So Russia could churn out T-34’s, Katyushas, Migs, mobilize millions of men, but they lacked the indsutry to build concentration camps?
Yes! Your history is again spotty Mary I hope you aren’t a history teacher. The purges of the military and party offiicials began in 1937 and even then Russias state of industrialization was not what it was by wars end. Further, the even I was referring to ie forced collectivization began in the late 20s almost at the beginning of his reign. This is when Stalin let peasants in the Ukraine starve etc etc in order to industrialize, but even at the end of the war Russia was not as industrialized per capita anywhere near to where Germany was. They made up for this by their vastness. Also, a lot of the capital in terms of gold that Russia used to finance this came from Spain during the Spanish Civil War as the Russians demanded the Republic pay for arms in gold so much of the gold from the Americas ended up in Moscow.
No. They poured everything into defeating Germany. Germany, on the other hand, devoted resoucres to liquidating ethnic groups EVEN as the Wehrmacht was being steamrolled across the Volga. THAT is murderous insanity.
Sure but so did Germany. The amount of manpower tied down to the final solution was very small relatively speaking and stalin too had death squads. And you neglect to mention that many of the first immigrants to the Levant after the war not from the MiddleEast came from Stalinist Russia, ie the Ukraine and the Baltic States b/c they were afraid of Stalin.
Say what you will about the evils of National Socialism, but it was an ideology.
Was it now? I know people that would dispute this.
The Nazis in their own warped and twisted way felt that they were doing right by their own people, or at least what they viewed as “Aryans”.
I don’t agree I think they saw it all as an end to a means that is if they give the people what they want or what they think they’ll want then it would solidify their control over them.
Stalin had no “greater good” outside himself and the power he could acumulate.
As I think it can be said that Fascism was basically an ideologically bankrupt system the same could be said about Stalinism and its break from Bolshevik ideology. Stalin and Hitler therefore were very similar in that they both wanted to create states which serviced them.
To put it another way since we are comparing evils, which is hard to do because it can sound at times like you are defending an evil which is not my intent at all. For those of you who have seen the movie “Seven”, the serial killer there was more along the lines of evil as far as how I see the Nazis. “Voices”, “God”, or his dog may have been his inspiration for doing what he did, but he believed in it. In the Nazis case, it was that they thought that they were decedants from Atlantis who migrated from India. Needless to say, both crazy as hell.
But this is the problem I see with how the West concieves of the Halocaust versus Stalinist purges. Hitler is just seen as crazy but Stalin as evil. I would argue they are both the same, either both are evil or both are crazy but to seperate them does ultimately make you a defender of one or the other.
Stalin on the other hand was just a killer, no ideology what so ever. Kill for gain, kill for profit, kill because he just liked killing.
But I think you underestimate Stalinist motives and blanket them with bland generalizations. Clearly Stalin was trying to create a super state apparatus around himself, but isn’t that what Hitler was trying to do. While you can point to the clearly social darwinist logic behind National socialism you can’t overlook that this was in every single western country at that time but only Germany went to that end. The same sort of vehement racialism existed in the US, France, the UK, etc etc but only in Germany did it lead to genocide.
