Stalin's American victims

[jetsetter]

Tim Tzouliadis's The Forsaken tells of thousands of American socialists and Communists who moved to the Soviet Union in the thirties to find work and a workers' paradise. They were quickly disappointed. Adam Hothschild reviews (http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article5390210.ece) the book in the London Times (TNC subscribers can read Stephen Schwarz's review from the September 2008 issue here (http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Degradation---disgrace-3899)):

From Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other Russians who have borne witness, we know about the midnight arrests, the interrogations and forced confessions, the trains hauling packed boxcars of emaciated prisoners to the labour camps scattered across the Arctic, Siberia, Kazakhstan and elsewhere. Tzouliadis traces the story of the Americans who got caught up in this madness through a wide range of letters and documents, and the published memoirs of two men who played on American baseball teams in Moscow in the mid-1930s, Victor Herman and Thomas Sgovio. Unlike many of their fellow players, whom they occasionally encountered in the gulag, they survived their imprisonment: Herman in central Russia and Sgovio in Kolyma. No one knows how many of the American immigrants were caught up by the Purge and perished either in execution cellars or in the camps, although one mass grave with more than 140 American bodies was found in 1997 near the Finnish border. Tzouliadis does not try to estimate the total American dead. My own guess would be that the figure is in the thousands; if we add victims among Britons and other Westerners living in USSR at the time, the total would be in the tens of thousands.

And it wasn't just Russia to whose siren call left-wing Yanks infatuated with proletarian dictatorship were inexorably drawn. In way, they commanded an odd respect; at least they put their money where their mouths were and picked up to go see socialism as it actually existed outside the cafes and salons of democratic cities. Bellow has a great set piece in his novella Mosby's Memoirs about a poor political innocent called Lustgarten, who moves to Yuglosavia hoping that Tito's alternative will be any alternative at all:

"They're asking interested people to come as guests to tour the country and see how they're building socialism. Oh, I know," he quickly said, anticipating standard doctrinal objection, "you don't build socialism in one country, but it's no longer the same situation. And I really believe Tito may redeem Marxism by actually transforming the dictatorship of the proletariat. This brings me back to my first love--the radical movement. I was never meant to be an entrepreneur."

Bellow wastes no time in bringing down the other shoe. On the next page:



"To say that in September the Lustgarten who reappeared looked frightful. He had lost no less than fifty pounds. Sun-blackened, creased, in a filthy stained suit, his eyes infected. He said he had had diarrhea all summer.

"And what did they feed their foreign VIPs?"

And Lustgarten shyly bitter--the lean face and inflamed eyes materializing from a spiritual region very different from any heretofore associated with Lustgarten by Mosby--said, "It was just a chain gang. It was hard labor. I didn't understand the deal. I thought we were invited as I told you. But we turned out to be foreign volunteers-of-construction. A labor brigade. And up in the mountains. Never saw the Dalmatian coast. Hardly even shelter for the night. We slept on the ground and ate **** fried in rancid oil."

"Why didn't you run away?" asked Mosby.

"How? Where?"

"Back to Belgrade. To the American embassy at least?"

"How could I? I was a guest. Came at their expense. They held the return ticket."


http://www.newcriterion.com/posts.cfm/Stalin-s-American-victims-5380


An event in history I didn't really think about until a few months ago when I looked at a book describing the fates of misguided Americans who ventured to Soviet Russia. It is a little known fact than many thousands migrated from the United States and Europe into the Soviet Union and when they got there the reality was quite than what they were expecting. A substantial percentage of those who migrated would die.

