Question about Stalin?

Question

Ok I like history, so I'm not asking this for homework or anything, and this question is probably unbelievably dumb, but what did Stalin really do?

I mean whenever we learn about him in school, I don't know if I just don't get it or if the teachers just don't explain it well or what, but did he really kill more people than Hitler. I know he's communist, he turned Soviet Union from an agricultural nation, to a more industrial nation, but we havn't really learned about what he did to his own country. Just mainly how he was involved in WWII, and how when he was Communist, the U.S started the Cold War with the Soviets. Nothing about what he did to his own people. From reading other books I understand he killed alot of his own people, unlike Hitler who killed others, which is why people see Stalin worste than Hitler, but can someone please explain to me what Stalin did other than what I said?

Again for my personal knowlege, not school.

Answer 1

As someone who earned a history degree as an undergraduate, with a particular interest in Communistic despots, your question tickles my fancy.

You are right; those who know their history consider Stalin the most evil man of the 20th century, worse than Hitler. And you touched upon the reason; he murdered so many of his own people. Hitler, demonic butcher that he was, was far easier to live under. Like your “lesser”, more garden-variety dictators, if you kept your mouth shut the chances are you would have been fine, or as fine as you could be in the Third Reich. Except for the Jews that is, it was only the 6 million Jews dying in the death camps that elevates Hitler to the perch that he is on. It sounds horrible to use the word “only” in the same sentence as “6 million Jews dying” but as a fellow lover of history, I believe you understand my point.

It was a whole different picture under Stalin. One of my favorite history professors, a Dr. Geraldine Phipps, explained the evil of Stalin in a way that I will never forget. “Under Hitler, if you said something stupid, you would disappear and never be heard from again. Evil? Of course. But under Stalin, if you said something stupid, you would disappear…..as well as anyone who might have been in earshot of what you said when you said it, as well as all of your families and the whole lot of you would never be heard from again. Disloyalty and dissent was a kind of disease in Stalin’s eyes. Why take a chance of it spreading”?

Then there were the purges. Every now and then Stalin would get paranoid enough to decide to kill tens of thousands of people en mass; in government, the military…anywhere he saw a threat. Almost all of these people were totally innocent, innocent of plotting against Stalin anyway. Over almost 30 years the numbers would reach into the millions.

(A significant side-effect of these purges in the military was a severe lack of competent leadership in the early years of the war against Nazi Germany. Scores of Soviet soldiers and civilians died as a direct result.)

Then there were the famines. Stalin’s régime oversaw the collectivization process. Small family farms were reorganized into huge government owned farms. The mismanagement of these farms would lead to millions of deaths.


Be sure to check out the link I will provide, it gives you more information, in particular, a breakdown over the numbers. (Over 40,000,000 in total) On the subject of numbers of deaths, I’ll leave you with a quote from old Papa Joe himself.

“One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic”.

Answer 2

First of all, I reccomend you read Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore. This is the best book out on who Stalin was and what he did. It's a big book, but its in paperback now and it has a good narrative.

Stalin was a manipulator par excellence. He very rarely did dirty work himself. He got others to do his bidding throug personal charm and charisma. Churchill, Roosevelt and Truman were all charmed by him and liked his bluntness. He hardly let weakness like greed or sex stand in his way. He desired nothing but power. He achieved that goal better than anyone berfore or since. Hitler thought himself infallible and he ended up loosing everything .

Stalin was not an orthodox communist. He used the dogma as a way to get and use power as it suited him. You won't find much on his ideology anyway because there really was none save getting more power. He wasn't that great of a general. When he tried to run the war, he ended up with Gremans knocking on the gates of Moscow. He knew what his limitations were and stepped back and let the generals do their thing and win the war. We might have had Hitler longer if he would have not tried to run the war.

The US didn't start the cold war. Stalin said that war between capitalisim and communisim were inevitible and geared the USSR postwar recovery to fight this next war. To be fair, the USA had an atomic monopoly, but the fact they never used it while they had the monopoly shows no agressive intent.

The final total:
Hitler: 6 million jews, gypsies and others killed
Stalin : 20 million political prisoners killed
20 million Ukranians starved
Mao: 60 million Chinese starved
Pol Pot: 1 million Cambodians killed

Answer 3

First, if it is true that the US started the Cold War -- I think Stalin began it with his treatment of Poland -- it was in preference to a real war, which, given Soviet numbers, would inevitably have involved the use of nuclear weapons. In the late 40s we had those and the Soviets had not.

If we can disregard the stalags and probable death for any possible opponent of his regime, already purged by the murder of any bolshevik who might disagree with a cult of personality, then perhaps the starvation of several millions of Ukrainian peasants and Russian kulaks may count as "a lot".

