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.
Really? Stalin’s Soviet Union is why Americans have such a knee-jerk reaction to the concept of communism. We had entire moral panics that people might be brushing their teeth in a particularly Soviet way. The Soviets have been rivals or enemies a lot longer than they were allies. You find me an American that doesn’t agree with the statement “World War 2 was won with British intelligence, American steel and Soviet blood.”
My American Education included…what Americans know as the Berlin Airlift, I’d be curious to learn what the Germans and ex-Soviets call this incident. That Germany as a whole was divided East/West, with the Western half being controlled by the capitalist allies, and the East being controlled by the communist Soviets. Berlin was too, despite the city being located well into the Eastern half. So there was this little enclave of capitalism in communist East Germany, some barbecue in the borscht.
Boiling this down a bit (there was some nonsense about Russia resisting the west introducing the deutchemark) Stalin blockaded the city with the ultimatum “become communist or starve.” The West responded by flying in supplies by air, using the rationing expertise the British had developed during the war along with USAF and RAF airlift power. One pilot started dropping little parachute bundles of candy to the children who would hang out near the airport watching the planes, and when President Truman heard of this he ordered the candy drops increased.
It was that easy to come off looking like the Big Damn Heroes in this situation; they come bearing cold and starvation, we answer bearing fuel and food.
If anything, it’s the Japanese our schools go easy on; Imperial Japan were easily peers of the Nazis in the atrocity department, yet more American textbooks contain the word Auschwitz than the word Nanking.
I grew up in the Cold War era, and I hardly ever heard any real talk of Russian leaders, which was mostly Breshnev when I was growing up. Instead, it was a just a general hatred of the entire Communist/Soviet system in general. The guy at the top was just considered a figurehead. He certainly didn’t seem to have the same vicious stranglehold that Stalin had. The purges seems to have mostly died with him.
So we didn’t learn much about the people over there, mostly just the names Lenin, Stalin, Kruschev, and Breshnev. Occasionally Trotsky’s name came up. But mostly we just heard “Commies Bad. Don’t be a Commie.”
I was born about a week after Reagan said “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Growing up in the 90’s I didn’t get the childhood “better dead than red” stuff, we didn’t practice hiding under our desks from nuclear bombs. We did fire and tornado drills. As an aside, being an American school kid in the 90’s felt sane in a way I don’t think it did before or since? The Metroid were eradicated, the galaxy was at peace.
From our perspective, we had won the Cold War by default. With the iron curtain down, it was fairly easy to take a look at our old adversaries and we saw…very little we wanted. A few nice symphonies and ballets, a warehouse full of really cool rocket engines, and precisely one video game. By my era, we said “Don’t be a Commie, or you’ll end up like that.”