Joseph Stalin was a communist leader inspired by Leon Trotsky
Trotsky was a communist revolutionary and intellectual. He once wrote “In politics, obtaining power and maintaining power justifies anything” in his book “Leur morale et la nôtre”*
In this book, Trotsky justifies the use of lies, infiltration of other political parties, smearing, even hostage taking. He says absolute ruthlesness is necessary to overthrow a hostile system and wield power. He concludes "We are acting for the greater good. We can’t be restrained by normal morality".
Joseph Stalin took Trotsky’s advice literally. So he murdered Trotsky because he saw him as rival. Stalin also started killing people because he believed they could be sympathetic to capitalism or opponents to his power.
Matvei Bronstein: Theorical physicist. Pioneer of quantum gravity. Arrested, accused of fictional “terroristic” activity and shot in 1938
Lev Shubnikov: Experimental physicist. Accused on false charges. Executed
Adrian Piotrovsky: Russian dramaturge. Accused on false charges of treason. Executed.
Nikolai Bukharin: Leader of the Communist revolution. Member of the Politburo. Falsely accused of treason. Executed.
General Alexander Egorov: Marshal of the Soviet Union. Commander of the Red Army Southern Front. Member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Arrested, accused on false charges, executed.
General Mikhail Tukhachevsky: Supreme Marshal of the Soviet Union. Nicknamed the Red Napoleon. Arrested, accused on fake charges. Executed.
Grigory Zinoviev:: Communist intellectual. Chairman of the Communist International Movement. Member of the Soviet Politburo. Accused of treason and executed.
Even the secret police themselves were not safe:
Genrikh Yagoda : Right-hand of Joseph Stalin. Head of the NKD Secret Police. He spied on everyone and jailed thousands of innocents. Arrested and executed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrikh_Yagoda
Nikolai Yezhov : Appointed head of the NKD Secret Police after the killing of Yagoda. Arrested on fake charges. Also executed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov
Everybody was absolutely terrified during this period. At least 500 000 people were murdered. Over 1 million people were deported to Gulags, secret prisons in Siberia, where they worked 12 hours a day.
Joseph Stalin decided to crush Ukraine for resisting communism and supporting independance. In 1933, he seized all Ukraine’s food. In the next months, 5 million Ukrainians were starved to death. The situation was so bad that thousands of Ukrainians turned to cannibalism. When Nazis invaded Ukraine, some Ukrainians thought they were saviors
https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/holodomor
https://www.history.com/articles/ukrainian-famine-stalin
Hitler was a monster, but we really don’t talk enough about how bad Stalin was.
All my life I’ve seen Stalin listed with people like Hitler and Pol Pot as murderous despots. How the hell are we “not talking enough about how bad he was?”
We’re on Lemmy. A not insignificant percentage of the crowd are tankies.
the thing I love about tankies is they hate the US as much as I do 🥰
I don’t think any “tankie” is going to have their minds changed by this post. Unless they’re a 90 year old Russian who has gone out of there way to avoid “western propaganda” they’ve already heard all these points a million times over.
If anything posts like these reinforce their identity because they can dunk on them with their prepared rebuttals to all of this.
True. Tankies are in a cult.
Nah, it’s just the same as any other ideology - people follow it not because they’re ignorant and don’t know something, but because they expect a different outcome than you do, given the same inputs.
Every ideology has weak spots.
Etc. etc.
Yet everyone thinks they’ll be able to manage the system in a way that always evades the issue.
I’m sorry, no, they’re definitely in a cult. Have you spoken to tankies here recently?
You mean like a cult
It doesn’t have anything to do with Lemmy. American education has always given a pass to Stalin, probably because he was an extremely helpful ally in WW2. We are taught in America that WE saved the world when we entered WW2, but the reality is that the Soviet Union lost many, many more lives at the hand of the Nazis than the other allies, including America. The Soviet Union’s contribution was easily as significant as America’s. When the Soviets finally defeated the Nazis in Russia, and started marching toward Germany, one Nazi general said “If they treat us half as bad as we treated them, were in big trouble.”
So coming out of the war, school curriculums taught about the current cold war propaganda, but Hitler was the bad guy they focused on, not the guy that helped us beat him.
Just to put it in perspective, here’s a joke.
Do you know what’s the difference between nazis and communists?
Communists killed more communists.
