Discussion of Stalinism

[Brenus]

“Demographics can and did register the impacts of the Holocaust, let alone of the Holodomor.”
No. We can’t be sure of victims of holocaust.
If you think so, give me the number of Serbs killed by the Utase regime in extermination camp and mass execution… Or the number of Tziganes (Gypsies) killed in German’s extermination camps…

Holodomor: A Stalin’s famine specifically created for Ukraine? The fact is all Russia suffered of this one.
Still, you can’t know because no reliable statistics are available. All of them would have come either from the Tsar, or the Red Commies you don’t trust ant way…

“The Black Book of Communism”: Well, the intention is in the title and is clear: bad commies…
And from where their figures are coming from?

[Fragony]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU67r0-QgZs

Too good not to post. Courtesy of Hussy.

[HopAlongBunny]

Stalin admirable? I don't think so.

He did achieve the rapid industrialization/militarization of the USSR; so successful was he that we lived in a bi-polar world for almost half a century; but, anyone who was in the position at that time would have had to achieve the same thing or perish. I don't think its too far-fetched to suppose that someone else could have done what Uncle Joe achieved, without the terror he used.

He was massively assisted in what he achieved by the Allies...because he was an ally.
After WWII Uncle Joe became the demonized Stalin. That was necessary because now that the fight for survival had been won, the fight for ideology needed tending to. Fortunately, Stalin was a murderous paranoid prick, making the media campaign much easier.

The good that was achieved was born of necessity, but it's in the "other stuff" that he established his personality. I don't think he established himself as one to be admired.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Basileos, Aemilius:

Having observed you sniping at one another in two thread so far, I would encourage you both to deal with it via private messages. A little decorum here please.

Sarmatian, EMFM:

You'd be better off citing and linking to your sources rather than questioning same -- at least it would take you less time.

Brenus:

My comments on Hitler having lost his nerve and Stalin benefiting from that mistake were part of a rather well researched theory in the book Panzers East. While no such theory can be presumed correct beyond any doubt, the author did make a good case for -- unaltered -- a successful Barbarossa with the removal of Moscow from the Soviet industrial resource base and transportation network -- and that it would have hampered them badly.

[rory_20_uk]

Ah yes, all rail hubs or at least the vast majority were via Moscow. Fronts would be divided resources would have difficulty getting to the armies.

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

Sarmatian, EMFM:

You'd be better off citing and linking to your sources rather than questioning same -- at least it would take you less time.

Understood, but I'm done. I've linked to sources, I've explained why the Soviet archives are flawed, I've linked to sources explaining why the archives and demographics arguments are flawed, and now the same points are being rehashed regardless.

[Sarmatian]

Understood, but I'm done. I've linked to sources, I've explained why the Soviet archives are flawed, I've linked to sources explaining why the archives and demographics arguments are flawed, and now the same points are being rehashed regardless.

You've linked to exactly one website, in the 5th post of this thread...

Those who defend Stalin are precisely the same as those who defend Hitler. They are defending the two most evil regimes ever put on the face of the earth, and it disgusts me. I ask that anyone who tries to defend Stalin educates themselves before they continue defending such a monster.

... and that is exactly the same website you linked to when we touched the topic of Stalin the last time. Now, I couldn't find anything there about the data in Russian Archives being flawed. Granted, it's a rather big and poorly organized site and I may have missed it. If that's the case, please provide a link directly to the part that deals with that, because I didn't find it.

On the other hand, I've found the part that deals with references and sources for the USSR(click). There's more than 100 sources and references to various books, papers and other research material the guy used and not a single one is after 1990, and majority being from 1930's - 1970's.

The first 10 for example are...
"Afghanistan: Six Years of Soviet Occupation." United States Department of State Special Report No. 135, Washington, D.C., December 1985.

THE WORLD ALMANAC AND BOOK OF FACTS 1986. New York: Newspaper Enterprise Association, 1985.

Ambartsumov, Yevgeny. "Remembering the Millions that Stalin Destroyed." MOSCOW NEWS, (July, 1988), p. 12.

Andics, Hellmut. RULE OF TERROR. Translated by Alexander Lieven. London: Constable & Co, 1969.

Antonov-Ovseyenko, Anton. THE TIME OF STALIN: PORTRAIT OF A TYRANNY. Translated by Stephen F. Cohen. New York: Harper & Row, 1981.

