u/Ruanda1990 - originally from r/GenZhou
Hi, me again
I was looking into a thread about Israeli and US sottraction of the land of native population in the areas but one user pointed out Soviet era deportation of peoples, posting this article of Wikipedia and this other article
According to Wikipedia, soviet population transfers were “the forced transfer of various groups from the 1930s up to the 1950s ordered by Joseph Stalin”. According to Wikipedia the “targets” were Kulaks, ethnic minorities and occupied territory citizens and were a form of “ethnic cleaning” and “genocide”, which caused the death of approximately 800,000 to 1,500,000 people. The article starts mentioning the forced deportation of Kulaks (Dekulakization) and the deportation of soviet Koreans in 1937.
The article goes on talking about the deportation of the crimean Tatars, the deportation of Circassians, the deportations of Chechens and Ingush people, the deportation of Germans and Poles after WW2 and finally the deportation of Estonians and other baltic peoples after. Many of those supposed genocides are recognized by the EU and other post soviet states like Ukraine. On 26 April 1991 the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic, under its chairman Boris Yeltsin, passed the law On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples with Article 2 denouncing all mass deportations as “Stalin’s policy of defamation and genocide.”
What do you think of these articles? Do you recommend any good books on the subject from an ML perspective? Do you have anything to add to these claims? Thank you in advance and have a good day.
u/Assassin4nolan - originally from r/GenZhou
I’ll try and get readings in a sec, but the general gist is that the USSR did move around various ethnic populations for various reasons, mostly during WW2 to try and prevent a 5th column (5th column in the USSR refers to potential fascist collaborators)For instance, the USSR famously moved 1-2 (1.5 maybe) million Jews from Poland, baltics, and western USSR to the eastern USSR to put them out of the nazi war path, forseeing the holocaust.
Aswell as this, ethnic germans and chechens were reported as having high amounts of fascists and collaborators in their communities, and were moved in the tens/hundreds (depending on who you ask) of thousands across the USSR to move them away from the front. Molotov himself has made statements on why this was done and why he believed it justified at the time, while acknowledging excesses and collateral deaths.
I think the main problem with this topic is that both numbers of those moved, and of those who died while moving are unreliabally sourced by anti Soviet sources, there are probably reliable numbers if you can read Russian and dig deep enough, but anything that posits that Stalin perosnally, stalin alone, stalin malevolently, commanded something due to ethnic chauvinism is overtly an anti communist lie.
This book has a chapter (13) dedicated to deportations, I’m sure it has plenty enough direct document sources
u/Ruanda1990 - originally from r/GenZhou
I don’t feel entirely satisfied with this response, because you didn’t address the casualty numbersWhether it was intentional or not, for ethnonationalism or national security, the numbers are incredibly high and concerning. Unless you can disprove the numbers provided by Wikipedia, the deportations in the USSR are to be considered in fact a crime and a black mark in soviet history. According to Wikipedia hundreds of thousands of Koreans died during the transfer, likewise for Germans, Chechens and Ingush and Estonians etc… Amounting to millions of total deaths, so what about them?
You can’t deport an entire people because “were reported as having high amounts of fascists and collaborators in their communities”, it sounds like the US when they torture people in Guantanamo because they are “terrorists”…
I also need more precise numbers, not “and were moved in the tens/hundreds (depending on who you ask)”…
u/Assassin4nolan - originally from r/GenZhou
If you’re only willing to learn from reading reddit comments and not from the books provided therein, you arent really willing to learn. I gave you the book and the specific chapter to read, free pdfs are widely available. I cannot be expected to know such numbers off the top of my head, I do not know what numbers are real and fake atm.It is your task to look into wikipedias sourcing and find where they originally come from, aswell as to read the book chapter (and all its sources) cited.
