Joseph Stalin was a communist leader inspired by Leon Trotsky
Trotsky was a communist revolutionary and intellectual. He once wrote “In politics, obtaining power and maintaining power justifies anything” in his book “Leur morale et la nôtre”*
In this book, Trotsky justifies the use of lies, infiltration of other political parties, smearing, even hostage taking. He says absolute ruthlesness is necessary to overthrow a hostile system and wield power. He concludes "We are acting for the greater good. We can’t be restrained by normal morality".
Joseph Stalin took Trotsky’s advice literally. So he murdered Trotsky because he saw him as rival. Stalin also started killing people because he believed they could be sympathetic to capitalism or opponents to his power.
Matvei Bronstein: Theorical physicist. Pioneer of quantum gravity. Arrested, accused of fictional “terroristic” activity and shot in 1938
Lev Shubnikov: Experimental physicist. Accused on false charges. Executed
Adrian Piotrovsky: Russian dramaturge. Accused on false charges of treason. Executed.
Nikolai Bukharin: Leader of the Communist revolution. Member of the Politburo. Falsely accused of treason. Executed.
General Alexander Egorov: Marshal of the Soviet Union. Commander of the Red Army Southern Front. Member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Arrested, accused on false charges, executed.
General Mikhail Tukhachevsky: Supreme Marshal of the Soviet Union. Nicknamed the Red Napoleon. Arrested, accused on fake charges. Executed.
Grigory Zinoviev:: Communist intellectual. Chairman of the Communist International Movement. Member of the Soviet Politburo. Accused of treason and executed.
Even the secret police themselves were not safe:
Genrikh Yagoda : Right-hand of Joseph Stalin. Head of the NKD Secret Police. He spied on everyone and jailed thousands of innocents. Arrested and executed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrikh_Yagoda
Nikolai Yezhov : Appointed head of the NKD Secret Police after the killing of Yagoda. Arrested on fake charges. Also executed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov
Everybody was absolutely terrified during this period. At least 500 000 people were murdered. Over 1 million people were deported to Gulags, secret prisons in Siberia, where they worked 12 hours a day.
Joseph Stalin decided to crush Ukraine for resisting communism and supporting independance. In 1933, he seized all Ukraine’s food production including all the bread, the wheat, the cows, the chicken. In the next months, over 5 million Ukrainians were starved to death. The situation was so bad that thousands of people turned to cannibalism. When the Nazis invaded Ukraine, some Ukrainians thought they were saviors
https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/holodomor
https://www.history.com/articles/ukrainian-famine-stalin
Hitler was a monster, but we really don’t talk enough about how bad Stalin was.
Whenever someone says we have to take control no matter the price and ignore all our previous values and laws you know what is coming next.
I also like murdering every capitalists so you can be the only one. Very Highlander.
Did he Make The USSR Great Again?
All of recorded history is western imperialist propaganda.
Any proof of that
Clearly you’ve been brainwashed by capitalism.
All my life I’ve seen Stalin listed with people like Hitler and Pol Pot as murderous despots. How the hell are we “not talking enough about how bad he was?”
We’re on Lemmy. A not insignificant percentage of the crowd are tankies.
It doesn’t have anything to do with Lemmy. American education has always given a pass to Stalin, probably because he was an extremely helpful ally in WW2. We are taught in America that WE saved the world when we entered WW2, but the reality is that the Soviet Union lost many, many more lives at the hand of the Nazis than the other allies, including America. The Soviet Union’s contribution was easily as significant as America’s. When the Soviets finally defeated the Nazis in Russia, and started marching toward Germany, one Nazi general said “If they treat us half as bad as we treated them, were in big trouble.”
So coming out of the war, school curriculums taught about the current cold war propaganda, but Hitler was the bad guy they focused on, not the guy that helped us beat him.
As Eddie Izzard joked about mass murderers like Stalin: “The reason we let them get away with it is because they killed their own people, and we’re sort of fine with that. Oh help yourself! We’ve been trying to kill you for ages!”
Her[1] bit on Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk_pHZmn5QM
For anyone that doesn’t know, Eddie Izzard is now Suzy Izzard ↩︎
I had probably 10 times as many educational hours dedicated to Hitler and the Holocaust as I did learning about Stalin.
