one month in the middle of a major famine, pointed out that a lot of people starved (as if "major famine" didn't already imply that) and then dishonestly presented it as somehow representative of the prison system as a whole, so as to make the entirely unsupported assertion that "they were often designed to be death camps."

You will need to do a lot better than simplistic rhetorical tricks.

 

[8enotto]

If I were a ww2 soldier and had to pick a nation it wouldn't be Russia. Germany would be a better choice as a common soldier you probably wouldn't be gunned down by a comrade for trying to save your skin.

But that still isn't a good choice by far.

Wartime and post war labor camps had the same decor and methods between the Russian and German camps. It wasn't a good thing to be in either one.

I did read the US forces turned over German POW to the Russians to not have to deal with them, wasn't too keen on bothering to keep them healthy while they did.

Post war and cold war gulags stayed on a lot longer and they got good at keeping the human rights types from knowing what really went on. Many went in and few went back home. I googled some stuff up of gulag life and even if only half true, it was brutal and life was horrible at best.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

It's tough to have a definitive ranking, since we're talking about the intersection of ambition and opportunity.

I'm going with Adolf Hitler. It's pretty clear that his ambition, given the opportunity, would have resulted in multiple genocides on a global scale.

We gave him plenty of opportunity, but did he use it to the full? His tally was impressive for sure, but it could have been much higher if he had tried harder. And Stalin? Only managed to deliberately kill a few million civilians. Had nukes and didn't even use them!

Both Hitler and Stalin were amateurs compared to the Japanese, but even they scarcely made a dent in world population. The entire death toll from WWII and related activities was only around 3~4%, not nearly enough to make a significant difference ecologically. Certainly they could have done better, so I can only conclude that they weren't even trying to kill as many people as possible.

Most of the deaths attributed to Hitler and Stalin were the result of incompetence rather than malice, or due to events not under their control. I doubt that either of them planned or expected the huge number of deaths among their own countrymen caused by the war, and I bet Hitler did not at all relish killing the last one he personally pulled the trigger on.

But there are others you don't hear about, who even today are quite happy being responsible for millions of deaths per year.

CDC Smoking & Tobacco Use fast facts:

Worldwide, tobacco use causes more than 7 million deaths per year...

Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States, including more than 41,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure. This is about one in five deaths annually, or 1,300 deaths every day.

But tobacco companies are just faceless corporations. We need a real person to pin the blame on - a well known character from history whose infamy can be inflated without worrying about facts getting in the way. I nominate Christopher Columbus, for it was he who introduced Europe to tobacco. And he was also responsible for the deaths of 80-90% of the Native American population. That's a figure any genocidal dictator would be proud of, and he wasn't even trying!

 

[dann]

If I were a ww2 soldier and had to pick a nation it wouldn't be Russia. Germany would be a better choice as a common soldier you probably wouldn't be gunned down by a comrade for trying to save your skin.

WWI or WWII?

During the First World War, only 18 Germans who deserted were executed. In contrast of the Germans who deserted the Wehrmacht, 15,000 men were executed. In June 1988 the Initiative for the Creation of a Memorial to Deserters came to life in Ulm. A central idea was, "Desertion is not reprehensible, war is".
Desertion: Germany (Wikipedia)

 

[8enotto]

Ww2, not just desertion but simply strategic retreat.. When you got orders to hold that line it meant hold it and die there if you didn't dominate the battle.

All armies killed deserters. It's just by degrees after that.