Stalin killed 20 million people and they love him

turnoffsaysthestar

turnoffsaysthestar

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in Georgia.
The consensus among historians is that Stalin’s purges, forced displacements, famine-causing policies and murders resulted in some 20 million deaths over his 30-year rule. And that’s a conservative estimate: literary giant Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose novel The Gulag Archipelago draws on the author’s time in a Soviet labour camp, argued the toll came closer to 60 million.
This was on chris tarrants railway show last night they have a big statue of him and foreigners are not allowed to go in the room.
 
Many were brought up with him in the Soviet Union, he was all that they had known in their formative years say from 1923 to 1953. They lived in a total dictatorship so they were bombarded with propaganda. In that period the Soviet Union moved from a relatively poor and powerless country to a Global superpower that was feared and respected. Many ordinary working class people were given a permanent job, had a decent flat, had a decent free NHS and free public education, free public amenities and almost free public transport. They also had enough for decent food and clothing. The vast majority of working class people would say they were better off in 1953 than 1923 and Stalin took a lot of the credit with these people. Against this the Soviet Union had been invaded by a massive German force in 1941 and completely defeated. Stalin was ruthless he was quite happy to kill anyone who had supported the Germans. He even disowned his own son when taken prisoner by the Germans.

He also was willing to kill anyone who opposed his Bolshevikism form of communism, say full collectivisation of farms which was brutal. On the other hand new land was brought into cultivation which extended the amount of farmland.

It would not be a society that I would like to live in, but most Russians felt better off under it particularly in working class communities that were not generally threatened by Stalin.
 
Michael Portillo visited his hometown in Georgia on his “Great Railway Journeys” TV programme a few weeks ago and they do indeed seem to love him there.,
 
As it happens a lot of people in Russia love Stalin, because they see him as a war hero and a strong man.

Try reading the Gulag Archipelago if you want to know the realities of the political system in the USSR.
 
Stalin did win the Great Patriotic War, so like Churchill his popularity is boosted by that.

He was a Georgian so maybe that's why he's popular there.

But in Russia, among people who know what happened, his reputation has waned. Stalino and Stalingrad were both renamed. That wouldn't have happened if there was anything positive about his reputation.

It's hard to imagine two dictators as extreme as Hitler and Stalin, and on the basis of crimes against his own Soviet people, you could argue Stalin was worse.
 
Really interesting subject and one I've not really read much about. I'll read the book mentioned here though.

Wasn't it Stalin who ordered the murder of 20k people in the Polish Forest?
 
I was in Georgia just last summer. According to people I spoke with, Stalin was, if anything, even harder on them than he had been on other Soviet republics in order to demonstrate just how 'fair' he was. Even in his hometown of Gori, the people felt only lukewarm about him, reason they even felt just lukewarm being the amount of money Stalin tourism brought into the town. Pictured, Stalin's train, Stalin's carsey.

Stalin'sTrain.jpgStalin'sCarsey.jpg
 
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