I was reading the wiki on Russia and here’s what it has to say about Stalin.
After Lenin’s death in 1924 Joseph Stalin consolidated power and became dictator. Stalin launched a command economy, rapid industrialization of the largely rural country and collectivization of its agriculture and the Soviet Union transformed from an agrarian economy to a major industrial powerhouse in a short span of time.
And that is all it has to say about Stalin. Nothing about the purges or anything remotely critical.
Why? Do the Russians get to dictate how encyclopedias record history?
The entire history of Soviet Russia in that article is summed up in four paragraphs. Basically all history gets white-washed at that resolution. It does link to a more in depth article on Stalin’s Russia which talks about the purges, and that article has a link to an article entirely about the purges, the Secret police, the invasion of Poland, etc.
The article is question is supposed to cover the entire history, geography, culture, demographics, and other major facts about Russia. How much attention can it devote to one individual? The article on Stalin himself goes into more details about his sordid history and links to other articles about the purges.
This sort of organization makes much more sense in a web-based encyclopedia than trying to fit the whole history of Russia into a single, extremely long entry.
Its the main article for a country, its supposed to be “whitewashed” apparently.
I’ve seen other edits on country pages where someone has tried to put a few mentions of something controversial in a country’s history on that page, only for it to be taken off and placed in another sub section pertaining to that country.
There’s a discussion on the history section already and its bias towards and treatment of Soviet history.
The article is long, since it is everything about Russia. All aspects of the article are supposed to be broad generalizations; specifics go in sub-articles linked at the top of the various sections. I haven’t looked, but I’d be very surprised if there isn’t a project about Russia ongoing, with multiple interconnecting links and considerable detail.
Any really controversial facts in the main article would simply result in an edit war, with revert after revert. That’s why they discuss things (often endlessly) to try and reach consensus. I often learn more about a subject from the discussion page than I do from the article itself.
A quick glance at the article on Stalin shows that it has sections titled “purges”, “deportations”, “number of victims”, etc. I think you’re just reading the wrong page if you really want to hear that much about Stalin, or even about the history of Russia in general.
The nice thing about wikipedia (in comparison to a print encyclopedia), is that you can just click a link to get more detail about any subject.