[jetsetter]

A review of the book:


From The Times Literary Supplement
Click here for more information
December 23, 2008
Americans in the gulag
The little-known story of US citizens trying to escape the Depression
Adam Hochschild

Mountainous Kolyma, only a few hundred miles west of the Bering Strait, is the coldest inhabited area on earth. During Stalin’s rule, some 2 million prisoners were sent there to mine the rich deposits of gold that lie beneath the rocky, frozen soil. In 1991, when researching a book about how Russians were coming to terms with the Stalin era, I travelled to the region to see some of the old camps of Kolyma, legendary as the most deadly part of the gulag, some of whose survivors I had interviewed. In a country beset by shortages of building materials, all of the hundreds of former prison camps accessible by truck had long since been stripped bare. The only ones still standing were those no longer reached by usable roads, and to see them you had to rent a helicopter.

I spent a full day being flown across this desolate territory, its gravelly mountainsides streaked with snow even in June. We descended into three of the old camps, finding rickety wooden guard towers, high fences of rusted barbed wire, and, in one camp, an internal prison of punishment cells. Its roof was gone, but thick stone walls still stood; within them were small windows crossed both vertically and horizontally by heavy bars, the intersections further cinched with thick iron bands. At the end of the day in Kolyma, as shadows filled the hollows like spreading ink,we flew back to the town where I was staying. I sat in the helicopter cockpit between the two pilots. Beyond every jagged ridge, it seemed, in every valley, were the ruins of another camp, the wood blackened by decades of exposure, as if an angry giant’s hand had scattered them across the harsh, bleak moonscape.

No one knows exactly how many Soviet citizens met unnatural deaths during the quarter-century that Stalin wielded absolute power, but adding together those who were sentenced to death and shot, died in manmade famines, or were worked to death in gulag camps like these, authoritative estimates put the total at approximately 20 million. Like the other great horror show unfolding in German-occupied Europe in the same period, the Soviet story was one of mass deaths on an almost unimaginable scale. But, unlike the Nazis, the Soviets, in their first two decades in power, were partly sustained by great idealism on the part of people all over the world who were fervently hoping for a more just society. The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis is a poignant reminder of this. For his account of the Stalin years and their aftermath is seen through an unusual prism: the experience of tens of thousands of Americans who emigrated to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Many of them, like the Russians they lived among, fell victim. Bits and pieces of this story have been told before, mainly in survivors’ memoirs. But to my knowledge this is the first comprehensive history, and a sad and fascinating one it is.

Like the thousands of Western Europeans who arrived in the same period, these immigrants were driven by the Great Depression at home and the belief that a better, fairer way of life existed in the USSR. A quarter of the US labour force was unemployed, and millions of Americans were standing in line at soup kitchens or living in “Hooverville” shantytowns when they had lost their homes or farms. Was it not possible to construct a more humane society than this? Of course it was – and in Russia, apparently, they were doing it. Factories were hiring – particularly skilled workers and engineers, who were being offered what seemed to be lucrative contracts. And these factories were said to have nursery schools, clinics, libraries. Although many of the American immigrants had been socialists or Communists in the US, you didn’t have to be one to believe that somewhere in the world someone had been able to build a more sensible economy than the Depression-ridden American one. One of many intriguing facts Tzouliadis has unearthed is that an English translation of something originally written for Soviet schoolchildren, New Russia’s Primer: The story of the Five-Year Plan, spent seven months on the US bestseller list in 1931.

When the Soviet foreign trade agency advertised jobs for skilled American workers in Russia that year, 100,000 Americans applied. 10,000 Ten thousand of them were hired; untold thousands more headed for the country on tourist visas, hoping to find work when they got there. By early 1932, the New York Times was reporting that up to 1,000a thousand new Americans were arriving in Moscow each week – and that the number was increasing. The Times correspondent,, Walter Duranty, was a notorious fellow traveller and may have exaggerated; nonetheless, that year the number climbed high enough for the English-language weekly Moscow News to go daily. The Immigrants brought their children, and soon there were English-medium schools in at least five Soviet cities. For $40 million, Stalin bought 75,000 Model A sedans from Henry Ford, plus an entire Ford factory – which, of course, required expert technicians to run it, and so more Americans came.

