Matvei Bronstein: Theorical physicist. Pioneer of quantum gravity. Arrested, accused of fictional “terroristic” activity and shot in 1938
Lev Shubnikov: Experimental physicist. Accused on false charges. Executed
Adrian Piotrovsky: Russian dramaturge. Accused on false charges of treason. Executed.
Nikolai Bukharin: Leader of the Communist revolution. Member of the Politburo. Falsely accused of treason. Executed.
General Alexander Egorov: Marshal of the Soviet Union. Commander of the Red Army Southern Front. Member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Arrested, accused on false charges, executed.
General Mikhail Tukhachevsky Supreme Marshal of the Soviet Union. Nicknamed the Red Napoleon. Arrested, accused on fake charges. Executed.
Grigory Zinoviev: Chairman of the Communist International Movement. Member of the Soviet Politburo. Accused of treason and executed.
Even the secret police themselves were not safe:
Genrikh Yagoda : Right-hand of Joseph Stalin. Head of the NKD Secret Police. He spied on everyone in Russia and jailed thousands of innocents. Yagoda was arrested and executed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrikh_Yagoda
Nikolai Yezhov : Appointed head of the NKD Secret Police after the death of Yagoda. Arrested on fake charges, executed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov
Everybody was absolutely terrified during this period. At least 600 000 people were killed and over one million people were deported to Gulags in Siberia.
Of course a SJW poster would post propaganda on YSK.
I am more annoyed by people complaining about tankies that actual tankies at this point.
The purge of the red army was noticed by the German high command which factored into launching Operation Barbarossa. The red army was a shambles as most of the officers had been murdered or imprisoned. Units struggled to respond without them.
Is this post satire?
“Stalin was a communist leader inspired by Leon Trotsky”??? The two were massive rivals with completely different ideologies.
I can heae the Hexbear slop community furiously masturbating at thought of ripping this post to shreds.
As they should, with factual errors this fucking baby-brained
LOL LOL of course a tankie came out for this one.
Damn, you sure showed them! Got any other galaxy brain zingers in there, Megamind?
Any actual notes?
Define tankie.
And now for those who haven’t seen it, or haven’t seen it for a while, go and watch The Death Of Stalin. Brilliant relatively truthful satire of the events preceding and after the event.
Jason Isaacs is fantastic in it.
aside from compressed timeline - it actually does a good job representing the major players and their core traits and interactions. Lots of straightforward historical dramas about that period took a lot more artistic license in that regard. Like there’s an old movie called The Inner Circle which is basically about Stalin’s movie club - and it paints the same people in borderline caricature simplistic tones despite the movie technically being a serious drama.
If I remember it correctly, it was quite funny
It’s funny, because we weren’t there.
Honestly, the guy was a real jerk.
No way
the more I read about this Hitler guy the more I don’t like him
Adolf Hitler? The art student?
Shocking, right? I was similarly surprised when I heard about the extracurriculars of Ted Kaczynski, the mathematician.
Some people need better hobbies.
I disagree with a lot of Ted Kaczynski’s reasoning in his manifesto. But he wasn’t wrong that we are destroying the environment and letting consumerism ruin everything. Honestly, I think most of the people on this site would agree with his assessments even if he came to the conclusions under faulty assumptions.
Half the people on this site are advocating for stochastic responses to the current U.S. government anyway. So whats the difference?
The lesson is not to reject aspiring artists from art school, lest they decide to take over a country and start invading their neighbors.
I’m sick of these kind of characters. I think we should kill Hitler.
party foul!
To put it mildly
I see you there P and R ref. Well played!
Bots spreading double genocide theory? Are we in a 2008 economic crisis again?
Meanwhile, the average victim of communism (considering soviets inflicted 7/10 nazi casualties):
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/historypresent.4.2.0115
I would argue Maximilien Robespierre did it before him
I can’t believe Trotsky convinced Robespierre to do the Reign of Terror
I never mentionned Trotsky
OP incorrectly said Trotsky influenced Stalin’s authoritarianism, so I was making a joke about that.
Hitler was a monster, but we really don’t talk enough about how bad Stalin was
Not only is The Double Genocide Theory a form of soft Holocaust denial, it’s deeply comical to claim “we don’t talk enough about how bad Stalin was”. Yes we fucking do??? American popular code culture has been built on anti-Communism for decades!
