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Whitewashing Stalin

Guest | January 31, 2009 | 0 Comments

By Natalie

Andrew L. Jaffee recently wrote about Russia’s troubling relationship with their past, specifically with the mass-murderer Josef Stalin. In this article, the BBC reports that Stalin came in third in a national search in Russia to find the greatest Russian. Apparently, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is engaging in some historical revisionism, trying to justify Stalin as someone to be admired, rather than a monster to be ashamed of.

The whitewashing of Stalin isn’t just done in the former Soviet Union. I, knowing what I know now, feel that Stalin never really got his due in history. I think he has been remembered a lot better than he should be. In high school history classes, Adolf Hitler is always the primary focus of World War II. Stalin is very rarely mentioned, and he’s never mentioned when one studies the period leading up to the war or the post-war period. The impression I always got from my history classes that Stalin was bad, but, never mind that, because Hitler was much worse.

In fact, this is a common misconception, and I came to realise this entirely on my own through independent reading. Stalin killed many more people than Hitler did–the wide range of figures I’ve seen (between fifteen and fifty million) definitely exceed the generally accepted twelve million that Hitler killed. The people in the Soviet Union under his rule were also severely oppressed, kept in check with his murderous NKVD.

And this is to say nothing about the whitewashing of Communism. Communism has killed untold millions of people, yet all that people focus on is Nazism and its evils. Nazism was extremely evil–I would never dispute that–but it was no more evil than Communism.

Andrew provides a response in the comments section of his original article about this universal whitewashing: since the Allies sided with Stalin in the Second World War, he postulates, it is hard for us to come to terms with the fact that we allied ourselves with someone as bad, if not worse, than Hitler.

Uncomfortable as this fact may be, it’s time we came to terms with the fact that Stalin, as intelligent and fascinating as he was (and I have more to say about that another time), was a despicable mass-murderer.

Photo: Stalin in 1902, when he was about twenty-three years old; credit

Originally published at BirdBrain Blog
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