The key difference between Gitmo and this historical situation is that fascists genuinely murdered 90 million people in WW2, terrorists are a boogeyman created by imperialism, you’re comparing a fake threat to a real threat.
u/Ruanda1990 - originally from r/GenZhou
Fair enough. Thanks anywayu/Ruanda1990 - originally from r/GenZhou
By the way, I heard that Grover Furr is widely discredited as historian. There are a lot of threads and posts on r/badhistory on why Grover Furr is not a good source etcetera etcetera, so I’m reluctant on using him as a source. What do you think, is Furr a good source? Do you recommend other authors?u/Assassin4nolan - originally from r/GenZhou
Furr is not the source, the documents he cites are sources. Being a good historian is about creating a viablly true historical narrative from credible sources. I have seen no problems with Furrs sources and thus the narrative it gives off.Other people have problems with the narrative but refuse to tackle the sources themselves. This is backwards thinking and should never be trusted. Even as communists we cannot have gut reactions to anti communist narratives and use that to dismiss the sourcing for it.
You are learning about the history of a communist led country within the bubble of an imperialist and genocidally anti communist nation’s educational enviornment. (its media, its academia, its overt educational systems and subtle spaces like wikipedia etc) If you rely on the words of people alone because they are held up by the authority of this educational enviornment, you will learn nothing.
Basically, read the damn thing and see if its credible sourcing yourself.
u/Ruanda1990 - originally from r/GenZhou
Ok, thanks againu/saltshakerFVC - originally from r/GenZhou
Did you read the chapter yet?
u/dornish1919 - originally from r/GenZhouYou can’t deport an entire people because “were reported as having high amounts of fascists and collaborators in their communities”, it sounds like the US when they torture people in Guantanamo because they are “terrorists”…
As if the USSR didn’t participate in a war where over 20 million civilians and soldiers died at the hands of fascists and fascist collaborators. I think they had every right to defend themselves from potential fifth columnists and collaborators which, by the way, absolutely did exist. This wasn’t some conspiracy nor was this a group of extremists formally trained by the NKVD taking revenge for religious reasons. This was an organized group of ultranationalists who had swastikas on their flags. Certainly not everybody fell under that category but the Soviets felt at the time they couldn’t tear the community apart without there being serious repercussions nor could they separate the men from their families without risk of their population decreasing. Therefore they chose to relocate.
u/dornish1919 - originally from r/GenZhou
One also has to consider the other options. To do nothing means potential pogroms carried out be malicious nationalists, as well as rebellions/revolts, from an organized fascist group. To exile them means taking away their citizenship and dooming them to poverty. To put them in work camps like in the USA is also a horrific thing. Or they could just murder all of them in the name of freedom like America does. Relocation, while rushed, was something that many Soviet officials feels was the best thing to do in a dire situation. Perhaps nowadays we’d consider some sort of vocational training like in PRC to avoid fascistic ideology from spreading.
u/california_sugar - originally from r/GenZhou
These articles are hot garbage with zero analysis, though.u/Ruanda1990 - originally from r/GenZhou
There are actually a lot of sources in them. Do you have any?u/california_sugar - originally from r/GenZhou
I can see there are sources. The quality of those sources is the question. When an article simply makes a forgone conclusion—the deportations are genocide—there’s no discussion. The premise is that Stalin is a mass murderer and now here’s some sources to potentially back that claim.u/saltshakerFVC - originally from r/GenZhou
We all agree that the central claim is lib shit, but I’d love to get an ML perspective on the population transfers.I can turn to Grover Furr for information on the purges and Tottle for information on the Ukrainian famine, do you know who I can turn to for quality research and writing on the population transfers?
u/saltshakerFVC - originally from r/GenZhou
I’ve been looking for some resources on this as well.u/ewrjwoerwepf - originally from r/GenZhou
Seconding this, if anyone has good books on this (in any language) please post it!!u/dornish1919 - originally from r/GenZhou
I know that Tatars and Chechens at one point were supportive of Nazi Germany and even had swastikas on their nationalist flags during an era when 20 million Soviet citizens were brutally murdered. The USSR thought it best to keep a closer eye on them by relocating them inward, and to prevent events like genocide from happening as most of their soldiers were men, they required their families travel with them. Of course the western narrative tries to twist this into something else completely while ignoring its own history of concentration camps and genocide. Funny that.