American popular code culture has been built on anti-Communism for decades!
Great, doesn’t change the fact that the majority of the world is not America.
Are US Americans even aware of this, though?
Being opposed to Stalin != being opposed to communism
Not really, the Soviets were considered Allies. In addition, the USA supplied weapons and materials to the Soviets and the fucks used them against Finland.
In addition, the USA supplied weapons and materials to the Soviets and the fucks used them against Finland.
False. The war with Finland happened in 1939 and the lend-lease program didn’t begin until 1941. There wasn’t even a supply route connecting the USSR to the other allies until the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, also in 1941 (which was one of the main reasons for the invasion).
True for the illegal Soviet aggression, but false for the Continuation War from June 1941 to Sep 1944. Assisting a communist country over a democratic one is disgusting. I would have let the Nazis and Bolsheviks murder each other until they were both severely weakened.
Well then, thank God you weren’t the one in power back then, or we would’ve lost the war. Hopefully, no one like you ever gets near the levers of power.
The Nazis and “Bolsheviks” did fight each other and become severely weakened because of it. 27 million Soviets gave their lives in the heroic struggle to save the world from the Nazis.
Btw:
When the Soviets attacked Finland, the Suomi pleaded for help from the UK and USA before turning to Germany. You gave them no choice.
What is wrong with watching the sick Bolsheviks and Nazis kill each other off from the sidelines? The world is better off without them.
The heroic Soviet struggle, which brutality occupied eastern Europe. Only an insane person would want to be influenced and occupied by the sick Russians again, which you support.
I suppose you also want the British to die, right? They invaded Iran, a neutral country, supported the Soviets in the Continuation War, and they inflicted multiple devastating famines on India, not to mention Ireland. Why don’t we just kill everybody, then?
and the fucks used them against Finland.
but why?
Very briefly during the second world war, but beyond that period, both before and after, the Soviets were considered an enemy of the US and co.
How tf was he inspired by Trotsky? He fucking had the guy killed!
If hitler were a lemmy thread he’d be this one
And Russia would join in an alliance with him
New canon: neocons astroturfing YSK
How tf is writing articles about historical facts astroturfing??? I live in post-soviet eastern european country and we have a saying “If a theory doesn’t match the facts, so much the worse for the facts.” precisely for people like you
I am a real human and I am trustworthy
Not too long ago I started listening to the audiobook of The Gulag Archipelago, and I had to stop a few chapters in because it was negatively affecting my mental health.
You may have heard about the Soviet Union being bad in the 70s and 80s, but that was an absolute cakewalk compared to the Stalin era.
Gulag Archipelago is a fiction work, though. You want documented information on the Great Terror, you can go to legit works like the Memorial foundation, no need to read fiction written by a fascist
The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is a three-volume nonfiction series . . .<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago?wprov=sfti1
The Gulag Archipelago (Russian: Arkhipelag GULag; literally, “The Gulag Archipelago”) is a three-volume nonfictional literary investigation. . .<
You could go ahead quoting Wikipedia:
UCLA historian J. Arch Getty wrote of Solzhenitsyn’s methodology that “such documentation is methodologically unacceptable in other fields of history” and that "the work is of limited value to the serious student of the 1930s for it provides no important new information or original analytical framework. Gabor Rittersporn shared Getty’s criticism, saying that “he is inclined to give priority to vague reminiscences and hearsay … [and] inevitably [leads] towards selective bias”, adding that “one might dwell at length on the inaccuracies discernible in Solzhenitsyn’s work”. Vadim Rogovin writes of the eyewitness accounts that Solzhenitsyn had read, saying he “took plenty of license in outlining their contents and interpreting them”. Both Rogovin and Walter Laquer argue that the book belongs to the genre of ‘oral history’.
Assuming for the moment that all these criticisms are completely correct and valid, “Provides no new information” or “documentation is methodologically unacceptable” or “selective bias” or “took license” do not mean that a book should therefore be characterized as fictional.
Go ahead reading your Tsarist fascist as much as you want, you’ll just get called out when you try to cry crocodile tears while doing it.