It’s funny, because it’s true.
No it isn’t. Not even remotely.
Really? Stalin’s Soviet Union is why Americans have such a knee-jerk reaction to the concept of communism. We had entire moral panics that people might be brushing their teeth in a particularly Soviet way. The Soviets have been rivals or enemies a lot longer than they were allies. You find me an American that doesn’t agree with the statement “World War 2 was won with British intelligence, American steel and Soviet blood.”
My American Education included…what Americans know as the Berlin Airlift, I’d be curious to learn what the Germans and ex-Soviets call this incident. That Germany as a whole was divided East/West, with the Western half being controlled by the capitalist allies, and the East being controlled by the communist Soviets. Berlin was too, despite the city being located well into the Eastern half. So there was this little enclave of capitalism in communist East Germany, some barbecue in the borscht.
Boiling this down a bit (there was some nonsense about Russia resisting the west introducing the deutchemark) Stalin blockaded the city with the ultimatum “become communist or starve.” The West responded by flying in supplies by air, using the rationing expertise the British had developed during the war along with USAF and RAF airlift power. One pilot started dropping little parachute bundles of candy to the children who would hang out near the airport watching the planes, and when President Truman heard of this he ordered the candy drops increased.
It was that easy to come off looking like the Big Damn Heroes in this situation; they come bearing cold and starvation, we answer bearing fuel and food.
If anything, it’s the Japanese our schools go easy on; Imperial Japan were easily peers of the Nazis in the atrocity department, yet more American textbooks contain the word Auschwitz than the word Nanking.
I grew up in the Cold War era, and I hardly ever heard any real talk of Russian leaders, which was mostly Breshnev when I was growing up. Instead, it was a just a general hatred of the entire Communist/Soviet system in general. The guy at the top was just considered a figurehead. He certainly didn’t seem to have the same vicious stranglehold that Stalin had. The purges seems to have mostly died with him.
So we didn’t learn much about the people over there, mostly just the names Lenin, Stalin, Kruschev, and Breshnev. Occasionally Trotsky’s name came up. But mostly we just heard “Commies Bad. Don’t be a Commie.”
I was born about a week after Reagan said “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Growing up in the 90’s I didn’t get the childhood “better dead than red” stuff, we didn’t practice hiding under our desks from nuclear bombs. We did fire and tornado drills. As an aside, being an American school kid in the 90’s felt sane in a way I don’t think it did before or since? The Metroid were eradicated, the galaxy was at peace.
From our perspective, we had won the Cold War by default. With the iron curtain down, it was fairly easy to take a look at our old adversaries and we saw…very little we wanted. A few nice symphonies and ballets, a warehouse full of really cool rocket engines, and precisely one video game. By my era, we said “Don’t be a Commie, or you’ll end up like that.”
The ironic thing is, while we were celebrating our win, they never stopped fighting the Cold War We took our eye off the ball, and they didn’t, and our current situation is the result.
But more to your point, I remember reading that after the fall, we discovered that not only was Soviet technology not up to our standards, they didn’t even have the machines to make the machines that it would take to make technology at our level.
But that was back in the 80s. They’ve had a lot of time to catch up.
We felt like right gits having built the F-15 in response to the Foxbat. What’s Hisnameski defected with a Foxbat, the West finally got a look at it, and said “oh. Heheh. Shit, did we overreact.”
My favorite thing ever said about the F-15 is “The last time we took (Russia) seriously, we built that thing.”
As Eddie Izzard joked about mass murderers like Stalin: “The reason we let them get away with it is because they killed their own people, and we’re sort of fine with that. Oh help yourself! We’ve been trying to kill you for ages!”
Her[1] bit on Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk_pHZmn5QM
For anyone that doesn’t know, Eddie Izzard is now Suzy Izzard ↩︎
Huh! No I didn’t.
It kinda makes sense, though. She was a “transvestite” for a very long time, and I guess just finally realized she was a she. :) For a while, she said she didn’t mind being called Eddie or Suzy, but more recently said that actually, she would prefer Suzy, although I suspect she’s pretty relaxed about it. :)
Social contagion, possibly. Not that it makes it inherently wrong, just saying that this seems like evidence towards that theory.
She seemed to be quite effortlessly a “male lesbian” when she was more actively touring. That was a part of a joke though, so might have meant nothing also.