With them, the newcomers brought baseball. Tzouliadis includes a group photograph of smiling young American players at Gorky Park in the summer of 1934, with the initials on their jerseys identifying their teams: the Moscow Foreign Workers’ Club and the Gorky Auto Workers’ Club. Paul Robeson, who had been a star college athlete before becoming a Communist and a famous singer, was named honorary catcher of one of the teams. Other American baseball teams sprang up everywhere from Kharkov in the Ukraine to Yerevan, Armenia. (A map in this book would have helped, incidentally.) The motif of baseball threads through The Forsaken, and some of its pages trace what happened to the men who played that day in Gorky Park.

Baseball caught on with Russians, and they began joining the American teams, or starting their own, although they considered the practice of stealing bases somewhat capitalistic. Then suddenly it was 1936, and the Great Purge had begun. Having already jailed, shot or exiled all his real political opponents, a paranoid Stalin now went after imaginary ones, in the process tapping a deep vein of Russian xenophobia. Waves of mass arrests swept across the country, with an estimated one out of every eight Soviet men, women and children being seized in the space of half a dozen years. At the show trials of high Communist Party officials, the charge was usually espionage for a foreign power. And so foreigners, or anyone connected with foreigners, were suspect. No more Russians joined the American baseball games. Very soon, there was no more baseball.

From Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other Russians who have borne witness, we know about the midnight arrests, the interrogations and forced confessions, the trains hauling packed boxcars of emaciated prisoners to the labour camps scattered across the Arctic, Siberia, Kazakhstan and elsewhere. Tzouliadis traces the story of the Americans who got caught up in this madness through a wide range of letters and documents, and the published memoirs of two men who played on American baseball teams in Moscow in the mid-1930s, Victor Herman and Thomas Sgovio. Unlike many of their fellow players, whom they occasionally encountered in the gulag, they survived their imprisonment: Herman in central Russia and Sgovio in Kolyma. No one knows how many of the American immigrants were caught up by the Purge and perished either in execution cellars or in the camps, although one mass grave with more than 140 American bodies was found in 1997 near the Finnish border. Tzouliadis does not try to estimate the total American dead. My own guess would be that the figure is in the thousands; if we add victims among Britons and other Westerners living in USSR at the time, the total would be in the tens of thousands.

The testimony of Herman and Sgovio has found its way into some histories of the gulag. But Tzouliadis’s most unexpected contribution is the sorry tale of how desperate pleas for help from captive Americans, some smuggled out of prison, some made by family members still at liberty who risked their lives by walking into the closely watched US Eembassy, were ignored by diplomats in Moscow and officials back in Washington. Tzouliadis has burrowed through hundreds of old State Department correspondence files for this evidence, finding even a wooden tag smuggled out of a camp with the words, in English, “Save me please and all the others”. Even though the conservative Ambassador of tiny Austria was able to save the lives of more than twenty Austrian left-wingers by sheltering them in his basement, US officials, contemptuous of the Americans who had come to Russia out of naive idealism, did virtually nothing. Yet they could have saved many lives if they had tried, for Stalin was shrewd enough to want to please a valued foreign trading partner. Again and again, the diplomats turned aside those begging for help, generally with the excuse that there was no proof that the prisoner involved was a US citizen. This was literally often true, for when Americans arrived to work in the Soviet Union, the Russians usually confiscated their passports – the better to exert control, and also to acquire a stash of US passports they could later doctor and use to send Soviet spies abroad.

Why were the officials so callous? For one thing, making too much noise might get you expelled from what was, for a rising young Foreign Service officer, a plum post. Beyond that, diplomats temperamentally are seldom troublemakers; the exceptions, like Raoul Wallenberg or Henry Morgenthau Sr, the US envoy to Turkey who did so much to publicize the Armenian genocide, are rare. And finally, behind those who played it safe at the US Embassy in Moscow in the late 1930s was another factor: their boss.

