Some have, some haven’t. The Eastern European States are doing the best at this. Last I heard, they were growing at rates better than western Europe.
True enough. But the real growth ended before the Nazi attack on Russia. Moreover, it was largely due to having a massively underutilized industrial potential. Even with that, however, they never fully brought themselves up to par with the west. All during WWII, the Red Army was dependant on the west (Britain, and through Britain, America) for war materials. convoys loaed with tanks and planes, not to mention the spare parts and all went to Russia.
What the Communists did was to imitate the industrialized societies that were supposed to spawn Communism! Talk about putting your cart before the horse, says Marx.
A lot of the problem was the Czar. Under his rule, yo could get enough to eat, but you couldn’t do anything else. The Communists did change that. If they hadn’t been murderous paranoid force-wielding bastards, they’d have accomplished one of the greatest feats of the 20th century: turning on fo the most backward countrys on the planet into the world power it had the potential for.
Actually, what happened was sort of going from a third world country, to a heavily armed, third world country.
Although you are right about the 20 million killed by the Nazis. When you add to that the 30 million killed by Stalin, the achievement becomes even more impressive.
The Soviet Union managed, after a fashion, to handle the switchover from feudalism to an industrialized economy. They could never compete with free-market economies successfully, but their major flaw was their inability to compete after the switch to more labor-intensive industry. They always wanted more and bigger. Hence the bitter Soviet joke - “The Soviet micro-chip - biggest in the world!” The Soviet economy failed mostly in consumer goods, high tech industries such as computers, and agriculture (remember Krushchev’s disastrous “virgin lands” idea, to bring uncultivated marginal land into production? Another example of “more is better”, and a hideous disaster).
The only thing that really worked in the USSR was the military, and even there the switch to high-tech weaponry left them hopelessly behind the times. Which is why the Iraqi, Soviet-supplied tanks and planes were sitting ducks for the Allies during the Gulf War.
The seeds of the end of the USSR were sown during the Brezhnev era, when only subsidized grain sales from the West kept the USSR from embarassing famines. The rest of the world moved ahead, and the USSR under its ateriosclerotic leadership spun it wheels trying to run a 1940s-based economy while the West got ready for the economic and technical boom of the 80s and 90s.
For those interested, Murray Fechbach (a demographer at Georgetown) has been studying health and environmental issues in Russia (and the fomer Soviet Union) for close to 40 years.
IMHO, the environmental and health problems chronicled by Feshbach will have far reaching implications for the future of Russia’s economy. I should point out that while health measures in Russia sharply declined in Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the trends in environmental degredation (which has contributed to the decline in health) reported by Feshbach had occurred well before the collapse of the Soviet Union. So it’s ludicrous to blame “free market capitalism” for current Russian health/environmental issues that have been ongoing for YEARS.
The most extensive study of the Soviet gulag was done by J. Arch Getty, Gabor Rittersporn and Victor Zemskov, who examined previously secret Soviet police archives in 1993. Their results were published in “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,” American Historical Review, 98 (Oct. 1993) 1017-1049.
They report that the total number of executions from 1921 - 1953, was 799,455. No breakdown on this figure was obtained, but the researches estimate that the number executed for political crimes (“counter-revolutionary offenses”) varied from 12 to 33 percent from year to year, giving an estimate of between 150,000 - 200,000 executed for political crimes over a 33 year period encompassing Stalin’s reign.
Chumpsky, the figure for Stalin’s death toll ought to include those killed during forced industrialization, for instance, not just those executed. Further, your figures on executions are only those of the “Penal System”–and thus, I’m assuming, don’t include extra-judicial killings, which I imagine account for quite a bit more.
Yes, I realize that various types of liars like to count those killed during the industrialization of Russia as being killed by Stalin. However, there is no reason to take such absurdities seriously. Regarding the extra-judicial killings, you will have to enlighten me on that.
You know, your intellectual dishonesty is really quite astounding. In a previous thread, you tried to claim that the US government was directly responsible for what you estimated as some 50-odd million deaths worldwide, without giving a timeframe or a cite, yet you try and weasel down the numbers dead in the Soviet Union due to policies implemented, after all, by Stalin and his cohorts.
I take it you reject R.J. Rummel’s estimates of 61 million killed in the Soviet Union during the period 1917-1954 (not including those killed in the war with Germany, btw):
Why not? They were killed as a direct result of Stalin’s policy programme. Maybe he didn’t say “Go out and kill these people,” but he did decide to risk an enormous number of people in order to industrialize, damn the consequences.
I challenge you to respond with analysis, not some random assertion and ad hominem attack that prove nothing.
Another issue regarding which I would like to see you provide a cite, Chumpsky is the direction in which the economy was heading before some market freedoms were introduced. My recollection is that the soviet economy was contracting rapidly.
There’s no logic in blaming capitalism for how bad the situation is now, unless you can prove that if communism had persisted until now the situation would have been any better.
Expecting Russia to convert successfully to capitalism in ten years is like expecting the United States to convert successfully to communism in ten years.
The number of deaths that can be attributed to Stalin is perhaps the most political question in history. People who devote their lives to studying it still come up with vastly different answers. There are too many variables. Do you count vicitims of failed policy or simply those that were outright executed? Do you count those that were convicted in trials? There is no way to come up with a single, non-political truth to the question of how many Stalin killed. We are going down a road that even the most devoted scholars have not found the end of.
But I don’t think anyone thinks of Stalin as a good guy. At most, some people believe that he wasn’t outright evil, but even those people are few and far between. Most modern Communists believe that Stalin is what stood in the way of Russia ever experiencing Communism.
