u/USSRftw - originally from r/GenZhou
I keep being confronted with the population transfer of several ethnic groups to remote areas during Stalin like the Kalmyks, Tatars, Balkars, Chechens, Koreans, etc. While I have found that there were some cases of spying or even desire to collaborate with the invading Axis forces, I don’t think there is a reason to deport all the population? Or is there something else I am missing?
u/kamrater - originally from r/GenZhou
while it’s important to put these internal deportations into proper historical context, you are right in that they were not justifiable. in my opinion at least, they were a major mistake of the union under stalin, an injustice and an unnecessary violation of these nations’ rights and national self-determination.u/Dependent-Editor-290 - originally from r/GenZhou
Lots of collaborationists and endangered people, iirc. Also it wasn’t completely a right decision, some transfers are debatable at best.u/oxamide96 - originally from r/GenZhou
It wasn’t right at all. Why are we hesitant to criticize Stalin where it’s valid? Just because this was a mistake doesn’t mean he didn’t do other good things, and doesn’t mean the 50 million killed propaganda is real.I get why leftists do this. The realization of the ridiculous propaganda against Stalin and the USSR generates a natural reaction to reject every criticism of Stalin. But we should not fall for that. We should not subscribe to any great man theory.
u/FaustTheBird - originally from r/GenZhou
There are arguments to be made that at least the Korean transfer was critical to the USSR avoiding the emergence of a pretense for the Imperial Japanese to invade Russia from the Korean peninsula.u/Dependent-Editor-290 - originally from r/GenZhou
I just don’t remember much so the answer is only half-baked, I’m pretty sure there are better answers. We must analyze and criticise every mistake we find, otherwise we are bound to fail.
[deleted] - originally from r/GenZhou
[deleted]u/Euromantique - originally from r/GenZhou
I don’t know if it’s considered part of the population transfers but the only Jews who survived the Holocaust in Poland were those in the territories annexed to the Belarusian and Ukrainian SSRs in 1939. Soviet authorities evacuated all of the Jews in Kresy to the east and had they not done this they would have all been killed during the Nazi occupation.u/Baultenn1234 - originally from r/GenZhou
While yes evacuating the Jews east was a good thing, they evacuated them to Siberia. Extremely far in the East. Seems a bit excessive to me.u/Euromantique - originally from r/GenZhou
They didn’t just go to Siberia but also to Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, etc. The reason isn’t a nefarious anti-Semitic plot but rather because these areas were sparsely populated and very recently industrialised and consequently had lots of new cities and jobs available. It makes more sense to help migrants move to the safest area of your country where they can get better access to work and housing rather than crowding them all into slums in Moskva or Leningrad where they would be endangered during the war and have to move east again.u/Baultenn1234 - originally from r/GenZhou
Yeah of course, I know several Russian Jews who’s families were forced to move to Kazakhstan, they recently had to move though due to ethnic tensions with middle easterners. Anyways, I don’t think it was nefarious but moving them to Siberia was a pretty bad idea.
u/mijabo - originally from r/GenZhou
Would you happen to have a good source for numbers?[deleted] - originally from r/GenZhou
[deleted]u/mijabo - originally from r/GenZhou
Thank you. I agree with everything you said. I bet Grover Fur will have some numbers about this in one of this books as well (and I think the vast majority of statistics he uses is from soviets archives) but I haven’t read much of him yet.
u/Big_Understanding516 - originally from r/GenZhou
While it is true that lots of people collaborated, deserted, or joined bandit groups, IMO theres still nothing to justify. It was the worst thing the USSR ever did.Its not like in order to be supportive of the USSR or Stalin you have to pretend that it literally did nothing wrong.
u/damlarn - originally from r/GenZhou
I see those events as absolutely tragic, and arguably a mistake, but also arguably necessary.Think of it like this. Stalin is trying to win WW2 by any means necessary because the stakes for humanity are astronomically high. This requires a high level of regimentation and control, particularly near the front lines, where the Soviets notably gained an advantage over the Nazis by denying them the ability to infiltrate and gather information. But how can a primarily Russian and Russian-speaking army achieve that necessary level of control within local cultures they don’t understand and in languages they don’t speak? This has nothing to do with race, racism, group prejudice, or collective punishment, it’s simply a practical problem — one imposed on them by Nazism, mind you — that presents a brutal dilemma with no good solutions.