In the American practice of handing out ambassadorships to presidential chums and campaign contributors, never was there a more ill-fated choice than Franklin D. Roosevelt’s selection of Joseph E. Davies as US Ambassador to Moscow in 1936. Davies knew nothing about Russia; he had made a small fortune as a lawyer, defending corporations against government tax collectors during the boom times of the 1920s. He had then married the owner of a much larger fortune, the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, known for her array of extravagant homes, one of which was the world’s largest private yacht, the three-masted Sea Cloud, with a crew of sixty-two.

Davies “loved bigness”, Justice Louis Brandeis once said, criticizing him for his failures on a government commission that was supposed to curb monopolies. In Stalin’s Russia, Davies found bigness that satisfied him completely. To the horror of other diplomats, he attended several of the Purge show trials and told the State Department that justice had been done. It did not seem to bother him when Soviet acquaintances vanished. One Russian diplomatic liaison officer had taken Davies’s daughter and some friends out for dinner and dancing when two men came to their table and tapped him on the shoulder. “He was never seen again”, Tzouliadis writes. Nor was Mrs Davies much disturbed by any of this, even though, she said years later, from their bedroom at the US Ambassador’s residence, she could sometimes hear women and children screaming in adjacent apartment buildings as men were arrested in the middle of the night. Her main interest was in collecting art, jewellery and china that had once belonged to the Russian aristocracy, something she was able to do on a lavish scale as the government raised hard currency by selling off confiscated collections.

In 1937, the peak year of Purge arrests, ’sDavies managed to spend most days of the year outside Russia, some of it cruising the Baltic on the Sea Cloud, with his astonished Soviet secret police guards along as his invited guests. At the end of his stay in Moscow, he was overjoyed that Stalin granted him a two-hour audience, after the dictator had refused to meet other Western ambassadors. “He is really a fine, upstanding, great man!”, Davies told an underling at the Eembassy. Of all the foreign deniers and abettors who helped Stalin get away with mass murder, this staunchly capitalist couple were certainly among the strangest.

There is a later chapter to Tzouliadis’s story, for a second wave of Americans entered Soviet prison camps – at least 2,800 of them, according to one Russian document he cites – at the end of the Second World War, as the Red Army overran POW camps in Germany, and a third, smaller wave as the Chinese turned over POWs captured in Korea. The Russians refused to give back these men or even to acknowledge their existence. With the Cold War now under way, the leverage that the US had once had over the Soviet Union was lost, and more Americans met their end amid snow and ice.

Tzouliadis apparently does not know Russian, but aside from a few odd transliterations and an infelicity in his subtitle (the acronym gulag refers to the entire network, not to an individual camp), this has not limited his research. Soviet officials who dealt with Americans during the 1930s are by now all dead, many of them Purge victims themselves; and Russian archives, once briefly accessible in the early 1990s, are again now mostly closed to foreign researchers. This is an American as well as a Soviet story, and in telling it skilfully from a wide variety of rarely used and mostly American sources, Tzouliadis has etched a small piece of a great historical cataclysm and reminded us of how Stalin’s regime devoured not just human lives but hopes, dreams, trust. Those American baseball players who came to Russia found themselves in a tragic game with no umpire – either in the Kremlin or the US Eembassy. This book makes me wonder whether the several mass-grave sites I saw in Russia – one full of earth-stained, bullet-riddled skulls in central Siberia, and one of bones bleached white under an electrical transmission tower on a foggy, wind-swept hillside in Kolyma – might have contained any of my countrymen who were once catchers, pitchers, or first basemen.

Tim Tzouliadis
THE FORSAKEN
From the Great Depression to the Gulags
Hope and betrayal in Stalin’s Russia
472pp. Little, Brown. £20.
978 0 316 72724 2

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article5390210.ece


In December 2008 Stalin was voted third in a poll of the greatest Russians, quite interesting.......

One should not hold any misconceptions about Stalin. He was as bad and in many cases worse than Hitler. That is something that should not be forgotten.