Or how about you fuck completely and all the way off with that bigotry.
You should learn a bit of history.
I’m not here to teach you. I’m here to tell you to fuck off with your bigotry and block your bigoted ass.
putins most obvious influence too, or maybe they just have a lot in common
All your life you’ve lived under capitalism and have been exposed to anti-communist propaganda, because to date communism has been the only successful alternative to capitalism.
Somehow OP thinks that a lifetime of anti-communism isn’t enough anti-communism.
It’s a natural pendulum moment. We are flooded with anticommunist propaganda, so when you start lifting up the curtain and seeing more and more of the lies, you can start wondering what else was a lie.
That’s the moment all sorts of ideologies jump out of the woodwork to recruit you, and given most of your education was a subjugating lie you probably don’t have the tools to distinguish them that well.
And that’s how you end up with people denying the holocaust or thinking covid is fake or saying Stalin wasn’t so bad actually.
So as we’re dismantling capitalism we’re going to have to constantly help people find their footing in reality, including helping them reaffirm the parts of capitalist propaganda that were true enough.
I live in Canada, the general vibe we get through our culture and education is that Hitler was #1 worst guy in history, everyone else was a close second.
This. Even in my psychology of genocide course in uni, a lot of it was focused on Hitler being the worst, and not much about Stalin.
Sort of related sort of not, I learned in the last few years how awful the British were, too. Different levels of awful, but I’m thinking because Canada is a commonwealth country and was pretty much run by the Brits back in the day, the Brits excluded from our education the bad things they did, ie to native Americans/First Nations people, Africa, etc. I didn’t learn about any of that… So I think what they wanted people to learn and what they wanted people to forget shaped what was taught in Canadian schools.
So, like many others, I was awed and excited by the royals. Now that I know what they’ve been trying to hide, meh.
I had probably 10 times as many educational hours dedicated to Hitler and the Holocaust as I did learning about Stalin.
Israel weaponized the Holocaust and drilled two falsehoods into everyone’s head:
This allows them to genocide Palestinians while calling everyone who questions their ethno supremacist expansionist colonial project a Nazi.
6 million Jews were murdered, out of 17 million victims.
Genocide of Indigenous Americans (1492–1832): it is estimated that 90% of the indigenous population, amounting to over 55 million people, died due to violence, forced labor, and disease after European colonization.
Mao Zedong (China, 1958–1961/1966–1969): Historians estimate that between 30-70 million people died due to famine, persecution, and forced labor during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
Mongol Conquests (13th Century): Under Genghis Khan, it is estimated that 30-60 million people were killed, representing about 10% of the world’s population at the time.
To name a few… Hitler was a monster, but he was hardly the worst monster.
Even if there are genocides worse than the holocaust. The entire point of the Nazis were to kill everyone eventually in order to create their dumb idea of an ubermench.
Most genocides are about keeping power. But the holocaust was about creating a whole new humanity by killing anyone that wasn’t blue eyed, blond haired super people. It would affect the entire world eventually. Definitely not just Jews.
If we’d let them, the Nazis would have easily caused the worst genocide in human history, with no equal in reality except for the atrocities in sci fi like Warhammer 40k.
Definitely this. This is what they chose the curriculum to cover more.
because most of the atrocities that Stalin commited didn’t happen in Western world.
Yeah, the Western world preferred to export violence, not keep it home-grown
Most of the focus is on how bad communism is, not how bad its leaders were.
Edit: people are assuming that I took a stance vis-a-vis communism but I’m really talking about where western propaganda focuses
To be fair, having authoritarian government means you’ll absolutely have an oppressive regime at some point.
If anything, Stalin was the one to cement authoritarianism as the system of power in USSR and make sure it cannot be reverted without massive issues in the form of separatism, civil disobedience, and more. The subsequent leaders could only open the valve of democracy so much without breaking the country apart.
So, it’s not just leaders, it’s the system of authoritarian power and imperialism. Communism and socialism must be democratic and directly managed by worker’s councils, bottom to top (i.e. Soviet in its original sense), lest you fall into the same trap with any leader eventually.
*how bad a straw man version of communism is
Well that was my point.
I know. I seem to be the only one who upvoted you before you made the edit.
Thank you for being charitable. People are very angry on Lemmy this week for some reason.
There’s a spectre haunting stoly