So if you want to argue it was a mistake, you should understand the bar you need to clear to make that claim. You have to be able to argue that there was an alternative path that they didn’t take, and that it still would have led to winning the war. The problem is that most critics of Stalin happily ignore the necessary material details of that argument and take the uselessly self-righteous and idealistic high road, free from compromise and sacrifice, that doesn’t actually exist.
It’s also useful to compare to Japanese internment, which wasn’t on any front line, was arbitrarily applied for one ethnic group among the Axis powers, and was justified in the American media using explicitly racist and Orientalist terms about the supposedly sly/cunning/duplicitous/barbaric Japanese.
u/Assassin4nolan - originally from r/GenZhou
Source for the koreans being included?u/Elektribe - originally from r/GenZhou
EspressoStalinist has some writings worth consideringAlway take sources with a grain of salt of course. But this about sums it up.
CHUEV: How do you explain the forced resettlement of entire ethnic groups during the war?
MOLOTOV: …The fact is that during the war we received reports about mass treason. Battalions of Caucasians opposed us at the fronts and attacked us from the rear. It was a matter of life and death; there was no time to investigate the details. Of course innocents suffered. But I hold that given the circumstances, we acted correctly.
Until populations start purging their fascists and dealing with that shit, in times of war that shit is gonna require more drastic steps. Coincidentally the least likely populations to want to keep their shit in check, libertarianism, are the most likely to harbor fascists.
That being said if the soviets did something there’s a reason for it somehow - either a valid justification or a corrupt infiltration. The USSR didn’t just do shit for no reason. They aren’t ebul baddies that run around resettling minorities just to fuck with minorities or some stupid liberal brain shit like that. Anyonr who complains about any of the USSR resettlements without addressing the reasons and context are arguing in bad faith with no consideration for material conditions of historical context of decisions and are just looking to demonize communism fundamentally.
u/kamrater - originally from r/GenZhou
i am quite alarmed by this type of left dogmatism that posits that socialist projects literally cannot do any wrong. glory to historical context, but it doesn’t change that the deportations were wrong, they violated the self determination of whole nations and collectively punished them for the crimes of small minorities within them, any principled communist would condemn this as unnecessary and contrary to our principles. marxism isn’t a dogma and it is not a religion, we do not believe that stalin or any other revolutionary leader was infallible and we do not adopt all of his actions and positions as our own uncritically and without question.u/echoesofalife - originally from r/GenZhou
He didn’t say correct, he said for a reason.I’m not educated on this subject, but like China’s vocational program, I compare it to the alternatives of its time. The alternatives being the war on terror and japanese internment camps, respectively. I don’t have to think that either are good, but it is worth taking note that they both easily beat their contemporary alternatives and thus approaching the narrative accordingly.
u/Unclerickythemaoist - originally from r/GenZhou
No real reason to defend EVERYTHING done by Uncle Joe dudehe was based but some Things he did were awful and stupid.
just because he didn’t kill 100000000000 people and eat me doesn’t mean he was infallable
[deleted] - originally from r/GenZhou
An necessary evil, given the circunstances, its not like there was a lot of things they could have done instead. Some comrades up here already explained about the mass treasons, if we consider they where in the middle of a war, it was justified.And its not even comparable to things other countries did only for the sake of rascism, like the US concentration camps for japanese descendants, or, you know, the nazis.
And i want to see the people here saying this was the worse thing the soviets did to tell me: did they really have a chance? And if yes, tell me what alternative they could have done