[Mr.K]

Baseball caught on with Russians, and they began joining the American teams, or starting their own, although they considered the practice of stealing bases somewhat capitalistic.

I have a great difficulty believing in this, all the Russians I know don't like baseball.

[SBL]

I have a great difficulty believing in this, all the Russians I know don't like baseball.
Were they alive in the 30s?

[LineDoggie]

Coming out of the Ice (1982)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083749/

the story of American Victor Herman

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjwYVPU8_lU

[Mr.K]

Were they alive in the 30s?

Both grandfathers don't like baseball, parents do not like it, childhood friends didn't like it Not a single russian that I know, likes that sport.
The only thing from baseball that was popular in Russia were the baseball bats used by rival gangs when they fought eachother.

Officially a baseball league in USSR appeared in 1987.


Back to the subject, its very horrible and regretful that americans in soviet union had such a fate, life in the USA must have been a real hell in the 1930s

[backpack]

1234567...

[KoTeMoRe]

A review of the book:



In December 2008 Stalin was voted third in a poll of the greatest Russians, quite interesting.......

One should not hold any misconceptions about Stalin. He was as bad and in many cases worse than Hitler. That is something that should not be forgotten.

I don't see how you can judge this...Koba was bad, but his legacy was a bit more complex than
in many cases worse than Hitler.

[[WDW]Megaraptor]

I don't see how you can judge this...Koba was bad, but his legacy was a bit more complex than [Hitler] .

Only because he won the war.

[Connaught Ranger]

although one mass grave with more than 140 American bodies was found in 1997 near the Finnish border.

How did they know that 140 bodies were Americans?

[LineDoggie]

http://kitkat.wvu.edu:8080/files/169/thesisvb.pdf

[KoTeMoRe]

Megaraptor;3805255']Only because he won the war.

Oh and, I'm sure you would have liked the opposite happening?

[KB]

A US writer named Anne Applebaum wrote a book on the Gulag a few years ago; part of the book touched on Americans who were caught up in the Soviet forced labor camps.

The plight of the few Americans who were caught up in the camps is interesting, but they were a infintesimal drop in the bucket compared to the tens of millions of unfortunate Russians who had to endure Stalin's system.

[Kilgor]

Back to the subject, its very horrible and regretful that americans in soviet union had such a fate, life in the USA must have been a real hell in the 1930s

Life was difficult, but they were the fools who believe the Potemkin Village stories, and other propraganda. The "truth" about what was happening in the soviet union at the time was not common knowledge.

Given the famines and hunger at the time, things could not have been worse in the US.

[Abbadon the Despoiler]

interesting thread, thanks.
Stalin was cruel paranoid power-mad tyran who've killed more than 20 million of his own people and he got voted for a great russian, won 3rd place? ...that nicely represent russian temper.

[Mordoror]

that nicely represent russian temper.

and that simple comment from a retard mind represent your temper

if you were a little more wise you would open different history books from different university sources or even go and see the proper thread on this forum and see that the situation is a little more complex that what your FoxNEws stuffed brain may have perceived

[Abbadon the Despoiler]

and that simple comment from a retard mind represent your temper

most of my posts are actually ment to represent my retard mind.
btw I don't watch tv nor read foxnews or whatever.



if you were a little more wise you would open different history books from different university sources or even go and see the proper thread on this forum and see that the situation is a little more complex that what your FoxNEws stuffed brain may have perceivedlittle more complex? tell it to the living survivors of his victims.
Stalin destroyed or ended too much innocent lifes to be THAT mighty amazing person. simple as that.