Definitely this. This is what they chose the curriculum to cover more.
I live in Canada, the general vibe we get through our culture and education is that Hitler was #1 worst guy in history, everyone else was a close second.
Not too long ago I started listening to the audiobook of The Gulag Archipelago, and I had to stop a few chapters in because it was negatively affecting my mental health.
You may have heard about the Soviet Union being bad in the 70s and 80s, but that was an absolute cakewalk compared to the Stalin era.
Oh yeah, this should be required reading for all teenagers. Does it destroy your psyche? Yes, and that’s why it’s important.
0 out of 10, would never read again. Glad I did though.
Honestly, the guy was a real jerk.
the more I read about this Hitler guy the more I don’t like him
Adolf Hitler? The art student?
Shocking, right? I was similarly surprised when I heard about the extracurriculars of Ted Kaczynski, the mathematician.
Some people need better hobbies.
I disagree with a lot of Ted Kaczynski’s reasoning in his manifesto. But he wasn’t wrong that we are destroying the environment and letting consumerism ruin everything. Honestly, I think most of the people on this site would agree with his assessments even if he came to the conclusions under faulty assumptions.
Half the people on this site are advocating for stochastic responses to the current U.S. government anyway. So whats the difference?
The lesson is not to reject aspiring artists from art school, lest they decide to take over a country and start invading their neighbors.
I see you there P and R ref. Well played!
To put it mildly
Yet people still don’t know the difference that he was an authoritarian that forced a grinding, socialist state on his people over what actual socialism/communism is.
Could it be because “actual socialism/communism” has never existed in reality and every time it was attempted, it turned out to be a “grinding, socialist state”?
That presumes they were trying socialism/communism and not just using it as a cover for their authoritarian ideology.
That’s a bingo! Same with China today.
I think you could make the same argument with just about any economic policy. Free market capitalism has never existed in reality and every time it was attempted, it turned out to be an abstract of colonial imperialism.
It ends up billions of apes are hard to govern in a way that excludes usery and violence.
A most interesting theory, comrade. Perhaps you would like to give a speech further exploring your ideas in the basement of the secret police headquarters?
Humans are the problem. Any system we come up with will be corrupted eventually.
While technically true, some systems make it far easier than others.
I mean, it took capitalism about 200 years to be corrupted because the economic power starts off more decentralized than communism or socialism.
That’s not to say capitalism is a good option, because it clearly isn’t, but communism and socialism require a more centralized federal government by default which is a much smaller point of failure.
But the problem is people with cluster B personality disorders and those who follow them. Some systems are easier for them to infiltrate, but it happens to all of them eventually.
The people who should have power are rarely the ones who seek it, unfortunately. I like Heinlein’s (I think, might have been Asimov) take on it. Government officials should be dragged in kicking and screaming and only be allowed to leave when they do a good job.
Hierarchy is the problem. Any social system that allows for it will be corrupted eventually.
I invite you to describe the framework for a society that functions without any form of hierarchy, then.
I view the general problem with it is simply the existence of other societies.
IE lets say you have 4 societies on an island. 3 of them put all of their focus into developing a sustainable workable long term solution, farming/fishing etc…
1 of them, works on building weapons and attacking the other 3. Result, the murderous colony kills the other 3, then eventually either learns to act like the ones it killed and produce food, or it dies out with nothing left to raid.
Or like say rabbits, if you try and raise rabbits. You drop 2 in the wolf enclosure and see what happens. obviously the result is the rabbits die out. it’s not that rabbits aren’t a viable evolutionary path. It’s that without time and space to grow their numbers before getting encroached by the nearby predators, there’s no shot.
Humans aren’t ready for actual socialism. We have to evolve out the tribal savage first.
I’m curious how you define socialism, what you think humans aren’t ready for, and what alternative do we have and why
No you’re not. You just think you disagree with my opinion.
Oh I guess you’re a better judge on my level of curiosity! Have a wonderful day.
You don’t have to be a psychopath to obtain power, but it makes it easier. You do have to be a psychopath to want the power to murder indiscriminately.
