Was Stalin really that evil?

[Az]

I know Stalin was a complete *******. believe me. and he killed millions of people ( but not 40.)

But most of these target not Stalin, but the Soviet Union, in general. funny that people say that the SU is evil, while the vast majority of the people of the former SU suffer much more under the new marvellous democratic regimes.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Azazel
I know Stalin was a complete *******. believe me. and he killed millions of people ( but not 40.)

But most of these target not Stalin, but the Soviet Union, in general. funny that people say that the SU is evil, while the vast majority of the people of the former SU suffer much more under the new marvellous democratic regimes.

It is hard to accept large numbers, I know. It is natural. However, avoiding acceptance does not alter the past.

How would you feel about the Soviet Union if some of your family experienced the camps, or Lubyanka after Stalin? Many Westerners consider as 'evil' any regime that inflicts torture and death on large numbers of its own citizens. The Soviet Union did this both before and after Stalin, but at reduced levels.

We also flay ourselves for the transgressions of our own nations in the past. Don't feel picked on, no one's country is without sin at sometime.

[Az]

It is hard to accept large numbers, I know. It is natural. However, avoiding acceptance does not alter the past.

It's not that I am in some sort of a denial. Fact is that this number of people would destroy the SU, and it's economy, not make it grow tremendously.

How would you feel about the Soviet Union if some of your family experienced the camps, or Lubyanka after Stalin? Many Westerners consider as 'evil' any regime that inflicts torture and death on large numbers of its own citizens. The Soviet Union did this both before and after Stalin, but at reduced levels.

My greatgrandfather spent a couple of years in a gulag. But after Stalin, there was no enslavement of the people, though there was the punishment of political dissidents.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Azazel

It's not that I am in some sort of a denial. Fact is that this number of people would destroy the SU, and it's economy, not make it grow tremendously.

My greatgrandfather spent a couple of years in a gulag. But after Stalin, there was no enslavement of the people, though there was the punishment of political dissidents.

The total was spread over 70 years. It did not all happen at once.

If there was no enslavement after Stalin, what were the Czechs and Hungarians on about then? Who did the Stasi learn from?

You are correct, the level of democide decreased dramatically after Stalin, but dissidents being killed is not a good thing either, is it?

[curtsibling]

I think over 150,000 dead to develop one factory area put Stalin into the 'nasty' leader category.

Don't forget his post-war excesses either.

Mass purges, rural death and despair, not to mention the total abusive destruction of the Kulaks...

All together these put 'Uncle Joe' on the same par as Hitler.

I think they will share the same jacuzzi in hades.

[Sirotnikov]

I think english speakers have a right to know what was said:

Serb:

umyl ty byrzhuev po polnoy programme. Kruyt im ne chem.

I vobshe menya ubivaet ih predvzyatost. Dostatochno kakim nibud otmorozkam pizdanut "genozid
!!! Ubivayut!!!" I oni uzhe gorlanyat vo vse gorlo pro nashi zverstva. I im gluboko poebat chto eti otmorzki sami konchenie mudaki. Vobshem zhutko doverchiviy i naivnyi narod eti burzhui, odno slovo- vragi.

Translation (without nasty slang, replaced by nicer words):
You've "washed" these borgouise good. They can't handle it.

And anyhoo I can't handle their bias. You can't yell "genocide, murder" to any wimp, without them yelling about our massacares. They are complete fools. Generelly, easily fooled and lead by the nose, these people, the borgouise. In one word - enemies "


Propoganda

vse pravilno. oni vse vragi noroda, eti europitzi i amerikansi. ih propagandisti gosudarvstva zabili v'rot etu vsyu chush, i oni syeli neznaya shto oni yedat, i yesho neznayut shto ih zorozili boleznyu. ya igrayu rol' teper kak antibiotic. YA ETO VSYO SKORO OSTONAVLYU!

PS: ti imiyesh MSN Messenger ili net?

"You got it right. They are all enemies of the people, these europeans and amerikans. The propogandists of their states filled thier heads with all sorts of crap, and they ate it without knowin what they are eating, and without knowing they were infected with a disease.

I'm playing a role now - like an anti-biotic. I WILL SOON BRING A STOP TO ALL OF THIS.

PS: do you have MSN messenger or not?"

Serb

Somnevayus. Bespoleznoe eto delo. Ya tozhe ranshe pitalsya. S takim zhe uspehom mozho golovoy steny taranit.

Net. Da i nakoi on mne, kogda mozhno i tut po spamit

"I doubt it. This thing is useless. I also tried before. With the same success you can bang your head into the wall.

No. And what do I need it for, when you can spam here?"

Serb

Russkoyazichnogo polku pribilo

Kstati, shas smotryu 'vrag u vorot'. Nu takaya... huynya, prosto polnaya. Ktruto oni sebe predstavlyaut voinu na vostochnom fronte.

p.s. Blyat, vot urodi. Rezhiseru nado nogi virvat za takoi naglyi pizdesh.

