Current Events > what is your impression of stalin?

(+) Yeah! (+)

CoyoteTheGreat posted...

Stalin was about as awful as dictators get, but its hard to really call him a "communism true believer". He was more a believer in authoritarianism with him at the helm, and communism was the window dressing for that (There is even some evidence that he got his start as an informant for the Tsar's secret police.). Right-communism is generally a mess that leads directly to authoritarianism.

he was absolutely a true believer in communism. he grew up poor but got an education at seminary and could have gone to the university of moscow to continue his education but instead devoted his life to the bolshevik party in georgia (which was the fringe of the fringe there and wildly unpopular even among communist movements). he definitely compromised his stated beliefs later in his reign to an extent but in a means to an end kinda way. the private transcripts reflect his belief in communism even in his private conversations throughout his life and rule.

https://youtu.be/uFcb50HUNvE?si=SeBJDbqRZ4a1y6kD

that guy is a really easy to listen to historian that primarily studies stalin. he is respected by both western style thinkers and communist style thinkers and generally has a p objective style and is a great storyteller imo

Y'all ought to read Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed. Dude shits all over Stalin for 233 pages.

Questionmarktarius posted...

Cool mustache, utter asshole otherwise.
Trotsky would have been a better successor to Lenin, but would have ended up about as much an asshole.

I don't think that's true. Trotsky would have been a failure, exactly because he wasn't a bastard like Stalin.

He probably would have gotten just as many people killed, but not out of malice.

Daremo posted...

Trotsky would have been a failure, exactly because he wasn't a bastard like Stalin.

Trotsky was completely an asshole bastard, just not quite in the same ways.
Hated the kulaks even more than Stalin.

A freight train of a dictator, with no concern for anything but his rule, his legacy, & the survival of his reign over Russian populace.

Narrowminded to the nth - nothing could convince him of Barbarossa until it was already too late.

Questionmarktarius posted...

Y'all ought to read Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed. Dude shits all over Stalin for 233 pages.

troysky's opinion on stalin changed a great deal due to stalin outmanuevering him. trotsky never liked stalin but his account of what stalin did shifted once stalin won the power struggle.

Daremo posted...

I don't think that's true. Trotsky would have been a failure, exactly because he wasn't a bastard like Stalin.

He probably would have gotten just as many people killed, but not out of malice.

troysky was absolutely a vicious murderer as well. he was ok with the massacre of civilians and with murdering the royal family in cold blood. he may not have gone to the brutal lengths stalin did in the same ways, but he was absolutely capable of large scale mass murder. both trotsky and stalin were ideologically driven much like lenin was. the most dangerous kind of person is someone with strong ideological convictions since they can justify basically any atrocities in the name of progressing towards their goals. the 20th century (and probably every century) is full of ideologically driven leaders who justified any actions in the name of whatever ideology they espoused

obviously great leaders can be ideologically driven as well, but there is a danger of someone putting their ideas before their humanity as we see with hitler/stalin/lenin/mao/ect

personally i think stalin is the most interesting of all the modern dictators and probably the most interesting of any modern leaders. all people are complicated, but his success in building backwater russia into a modern industrial power is really fascinating. when he came into power the soviet union was an agricultural economy and a complete backwater, and when he died they were a fully modern industrial and nuclear power.

not only his success in transforming russia is fascinating, but building it up on top of the blood and bodies of soviet citizens is a case study on the lengths a human will go to to fulfill their goals. by all indications he wasn't always the ruthless dictator he turned into. as time went by and decision had to be made he lost his humanity more and more, bit by bit. through the 1920s he was basically unknown to the world and even the soviet union outside of the party apparatus. by the time lenin died he was firmly in control with little threat by the time lenin finally died. 1929 saw his mask start to slip and by the early 30s he became the monster history now remembers him as.

andel posted...

and probably the most interesting of any modern leaders

Zelenskyy, tho.

andel posted...

troysky was absolutely a vicious murderer as well. he was ok with the massacre of civilians and with murdering the royal family in cold blood.