[Mordoror]

little more complex? tell it to the living survivors of his victims.
Stalin destroyed or ended too much innocent lifes to be THAT mighty amazing person. simple as that.

just to fix it : never said otherwise but it concerns your link between the fact that Stalin was the third on an internet poll and the average russian temper

to say it otherwise : it spills your free hate of everything which is russian

[Abbadon the Despoiler]

to say it otherwise : it spills your free hate of everything which is russian

well I've been kinda raised in that way, for obvious reasons, so it's hard to fight it. looking back, kreml didn't do much good around.
I don't hate 'avarage' russians as long as they're not commies lol.
anyway I know only 3 or 4 russians but they're all very patriotic, proud, obstinate and unyielding.

[Mordoror]

they're all very patriotic, proud, obstinate and unyielding.

who is not ??:)

back on the topic : Stalin had little regard to state potential ennemies concerning their respective nationalities

that said, i don't think these Americans were purposely targeted but they were on the bad place at the bad time much more like millions of SU citizens (including a large majority of russians and ukrainians ....)

[KoTeMoRe]

who is not ??:)

back on the topic : Stalin had little regard to state potential ennemies concerning their respective nationalities

that said, i don't think these Americans were purposely targeted but they were on the bad place at the bad time much more like millions of SU citizens (including a large majority of russians and ukrainians ....)

They were specifically selected, skilled you went with the technicians and engineers, planners what not. Unskilled you had to be "isolated" from the masses. After all these US nationals were far more politically awaken than the average soviet citizen, hence the trip.

Wich made them an anomaly in a system where things tended to sink not bounce.

[Red_Rage]

most of my posts are actually ment to represent my retard mind.
btw I don't watch tv nor read foxnews or whatever.

little more complex? tell it to the living survivors of his victims.
Stalin destroyed or ended too much innocent lifes to be THAT mighty amazing person. simple as that.


My great great mother (who just recently turned 97) - survived 2 world wars, a revolution, purges, Perestroika in Western Ukraine - she still worships Stalin as a great hero.

Generation that actually experienced Stalin, for the most part loves him. Anti-Stalinism really caught on in Russia in the '90s and since most of the forum posters here are "products" of Perestroika, you are essentially preaching to the choir here. I , born in 1982, think that Stalin was wasteful with human lives and resources and generally Soviets deserved a better and more refined (or at least educated) leader. My great grandma, born in 1912, worships him as a God. All matter of perspective, and quite frankly I don't think you or I have a right to disrespect the perspective of people who actually experienced those times.

[[WDW]Megaraptor]

Isn't worshiping Stalin as a god pretty much what he brainwashed the people into doing?

[LineDoggie]

It's called a Cult Of Personality..........

[Hollis]

It's called a Cult Of Personality..........



Yep, Stalin was a Stalinist before he was anything else. Heaven forbid if a person under his control was not a Stalinist too.

[Mr.Flint]

My great great mother (who just recently turned 97) - survived 2 world wars, a revolution, purges, Perestroika in Western Ukraine - she still worships Stalin as a great hero.

Generation that actually experienced Stalin, for the most part loves him. Anti-Stalinism really caught on in Russia in the '90s and since most of the forum posters here are "products" of Perestroika, you are essentially preaching to the choir here. I , born in 1982, think that Stalin was wasteful with human lives and resources and generally Soviets deserved a better and more refined (or at least educated) leader. My great grandma, born in 1912, worships him as a God. All matter of perspective, and quite frankly I don't think you or I have a right to disrespect the perspective of people who actually experienced those times.
Even if we have the opposite perspective of people who actually experienced those times?

[Red_Rage]

Megaraptor;3813569']Isn't worshiping Stalin as a god pretty much what he brainwashed the people into doing?


My point is that people who have been "brainwashed" are either dead or will be soon. No need to spit and trample on something that they experienced and believed all their lives.

It seems that people that get worked up the most about Stalin have never not only never lived in a communist country, but were born after the Cold War was over.

[Red_Rage]

Even if have the opposite perspective of people who actually experienced those times?


Did you read what I said? I suggest you read the part you so conviniently highlighted in bold again.

