Tali Perch, writing in Guernica Magazina, chronicles the horrors of Stalin’s repression, banditry, and genocide. She readily conflates him with Hitler. Notably, Stalin’s goons break into poor shtetl homes looking for gold and cash. It was an interesting read about generational trauma. Even so, I have a hard time believing some of the claims put forward. Does someone more knowledgeable than me want to clarify its contents?
Stalin brutally extracted the grain with his giant spoon. <- this claim is 100% true.
When your great-grandparents grew up in Stalin’s terror-famine, your grandparents in the Holocaust, and your parents in a straddle between totalitarianism and democracy, you grew up confused about pain. Were you entitled to it? Was it real?
I swear, there are Warhammer 40k novels with a more restrained style than this
“I was there… I was there the day Gorbachev betrayed the Union”
Pizza Hut Heresy
Edit: What’s this business of “Stalin’s starvation, in the 1920s, of Ukrainian peasants who resisted Soviet collectivization?” I thought the holodomor is supposed to have started in 1932.
There was an absolutely monstrous famine in the USSR in 1920’s. It demolished Povolzhye and AFAIK did affect Ukraine. Of course there are people who blame it on Bolsheviks and “war communism” policy.
Absolutely nothing to do with 7 years of continous brutal war. As Lenin put it, even the rich and victorious countries like France had famine after that war, and France had only a small fraction of territory destroyed in the course of war, so how they would think half feudal country would look after double warfare time also waged on their most productive territories?
Don’t forget severe weather problems and other countries refusing to sell grain for gold
But it began in 1921, correct? Which was a full year before Stalin became general secretary.
Like that would stop anti-communists
“All my relatives were murdered by ebil commies and then miraculously came back to life to tell me how horrible it was”
I would said the only thing Stalin extracted were their brains and conscience but they did had not any anyways. Pity he did not extracted their balls since gusanoism is hereditary.
Yeah, the author’s entire argument is “I had terrible parents who fed me too much candy and then took me to a back-alley dentist when I got massive tooth decay. This must be Stalin’s fault!”
Guernica Magazina. Presumably named after Guernica, famous for being bombed by the Nazis. And they have the gall to compare communists to Nazis. That’s some bullshit.
I’m sure if you search for Holodomor in Lemmygrad you will find some great and excellent post/comments that will go way more in depth than me, but as a brief version: It’s Western propaganda. Basically during the Holodomor some landlords and bourgeois who owned grain in Ukraine preferred to dispense of the grain instead of giving it to the USSR because they would not get any profit from it, which was going to be used to distribute it among the many countries that composed it. This caused a famine and it is Stalin’s fault somehow during a time when the USSR was already facing a harsh time in many senses.
Stalin only did three things wrong:
- Recriminalising homosexuality
- Forcefully deporting ethnic minorities to far-flung reaches of the USSR due to some bat-brained belief that their ethnicities affected their loyalties
- Not cleansing Baltic states of fascist sympathies
However, Stalin’s success in obliterating Nazis overshadow all of his mistakes and thus his legacy must be upheld.
One more, stopping at Berlin.
another one: he died
From what I read, Stalin’s thinking at the time was that removing fascist elements and traitors from racial groups in the Soviet Union was already stirring up more blowback and dissent than expected. Amplified by the spread of capitalist lies and media, he and the other Soviet leaders at the time were between a rock and a hard place. They figured either go “all-in” with the repression of capitalist elements, which is a process that would take a longer amount of time than the USSR had before Nazi invasion, or move populations further east away from the Nazis, set up new regions and then filter out the scumbags.
I saw a tweet many months ago that used data from racial and ethnic groups in the USSR that was compared to political affiliation, and the data showed that the extent of the purges and repression against interlopeprs (Yezhov’s excesses notwithstanding) was supposedly at or around the maximum that many populations would tolerate, and Stalin didn’t want to risk further subterfuge or breakup of the USSR.
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Believing Lysenko, who claimed that he could end the famine in Ukraine by “educating” plants to grow faster and insisted that DNA was a Nazi hoax
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Trusting Yezhov, who started the Great Purge after conning Stalin into believing that the Soviet government was thoroughly infiltrated and killed many Stalin allies and innocents
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He tried to assassinate Tito just because of some stupid ass personal feud and permanently ended any possibility of alliance between the Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia
A lot of these problems – belief in pseudoscience, a paranoia about "infiltration, being a bit too open towards race essentialism, etc. – were endemic to governments of the time. Stalin’s was far and away the least bad here.
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