To all full-grown hexbears, NO DUNKING IN MY THREAD...ONLY TEACH, criminal scum who violate my Soviet will be banned three days and called a doo doo head...you have been warned
To all full-grown hexbears, NO DUNKING IN MY THREAD...ONLY TEACH, criminal scum who violate my Soviet will be banned three days and called a doo doo head...you have been warned
I will say this, I get frustrated by most any anti-Stalin slander, but I also get really depressed when i look into a figure in soviet history and see "died 1938-9" because so so often it is needless. So many comrades lives wasted and in many cases indefensibly, however what is worth considering is these are the exception not the rule. Most people who got tried didn't get executed, most purged just got reassigned or kicked from the party, and the vast majority of citizens faced none of this. That doesn't make a great deal of it any less of a mistake, but it becomes a mistake among triumphs.
There is a reason so many people who got purged and executed have wiki articles, and it is not just western propaganda, it is because people in prominent and noteworthy positions were more likely to be killed or become relevant in hindsight, whereas random worker who got his pension and retired happily and voted in his soviet is not "worth" making an entry for, and for understandable reasons.
So many dissidents or executed people who get attention are artists, creatives, and this seems to imply that the purges went so deep into harmless things, but really it shows us that a great deal of the purges are part of an almost culture war or battle within an agency, a disproportionate number of those purged are public individuals. So you naturally will see more info on them.
Another part of it is that there are for sure bad actors and people operating out of malice, plenty involved in the ethnic expulsions did so with cruelty and while there are reasons for why at the highest levels say Stalin would approve of deporting so many Chinese and Korean communists from the Far East out of concerns that Japan would claim that made it legitimate territory for Manchuria to claim (as they had elsewhere), another case like that of the Ingush is far less reasonable even compared to the incorrect logic of the prior example, and carried out even more harshly often in an openly racist manner by officials. Sometimes this was ignored or approved of by higher officials, but often local powerbases protected themselves until dismantled.
We see this with Ukraine and Stalin bringing the hammer down on officials who did discriminate and mistreat people intentionally
Stalin was very ugly and wasn't hot.
But, seriously, thanks for the response! I do agree about the bias in seeing reports on negative events rather than on positive events. I know many people did relatively well in Soviet Union. My girlfriend's family, for example, was deported/moved under Stalin, I think twice, so she and her family aren't very sympathetic towards him and I figure that other families that remember those events will still harbor some grudge, understandably. But, that being said, their family did relatively well and she's still a Communist.
Anyway, I'm just trying to navigate this because I don't want to just blatantly dismiss the guy but I also know he wasn't perfect and there is inevitably some truth to the claims but it's difficult to parse what that is exactly. It's also really helpful to learn that most purges didn't involve executions and people made it out of gulags, and so on. Thanks!