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by WiseWeasel 4764 days ago
Maybe the fact he sent >12 million of his own citizens to slave and die in the Gulag in Siberia could have made it difficult to cast him as a hero. For a depressing account of the Gulag and other aspects of life under Stalin's rule, read a few of Solzhenitsyn's books.
1 comments
kmm 4764 days ago
Where did you get that from? The total number of Stalin's victims is around 1.5 million.

EDIT: I misread. It's about double, 3 million. Unreliable figure in any case.

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bjhoops1 4764 days ago
1.5 million is a comically low estimate. Where did you get your figure? Over 3 million died in the Ukrainian collectivization political famine alone.
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mpyne 4764 days ago
And suddenly Stalin's quote about statistics becomes apropos again. :-/
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kmm 4764 days ago
I want to start by saying that's controversial. Famines were frequent in that area way before the Soviet Union even existed. Can you attribute these to Stalin's policies alone? Nobody would blame Coolidge for the Dust Bowl.

But you're right that 1.5 million is too small. I read again and there's about 3 million officially recorded victims. I cannot trust or distrust the higher figures, as these were reported either by western media or political dissidents, both of whom have very good reasons to demonise the USSR.

Just as the USSR spread a lot of lies about the Western world, I don't trust the Western media about these controversial subjects.

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bjhoops1 4764 days ago
I suggest you read Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

The artifical famine of 1932-1933 was not a natural famine. It was a calculated effort by Stalin to undermine the Ukrainian peasant farmers, a class he viewed as a threat, and force them into collectivization. It was perpetrated by the Communist party through the steady increase in grain quotas. It is a matter that of historic fact that Ukrainians starved to death while trains shipped away mountains of grain that they themselves had grown.

Feel free to distrust "Western media", but there are primary sources that support this narrative. For instance, Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko's account, or the narrative of American (and up to that point Soviet sympathizer) William H. Chamberlin (although perhaps you might not trust his account since he's a Westerner).

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WiseWeasel 4764 days ago
From Wikipedia's entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag):

"... during the period of 1928–53, about 14 million prisoners passed through the system of GULAG labour camps and 4-5 passed through the labour colonies."

Original source: Robert Conquest in 'Victims of Stalinism: A Comment.' Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 49, No. 7 (Nov., 1997), pp. 1317-1319 states: "We are all inclined to accept the Zemskov totals (even if not as complete) with their 14 million intake to Gulag 'camps' alone, to which must be added 4-5 million going to Gulag 'colonies', to say nothing of the 3.5 million already in, or sent to, 'labor settlements'."

Subtracting the ~1.5M foreign prisoners of war, the 12M estimate seemed like a reasonable minimum number of Russians sent to the Gulag.

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