Joseph Stalin was a communist leader friend with 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, manipulation, bribery, spying, infiltration of other political parties, even hostage taking. He says absolute ruthlesness is necessary to wield political 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 personal 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.
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.
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.
American education has always given a pass to Stalin
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.”
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!”
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.
Yet people still don’t know the difference that he was an authoritarian that forced a grinding, socialist state on his people over what actual socialism/communism is.
Could it be because “actual socialism/communism” has never existed in reality and every time it was attempted, it turned out to be a “grinding, socialist state”?
Cuba?
No.
I think you could make the same argument with just about any economic policy. Free market capitalism has never existed in reality and every time it was attempted, it turned out to be an abstract of colonial imperialism.
It ends up billions of apes are hard to govern in a way that excludes usery and violence.
It did exist, it’s just that in the past, the real socialist revolutions were crushed by the authoritarians.
All of recorded history is western imperialist propaganda.
it’s true that history is written by the victors but there’s still the point that (most) americans in 1960 could afford 1 house, 2 cars and 3 children.
Any proof of that
Clearly you’ve been brainwashed by capitalism.
I’ll take that as a no
New canon: neocons astroturfing YSK
How tf is writing articles about historical facts astroturfing??? I live in post-soviet eastern european country and we have a saying “If a theory doesn’t match the facts, so much the worse for the facts.” precisely for people like you
I am a real human and I am trustworthy