Oh yeah, this should be required reading for all teenagers. Does it destroy your psyche? Yes, and that’s why it’s important.
0 out of 10, would never read again. Glad I did though.
It shouldn’t be, because it’s a work of fiction.
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-exwife-says-gulag-is-folklore.htmlThat’s a rather paltry article to link to declare “fiction”, based solely on his ex-wife. From wikipedia -
Solzhenitsyn constructed his highly detailed narrative from various sources including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and his own experience as a Gulag prisoner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago
It’s not “100% accurate, detailed notes from one man’s point of view”, but this book is widely acknowledged to be a nonfiction account, even if many of the tales & details are anecdotal and not verifiable.
That’s a very large conclusion to reach from one person’s completely undetailed single statement.
All my life I’ve seen Stalin listed with people like Hitler and Pol Pot as murderous despots. How the hell are we “not talking enough about how bad he was?”
Look at main lemmy dev positing essays about how great Ussr was.
We’re on Lemmy. A not insignificant percentage of the crowd are tankies.
I don’t think any “tankie” is going to have their minds changed by this post. Unless they’re a 90 year old Russian who has gone out of there way to avoid “western propaganda” they’ve already heard all these points a million times over.
If anything posts like these reinforce their identity because they can dunk on them with their prepared rebuttals to all of this.
True. Tankies are in a cult.
Nah, it’s just the same as any other ideology - people follow it not because they’re ignorant and don’t know something, but because they expect a different outcome than you do, given the same inputs.
Every ideology has weak spots.
- Tankies can easily slip into left imperialism, which then locks them into an authoritarian trap and detaches them from reality on the ground
- Regular socialists and communists are yet to balance the incentives in relation to the more ambitious individuals
- Liberals are waging an impossible war against economic laws, trying to have a cake and eat it too (i.e. giving businesses incentives to grow while also fighting monopolies)
- Conservatives are inevitably undermining the very workforce they rely on, checking just how much they can cut before people fall off
Etc. etc.
Yet everyone thinks they’ll be able to manage the system in a way that always evades the issue.
I’m sorry, no, they’re definitely in a cult. Have you spoken to tankies here recently?
which then locks them into an authoritarian trap and detaches them from reality on the ground
You mean like a cult
No, it’s a cult. They actively ignore objective facts that disagree with their worldview.
the thing I love about tankies is they hate the US as much as I do 🥰
It doesn’t have anything to do with Lemmy. American education has always given a pass to Stalin, probably because he was an extremely helpful ally in WW2. We are taught in America that WE saved the world when we entered WW2, but the reality is that the Soviet Union lost many, many more lives at the hand of the Nazis than the other allies, including America. The Soviet Union’s contribution was easily as significant as America’s. When the Soviets finally defeated the Nazis in Russia, and started marching toward Germany, one Nazi general said “If they treat us half as bad as we treated them, were in big trouble.”
So coming out of the war, school curriculums taught about the current cold war propaganda, but Hitler was the bad guy they focused on, not the guy that helped us beat him.
Uh not my public California school. They were pretty clear about the whole biggest genocidal murderer in history thing
That’s interesting. I don’t recall hearing a word about Stalin in school. I knew he was a bad guy for some reason, but chalked it up to typical Commie hating. It wasn’t until I was out of school, and cultivated an interest in history, that I read more about him, and learned that he and Hitler seemed to be having a competition to be the worst guy ever.
You can probably blame the difference in there being 50 different public school curriculums, for some reason. Some states get a different education than others, and I suspect that one of the biggest differences is history. 2+2=4, CAT spells cat, in every state in America, so why do we have 50 different curriculums, many specifically created by Treasonous Pedophiles to groom and indoctrinate children into their cults? Education should be Federal, and the Federal government should create a comprehensive curriculum, and the MAGAs will have to go along with it, or they can just homeschool their kids to be morons.
Just to put it in perspective, here’s a joke.
Do you know what’s the difference between nazis and communists?
Communists killed more communists.
It’s funny, because it’s true.
No it isn’t. Not even remotely.
