• Frank [he/him, he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          The Soviet archives report about 730,000 executions during the Great Purge. To what degree that was appropriate given the conditions faced by the USSR is up to you.

          The 1932 famine was not deliberate but there was significant administrative mismanagement that contributed to the death toll. It is reasonable to level the accusation that the Soviet administration had both the ability and the duty to intervene in the famine earlier and failed to do so. The reasons for this are very complex, but the fact remains.

          Mass deportations of ethnic groups after the war is a pretty big Soviet L. The famine conditions of 1946 combined with almost non-existent preparations for the arriving populations caused a lot of unnecessary deaths. Also, collective punishment always causes more problems than it solves.

          My understanding, which is admittedly limited, was the Sino-Soviet split was largely due to the actions of Kruschev's administration after Stalin's death.

        • JosefStainlessSteel [none/use name]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Deportations due to suspected collaboration with Nazis

          Almost entirely fictional. This is basically the "Uyghur genocide" of the 1940s.

          As the nazi army ate more into Soviet territory. The Soviet Union then pulled people into the territory to prevent them being exterminated. The classic example is the Crimean Tatars with wikipedia claiming it was a "cultural genocide" (lmao sound familiar?)

          Soviet relationship with China

          Sino-soviet split happened because of the Kruschevites?

          Treatment of religion

          I um and ar about this but at the end of the day a lot Christians were White Guardists and only in 1940s when Stalin allowed Orthodox church back had they really taken on a Soviet orientation that wasnt traitorous

          Lysenkoism

          Lysnko was proven correct

          https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674089051

          • space_comrade [he/him]
            ·
            edit-2
            2 years ago

            Lysnko was proven correct

            https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674089051

            That's ridiculous, just because epigenetics are real doesn't mean his theory was sound at all. He made much bolder claims than what empirical evidence of epigenetics shows us.

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Epigenetics is not what Lysenko theorized. The results and method of action are completely different. Lysenkoism's superficial resemblance to epigenetic phenomena is an accident of history, not evidence of suppressed genius.

            • Tachanka [comrade/them]
              ·
              edit-2
              2 years ago

              yeah it's like saying anaximander "was right about evolution" because he said humans are descended from mermaids.

            • JosefStainlessSteel [none/use name]
              ·
              2 years ago

              I suspect this is a stretch but don’t have a deep enough knowledge of Lysenko’s claims nor epigenetics to really know.

              I actually read into it further last night and was mistaken. I had heard of Lysenkos resurgence and assumed he was right but it turns out he was just partly right and mostly wrong so ignore that.

      • space_comrade [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I’m curious as to what mistakes you think Stalin and Mao made?

        Stalin did a People's Ethnic Cleansing during WW2, most notably the Crimean Tatars, the reason being preventing collaboration with the nazis. Even though the fears of collaboration with nazis weren't unfounded deporting entire ethnicities from their homelands to some fucking backwoods without proper infrastructure is a :yikes: from me.

        • JosefStainlessSteel [none/use name]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          Stalin did a

          Stalin didn't do anything. The soviet Union under Stalin was ran under collective leadership. Something even the CIA agrees with

          Even in Stalin's time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Stalin was merely the captain of a team.

          People’s Ethnic Cleansing during WW2

          The Nazis occupied most of what we now call Ukraine and was only a few hundred miles from Crimea in 1944. A Slither of Soviet resistance separated Nazi occupied Ukraine from Crimea in 1944

          https://omniatlas.com/maps/europe/19440129/

          So did the Soviets move the Tatars because they wanted to "do a peoples ethnic cleansing" or did the Soviets move them to prevent what happened to all Soviet peoples under the flag of the 3rd reich?

          deporting entire ethnicities from their homelands to some fucking backwoods without proper infrastructure

          Yes. Much better to have the Nazis ride over the skulls off the Soviet supporters among the Crimean Tatars, the Nazis to empower the collaborators and use all the socialists and communists for slave labour like the OUN/UPA in the rest of Nazi-occupied Ukraine . Who signed up for Einzatsgruppen, and SS squads and wholesale slaughtered their own people

          • space_comrade [he/him]
            ·
            edit-2
            2 years ago

            Stalin didn’t do anything. The soviet Union under Stalin was ran under collective leadership. Something even the CIA agrees with

            The question was "what mistakes did Stalin make", I don't want to argue semantics here, you know what I meant.

