RedDogBear "And yet you still think he was as bad as Hitler?
Hm. One of us is surely missing something."
I'm talking about a moral evaluation. Stalin ruthlessly killed millions of his own people in the Gulags. He created a climate of fear and paranoia through the Soviet bloc countries and he ruled those countries through intimidation.
The fact that he was also used as a bogey man by the right wing US and that they inflated the threat he posed doesn't matter much when evaluating his morality. Its analogous to Sadam Hussein. He was never a serious threat to the US and he was also overblown as an external enemy. That doesn't mean he wasn't a murderous tyrant.
Hm. One of us is surely missing something."
I'm talking about a moral evaluation. Stalin ruthlessly killed millions of his own people in the Gulags. He created a climate of fear and paranoia through the Soviet bloc countries and he ruled those countries through intimidation.
The fact that he was also used as a bogey man by the right wing US and that they inflated the threat he posed doesn't matter much when evaluating his morality. Its analogous to Sadam Hussein. He was never a serious threat to the US and he was also overblown as an external enemy. That doesn't mean he wasn't a murderous tyrant.
TheWM "Stalin ruthlessly killed millions of his own people in the Gulags."
What really happened in the Gulag? I for one do not trust Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's account of things. He was a pretty fervent Orthodox Christian and saw everything through that prism.
There are a lot of wildly inflated numbers circulating when it comes to tallying up all of Stalin's victims, a lot of misinformation. I think it may be a while before a really reliable and accurate history of the Soviet Union is written.
Clearly, Stalin did many very bad things. But he also took over the Soviet Union when it was still mostly agrarian and illiterate, and when he died three decades later it was mostly literate and industrialized.
When Hitler took over Germany it was a world leader in science, industry and culture, and when he died twelve years later it was a smoking pile of rubble, its citizens' heads were full of racist propoganda, Germany had started a world war in which over 50 million people died, and millions of men, women and children -- including tiny babies -- had been systematically gassed and shot.
What really happened in the Gulag? I for one do not trust Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's account of things. He was a pretty fervent Orthodox Christian and saw everything through that prism.
There are a lot of wildly inflated numbers circulating when it comes to tallying up all of Stalin's victims, a lot of misinformation. I think it may be a while before a really reliable and accurate history of the Soviet Union is written.
Clearly, Stalin did many very bad things. But he also took over the Soviet Union when it was still mostly agrarian and illiterate, and when he died three decades later it was mostly literate and industrialized.
When Hitler took over Germany it was a world leader in science, industry and culture, and when he died twelve years later it was a smoking pile of rubble, its citizens' heads were full of racist propoganda, Germany had started a world war in which over 50 million people died, and millions of men, women and children -- including tiny babies -- had been systematically gassed and shot.
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