Ashton, D. L. W. "Communist Concentration Camps-Today." EAST-WEST DIGEST, Vol. 9 (September, 1973), pp. 664-676.

Backer, George. THE DEADLY PARALLEL: STALIN AND IVAN THE TERRIBLE. New York: Random House, 1950.

Bawden, C. R. THE MODERN HISTORY OF MONGOLIA. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968.

Beck, F. and W. Godin. RUSSIAN PURGE AND THE EXTRACTION OF CONFESSION. Translated by Eric Mosbacher and David Porter. New York: Hurst & Blackett Ltd., 1951.

Bennigsen, Alexandre. "Afghanistan & the Muslims of the USSR." in Rosanne Klass (Ed.), AFGHANISTAN: THE GREAT GAME REVISITED. New York: Freedom House, 1987, pp. 287-299.

... and those that come after are generally older. Except several (one a daily newspaper, in other says "translated" but doesn't say from which language or the name of the original work or where it comes from), all sources are western, predominantly American.

Sarmatian, EMFM:

You'd be better off citing and linking to your sources rather than questioning same -- at least it would take you less time.

That's the point really. That's precisely what I didn't want to do. There are thousands of sources, there are over 100 just on that one website and I can't possible address them all. That's why I addressed what they all have in common and why I think they mustn't be accepted without critical assessment. Hell, even wikipedia has many sources that state many different figures...

I'm not really arguing a case for Stalin here. I'm not saying he killed 1, 5, 25, 50 or 100 millions. I'm just saying I find the number of people he killed exaggerated because all the research on the issue is flawed for the reasons I already stated.

The website EMFM linked to says it all, of the 100+ sources used:

95%-100% are western
100% are before 1990's
app. 95% are from the Cold War, the rest even before

I'm not a historian but I know that's not how you conduct research. If I want to research American Civil War, I won't go to India but to the US. If I want to write a paper about Vasco de Gama, I won't go to Canada but to Portugal. If it's about Han dynasty, I won't go to Nigeria, I'll go to China. For Hitler, it would be Germany. I'm not saying 100% of the material must be from the country in question - no, but the bulk and the basis should.

It's perfectly understandable for scholars back then not to do that. They simply couldn't and they had to use every bit of information they could get their hands on (I'm talking about serious scholars, not those who created propaganda). Nowadays, scholars can do that but instead they're constantly rehashing stuff written 20-80 years ago, like that guy in the website that's in question.

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

You've linked to exactly one website, in the 5th post of this thread...

Not just in this thread. In previous debates I have linked to you websites in both English and Russian on this issue - those websites also addressed the ones of research on the Russian Archives being flawed (though last I checked, that was also on Wikipedia).

That being said, the following link kind of disproves that demographics were not taken into account and that Russian sources were not used.

THE WORLD ALMANAC AND BOOK OF FACTS 1986. New York: Newspaper Enterprise Association, 1985.

Don't Almanacs generally take into account demographics?

Ambartsumov, Yevgeny. "Remembering the Millions that Stalin Destroyed." MOSCOW NEWS, (July, 1988), p. 12.

Antonov-Ovseyenko, Anton. THE TIME OF STALIN: PORTRAIT OF A TYRANNY. Translated by Stephen F. Cohen. New York: Harper & Row, 1981.

Doesn't sound very Western to me.

I'm not really arguing a case for Stalin here. I'm not saying he killed 1, 5, 25, 50 or 100 millions. I'm just saying I find the number of people he killed exaggerated because all the research on the issue is flawed for the reasons I already stated.

The demographics argument is the one that is flawed. I have already pointed out why. From an earlier post:

I think you and Sarmatian may be making two fatal errors. Firstly, Stalin did not just kill people who were in the USSR. He killed a massive number of Poles, for example. Secondly, nobody is suggesting that everybody was killed all at once - Stalin ruled for thirty years, and even before that he had power to murder - executing Tsarists, burning villages and killing peasants, etc. Also, not all of the dead were during the purges. Nonetheless, the quoted figure for Stalin usually hovers around forty million, not sixty to seventy - the latter number generally applies to the whole Soviet Union.

So yes, if you took the whole Soviet Union (but only the Soviet Union) in any one year during Stalin's reign, and subtracted the people killed, you would have a completely unreasonable number. But how about including surrounding countries and then averaging out the numbers over the years Stalin ruled? The totals you will come up with are perfectly fine, and I am 99% sure that professors/historians doing research will have taken this into account.