Possibly. Indeed Stalin’s system was as harsh as US Criminal Justice System today – incarceration rate was about the same.
But it is possible that without the purge, there would have been another revolution in Russia. Stalin was a part of 1917 revolution, and understood revolutionaries very well.
Definitely it would have meant defeat and disaster for USSR. I would not exist.
Before Soviet population realized that Hitler had a genocidal policy, many soldiers surrendered simply because they did not want to fight for Communism. But then the population realized that the Nazis were a much greater evil.
A system which incarcerates hundreds thousands of thousands of people for non-progressive views is evil. But the Nazi system is a much greater evil.
Oh my. How many officers and government officials have been executed? How many show trials have we had. :rolleyes:
The Soviets had very functional defensive fortifications along its pre 1939 borders. When the army occupied its new territory it hadnt time to build new fortifications before the nazis invaded. They also helped push Romania, Hungary and Finland into Hitlers Axis.
USA 2015 and USSR during Stalin’s time have about the same incarceration rate. But few of the elite are imprisoned in USA 2015.
Definitely. But the main reason for Soviet defeats at the beginning was the fact that most people did not want to fight for the progressive Communist ideals until they realized that Nazis were a much greater evil.
Cite please? And how accurate would a 1930s soviet incarceration cite be when the collecting of such data would be considered treason?
For a few years, the penal system was as harsh as Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi 2015.
You understand that the gulags were forced labor camps, right? There are no equivelent to a gulag in the USA. There are not hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in the USA. Gulag - Wikipedia
Also there were factors in the ussr that kept the crime rate down Crime in the Soviet Union - Wikipedia
I have not considered that; I thought he was just an asshole.
I understand that many Russians starved because he could not coordinate resources.
He also wanted to punish Ukraine
But then neither would Mrs. Plant (v.2.0) and I would have lots more money to spend on Mrs. Plant (v.3.0). 
That was a horrible tragedy – people starved due to the fact that money was needed for industrialization. Without industrialization, Russia would have lost WWII.
I beg your pardon. Perhaps it was his own Georgia that he starved through incompetency.
Whoa…are you seriously claiming that the only or even primary reason Russian’s starved was due to WWII or that money was needed for industrialization?? Could you please cite your sources on this incredible assertion or perhaps refine what you are stating, because it’s so outrageous that I must be reading your assertion incorrectly…either that or you have a seriously warped view of Soviet era history. :eek:
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Neither the US or UK had their territory invaded directly though, and certainly not to the massive extent of the USSR.
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But Germany and Japan were, and they fought every bit as hard to defend their homelands. In addition, the UK fought basically alone after France fell and endured unbelievable levels of bombing and hardship yet fought on…and there is no indication that if they had been invaded the would have just folded and surrendered. The US was basically immune to any sort of invasion that the Axis could have mounted, but, again, no reason to believe that Americans (or Canadians) would have just surrendered either.
Sure it was…the Soviet Union didn’t win by itself, and basically it was sink or swim for them. Again, there is no indication that the US or UK would have acted any differently. And Japan and Germany, who also had their backs to the wall, acted basically the same way when existentially threatened. True, they weren’t democracies, but they weren’t communist either.
Sounds like a lot of Soviet propaganda and historical revisionism to me. It ignores the fact that the Soviets were able to do all those wonderful things because the US and UK were pouring resources into them. Food, clothing, ammunition, weapons, tanks/trucks/jeeps/planes plus technology. No one was doing that for Germany.
Germany wasn’t a ‘capitalist’ nation either. The means of production was mixed, but even the privately owned corporations were tied directly to the Nazi government, who decided who would get resources and survive and who wouldn’t, how that production would be used and directed and distributed, etc etc…much more so than in either the US or UK. The ACTUAL capitalist countries such as the US produced not only enough weapons and materials for them to make a decisive contribution to the war but also much of that used by the Soviet Union, allowing them to focus their production on more limited fronts like tanks and planes (though we gave them plenty of those as well) instead of having to divert resources to build logistics capabilities (and of course all the logistics supplies too). The UK also provided not only resources for Russia but also technology transfers that allowed the Russians a lot of capabilities they wouldn’t and didn’t have otherwise, capabilities that had substantial effects wrt their ability to fight Germany on a more even playing field.
That’s a new one.
It’s a bit hard to imagine the Tzarist leaders thinking that their regime was “feeble.”
Meh, edit
I believe the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio runs chains gangs and sweat boxes for meth users.
The US was crucial in rearming Germany and giving it essential technology too.
OK, probably for a separate thread.
