As a consequence, both army and industry had been gravely weakened by the second world war and this nearly produced disaster when Hitler invaded.
Historians have written that Stalin was a "consummate actor". When post-Soviet Russian historians saw that Stalin had deceived Roosevelt in crucial world war two negotiations, academics pointed out that this was perhaps not very surprising, since he had even managed to deceive Alexei Rykov, Lenin's successor as head of the Soviet government, who had served with him on the politburo in daily, close contact for over a decade - only to be shot later.
In fact, if we look back at Stalin, we see not only terror and ruthlessness, but - even more - deception. Not only in such things as the faked public trials, the disappearance of leading figures, of writers, of physicists, even of astronomers, but in the invention of a factually non-existent society.
The British socialists Sydney and Beatrice Webb were taken in by the not very sophisticated trick of having meaningless elections, trade unions, economic claims and so on. One major attribute of Stalinism was stupefaction or stultification. His subjects, or dupes, had to act as if they believed what the Kremlin was telling them in the press, on the radio.
Anna Akhmatova, the poet, said that no one could understand the Soviet system who had not been subjected to the continuous roar of the Soviet radios at street corners and elsewhere. And, with all that, the effective banning of non-Stalinist thought, or its expression. Even the wise physicist Andrei Sakharov, one of the finest minds of the generation, said later that he was deeply affected by Stalin's death; it took him years to break out of what he described as a "type of hypnosis" that had blinded him and so much of the population to the reality of Stalin's regime.
As one Russian scholar later remarked, "we wiped out the best and brightest in our country and, as a result, sapped ourselves of intelligence and energy". Any comparison of post-Nazi Germany with post-Stalinist Russia throws up the obvious difference that one regime was totally destroyed and its ideas totally discredited.
There was no formal process of de-Stalinisation in Russia; the disorganised breakdown of the Soviets left a detritus of both ideas and interests, which took decades to disintegrate. Stalin's heritage today? He remains respected by a swath of what may legitimately be called reactionaries in Russia: nationalists - chauvinists.
This might have surprised him, because Stalin was not Russian and did not even begin to learn the language until he was eight or nine. Those who remain devoted to Stalin often combine Stalinism with religion. How Stalin, the rebellious young theology student who went on to blow up the Cathedral of the Christ the Saviour, would have jeered. Born December 21 to cobbler Vissarion Djugashvili and wife Catherine. Grew up in Gori in Georgia. Father died when he was His hard childhood was not helped by two of his toes growing together and smallpox scars on his face.
We will never know how many millions Stalin killed. Time magazine put Stalin on its cover 11 times. Russian public opinion polls still rank him near the top of the greatest leaders of Russian history, as if he were just another one of the powerful but bloodthirsty czars.
Every family had not only victims but perpetrators. Can you put it in your past? How is a national identity formed when a central part of it is a crime? Toward the end of his life, Stalin may have had another genocide in his crosshairs. No one. In the end, they all got what they deserved. Who remembers? Oriana Skylar Mastro has built two careers simultaneously: one as an academic, the other, as a service member in the U. Air Force. To commemorate Veterans Day, wreaths will be placed in Memorial Court and Memorial Auditorium, along with a letter from President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, to honor members of the university community who have served or are serving in the U.
Armed Forces. Stanford News is a publication of Stanford University Communications. Drawing of a solitary confinement cell by artist Jacques Rossi, who spent nineteen years in the Gulag after he was arrested in the Stalin purges of — It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive. Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between and , while both Stalin and Hitler were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more.
The total figure for the entire Stalinist period is likely between two million and three million. The Great Terror and other shooting actions killed no more than a million people, probably a bit less. The largest human catastrophe of Stalinism was the famine of —, in which more than five million people starved.
Of those who starved, the 3. Tens of thousands of people were shot by Soviet state police and hundreds of thousands deported. Those who remained lost their land and often went hungry as the state requisitioned food for export. The first victims of starvation were the nomads of Soviet Kazakhstan, where about 1.
The famine spread to Soviet Russia and peaked in Soviet Ukraine. Stalin requisitioned grain in Soviet Ukraine knowing that such a policy would kill millions.
Blaming Ukrainians for the failure of his own policy, he ordered a series of measures—such as sealing the borders of that Soviet republic—that ensured mass death. A poster from In , as his vision of modernization faltered, Stalin ordered the Great Terror.
Because we now have the killing orders and the death quotas, inaccessible so long as the Soviet Union existed, we now know that the number of victims was not in the millions. We also know that, as in the early s, the main victims were the peasants, many of them survivors of hunger and of concentration camps. In all, , people were killed during the Great Terror, to which might be added a few hundred thousand more Soviet citizens shot in smaller actions.
The total figure of civilians deliberately killed under Stalinism, around six million, is of course horribly high. But it is far lower than the estimates of twenty million or more made before we had access to Soviet sources. At the same time, we see that the motives of these killing actions were sometimes far more often national, or even ethnic, than we had assumed. Indeed it was Stalin, not Hitler, who initiated the first ethnic killing campaigns in interwar Europe.
Nazi Germany began to kill on the Soviet scale only after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in the summer of and the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland that September. About , Polish civilians were killed between and , with each regime responsible for about half of those deaths.
It was this policy that brought asphyxiation by carbon monoxide to the fore as a killing technique. Beyond the numbers killed remains the question of intent. Most of the Soviet killing took place in times of peace, and was related more or less distantly to an ideologically-informed vision of modernization.
Germany bears the chief responsibility for the war, and killed civilians almost exclusively in connection with the practice of racial imperialism.
Germany invaded the Soviet Union with elaborate colonization plans. Thirty million Soviet citizens were to starve, and tens of millions more were to be shot, deported, enslaved, or assimilated. Such plans, though unfulfilled, provided the rationale for the bloodiest occupation in the history of the world.
The Germans placed Soviet prisoners of war in starvation camps, where 2. A million Soviet citizens also starved during the siege of Leningrad. Some , German soldiers died in Soviet captivity.
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