Truly a paragon. Transcending above racism, classism, or religion, he believed in and fought for equal opportunity murder.
All animals are equal, but some of them have guns
Also crazy that he just died from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 74. If it weren’t for that, he’d probably have another 20 years in him.
It’s possible he was assassinated.
People forget there was around a dozen actual documented assassination attempts, the first in 1931.
That’s always the problem with being in power, there’s almost certainly someone who wants to get rid of you, but the more paranoid you behave about it the number of people who want you gone increases.
I wouldn’t say that an alcoholic in his 70s who died from cerebral hemorrhaging was assassinated.
Stalin spent the last 15-20 years of his life getting blackout drunk every single night. He also forced all of his top ministers and generals to join him in this drunkenness.
The full story is wild.
Then when Stalin died, everyone sort of knew that he was having a medical emergency, and they left him laying on the carpet to die for hours.
Which is also a wild story.
He was slowly poisoned over years by this arch rival, Stalin.
Most likely he lucked out and avoided a public beheading.
When he had a (suspected) stroke, they sent out for a doctor. They couldn’t find a single doctor who would treat him, so they put him to bed and he died a horrible death.
That’s why I’m a capitalist, who famously have never killed anyone for being a communist
Hahaha, nice 1
Your downvotes hint to this actually being juust some more imperialistic propaganda
The downvotes hint at a general awareness by users that whataboutism is a playground debate technique on par with, “I know you are, but what am I?”.
If a point is valid in a vacuum but has no bearing on the topic, it absolutely should get a negative reaction.
Do people actually defend Stalin still?
Not necssesarily defend, but they shift blame away from Stalin. Essentially, “He was bad, but not THAT bad, that’s just western propaganda”
You’ll see commonly that .ml excuses the famines (yes, plural) created by Stalin by shifting the blame towards environmental factors like “oh but there was a bit of a drought” or “they actually did it all themselves by burning their grain”, “it was to stop the Nazis from siezing the grain themselves”, the list of excuses goes on.
It’s more that some people don’t actively condemn him to the satisfaction of others.
The USSR under Stalin defeated Nazi Germany. Idle denunciation of Stalin in 2026 is the classic and most trusted pivot for (crypto)fascists to focus on when cornered or feeling insecure.
That’s the primary scenario that people are accused of ‘defending Stalin’. There’s always a nazi all too willing to spearhead this conversation, 70 years on after his death. Usually can’t even bring up Khrushchev and De-Stalinization usually since it’s not focusing on Stalin enough.
We are in the golden age of stupidity. People defend everything.
As older generations with direct knowledge die off, the younger generations are forgetting.
The younger generation doesn’t remember it in the first place, due to not being alive. And that is used against them.
It’s why it’s important to teach students to be critical of their sources. And try to find multiple reputable sources that corroborate the same information.
Just this morning, I was looking at a tv screen when it was announced a new study had concluded nearly 68% of russians still lament the disband of the soviet union.
Propaganda as it is, even if we cut those numbers by two thirds, it’s still too many people longing by one of the most brutal totalitarian regimes that has ever existed.
As a side note: I worked for some time with a company that imported machinery from Ukraine and Belarus, in the 2000’s, and I saw the amount of graffiti with USSR simbology that was plastered on the crates. Some people don’t allow it to just shrivel and die silently.
This isn’t to say the USSR did not created good things.
I worked with a fellow from Romania and he was appalled with how bad by comparison my country’s public health care system was.
But the numbers tally a grimm story of the USSR and the wrongs vastly outnumber the rights.
Lamenting the fall of the Soviet Union isn’t the same as thinking Stalin was good. There were several people after Stalin who didn’t randomly disappear people. At least, not as much.
That said, post WWII through the fall of the USSR I’d bet the average Soviet citizen had a better standard of living than the average Russian does today.
We can ask some russian citizens if they’re available. Until that opportunity presents itself, we’ll have to make do with whatever information we can access and read it with a good dose of skepticism.
We can ask some russian citizens if they’re available.
This guy has some pretty good cartoon shorts on Russian nostalgia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQGQT9b9jeI
Apparently these communists aren’t any good
