Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events

A monster died 50 years ago today...
Larry J — (archived)

but there are still those who apologize for him.

Some readers will find the comparison with Hitler offensive. In fact, Stalin was worse. Alexander Yakovlev, an expert on Stalin's crimes, estimates that his victims totalled more than 30 million. To give some idea of the scale of this: Stalin's body count is the equivalent to an army of 1.5 million Fred Wests, or 10,000 11 Septembers. Yes, Stalin helped to defeat Nazism, but so would any Russian leader who had been attacked by the Reich.



One anecdote will have to suffice to give some sense of Stalin's contempt for human life. His wife Nadezhda began in the early 1930s to teach courses in textile production in an attempt to escape the misery of life in the Kremlin. She and her students carried out assignments in the Russian countryside, where she witnessed the degeneration of the peasantry because of Stalin's policy of forced seizures. According to the historian Robert Conquest, 3.5 million people starved to death, and cannibalism became rife. Nadezhda's students were so shocked that they insisted on reporting back to the great leader Stalin. They did, and Stalin had them all arrested for "sedition". Nadezhda killed herself not long afterwards.

I don't raise this only in order to provide a diverting history lesson. I raise it because Stalinism lives. Nazism is now a movement confined to the outer fringes of politics, yet Stalinists still control several countries and rule over a greater population than Tony Blair. Even after 50 years, the malign ideology of "Uncle Joe" has yet to join him in the grave.

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