How Bad Was Stalin? Some say he killed many millions. Some say he committed no crimes at all.

[JW Insider]

Although the topic is political, I am starting it within the group I usually comment in. The only person who has engaged the topic to any extent usually comments within this group, too, and I intended to include some of her comments as a starting point. Also, I think there is an excellent lesson to be learned about "truth" in general which might resonate with many of us within this particular group.

So. "How bad was Stalin?"

Some will say, "What does it matter?" They'll probably conclude that the 'truth' must be somewhere in the middle." Perhaps he only killed a few million rather than many millions. I expect that this is where many people expect to "land" if they learn there is evidence his crimes have been overly exaggerated for political purposes. Yet, it seems quite possible, even more likely, that ALL the evidence taken together, goes much further and quite probably shows that EVERYTHING we know about Stalin has been so greatly exaggerated that he actually "killed" far less people than we are ready to imagine.

But there are other reasons to take the question a little more seriously. What if the answer helps us learn about our own prejudices? What if knowing more about this situation reveals more about the definitions that are commonly misused, or the differences between deliberate lying, falsification, fabrication, misunderstanding, bias, etc.? Is it possible to determine the effects of revisionism, gullibility, iconoclasm, and crazy conspiracies? What if the answer can inform our understanding and misunderstanding of world events, not just in Stalin's time and place, but also in the Ukraine, Poland, Germany, even Japan, Korea, China, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and by extension Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Hong Kong, and many more places?

In my opinion those questions certainly can be answered, assuming we are willing to put just a little bit of work into some research and understanding.

Just to be clear, it's my opinion that we should give serious consideration to a side of the arguments that current researchers and historians are now realizing has merit. This is the side that "defends" Stalin against exaggerations made for political purposes. Of course, a much larger group of people still accept an Anti-Stalin Paradigm (ASP) that has been already been pushed by mainstream historians for decades. However, I think it is impossible for new mainstream historian-scholars to follow the ASP without either lying or seriously misrepresenting evidence. Two of the most often quoted authoritative works based on the ASP have been written by Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands) and now Stephen Kotkin (Stalin...1929-1931).

The most thorough of the non ASP historian-scholars has taken apart the last few ASP books and offers us a look at the evidence. One of them, Grover Furr, looks up ALL the footnotes in Snyder and Kotkin and reports on the evidence that these supposed "experts" have pretended to use. I'll try to use many of the same arguments that Furr uses, without tediously re-quoting him. I'm more interested in his arguments than relying upon him for quotations. The footnotes of Snyder and Kotkin have turned out to be devastating in exposing mainstream ASP "scholars" for their lack of scholarship. In many cases it exposes them as simple liars, in my opinion.

[JW Insider]

I mentioned that this particular topic is tied to many other political ideas and questions, covering other areas of the world, and so I might as well get some of those other questions in here right now that were not addressed when similar ideas came up in the past. Here are a few of the questions and statements that could be discussed further. These were from another topic area, but I'm re-quoting the questions here, because that topic didn't need any more sub-topics.

The first was more about China, from page 20 of the other topic:

On 10/15/2019 at 9:11 AM, TrueTomHarley said:

The “terrible trade deals” with China that Trump carries on about (and most of the U.S. business community agrees that they are indeed terrible from the US point of view) were based on the assumption that if China became prosperous, its own citizens would demand government not Communist and would lean to a more democratic model. Instead, the very opposite is happening. True or no?

The reason that theft of intellectual property proves so intractable to negotiate is that the communist government and those molded by it really doesn’t understand the concept. True or no?

More specifically to one of the points here, something said a bit earlier on page 17 of the same topic just mentioned:

On 10/14/2019 at 1:36 AM, Arauna said:

Read a three volume biography called "stalin" by the worlds expert on stalin. First two of them already available on Amazon if I remember  correctly.

Rewriting of history is now happening all over the world to suit the new global agenda.  Wikipedia is now edited by people who are so far left that people are maligned as far right for merely saying something negative about Islam..... and their applications to wikipedia to have the "label" corrected is ignored.

Communalism is the neo-communism of our age..... and it will bring with it the deliberate starvation of millions.