            So did the Soviets move the Tatars because they wanted to “do a peoples ethnic cleansing” or did the Soviets move them to prevent what happened to all Soviet peoples under the flag of the 3rd reich?

            Uh huh, so why didn't they bring them back after the war? And also why didn't they do the same for all civilians, the nazis had plans to eradicate or enslave pretty much every ethnicity east of Berlin.

            • JosefStainlessSteel [none/use name]
              ·
              2 years ago

              Uh huh, so why didn’t they bring them back after the war?

              After ww2, World War 3 was expected to break out at any moment. Soviet and Americans were shooting each others planes down in the Korean war (1950)

              A lot of Americans and British were hoping to turn the Hungarian Colour Revolution of 1956 into a world war documented here

              Stalin died in 1953.

              • space_comrade [he/him]
                ·
                edit-2
                2 years ago

                Those are some pretty wild mental gymnastics.

                If WW3 were to break out what would it matter where the Tatars were at the time? WW3 clearly wouldn't have been fought against nazis.

                Also they could have moved them back after Stalin's death, or did Khruschev's revisionism infect literally the entire Soviet Union instantly after gaining power? What was that about collective leadership again?

                • JosefStainlessSteel [none/use name]
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  2 years ago

                  If WW3 were to break out what would it matter where the Tatars were at the time? WW3 clearly wouldn’t have been fought against nazis.

                  No it would've been fought by the Anglo-American empire that rehabiliated Nazis and put them as heads of NATO, EU and even put Reinhard Gehlen in charge of the Gehlen Organisation who was a former werhmacht Major General and head of Nazi Intelligence.

                  World War 3 would've been fought by the Anglo-American empire using Nazi's and Nazi collaborators

                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehlen_Organization

                  The CIA and MI6 were parachuting Banderites (OUN/UPA holocaust collaborators) into Ukraine as late as 1954

                  Between 1949 and 1954, a total of seventy-five ZCh OUN and ZP UHVR agents were parachuted into Ukraine. With Czech wartime pilots at the controls, the planes evaded Soviet radar screens by flying at 200 feet (61 meters) across the Soviet border and climbing at the last moment to 500 feet (152 meters), the minimum height for a safe parachute drop. In May 1952, one group was sent by submarine. In 1953 two groups used hot-air balloons that lifted from British and West German ships close to the Polish coast. Other groups tried to reach Ukraine on foot. Ukrainian MI6 and CIA agents did not realize that very few of their missions could meet with success, because of infiltration by Soviet intelligence.

                  Stepan Bandera The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist

                  Training them

                  The American and British intelligence services were already taking an interest in Nazis and Nazi collaborators, before the end of the war. They were also interested in people and organizations, such as the German Military Intelligence on the Eastern Front (Fremde Heere Ost, FHO), and the various Eastern European far-right movements, including the OUN, who could provide them with information about the Soviet Union or who possessed other valuable knowledge. With the help of the CIA, Reinhard Gehlen, former head of the FHO, established the Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND), the intelligence service of West Germany. American intelligence protected Gehlen and his advisers.[1578]

                  And

                  Bandera had met with officials of the British Secret Intelligence Service (known as MI6), in the British zone at the end of the war. MI6 regarded Bandera as potentially useful for Cold War purposes, and therefore decided to help him.[1583] The American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in Munich also protected Bandera from Soviet intelligence, although it was more interested in cooperation with the UHVR, which began to compete with the ZCh OUN after the war. The CIC concluded that Bandera’s extradition would “imply to the Ukrainians that we as an organization are unable to protect them, i.e., we have no authority.

                  ..

                  Also they could have moved them back after Stalin’s death

                  You asked about Stalin and I'm telling you the justification for not moving them back until 1953 (Stalin's death) and 1956 (when Ww2 was still expected to break out)

                  did Khruschev’s revisionism infect literally the entire Soviet Union instantly after gaining power?

                  It should tell you something that nothing was done until Gorbachevs pererstroika. That nothing formal was done until 1989. Ie. when they pulled down the red flag and let the country explode into nationalist-ethnic violence throughout the entire eastern bloc. Where Soviet brothers shoot at each other decades later in Georgia/Armenia/Azerbaijan/Ukraine etc