In this situation, I’d be tempted to do a bit of Socratic dialogue.
Probe and question.
140k. Okay. That sounds terrible. Let’s work this out. When? All at once? Over ten years? More? 140k officers? Wow. How big was the army to have so many officers. Is these were officers, was this during a war? Which one? What side were those Ukrainians on? How? With his bare hands? Or were they killed by Soviet soldiers? During combat? Or afterwards as prisoners of war?
They either give you some details and you can discuss them. (And ask more questions about the details.) Or they don’t. But if they don’t, there’s not much you can say. (You could still say you’re interested and ask them to come back with more details the next time you meet.)
The point here would not be to get at the truth (in one conversation, anyway). That would require going back to the sources and studying, then meeting up again to continue the discussion.
The point is to unravel the claim and get your “friend” to see that he needs to hold himself to a higher standard of rigour. And to see that unless he meets an appropriate standard, you’re not going to entertain sensationalism.
Stalin made mistakes. So if someone points out a mistake, it’s okay to acknowledge it, to analyse it. If it’s a real mistake. If it really happened.
If someone does point out a mistake, it’s an opportunity to bring them into the fold and subtly shift the framework: yeah, that was bad; what problem were the Soviets trying to solve? and how should they have solved it instead? do we face a similar problem today? how would we deal with it if it came up?
If the 140k were killed in a war, likely WWII, it’s an opportunity to state how terrible that war was and to follow up with questions about who started it, why, and how the Soviets responded, and what would your friend have done differently.
This way, you’ve moved the ground and can get the other person to see that even if ‘Stalin killed 140k Ukrainians’, he did not just go out and murder a random 140k people. At the very least, if it turns out that the details prove the event happened, your friend has got to admit that Stalin could not have done this alone… and then you’ve started to break down this idea that Stalin was a single-minded totalitarian despot who got his way at the click of a finger.
In this situation, I’d be tempted to do a bit of Socratic dialogue.
Probe and question.
140k. Okay. That sounds terrible. Let’s work this out. When? All at once? Over ten years? More? 140k officers? Wow. How big was the army to have so many officers. Is these were officers, was this during a war? Which one? What side were those Ukrainians on? How? With his bare hands? Or were they killed by Soviet soldiers? During combat? Or afterwards as prisoners of war?
They either give you some details and you can discuss them. (And ask more questions about the details.) Or they don’t. But if they don’t, there’s not much you can say. (You could still say you’re interested and ask them to come back with more details the next time you meet.)
The point here would not be to get at the truth (in one conversation, anyway). That would require going back to the sources and studying, then meeting up again to continue the discussion.
The point is to unravel the claim and get your “friend” to see that he needs to hold himself to a higher standard of rigour. And to see that unless he meets an appropriate standard, you’re not going to entertain sensationalism.
Stalin made mistakes. So if someone points out a mistake, it’s okay to acknowledge it, to analyse it. If it’s a real mistake. If it really happened.
If someone does point out a mistake, it’s an opportunity to bring them into the fold and subtly shift the framework: yeah, that was bad; what problem were the Soviets trying to solve? and how should they have solved it instead? do we face a similar problem today? how would we deal with it if it came up?
If the 140k were killed in a war, likely WWII, it’s an opportunity to state how terrible that war was and to follow up with questions about who started it, why, and how the Soviets responded, and what would your friend have done differently.
This way, you’ve moved the ground and can get the other person to see that even if ‘Stalin killed 140k Ukrainians’, he did not just go out and murder a random 140k people. At the very least, if it turns out that the details prove the event happened, your friend has got to admit that Stalin could not have done this alone… and then you’ve started to break down this idea that Stalin was a single-minded totalitarian despot who got his way at the click of a finger.