"Russian speakers are flooding.

Btw, I'm now watching "enemy at the gates". This is so... #%#$%, just completely. The way they imagine the war on the eastern front.

btw, damn, these fookes. The director should have his legs torn for this rude %^$^."



CUT OUT: talking about other films.

[Sirotnikov]

The whole pre-emptive Soviet strike notion is pretty absurd. I would recommend Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia by Gabriel Gorodetsky, who is the Samuel Rubin Chair of Russian and East European Studies at Tel Aviv University.

who has time? i have to study.
maybe if i get to intelligence in the army i'll get to read it

i didn't say their attack would have been successfull.

but the russian historians who wrote these thesis brought many convincing proof.

[Propaganda]

Originally posted by notyoueither
Speaking of sources, going back to the first link I posted:

What was the world doing while all this was going on? Marco Carynnyk, 39, is a Toronto-based freelance writer and translator who five years ago embarked on single-handed research to document the holocaust. His work has revealed two reasons why the free world did not act: a press cover-up and government hard-heartedness.


For the most part, says Mr. Carynnyk, the Moscow press corps consisted of western journalists sympathetic to the cause of the Russian Revolution, inclined to believe what the Soviets told them. When word began leaking into Moscow from foreign engineers and technicians returning from the Ukraine, their reports were discounted by most. There was a prohibition on travel, for: another thing. For a third, in the spring of 1933 a group of British engineers working in Moscow had been put on trial for espionage. The story was top priority for the press corps, and the Soviets told them if they wrote about the famine they would not be allowed to cover the trial.

Returnee Muggeridge: The press aided the cover-up
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some got the story in spite of all this. Malcolm Muggeridge had gone to Moscow for the Manchester Guardian as a Communist sympathizer, and indeed, was fully expecting to live the rest of his life in the U.S.S.R. Scion of a Fabian Socialist family though he was, he was soon disillusioned by the atmosphere of fear he found and the stratification of society more severe even than Imperial India, with many privileges preserved for the Communist Party elite. When he heard of the famine, the embittered Mr. Muggeridge simply eluded the security net and hopped on a train to the Ukraine. He saw for himself and sent his stories back to Britain by diplomatic pouch to avoid the censor. The Guardian, a pro-Soviet liberal paper, printed them in a much mutilated form, and Mr. Muggeridge returned home to find himself in great disfavour with the socialist elite, and unable to get a job.


On the other hand, another Moscow correspondent, the New York Times' Walter Duranty sent home slavishly pro-Soviet articles throughout a long career and even won a Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Muggeridge calls him "the greatest liar of any journalist that I have met in 50 years." He printed a series denying the famine which served as valuable ammunition for communist sympathizers when the Roosevelt administration considered re-opening diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Western European governments knew too. The British government had word from nationals working in the countryside on heavy industrial sites, and from Ukrainians who had emigrated to Canada before the First World War and then returned to the Ukraine during the previous decade. The Germans had three consulates in the Ukraine, and the various embassies exchanged information freely.

http://report.ca/classics/10311983/p28i831031.html

You know, I don't see Conquest mentioned there. Do you? I guess eye witnesses are not so easy to 'disprove', eh?

Here's something interesting...

The So-Called `Press Cover-Up'
Like the film, Conquest's book claims the famine in the Ukraine remained relatively unknown in the West because of dishonest or pro-Soviet reporting among Western journalists. They single out for special condemnation the reporting by Walter Duranty of The New York Times, who had just won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Russia when the famine started. The film quotes British journalist Malcom Muggeridge calling Duranty a liar. 13 So does Harrison Salisbury, also a former Moscow correspondent for the Times, in the post-film discussion. And so does Conquest (pp. 309; 319; 320-1).

The immediate source for Conquest and the rest is an article by Marco Carynnyk in the neo-conservative Journal Commentary (Carynnyk researched this question for the film). This is the same man who knew of phony film and still photos in the movie "Harvest of Despair," yet admitted the fraud only after three years, and only then when publicly exposed by a Canadian researcher.

The basic complaint against Duranty is that he never appeared in print in the `30s with an estimate of famine deaths in the Ukraine of more than 2 million. However, according to Eugene Lyons, extreme anti-Communist and later a Reader's Digest editor, Duranty privately made much higher estimates, up to 7 million, to Lyons himself, and up to 10 million a few days later to a British diplomat. 14

In other words, Duranty is being blamed for not publishing the higher figures, which Conquest and Carynnyk believe to have been correct. Duranty also wrote in a more "objective," less militantly anti-Communist way, than did many other corerspondents. Naturally Carynnyk and the rest hate him for this, too.