The murder of any royal family isn't in cold blood, it is because if you have a revolution and don't kill every royal, then you end up with royalist armies taking up whoever is left's cause and a civil war that kills a much greater magnitude of your people. The Tsarist regime was one that had the peasantry in literal slavery, it is one of human history's worst governments, it wasn't something any of them wanted to return to.

CoyoteTheGreat posted...

The murder of any royal family isn't in cold blood, it is because if you have a revolution and don't kill every royal, then you end up with royalist armies taking up whoever is left's cause and a civil war that kills a much greater magnitude of your people. The Tsarist regime was one that had the peasantry in literal slavery, it is one of human history's worst governments, it wasn't something any of them wanted to return to.

they didn't kill every royal though, there were members of the romanov family that lived. the tsarist regime was finished, killing them wasn't necessary. there were multiple royal families that were deposed after ww1 that weren't murdered. brutally murdering children is never justifiable

the tsarist regime was brutal, but the soviets also enslaved millions through collectivization and millions more through the gulags. the tsarist regime was finished regardless of who replaced them at that point. nicholas ii was wildly incompetent and rapidly sped up the downfall of the dynasty, but even without his murder of civilians and disastrous entrance into ww1 that dynasty was on a clock that was quickly running out.

the soviet union wasn't inevitable, a regime change of some sort was inevitable though

Stalin was a paranoid lunatic who shouldn't have been invested with the authority that he was.

I know a lot of leftists like to claim that the Soviet leadership was the least awful the Russians ever had and I can see that argument for Kruschev and his successors but Lenin and Stalin were both awful mass murderers who trampled on the lives of their citizens and engineered famines that lead to the deaths of millions. And you can't just deflect that with a whataboutism towards capitalism.

And Trotsky may have been even worse for the USSR than Stalin. A lot of historians believe that had Trotsky triumphed over Stalin, he would have been the over ambitious conqueror that the world allied to defeat. It's a scary thought to think of a world where we allied with the fascists to defeat the Bolsheviks during WWII.

I gotta say, not a big fan.

FunWithAFryPan posted...

I gotta say, not a big fan.

Nobody is, unless you were a Soviet from 1941 to 1953, then you had to be - or else.

Cool mustache, Wario.

Oderus_Urungus posted...

Wario

Oddly,. an accurate analogue.
Waliugi as Trosky also strangely works.

Damn_Underscore posted...

Good lord. This post is embarrassing.

He is responsible for the deaths of millions of people. His country literally went through a destalinization period after he died because of how bad his policies and cult of personality were.

Can the US get started on Detrumpification sometime soon?

CoyoteTheGreat posted...

The murder of any royal family isn't in cold blood, it is because if you have a revolution and don't kill every royal,

You sound dangerously close to averagejoel justifying the murder of children during the French revolution

andel posted...

he made a ton of mistakes in ww2 that cost millions of russian lives (he was already a mass murderer at that point), but his organizational skills were the main reason the nazis got beat into the ground during ww2.

The Red Army succeeded in defeating the Nazis after Stalin stopped micromanaging the war and let his generals do the work. He was an all around detriment to the Soviet military and they would have suffered a lot less if someone else had been in charge. The only good thing he did was boosting national morale by staying in Moscow and giving inspiring speeches.

ZeldaMutant posted...

The Red Army succeeded in defeating the Nazis after Stalin stopped micromanaging the war and let his generals do the work. He was an all around detriment to the Soviet military and they would have suffered a lot less if someone else had been in charge. The only good thing he did was boosting national morale by staying in Moscow and giving inspiring speeches

So basically he was Hitler. He just stopped micromanaging things before screwing them up too much as opposed to well, never stopping.

Dark_Arbron posted...

So basically he was Hitler. He just stopped micromanaging things before screwing them up too much as opposed to well, never stopping.

FDR died becoming the American autocrat, and he failed several steps along the way.
Harry Truman, the next guy over, has an absurd death count history ignores for some reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
Only one nation has deployed nuclear weapons, and it was twice within a week.