American education has always given a pass to Stalin
Really? Stalin’s Soviet Union is why Americans have such a knee-jerk reaction to the concept of communism. We had entire moral panics that people might be brushing their teeth in a particularly Soviet way. The Soviets have been rivals or enemies a lot longer than they were allies. You find me an American that doesn’t agree with the statement “World War 2 was won with British intelligence, American steel and Soviet blood.”
My American Education included…what Americans know as the Berlin Airlift, I’d be curious to learn what the Germans and ex-Soviets call this incident. That Germany as a whole was divided East/West, with the Western half being controlled by the capitalist allies, and the East being controlled by the communist Soviets. Berlin was too, despite the city being located well into the Eastern half. So there was this little enclave of capitalism in communist East Germany, some barbecue in the borscht.
Boiling this down a bit (there was some nonsense about Russia resisting the west introducing the deutchemark) Stalin blockaded the city with the ultimatum “become communist or starve.” The West responded by flying in supplies by air, using the rationing expertise the British had developed during the war along with USAF and RAF airlift power. One pilot started dropping little parachute bundles of candy to the children who would hang out near the airport watching the planes, and when President Truman heard of this he ordered the candy drops increased.
It was that easy to come off looking like the Big Damn Heroes in this situation; they come bearing cold and starvation, we answer bearing fuel and food.
If anything, it’s the Japanese our schools go easy on; Imperial Japan were easily peers of the Nazis in the atrocity department, yet more American textbooks contain the word Auschwitz than the word Nanking.
I grew up in the Cold War era, and I hardly ever heard any real talk of Russian leaders, which was mostly Breshnev when I was growing up. Instead, it was a just a general hatred of the entire Communist/Soviet system in general. The guy at the top was just considered a figurehead. He certainly didn’t seem to have the same vicious stranglehold that Stalin had. The purges seems to have mostly died with him.
So we didn’t learn much about the people over there, mostly just the names Lenin, Stalin, Kruschev, and Breshnev. Occasionally Trotsky’s name came up. But mostly we just heard “Commies Bad. Don’t be a Commie.”
I was born about a week after Reagan said “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Growing up in the 90’s I didn’t get the childhood “better dead than red” stuff, we didn’t practice hiding under our desks from nuclear bombs. We did fire and tornado drills. As an aside, being an American school kid in the 90’s felt sane in a way I don’t think it did before or since? The Metroid were eradicated, the galaxy was at peace.
From our perspective, we had won the Cold War by default. With the iron curtain down, it was fairly easy to take a look at our old adversaries and we saw…very little we wanted. A few nice symphonies and ballets, a warehouse full of really cool rocket engines, and precisely one video game. By my era, we said “Don’t be a Commie, or you’ll end up like that.”
From our perspective, we had won the Cold War by default.
The ironic thing is, while we were celebrating our win, they never stopped fighting the Cold War We took our eye off the ball, and they didn’t, and our current situation is the result.
But more to your point, I remember reading that after the fall, we discovered that not only was Soviet technology not up to our standards, they didn’t even have the machines to make the machines that it would take to make technology at our level.
But that was back in the 80s. They’ve had a lot of time to catch up.
We felt like right gits having built the F-15 in response to the Foxbat. What’s Hisnameski defected with a Foxbat, the West finally got a look at it, and said “oh. Heheh. Shit, did we overreact.”
My favorite thing ever said about the F-15 is “The last time we took (Russia) seriously, we built that thing.”
As Eddie Izzard joked about mass murderers like Stalin: “The reason we let them get away with it is because they killed their own people, and we’re sort of fine with that. Oh help yourself! We’ve been trying to kill you for ages!”
Her[1] bit on Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk_pHZmn5QM
For anyone that doesn’t know, Eddie Izzard is now Suzy Izzard ↩︎
Huh! No I didn’t.
It kinda makes sense, though. She was a “transvestite” for a very long time, and I guess just finally realized she was a she. :) For a while, she said she didn’t mind being called Eddie or Suzy, but more recently said that actually, she would prefer Suzy, although I suspect she’s pretty relaxed about it. :)
Social contagion, possibly. Not that it makes it inherently wrong, just saying that this seems like evidence towards that theory.
She seemed to be quite effortlessly a “male lesbian” when she was more actively touring. That was a part of a joke though, so might have meant nothing also.