[Mr.Flint]

Did you read what I said? I suggest you read the part you so conviniently highlighted in bold again.
You apparently opted not to understand what i said.
Let me chew it out for you.
If we have relatives who actually experienced those times, and have an opposite perspective of the one you posted, do we still have no right to disrespect the perspective that conflicts with our relatives one?

[Red_Rage]

You apparently opted not to understand what i said.
Let me chew it out for you.
If we have relatives who actually experienced those times, and have an opposite perspective of the one you posted, do we still have no right to disrespect the perspective that conflicts with our relatives one?


I think that it was you who opted not to understand. Let's break it down for especially slow:

I don't think you or I have a right to disrespect the perspective (perspectives can be different...guess what? my perspective differs from that of my relatives, but i'm not about to go out and start proving to 80-year olds that the system they were part of, and them by association, were wrong from a modern moral perspective) of people (again, people is plural form and thus implies a wide variety of experiences and opinions) who actually experienced those times (hope all is clear here...).

[Hollis]

I think that it was you who opted not to understand. Let's break it down for especially slow:

I don't think you or I have a right to disrespect the perspective (perspectives can be different...guess what? my perspective differs from that of my relatives, but i'm not about to go out and start proving to 80-year olds that the system they were part of, and them by association, were wrong from a modern moral perspective) of people (again, people is plural form and thus implies a wide variety of experiences and opinions) who actually experienced those times (hope all is clear here...).


I guess it is difficult for some to realize Stalin did not victimize everyone. He had support, people liked him. People also hated him with a passion.

Also people misjudge the impact of WWII on the average Soviet or Russian. Some estimates will go as high as 100 Million Soviets died. While it was the Red Army and resiliency of the Soviet people that actually defeated the nazis, Stalin got a lot of the credit for it. That Credit covered a lot of sins and errors of Stalin. In a way the nazis saved Stalin's imagine.

[CPL Trevoga]

interesting thread, thanks.
Stalin was cruel paranoid power-mad tyran who've killed more than 20 million of his own people and he got voted for a great russian, won 3rd place? ...that nicely represent russian temper.

I could probably publish a poll naming George W. Bush as a greatest Russian, given sufficient funds. Let's not go crazy believing in polls and all that jazz. Nobody really knows that much about Stalin in the former Soviet Union. After Khruschev he was hardly mentioned and only briefly in historical contexts, also you got Western propaganda, where he ate babies and drank blood of 77 billion people.

All I know is that he was ruthless and on his orders hundreds of Soviet staff officers were killed and thousands of Polish officers as well. We know it from historical evidence, rest is very questionable.

[LineDoggie]

Hundreds of staff officers? Try thousands. His Purges greatly helped the Wehrmacht in initial stages of Barbarossa.

Lackeys dont win battles, it took far too many Brave Soviet Soldiers before Competant Commanders rose to lead

[Kilgor]

I could probably publish a poll naming George W. Bush as a greatest Russian, given sufficient funds. Let's not go crazy believing in polls and all that jazz. Nobody really knows that much about Stalin in the former Soviet Union. After Khruschev he was hardly mentioned and only briefly in historical contexts, also you got Western propaganda, where he ate babies and drank blood of 77 billion people.

All I know is that he was ruthless and on his orders hundreds of Soviet staff officers were killed and thousands of Polish officers as well. We know it from historical evidence, rest is very questionable.

the records are quite accurate when it comes to executions and prisoner movements, where the debate is in regards to the famines.

[Hollis]

After Khruschev broke the death grip of the Stalinist in the SU, information from with in the SU began to come out about him. The purge of the Red Army, gulags, etc. Not from Western sources but from within the CCCP.

[Zeonic Marine]

I think that it was you who opted not to understand. Let's break it down for especially slow:

I don't think you or I have a right to disrespect the perspective (perspectives can be different...guess what? my perspective differs from that of my relatives, but i'm not about to go out and start proving to 80-year olds that the system they were part of, and them by association, were wrong from a modern moral perspective) of people (again, people is plural form and thus implies a wide variety of experiences and opinions) who actually experienced those times (hope all is clear here...).


