Stalin died fifty years go and yet some people still don't take him seriously
Some readers will find the comparison with Hitler offensive. In fact, Stalin was worse. Alexander Yakovlev, an expert on Stalin's crimes, estimates that his victims totalled more than 30 million. To give some idea of the scale of this: Stalin's body count is the equivalent to an army of 1.5 million Fred Wests, or 10,000 11 Septembers.[...]
One anecdote will have to suffice to give some sense of Stalin's contempt for human life. His wife Nadezhda began in the early 1930s to teach courses in textile production in an attempt to escape the misery of life in the Kremlin. She and her students carried out assignments in the Russian countryside, where she witnessed the degeneration of the peasantry because of Stalin's policy of forced seizures. According to the historian Robert Conquest, 3.5 million people starved to death, and cannibalism became rife. Nadezhda's students were so shocked that they insisted on reporting back to the great leader Stalin. They did, and Stalin had them all arrested for "sedition". Nadezhda killed herself not long afterwards.
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It is true Stalin was very bad. It is also very disturbing to realize that the money he got from grain confiscation, that went for building industrial infrastructure in the UK, allowed the UK to stand against Nazi Germany. Had it not been for the UK, many think that we would not have defeated Hitler. It was the Russian front holding against the Nazi's that turned the tide.
Posted by: conf. on September 1, 2004 04:31 PM