I already began responding about this three-volume book (Kotkin's) under that same topic, wherein I mentioned that the deliberate starvation claim has been debunked (it was one of the points referenced in Kotkin's book, volume 2). I say it has been debunked, to which Arauna had already responded:

On 10/14/2019 at 3:29 AM, Arauna said:

Government came in and took ALL food - if that is not intentional then .... and IT HAS NOT BEEN DEBUNKED. 

Stalin was evil and knew how to hide his operations. He killed everyone close to him so his operations did not become known. 

China doing the same now - anyone in government who becomes too popular becomes a target. 

Most people today are quick to make strong judgements against Stalin (and China) because of having been trained to accept what mainstream sources, and so-called "world experts" tell us. This is one of the reasons I wanted to address these questions and claims more directly.

[JW Insider]

I included the question from TTH about China because it touches on a common belief about "communist" systems of governments. One is a common notion about nations such as China: i.e., that it cannot be truly a "communist" government because it has a strong economy poised to become even stronger, and because it has been spending so much on building up its internal infrastructure, and because it highlights manufacturing for world trade, etc. Another is that such a nation is not "democratic" or not a "democracy" because it is communistic. Or even that such a government offers no sense of "freedom" or "intellectual property" or "privacy." Aruana made a revealing statement in that other thread (p.17) when she said:

Foreigners as English teachers are no longer welcome in China (visas not renewed and no reasons given) because they will infuse ideas of freedom and democracy into the society.

The natural prejudices we form against communist-modeled governments (when we learn about them through our own so-called democratic government models) will include the idea that it is impossible for freedom and democracy to exist in a communist government. When we see things that go wrong under a communist government, they are blamed on the government itself. If things go wrong in Western governments we tend to defend the government as well-meaning, and blame specific areas of bad implementation.

At the same time it is true that the communist governments are often making big mistakes, too. I expect that China makes big mistakes just like the United States government makes big mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes are self-made, and sometimes they are over-reactions against those Western powers who have historically meddled with them. And there is a long history of Western governments, especially the US, UK, and NATO meddling with the economy of any governments that declare themselves socialists with the internally-declared expectation that those Western governments will be able to cause unrest, riots, civil wars, death and destruction in those socialist nations. The track record of such Western nations against socialist nations reveals that the Western nations are often quite afraid, deathly afraid, of successes by such socialist nations. When they begin to succeed, it means that the Western nations can no longer control their economies and resources, especially the flow of their oil and gas and other resources coming from within their borders. From a Western viewpoint, it is much better and easier to control a despotic "puppet" than to control a government that has the support of a majority of the people.

The real danger, the thing the West fears most from communism and socialism is that those governments will reach a point very quickly when they will have the support of a majority of their people. At that point socialism and communism becomes the DEMOCRATICALLY chosen form of government in those nations. Given free and fair elections, this is exactly the government they would continue to choose. The Western leaders realize they must interfere quickly with sanctions against any government that tries to completely control its own oil trade for example. Western governments must quickly arm any rebels holding out against the socialist government. Sometimes the number of these rebels is small, so they are given support from thousands of outside troops, along with a worldwide media campaign to position them as "freedom fighters" even if they are driven by greed and lust for terrorism and violence. If an open and free election chooses a socialist government, the West must declare the election to be invalid, and begin to drum up violence and sanctions against it for "civil rights abuses." Of course, we know that the US actually cares nothing about foreign civil rights abuses, and will even support them, just as the US supported terrorists against Syria, or civil rights abuses in Saudi Arabia against its own population, and against Yemen -- as long as it is convenient to US economic and political interests.

