Why are the Crimes of Stalinism Overlooked?

[StCapps]

It's okay. We are slaughtering your entire family because of your economic class rather than your race. We're not as bad as Hitler!

Commie logic lulz.

[BjornP]

It's okay. We are slaughtering your entire family because of your economic class rather than your race. We're not as bad as Hitler!

I think you need to find some actual Marxists if you want someone to say Stalin's purges were in any way "ok". And if your sarcasm means what I think it means, you're right, the kulak's just as dead no matter if Stalin's a 9.9 to Hitler's perfect 10 points on the evil mass murder scale.

[GloryofGreece]

As compared to the crimes of Hitlerism/Nazism? This is clearly a multifaceted problem, but do you think it had more to do with America's role in the Cold War (politicizing America's Containment policy etc.) or the association with Liberals - Socialism - Communism?

Here is a good talk with author of Gulag, Anne Applebaum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoO08EbT6zQ

Only actual, Soviet or Maoist-supporting Communists actively sought (and still seek) to excuse, diminish, or get people to overlook the atrocities of the USSR, China, Cuba or Khmer Rouge. When they don't simply reject the facts of what Communist regimes have done to their own people since their inception, they will argue that the purge of "counter-revolutionaries" was justified in the same way that some Western nations, or Latin countries, purged their countries of Communists as a domestic threat.

Besides those relatively few active obfusciation attempts based on ideology, though, I think there's a simpler explanation for why the killings of Stalinism (and Leninism) or Maoism are overlooked:

They're not as documented , especially visually, as the Nazi war crimes.

Compare to how many people are aware of the Armenian genocide, or the Rape of Nanking. The Nazis took their own photos, filmed their own movie reels, and meticulously documented the extent of their crimes in writing. And I'm not arguing simply that it's the amount of evidence that makes people zoom in on Nazi crimes as opposed to Soviet or other Communist killings. Nope. It's really the form of the source material.

Most people don't take the time to read through mountains of Nazi documentation. It's the videos, the photos, the audio-visual sources. People generally absorb history better if they have something to look at. There's a reason it is historical museums and not historical archives that attract most historically interested visitors, after all.

If, upon the fall of the Soviet Union, the archives been opened and photographic and video evidence of Soviet mass murder, executions, torture, etc. come to light, then you may today see Soviet killings in the same light as Nazi war crimes. That didn't happen because either they did not film, photograph and/or document their killings and torture to the extent the Nazis did, or they simply destroyed anything that existed.

There is also the difference between Soviet and Nazi war crimes and killings, that the Soviets - especially Stalin and the people under him - murdered people on a mass scale because they thought they had done something illegal, some crime against or attempt to subvert the ideal social order. The Nazis murdered people because they thought that the people they murdered were something illegal, that by their existence they subverted the ideal social order. The Soviets may murder the mother and father of a young child, but then they'd get the child adopted. The Nazis threw Jewish infants in with their parents because the goal was the destruction of an entire people, not simply someone who had acted in a wrong way.

The Soviets killed more people and over a greater expanse of time, and especially under Stalin, no one was safe in the culture of paranoia that surrounded him and his underlings. Number of killed people is not enough to declare something a crime. An airstrike against a terrorist target may kill twenty civilians. That doesn't mean the acts of the government of the United States of America is worse than the crimes of a serial killer who only tortured, killed and ate nineteen innocent civilians.

That makes sense. Like most things that area complicated there are multiple "reasons" and variables at play. This seems like one of many plausible explanations and I have really thought about it that way b/c I didn't know the Soviets didn't film and photograph their atrocities as much as the Nazis did. Thanks for the in depth comments.

[GloryofGreece]

Whats fascinating to me is what scholar and author Kotkin says about the "purging" Stalin did. Its not even close to how Hitler controlle his party and reacted to potential threats or imagined "threats". etc. If you were loyal to Hitler he usually didn't kill you. If you were in his inner circle or an administrator of his party you weren't killed. Sure there was the hundreds he got rid of to assume more control of the party in the 1930s but again nothing compared to the scope of what Stalin did. If you were an officer, high ranking general, other administrator etc. you would be exiled, or sacked in some way usually not killed.

[Fife]

It's all about perspective, I suppose. Oh, and wokeness.

[C-Mag]

It's all about perspective, I suppose. Oh, and wokeness.

This is where Stalin was brilliant, 'one death is a tragedy, a million a statistic'

[C-Mag]

It's all about perspective, I suppose. Oh, and wokeness.

Look at the phrasing, 'Lives were Lost', as if it was some sort of sacrifice for the greater good. Like Lives were lost by Firefighters saving others, or Lives were lost destroying Hitler.
Not, 100 Million people were murdered, tortured and starved by Communism in the 20th C.

[BjornP]

Whats fascinating to me is what scholar and author Kotkin says about the "purging" Stalin did. Its not even close to how Hitler controlle his party and reacted to potential threats or imagined "threats". etc. If you were loyal to Hitler he usually didn't kill you. If you were in his inner circle or an administrator of his party you weren't killed. Sure there was the hundreds he got rid of to assume more control of the party in the 1930s but again nothing compared to the scope of what Stalin did. If you were an officer, high ranking general, other administrator etc. you would be exiled, or sacked in some way usually not killed.

There had been political purges under Lenin, and I think because they were directed by and deleged to several levels of the party hierachy, more and more people would come in the crosshairs. Any social advancement in the USSR had to go through the party, and you can do that by climbing the ladder through hard work or you can whisper to the right people that your competition is a secret capitalist-sympathizer. And when your top boss is a paranoid tyrant, who demands "results" against all the state's (himself) enemies, you get an incentive to become overzealous yourself in your hunt for enemies of the state.

It makes a sick kind of sense. If you're worried that a failure to "act tough" on potential, accused counter-revolutionaries can lead to the state questioning your dedication to the state, it makes sense from a fatalistic, self-preservation motive to not question wether or not the people you kill really were enemies of the state.

Look at the phrasing, 'Lives were Lost', as if it was some sort of sacrifice for the greater good. Like Lives were lost by Firefighters saving others, or Lives were lost destroying Hitler.
Not, 100 Million people were murdered, tortured and starved by Communism in the 20th C.

On that subject: According to Russian state media, the Holodomor's just vicious Cold War era anti-Russian propaganda...

https://sputniknews.com/politics/201508091025560345/

[Speaker to Animals]

Hitler had people strangled to death he thought were plotting against him. Though, to be fair, they probably were.

[C-Mag]

Soviet KGB manuals translated
http://www.interpretermag.com/kgb-train ... ENi6dsRagQ

enjoy