I had probably 10 times as many educational hours dedicated to Hitler and the Holocaust as I did learning about Stalin.
Israel weaponized the Holocaust and drilled two falsehoods into everyone’s head:
- Jews were the only victims.
- The Holocaust is a special genocide that hasn’t happened before or since, is the worst crime in recorded history, and no one should dare question that.
This allows them to genocide Palestinians while calling everyone who questions their ethno supremacist expansionist colonial project a Nazi.
6 million Jews were murdered, out of 17 million victims.
Genocide of Indigenous Americans (1492–1832): it is estimated that 90% of the indigenous population, amounting to over 55 million people, died due to violence, forced labor, and disease after European colonization.
Mao Zedong (China, 1958–1961/1966–1969): Historians estimate that between 30-70 million people died due to famine, persecution, and forced labor during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
Mongol Conquests (13th Century): Under Genghis Khan, it is estimated that 30-60 million people were killed, representing about 10% of the world’s population at the time.
To name a few… Hitler was a monster, but he was hardly the worst monster.
Even if there are genocides worse than the holocaust. The entire point of the Nazis were to kill everyone eventually in order to create their dumb idea of an ubermench.
Most genocides are about keeping power. But the holocaust was about creating a whole new humanity by killing anyone that wasn’t blue eyed, blond haired super people. It would affect the entire world eventually. Definitely not just Jews.
If we’d let them, the Nazis would have easily caused the worst genocide in human history, with no equal in reality except for the atrocities in sci fi like Warhammer 40k.
Definitely this. This is what they chose the curriculum to cover more.
I live in Canada, the general vibe we get through our culture and education is that Hitler was #1 worst guy in history, everyone else was a close second.
This. Even in my psychology of genocide course in uni, a lot of it was focused on Hitler being the worst, and not much about Stalin.
Sort of related sort of not, I learned in the last few years how awful the British were, too. Different levels of awful, but I’m thinking because Canada is a commonwealth country and was pretty much run by the Brits back in the day, the Brits excluded from our education the bad things they did, ie to native Americans/First Nations people, Africa, etc. I didn’t learn about any of that… So I think what they wanted people to learn and what they wanted people to forget shaped what was taught in Canadian schools.
So, like many others, I was awed and excited by the royals. Now that I know what they’ve been trying to hide, meh.
putins most obvious influence too, or maybe they just have a lot in common
because most of the atrocities that Stalin commited didn’t happen in Western world.
Yeah, the Western world preferred to export violence, not keep it home-grown
Most of the focus is on how bad communism is, not how bad its leaders were.
To be fair, having authoritarian government means you’ll absolutely have an oppressive regime at some point.
If anything, Stalin was the one to cement authoritarianism as the system of power in USSR and make sure it cannot be reverted without massive issues in the form of separatism, civil disobedience, and more. The subsequent leaders could only open the valve of democracy so much without breaking the country apart.
So, it’s not just leaders, it’s the system of authoritarian power and imperialism. Communism and socialism must be democratic and directly managed by worker’s councils, bottom to top (i.e. Soviet in its original sense), lest you fall into the same trap with any leader eventually.
*how bad a straw man version of communism is
Well that was my point.
I know. I seem to be the only one who upvoted you before you made the edit.
There’s a spectre haunting stoly
All your life you’ve lived under capitalism and have been exposed to anti-communist propaganda, because to date communism has been the only successful alternative to capitalism.
Somehow OP thinks that a lifetime of anti-communism isn’t enough anti-communism.
It’s a natural pendulum moment. We are flooded with anticommunist propaganda, so when you start lifting up the curtain and seeing more and more of the lies, you can start wondering what else was a lie.
That’s the moment all sorts of ideologies jump out of the woodwork to recruit you, and given most of your education was a subjugating lie you probably don’t have the tools to distinguish them that well.
And that’s how you end up with people denying the holocaust or thinking covid is fake or saying Stalin wasn’t so bad actually.
So as we’re dismantling capitalism we’re going to have to constantly help people find their footing in reality, including helping them reaffirm the parts of capitalist propaganda that were true enough.
Truly a paragon. Transcending above racism, classism, or religion, he believed in and fought for equal opportunity murder.
All animals are equal, but some of them have guns
