The Dictator Files: Joseph Stalin

On the other hand, if not for his totalitarian effort to industrialise the country (which was one of the reasons for events like the "Holodomor" and death of millions), USSR would not have the industrial capacity to stop Nazi Germany in WWII. The rapid industralization of Soviet Union was unprecedented and could not be achieved under a more moderate leader. And without it, they would have not been able to produce enough arms to stop the Germans.

Stalin was a psychopath, a great oppressor and a mass-murderer, but if he didn't came to power, the fate of Slavic people of Central and Eastern Europe could have been mass extermination and enslavement, as was in the intention of Nazi government.

It probably has something to do with the fact that the USSR was a nightmarish totalitarian state that aggressively expanded its murderous system of oppression across much of the face of the world and put down all dissent with bloodthirsty zeal. Whereas Japan became a peaceful liberal democracy after WWII.

The whole idea that the USSR was hell bent on world domination has never been substantiated. But it ensured that so-called free people in the West lived in fear believing it was true. The whole idea of the Domino Theory, and the idea that all communist uprisings in nations throughout the world were initiated by the USSR was a complete fallacy, but it formed the basis of Cold War foreign policy and was something people truly believed and which is probably still widely believed today. The Vietnam War, which was probably the most glaring failure of this policy, could have been avoided. Ho Chi Minh very much wanted a united Vietnam to be a US ally, to act as a counterweight to China. Even now you can see the difficult situation Vietnam is in with developments in the South China Sea, but it is now wary of the US. What lives large in the psyche of the Vietnamese is the 1000 year occupation of Vietnam by China.

If you do not consider the nuances of the situations of individual countries then you make bad policy. There is also evidence to suggest, if you read Alan Bullock's 'Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives', that relations between the USSR and the West may have been a bit different if Roosevelt had lived. He and Stalin apparently got on very well, much to the chagrin of Churchill. Truman, on the other hand, was an ex-army colonel, who had nothing but distrust of Stalin, and had not developed the type of relationship Roosevelt had developed with him during the meetings in Tehran and Yalta.

Without a doubt it was the USSR that won the Second World War. They gained an insane amount of territory, wealth, and influence in the world. America gained absolutely nothing other than some influence, but that was largely overshadowed by what the Soviet influence was in the world at the time.

:) the thrust of the joke wasn't that he was spending too much time taking quizzes, but rather than his Russian propagandist employers would be disappointed with his use of Internet time. I'm currently unemployed.

Yes, I agree. Hitler is just as bad as people make him out to be, but Stalin was just as bad, if not worse. War has no "good guys" and the winners wrote the history. All the sides did terrible things. Especially the Soviets. This is not to defend Hitler in any way. He was a terrible person responsible for millions of deaths, but he was not an anomaly

There are good guys in wars. Stalin wasn't one of them.

He was just as bad with the ethnic cleansing. Entire tribes of people wiped out. He was a worse butcher than Hitler.

^ not you, I assume. And don't be so shy. Tell us all what an amazing guy you think Stalin was. If you actually believe it have the guts to commit to it and say it loud and proud. It will make my work easier.

I once saw an interesting answer on Quora about this. The guy compared Hitler to a serial killer who selectively tortures, rapes, and murders 12 people, Stalin to a mass shooter who kills 25 people randomly, and Mao to a drunk driver who accidentally kills 50 people in a car accident. The numbers aren't necessarily to scale here, and it's hard to measure whether Hitler or Stalin actually killed more people, but I think it illustrates a good point about these two. Stalin may have been brutal and sociopathic, but he wasn't selectively targeting entire ethnic groups for extermination like Hitler, nor was he as violent in his methods.

Don't get me wrong--Stalin was still a terrible terrible person and deserves no apologies. But, if I had to choose between living in Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany, I'd choose the former any day.

I wouldn't want to live in either, but, unless you belonged to one of the minority populations that Hitler decided to try and exterminate, at least up until the tide of war turned and Germany was being bombed and invaded, I imagine that it would have been substantially better living in Germany under the Third Reich versus almost anywhere in Stalin's Soviet "utopia." And living in Mao's China would have been even worse, still.

He wasn't an actual badass. But he played one on TV.

I've seen it several times in the past year. Here's one article: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2019-05-09/stalin-is-more-popular-than-ever-in-russia-survey-shows

Of course he's popular. The guy running Russia right now is a Stalin wannabe and feeds the Russian people revisionist, neo-Stalinist propaganda.

It's hard to deny that he was a dictator

By the way, the term "Holodomor" is really nonsense. How annoying it is for me. About Russia and Kazakhstan, who starved no less, everyone "forgets", exposing the famine as an alleged genocide of Ukrainians. They are already looking for any fact and distorting it so as to show how the Russians oppressed everyone. Although the USSR did a lot for the formation of Ukraine.

You're entirely misinformed, or you are spreading propaganda. Hundreds of survivors have been interviewed, and they are consistent. Parts of Ukraine were specifically targeted to starve because they had resisted Soviet assimilation. Stalin wrote a letter in 1932, saying that 50 separate municipal Communist committees reported that the grain procurement quotas were unrealistic. In that same letter, he said that Ukraine must become a "Soviet Fortress" and that dissent had to be put down. Then he decreed that districts and collective farms were to be put on the "blacklist" if they failed to meet these unrealistic quotas. Over 75% of blacklisted districts were Ukrainian. There were literal trainloads of Ukrainian grain that just rotted in Soviet shipping depots. Ukrainian peasants were not allowed to leave famine-stricken areas. This famine didn't happen naturally, and it didn't happen everywhere equally.