Henry B, I’m an American who is a film student with an emphasis on Communist cinema and a personal interest in Russian history and liturature. Enjoy the vodka, though. =).
Well, there was the small matter of the impending Nazi invasion, which Stalin foretold in 1931. The fact is that forced industrialization saved Russia from Nazi conquest, and it was Russia that slew the Nazi beast. If Russia had not built up her industry thousands of miles safely away from the front, she would not have survived. By far the majority of the fighting in Europe was done on the Russian front, where up to 80% of Nazi forces were fighting. Was the industrialization brutal? Nobody would argue otherwise. Was it necessary? Did it turn out to be a good thing in the end? Only a die-hard anticommunist would argue otherwise.
In short, to blame Stalin for the deaths that resulted from forced industrialization is to say that he should have taken some other action. What action is proposed? What other action could have been taken that would not have resulted in a Nazi victory? How different would the world look today if Hitler had succeeded in taking over Russia?
These are, indeed, political questions. But, it is simply absurd to say that Stalin killed 30 million, or whatever absurd figures reactionaries come up with.
These claims are so absurd one hardly knows where to start. And just because your authority Cecil says it does not make it so.
You see, Rummel basically attributes every death that occurred in the Soviet Union that was not due to old age as the direct result of Stalin. There is nothing to counter-balance these deaths with lives saved by the policies. Let’s say, for example, that 10 million die during forced industrialization in the face of an impending invasion. Then, let’s suppose that this industrialization saves the country from outright conquest. Is there no balance sheet on the other side? The problem is with assigning “blame.” Rummel and the other anticommunist fanatics want to blame Stalin for every death in the Soviet Unions, but they will not give any credit for the good that came from forced industrialization, such as defeating Nazism.
On the other hand, when it comes to U.S. responsibility, the standards are much, much lower. So, when the U.S. arms and trains a proxy army to attack a civilian population, this does not count as a death caused by the U.S. One can imagine a situation in which a U.S. officer holds up a Nicaraguan Contra and helps him pull the trigger as he guns down a Nicaraguan peasant. This would probably not be counted as a death caused by the U.S. in Rummel’s book. Nor are any of the deaths that are caused as a direct result of U.S. actions.
If the same standards were applied in both cases, then the U.S. would come out far in the lead in deaths caused.
STUPID BOARD EATING MY POSTS!!! AAAAAAARRRRGGGHHHHH!
Non-Sequitur; Strawman; some other fallacy I can’t name.
Stalin did not have to murder and loot and destroy to achieve his own naked desire for power. He chose to do this. Moreover, Russia had already achieved prominence (albeit few external ties) as an industrial power under Lenin. Stalin did what he did because he wanted to remain in power, with an absolute totalitarian state at his heel. He got it on the corpses of millions of dead.
He chose those policies. Do you think he was somehow innocent of their creation? That he did not know or understand what the consequences would be? Other people simply meant nothing to him.
You are entitled to your evaluation. The Russian people are entitled to theirs. Stalin (like Lenin before him) destroyed the Russian people. In one sense, you are correct that political leaders cannot always make easy choices. That is life. However, they likewise cannot evade responsibility for them. Nor are their choices correct simply because they happened to have one good consequence at some point.
Non Sequitur; Irrelevant; Naked attack at your debating opponents.
Let us use you own standards. US policy has resulted in many deaths across the world. owever, since those policies almost certainly prevented millions more deaths by Communist hands, * your own calculation says we were right*!
Actually, he did say something to that effect. I was including the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture when I mentioned the 30 million murdered by Stalin.
Sweet spirits of niter, is the above a load of fertilizer!
Forced industrialization did not defeat the Nazis. Aid from the Allies did. Cite.
The Soviet Union (not Russia - get your names straight) did not build up factories “thousands of miles” from the front. They moved those factories after Hitler invaded (in violation of the non-aggression treaty Stalin signed with him, and after the USSR and Nazi Germany had co-operated in invading Poland.)Cite.
You made an earlier unsupported accusation as follows:
If you are referring to other scholars who have examined and documented the famine engineered by Stalin, please present evidence that the policies implemented by Stalin which resulted in the starvation of millions should not be blamed on him. Cite.
If you are referring to me as a liar, please go fuck yourself.
I don’t know, you seem to prefer some lower number simply because you want to believe it’s so, and because it makes your case sound better, not because you really think it’s true. Personally, I fail to understand why you consider 10 million, or one million, or one thousand dead for political reasons, to be OK if it was by Stalin and his cohorts and not OK if it was by someone else.
Please provide any evidence you have that Rummel is an “anti-communist fanatic”.
Please present your estimate of how many lives you believe were saved by Stalin’s policies, then explain why you toss off the remaining millions killed so lightly.
Since you apparently claim that Rummel’s figures are false by a large margin, please open a thread in “Comments on Cecil’s Columns”, mentioning what you believe is the error and why, so that other readers will have the benefit of The Straight Dope on this matter. Of course, the Moderators may have some questions for you.
Yes it does. Anyone whose curiosity about the world takes them beyond a cursory glance at the comics page of a decent daily cannot have missed the ongoing story of the economic meltdown of the former USSR. You can’t expect to participate in a discussion if you haven’t made any effort to be informed or to do any research yourself.
tagos: You are aware I’m sure that Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia (all former USSR states) are candidates for EU membership in 2004? I highly, highly, doubt that if they were undergoing “ongoing economic meltdown” (to paraphrase you) the rest of the EU would even have invited them to join. Of course I got this from a “cursory glance” at the BBC - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2298639.stm
