Stalin's Soviet rule was hardly any less brutal than that of Hitler's Nazis

 

No, there’s nothing to admire about one of the 20th century's most brutal murderers writes Aaron MacLean in the Daily Wire's Circling Back On Joseph Stalin, the anniversary of whose 1953 death is today.

MacLean  is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the host of the School of War podcast.

It’s remarkable that even with so steep a butcher’s bill, Hitler does not hold first place among the 20th century’s murderers. That position is occupied by Chairman Mao Zedong, whose efforts to bring socialism to China killed more than 40 million Chinese, the vast majority of whom starved. Hitler must compete among historians for second place.

His rival is the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin.

Like Mao, Stalin led a revolutionary leftwing regime that sought to bring equality and justice to one of the most economically and socially backwards nations on earth. Like Hitler, who was born in Austria, Stalin also came from the outer reaches of the empire he would come to terrorize.

 … In Ukraine, this campaign of deliberate retaliation, remembered today as the “Holodomor,” caused the deaths of about 3 million, as Ukrainian-grown grain was taken and transported to feed the people of Moscow and other Russian cities. Whole villages died, but not before eating their pets, boiling shoe leather for soup, and grinding bones to make flour. Many went mad, their bellies distended, their limbs withered and strengthless. Cannibalism was far from unheard of, to include within families, to include mothers and their children. All in accordance with Stalin’s orders, all in the name of science and progress. 

 … Meanwhile, back at the regime’s center, among Soviet elites, Stalin feared dissent and plots to displace him from power — some real, most imagined. Such fears are the fate of any absolute dictator. To allay them, Stalin unleashed waves of purges of various elites in the state, the military, and the professions, culminating in the late 1930s in a period now known as the Great Terror. Over half a million Russians were executed during this period, many of them taken from their families in the middle of the night and shot in the basement of Moscow’s Lubyanka prison.

 … The world was … shocked when in August of 1939 Stalin agreed to a non-aggression pact with Hitler, giving the Nazi dictator a free hand to fight a war in the west while also dividing Eastern Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence. When Hitler invaded Poland in September, Soviet troops marched in as well, dividing the country in two.

Setting aside the unique horror of the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust which was still to come, Soviet rule was hardly any less brutal than that of the Nazis, with widespread liquidation (that is, murder) of Polish elites who might resist Soviet imperialism — famously, the execution in the woods near Katyn of over 20,000 Polish military officers, police, intellectuals, and other elites. A small number in comparison to other bloodbaths of the day — an immaterial observation to the families of the dead.

Hitler betrayed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, in one of the Soviet dictator’s most notable lapses of judgment: a man who never trusted another living soul in his own country bizarrely trusted Adolf Hitler. 

 … Nevertheless, the blood of the common Russian soldier, the snow of the Russian winter, and the steel of the American industrial machine prevailed in defeating Hitler in the east. The United States saved Soviet Russia due to a common interest in defeating Nazi expansionism, only then to have to deal with Soviet expansionism, as Stalin postwar imposed iron rule on Eastern Europe and sought opportunities for global communism to expand wherever the free world showed weakness, from West Berlin to South Korea. 

 … The terrain of the 20th century is made up of rivers of blood and mountains of murdered innocents, piled to the heavens. America’s heroic role in that period was to draw a line and defeat the terror of Hitler, and then contain that of Stalin.

Related:  • Some Mind-Boggling Revelations About Stalin, World War II, and a Century of Russian History  

(this is No Pasarán's main post on Russia and the Stalin era)
• "We Seem to Have Forgotten Everything": The West's Soviet Holocaust Denial

• For the first two years of World War II, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were allies; Hitler and Stalin secretly planned and jointly began the war that inflicted such horror and destruction.