How the fuck is post 11 still up?

spikethedevil posted...

How the fuck is post 11 still up?

Being a dumbass isn't actually a TOS violation.

andel posted...

they didn't kill every royal though, there were members of the romanov family that lived. the tsarist regime was finished, killing them wasn't necessary. there were multiple royal families that were deposed after ww1 that weren't murdered. brutally murdering children is never justifiable

the tsarist regime was brutal, but the soviets also enslaved millions through collectivization and millions more through the gulags. the tsarist regime was finished regardless of who replaced them at that point. nicholas ii was wildly incompetent and rapidly sped up the downfall of the dynasty, but even without his murder of civilians and disastrous entrance into ww1 that dynasty was on a clock that was quickly running out.

the soviet union wasn't inevitable, a regime change of some sort was inevitable though

I mean, you are forgetting the entire context of the Russian Civil War where they literally fought the "White Army" Tsarist forces to win the country to begin with. It was never inevitable that the Tsarist regime would be gone regardless of how incompetently it was ruled. The liberals also ruled the country incompetently and sent Russians to their deaths in the slaughterfields of World War I for the five seconds where Kerensky was Prime Minister. I think its very difficult to point at any point in Russia's history where it was ruled competently or for the sake of the people.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/0/6/AAb9YfAAEy1m.jpg

OudeGeuze posted...

You sound dangerously close to averagejoel justifying the murder of children during the French revolution

That entire families are killed during any transfer of power is kind of a fact of nobility that isn't limited even to these kinds of revolutions. It was very common during the time of Rome too, where they'd just mass murder babies of families for the crimes of their fathers. Its a pretty good example of why royalty and noble families shouldn't exist as concepts, because as long as they do, even a child can be considered dangerous by the state from the fact of its birth alone.

My impression:

"Hey, look at me I'm Stalin. I'm a ruthless dictator. Oh geez."

No real opinion.

My ancestors fled Ukraine during Stalin's repressive rule

not a fan

ForsakenHermit posted...

Stalin was a paranoid lunatic who shouldn't have been invested with the authority that he was.

I know a lot of leftists like to claim that the Soviet leadership was the least awful the Russians ever had and I can see that argument for Kruschev and his successors but Lenin and Stalin were both awful mass murderers who trampled on the lives of their citizens and engineered famines that lead to the deaths of millions. And you can't just deflect that with a whataboutism towards capitalism.

And Trotsky may have been even worse for the USSR than Stalin. A lot of historians believe that had Trotsky triumphed over Stalin, he would have been the over ambitious conqueror that the world allied to defeat. It's a scary thought to think of a world where we allied with the fascists to defeat the Bolsheviks during WWII.

My first exposure to historical fiction was Red Alert back in .. 97?

Here's my impression of him: Privet, I am Stalin

Ruvan22 posted...

My first exposure to historical fiction was Red Alert back in .. 97?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/2/0/AAds4pAAEy10.jpg

LaLeyenda posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/2/0/AAds4pAAEy10.jpg

I suppose my impression of Stalin was influenced by him not seeing that he was being used :P

CoyoteTheGreat posted...

That entire families are killed during any transfer of power is kind of a fact of nobility that isn't limited even to these kinds of revolutions. It was very common during the time of Rome too, where they'd just mass murder babies of families for the crimes of their fathers. Its a pretty good example of why royalty and noble families shouldn't exist as concepts, because as long as they do, even a child can be considered dangerous by the state from the fact of its birth alone.

it was a more common occurrence in more distant history, it definitely wasn't common in the post ww1 era when half the monarchies and autocratic regimes in europe fell. the soviets were unique in their brutality of that era.

the tsarist regime was done. some people still wanted to prop it up for various reasons but it was no longer tenable and the white army had no long term prospects of winning the war when the royal family was murdered in cold blood.

there really wasn't any difference for the peasantry between the tsarist regime and the early soviet regime. the peasants were still enslaved and the famines actually became worse for them, particularly for the non russian (kazak and ukranian in particular) people.