A quick look at all the governments the US has seen fit to BOMB-attack-invade since WWII will give an idea:

China 1945-46

Korea 1950-53

China 1950-53

Guatemala 1954

Indonesia 1958

Cuba 1959-60

Guatemala 1960

Belgian Congo 1964

Guatemala 1964

Dominican Republic 1965-66

Peru 1965

Laos 1964-73

Vietnam 1961-73

Cambodia 1969-70

Guatemala 1967-69

Lebanon 1982-84

Grenada 1983-84

Libya 1986

El Salvador 1981-92

Nicaragua 1981-90

Iran 1987-88

Libya 1989

Panama 1989-90

Iraq 1991

Kuwait 1991

Somalia 1992-94

Bosnia 1995

Iran 1998

Sudan 1998

Afghanistan 1998

Yugoslavia – Serbia 1999

Afghanistan 2001

Libya 2011

Additional countries have been attacked through NATO, proxies, rebel training, sanctions, and economic attacks via predatory loans by the IMF/WB, etc. Arms/weapons sales by the US to other nations have most often aligned with the side that is against democracy and against civil rights. In non-Western of the nations of the world, the US has the reputation of a country that hates democracy in any other country, even though it has developed a fairly stable, free and economically powerful "democracy" for itself.

[JW Insider]

THE FAMINE

The first major accusation against Stalin is that he purposefully starved millions of people. Most people never care to learn any details about the claim. It's enough just to think that he was so evil he purposefully starved millions of persons to death.

Snyder, the former world expert focused much of his book "Bloodlands" on this claim. His book became a kind of "Manifesto" for the current Nazi parties in Poland and Ukraine, and is still one of the most popular books on Stalin in those countries. Snyder himself has backed off of his original claim and now says that it was too much exaggerated and that exculpatory details were left out. In fact, Snyder had relied upon the very Nazi sources for his evidence that would later praise and utilize his book for continued propaganda.

Kotkin, the current "world expert" on Stalin (as Arauna called him) wrote volume 1 of his books on Stalin without any claim of any crime by Stalin. He saved this claim for volume 2, which we should look at more closely.

The first thing to note is that Kotkin makes his book thick with pages and pages of footnotes, which gives it an air of well-researched respectability. Yet he repeatedly calls the famine "Stalin's famine" and blames it on Stalin with NO evidence, no footnotes, just a claim that might as well be based on an opinion he picked up somewhere.

Even though the footnotes do not accuse Stalin, he still manages to use them to imply that Stalin was to blame. Watch closely Kotkin's quote on page 128:

You can see a good portion of the book here on Google books: https://books.google.com/books?id=hMUPDgAAQBAJ

So, we finally find some real footnotes, but our expert has become more nuanced here. This is all under the heading of Stalin's Famine. He had just said in previous paragraphs that the famine and related epidemics had killed between 5 and 7 million, with another 10 million nearly starved to death. He admits that it wasn't intentional but still wants to blame it on Stalin. So let's look again at how he does this. The paragraph starts out with the idea that contemporaries (or at least one Italian ambassador in Ukraine) thought it was deliberate but this doesn't actually pin it on Stalin. The first real accusation here is that Stalin "monstrously" accused the peasants of not wanting to work, which would have alleviated much of the famine.

The footnote #473 is evidently supposed to show how monstrous this accusation by Stalin was, or at least that Stalin participated in a monstrous accusation. The footnote references an article by Michael Ellman which only states that a doctor in Kiev province said that "leader and rank-and-file workers" in that province were blaming peasants who didn't want to work for their own starvation. Not Stalin. Ellman also says that Stalin had reported this finding to a writer named Michael Sholokhov and that such an attitude could threaten the people who worked in cities and the army too.

But anyone who reads Ellman's article will notice that there was nothing "monstrous" about the claim. Ellman himself says in the same article:

Stalin's idea that he had faced a peasant strike was not an absurd notion indicating paranoia. It seems that there really were numerous collective refusals by collective farmers to work for the collective farms in 1932: see Kondrashin and Penner, Golod, chapter 3 (Ellman, note 9, p. 837)

This reminds me of what JTR said in the other thread.

On 10/13/2019 at 11:25 AM, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

...Someone might even make the case that Josef Stalin did as well as could be expected with a large, ignorant, undisciplined peasant nation.

At any rate, Kotkin blames "collectivization" for the famine, and evidently is starting with footnote #474 to make this seem like more than just an opinion. But this is never stated in #474, which in fact comes closer to defending collectivization as the more proper way to try to alleviate the agricultural problems of the early 1930's. 

So what way is left for Kotkin to blame Stalin? He summarized the problem with that last quoted sentence: "[Stalin] twice deluded himself --partly from false reporting by frightened statisticians, partly from his own magical thinking-- that the country was on the verge of a recovery harvest."