Added later: There has been an amazing number of fine answers here, but raindog's is much the best. I would vote for it if I knew how to vote.

Answer 4

~If you are truly interested in history and curious about Stalin, why are you on YahooAnswers and not in the library. There is no end of the information available if you only bother to look for it. Given the answers you've already gotten here, doesn't it occur to you that you might want to check with a reliable source. The answer you seek wouldn't fit here anyhow. One thing that Stalin did, however, was win at Stalingrad, thereby bringing about the defeat of the Nazis and making the allied victory at Normandy possible. As to who killed the most people, don't forget to add the US Bureau of Indian Affairs into your equation. The Bureau's systematic program of genocide is on of the most successful the world has ever seen, and the US concentration camp system (ie: the reservations) was not only the first such systematized internment in history, but it served as the model for Hitler's camps and Stalin's gulag.

By the way, the Jewish total in the death camps represents less than half of the Jewish total deaths, but the Jews represent a minority of the 12 to 15 million who died in the concentration camps (and there is a BIG difference between the types of camps.)


Edit to Raindog:
Surely if you are a student of history you must know that only about 3 million Jews were murdered in the death camps (along with about 1 million others) and the other 3 million died in the concentration camps (along with about 12 million others) In Jasenovac, the Jews were a small minority of those gassed, the Serbs being the main target there, and the percentage of Roma exceeded that of any other group in all camps. There is no accurate count of Poles and Slavs murdered by the Nazis - for the most part, they didn't make it to the camps. 30 million Slavs were targeted for extermination after the war, but the Nazis lost and didn't get the chance.
By proportion, Pol Pot killed far more than either Hitler or Stalin (about 1/3 of the total population)
As to successful genocide, the blue ribbon still goes to the Bureau of Indian Affairs with a kill rate estimated between 65 and 80% of the entire race of American Indians being exterminated, either on the massacre grounds, the battlefield or in the camps (the rotted meat and smallpox infested blankets were a nice touch there - at least the Nazis used Zyklon B)

Answer 5

The reason you do not get much about Stalin and his crimes is that during the second world war the US government purposely suppressed negative news about the Soviet Union because they were allies against Nazi Germany.
Next for decades Stalin was revered in the western world by leftist authors, playwrights, poets, academicians, and journalists as the savior of the world from evil capitalism. They also refused to write about negative information about Stalin and deciminated pro Stalin propaganda. Therefore they had a stake in glossing over Stalin's crimes.

Answer 6

Stalin was intelligent, but stubborn, paranoid, and unspeakably cruel. He of course ordered many, many people shot, but when historians speak of him killing more people than Hitler, he didn't personally order 20-30 million people executed. In order to both feed his Army and prevent the advancing German army from finding food, he basically ordered all the crops in the USSR(mostly the Ukraine, which was second-class to him) confiscated for the government's use. Therafter there was lots of starvation and disease. He killed many others as well in his efforts to turn the Soviet Union from an agricultural to an industrial state through forced collectivization before the war. Again more starvation.

Answer 7

Stalin was much worse than Hitler in terms of the number of people he killed. But unlike Hitler, he left his country economically advanced. It was because of Stalin that USSR became a superpower.

Answer 8

It's been a long time since I took the class where I learned it, so my numbers may be off. I think Stalin was responsible for killing 20 million jewish people, while Hitler killed 12 million. As you pointed out, all of the people Stalin killed were within the USSR, while Hitler expanded his territory over half of Europe and was rounding up jewish people when a new area was conquered. Stalin wasn't as systematic about it as Hitler (Hitler identified and rounded up people and sent them to camps, while Stalin just made it open season for his cops to come into their homes and kill them). I know the name of Stalin's anti-jew program was called the pogroms. Stalin was also vicious with political rivals--being deemed a Trotskyist could get you sent to the Gulag.

Answer 9

Three main crimes he did :
- he had everyone who might be an opponent executed.This resulted in a climate of fear bc. tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands were executed based on false accusations or simply because they had the wrong family background.This is also one reason for the initial weakness of the red army, since about one third of their officers had been executed.
(Stalins Great Purge)
- he confiscated the farmers land in order to create collective farms (kolkhoz).Of course, the farmers didn't want to give it up for free, so lots of them were sent to prison.
- he forced certain groups, mostly those living on the edge of the USSR, to move to different areas in order to break their unity.

Answer 10

Russia substitute into actual an best buddy to the axis and basically later replaced factors.i've got faith the allies did prefer to forget approximately that actuality,enormously on the time, and basically hectic approximately having an added u . s . to component with them.