Carynnyk's article is the source used by Conquest. Mace, however, refers once to James W. Crowl's book, Angels In Stalin's Paradise, a more in-depth attack on Duranty's and Luis Fischer's reporting on the USSR. His evidence too is merely that Duranty did not report his worst estimates. Crowl's intense anti-Communist bias makes his interpretations of the evidence unreliable. For example, he writes: "Though it can not be proven that Duranty was ever paid by the Soviets, it is conceivable that he was paid handsomely to remain [in the USSR] during 1933."

Crowl's evidence occasionally helps us to see through his favorite sources. IN Assignment in Utopia (1934), Lyons claimed Umansky, Soviet press chief, told Western reporters that those who denounced the account of the Ukrainian famine by Gareth Jones, Manchester Guardian correspondent, would get inside information about the upcoming trial of British engineers (the "Metro-Vickers Trial").

This tale, picked up by Carynnyk (pp. 34-5), is the source for the film's statement that "Correspondents are bluntly told that if they want access to the trial, they are not to mention the famine in their dispatches" (transcript of film, pp. 18-9; see Conquest, p.309).

In a 1972 letter to Crowl Lyons wrote this meeting was "not" a general meeting of Western correspondents; the "blunt warning" disappears, "nor did Oumansky have to do more than `hint' as to what should be done." The attempt to "brige" Duranty and the rest disappears! Lyons even stated he was not certain Duranty attended this meeting with Uspensky.

Now, speaking of Muggeridge, Malcolm who was a journalist and associated with the media for the largest part of his life called his vocation "a fraudulent occupation" which he, on the whole, enjoyed! In this occupation he writes "there is a built-in element of farce which keeps it teetering on the brink of absurdity." He also states that he has never been able to take it quite seriously.

According to Malcolm "what we still call Western civilization is fast disintegrating, and the media are playing a major role in the process... Future historians will surely see us as having created in the media a Frankenstein monster which no one knows how to control or direct, and marvel that we should have so meekly subjected ourselves to its destructive and often malign influence."

Traditional moral values are being replaced in the media with a confusion of supposed "rights and wrongs", and sadly it seems that the mindless masses subject themselves indeed to this destructive lead. This brings to mind the words of Jesus Christ "If the blind lead the blind they will both fall into the ditch."

Malcolm Muggeridge also mentions "one of the most famous shots in the 1939-45 War, used many times subsequently for documentary purposes, of Hitler doing a weird little dance of triumph on hearing the news that France had fallen to the Wehrmacht. This turns out to have been a fake, procured by the simple device of removing a few frames from film of Hitler walking."

There goes his credibility...

[Propaganda]

Now, on speaking on the long list of sources you cited, one only has to read their works. If you notice, most of them cite each other! The root link here is Conquest, as he is constantly cited in many of those books numerous times! Of course, the credibility of those sources went in the ditch as soon as I read the dates of publishing. The fact is none of those books provide factual information, they wrote so-called "facts" before the facts were open for study.

[Propaganda]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Wow, I could flood a thread with so much drek that no one would read it and declare my point vindicated also. Course, unlike Propaganda, I'm actually trying to win people over to the revolution.

By all means, chegitz, swing me to your side. I consider myself an open-minded person, so it should be not of a problem(especially to myself) if you are persuasive enough.

[Propaganda]

Originally posted by Sirotnikov

The whole pre-emptive Soviet strike notion is pretty absurd. I would recommend Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia by Gabriel Gorodetsky, who is the Samuel Rubin Chair of Russian and East European Studies at Tel Aviv University.

who has time? i have to study.
maybe if i get to intelligence in the army i'll get to read it

i didn't say their attack would have been successfull.

but the russian historians who wrote these thesis brought many convincing proof.

Suvorov is somewhat interesting to read.

If you must know, he was the one who said(and has been quoted many times) that the Soviets were in an "offensive" position prior to Hitler's attack. He claims that because of this, the Soviets became disorganized and lost ground all the way to Moscow.

[loinburger]

Can somebody summarize the long-posts for me? All I was able to glean from them was "blah blah hooray for Stalin blah blah."

[Nubclear]

Originally posted by DinoDoc

He was a commie. The fact he was a "bad man" doesn't remove that fact.

[Propaganda]

Originally posted by loinburger
Can somebody summarize the long-posts for me? All I was able to glean from them was "blah blah hooray for Stalin blah blah."

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Propaganda
Now, on speaking on the long list of sources you cited, one only has to read their works. If you notice, most of them cite each other! The root link here is Conquest, as he is constantly cited in many of those books numerous times! Of course, the credibility of those sources went in the ditch as soon as I read the dates of publishing. The fact is none of those books provide factual information, they wrote so-called "facts" before the facts were open for study.

What about the numerous Ukrainian ex-nationals who lived through it and have told their stories to researchers around here? Where I live there is a high number of Ukrainian immigrants from both before and after the USSR. I guess they all read Conquest and collectively remembered it in the 1970s.

It's OK, dear. Plug your ears and cover your eyes. You too can see no evil and hear no evil.