Kotkin has absolutely no reference that mentions frightened statisticians. Based on knowledge of other verbal tricks he plays, it's quite possible he may have just made this up. (Of course, if they were frightened it implies he was listening to their dire warnings, which turned out to be true.)

But why blame the idea of a recovery harvest on "magical thinking"? This implies that he just stupidly decided on his own to depend on something without any basis in fact. What would we think of Kotkin however if he actually knew that a recovery harvest was exactly what the agronomic experts were widely predicting?

Mark Tauger, in his book: "Natural Disaster and Human Action in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933" states:

Soviet agronomic literature and other published and archival sources from the 1930's, however, which no previous scholarship on the famine has discussed, indicate that in 1932 Soviet crops suffered from an extraordinarily severe combination of infestations from crop diseases and pests. . . . . Cairnus and Schiller . . . spoke with Soviet agronomists who confirmed these impressions in Ukraine, in the Northern Caucasus . . . Byelorussia, the Central Blackearth oblast, and the Volga region. The Soviet agricultural newspaper even acknowledged major . . . infestations. . . . That fact that [it] was difficult for nonspecialists to detect helps to explain the numerous claims in memoirs and testimonies of a good 1932 harvest. Famine survivors in the Volga region whom the Russian historian Viktor Kondrashin interviewed, however, remembered that in the 1932 harvest the ears were somehow "empty," the characteristic one would expect from rusted grain. Nonetheless, agronomists and other personnel in central offices and the local branches of the NKZ detected the infestation and made efforts to survey it and combat it. Their investigations found that rust had become the most distributed disease and caused the most harm to agriculture in Ukraine and in the Soviet Union generally. . . . .destroyed up to 70 percent of the harvest in some regions, especially near rivers, reduced the weight of grain 40-47 percent. . . . reduced the wheat harvest in the North Caucasus by 50 percent. These losses help explain why the famine was so severe in that region.

Anyone who looks at the facts and evidence would not get the impression that this was Stalin's fault. Kotkin cites this study in his bibliography, and therefore knows that his statement about "magical thinking" was false. Kotkin, of course, is thorough enough to point to footnotes that tell the truth, but hides the evidence from his readers, by making false statements about it. It's clear he hopes that no one else looks them up.

[JW Insider]

There are some additional points of interest about "Stalin's Famine" as Westerners have come to call it. They forget that the same period of famine resulted in starvation in parts of India and other nearby countries that had nothing to do with collectivization.  Also, they forget that famines had regularly resulted in the starvation of Russians from well before Stalin's time.

In fact, Kotkin himself admits some of this truth in his first paragraph under the heading Stalin's Famine.

Of course, no one should say that governments don't make big mistakes that can harm (or kill) thousands and even millions of people. The United States had big agricultural problems in the 1930's, too. And much of it can be blamed on government sponsored policies. Anecdotally, here's a summary of Steinbeck's book about the period:

Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, agricultural industry changes, and bank foreclosures forcing tenant farmers out of work. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they are trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California along with thousands of other "Okies" seeking jobs, land, dignity, and a future. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath

The "Dust Bowl" itself was blamed on the following practices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl

The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent the aeolian processes (wind erosion) caused the phenomenon.^[1][2] The drought came in three waves, 1934, 1936, and 1939–1940, but some regions of the high plains experienced drought conditions for as many as eight years.^[3]

With insufficient understanding of the ecology of the plains, farmers had conducted extensive deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains during the previous decade; this had displaced the native, deep-rooted grasses that normally trapped soil and moisture even during periods of drought and high winds. The rapid mechanization of farm equipment, especially small gasoline tractors, and widespread use of the combine harvester contributed to farmers' decisions to convert arid grassland (much of which received no more than 10 inches (~250 mm) of precipitation per year) to cultivated cropland.^[4] During the drought of the 1930s, the unanchored soil turned to dust, which the prevailing winds blew away in huge clouds that sometimes blackened the sky. These choking billows of dust – named "black blizzards" or "black rollers" – traveled cross country, reaching as far as the East Coast and striking such cities as New York City and Washington, D.C.