Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scumbria who wrote (135939)	4/6/2001 12:51:24 AM
From: Andy Thomas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

i believe there were about 150 million people in the soviet union at the time, and stalin's numbers were somewhere between 20-50 million. but perhaps you're correct; perhaps the soviet union did have less than 100 million... that doesn't fit with my memory though. the number '143 million' seems to come to mind. andy

To: Scumbria who wrote (135939)	4/6/2001 10:10:56 AM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

02/01/97 Biography By Frost, Bob britannica.com Magazine: Biography, February 1997 Section: HISTORY THE KILLER IN THE KREMLIN ------------------------- Soviet leader Joseph Stalin slaughtered20 million of his own citizens. There is a photograph of Joseph Stalin in 1933 visiting the opening of alarge canal in the northwest of Russia that he had ordered to be built. Hewas pleased on this day to celebrate the waterway as a triumph of engineeringand a shining example of the Stalinist system at its best. In fact, the canalhad been built too shallow. Large warships could not use it to get from theBaltic to the White Sea. It was essentially useless. And it had been builtwith slave labor. Perhaps 200,000 people had died during its construction andwere buried in its bank. s. Many of the dead were peasants who had beenarrested and put to work as slaves during Stalin's forced collectivization ofthe country's agriculture. Ten million Soviet citizens died as a result ofthat policy. Seven million of them had starved slowly to death in theirvillages in the Ukraine and adjoining areas during the winter of 1932-33, in a premeditated, ruthlessly enforced "murder famine"--a war by the dictator against the peasantry.... .....Stalin and Hitler enthusiastically admired each other's brutality. WhenHitler in mid-1934 conducted the so-called Night of the Long Knives, a bloodyextermination of his politic al opponents, Stalin decided that he, too shoulddispense with his political rivals with wholesale murder; before this he hadlimited his killing to the peasantry. During the '30s, Stalin ordered the arrest, trial (usually in secret), andoften torture and execution of people he perceived as foes. At least 2 to 3million Soviets were killed in these terroristic roundups, called the"Great Purges"--many of them shot in the cellars of Moscow'snotorious Lubyanka prison. Others died from cold, hunger, and exhaustion inthe vast network of concentration camps that constituted the "gulagarchipelago." Associated with the Great Purges were the three MoscowTrials--trumped-up judicial actions against top party leaders. As withcollectivization, little accurate news of this tragedy made it to the Sovietpeople or to the West. One of the groups that Stalin decimated during these years was the seniorleadership of the Red Army. By 1941 he had barely begun to replace them. Three million German soldiers stood poised on the Soviet border on the nightof June 21-22, 1941. Stalin refused on this night, as he had been refusingfor months, to believe that Germany would attack. It seems he actuallytrusted Hitler to adhere to the terms of their mutual nonaggression pact,which had worked so well for both sides. The Germans launched Operation Barbarossa at 3:15 A.M. on June 22 and maderapid advances, partly because the Soviets had so few experienced commanders.In the wake of the assault, one of the great miscalculations in militaryhistory, Stalin went into deep shock and was incapable, for a couple of days,of making any decisions at all. But because he had been so thorough inliquidating all leaders of merit in the '30s, there was no one now to replace him in the moment of the nation's greatest peril. He held onto his power. His record as military leader during World War II was, at best, mixed; hemade a number of major mistakes that resulted in the loss of millions of lives. For better or worse, the Soviet Union had many millions of lives to give. Ordinary soldiers fought desperately, not for communism or Stalin butfor rodina, the Motherland, against a hated invader. And, after some dire moments in 1941 and 1942, they ultimately prevailed. The number of deaths among Soviet soldiers and civilians in World War II has been estimated at anywhere from 20 million to 27 million (American deaths totaled 400,000).... ....How many people did Stalin kill? The figure is at least 20 million, accordingto the most creditable Russian and Western sources. That number does not takeinto account the people who died from his blunders in World War II, nor doesit count any of the deaths caused by despots who took at least some of theirinspiration and ideas from him--Hitler, Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung,Nicolae Ceausescu, and others. Nor does it count deaths of the spirit.