Simply put? Yes, we do have that responsibility.

I think the debate over Stalin at the end of the day has to succumb to something called "the truth". My great uncle served in the 12th SS during WWII and thought Hitler was a great and powerful man guided by destiny. He was in the Hitler Youth (granted, essentially mandatory by the later stages of the regime) and believed in the system.

He eventually learned of the atrocities and while initially heartbroken came to be a realize this was the truth. He dealt with it and moved forward. It helped him form a resolve that such things must never be allowed to happen again. He became an element of change. Allowing a cult of personality to exist only foments the teachings the cult leader taught, something no culture can afford.

Am I suggesting we assail our elders and criticize them for being fools, blinded by propaganda? Certainly not. I'm not out to crush people's lives and exclaim they were a sham. We need to care for and respect them

What else would your Grandmother or many rank and file Russians think? Information isn't what it is today, and in communist Russia, especially under Stalin, information was strictly controlled down to a level that would make many micro managers head's spin. All they were told was Stalin was a saviour day in and day out and offered "evidence" to that fact. Her reaction is natural, given her age, many eldrly wax on how their pasts were ones of stability and security. It's a common human trait.

Stalin's propaganda machine was if nothing, effective and well tuned. Stalin wasn't so much a communist as a "Stalinist", everything was made to service Stalin, even state issues were determined on how they best suited him and his ideas. He was in many ways unique amongst dictators, right man, right mind, right time in history to achieve that cult of personality.

I can hardly blame the average factory working Russian or state farmer from being unable to see outside the crafted bubble society that was created for them. I feel bad for them more than anything. To them this was life and they were busy with the demands of working and raising families .The fact is however, that while they were living with this perception those with bad luck, the wrong affiliations or too much information were whisked away in the night to be worked in gulags and died in untold miliions. Propaganda banks on this ignorance to survive.

That being said, it is the responsibility of those that posses the truth to voice it. If people claim Stalin was a great and wonderful man, then that myth shouldn't be perpetuated any further. It is disrespectful to our elders to assume the position of "they just don't know any better" or allowing them to influence others with something that can continue to breed the myth and motives of a political system that did nothing but murder and oppress their own countrymen. I find that premise far more distasteful. We cannot respect people if we treat them like anomalies, quaint relics unable to understand or handle the facts.

What is of value, letting people believe what they want or unmasking the system that sought and in the minds of many, still seeks to dominate them.

Part of growth is admitting your past, dealing with history and offering everyone the honest respect of the truth. Stalin was and will always be a mass murderer of his own people and others and that's the truth, end of story like it, rationalize it or not. There is no perspective on this, only cold dead facts. The truth exists if we like it or not. This is the truest way to insure that people like Stalin are never afflicted on a people again. It is our responsibility. There is no set of modern ethics or past to jsutify his actions in anyone's minds.

Phillip K. **** once said:

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”

At the end of the day, love and respect your elders and if they want to believe, fine, but presenting them with the truth is only respectful and fair and when your dear grandmother passes, much like some members of my family, their vision that Stalin or Hitler was a good and great man has to be consigned to the rubbish bin for what it was.

A lie.

[Kilgor]

After Khruschev broke the death grip of the Stalinist in the SU, information from with in the SU began to come out about him. The purge of the Red Army, gulags, etc. Not from Western sources but from within the CCCP.

One must be careful with Khruschev, he was hardly a angel himself, sigining the death want for thousands and conducting his own brutal purges in the Ukraine. He has his own reasons to blame everything on Stalin.

[KoTeMoRe]

One must be careful with Khruschev, he was hardly a angel himself, sigining the death want for thousands and conducting his own brutal purges in the Ukraine. He has his own reasons to blame everything on Stalin.

Meh it was political Ping pong.