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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: maceng2 who wrote (53396)	10/20/2002 4:49:04 PM
From: BigBull	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Check roof and walls for vitreous substances before casting stone Just checked. They ain't so bad after all, so I went out to the Soviet quarry and discovered that those two little pebbles I threw had LOTS and LOTS of bigger buddies. :o{ In the pebble dept. we can start with 100-200k dead jews from various Soviet Pogroms during the earlier years, add 30-80K dead from the Army Purges. Nothing too distressing just yet. Then we move onto the forced collective induced famines: Kazakh famine ------------------------------------------------------------ brama.com Stalin had embarked on the collectivization of peasant agriculture earlier in the decade; the peasants--Ukrainians , Russians, and all others-resisted. They fought the authorities, sabotaged collective farms, killed party activists, and slaughtered their livestock. As a result, some one to two million Kazakh nomads, who were dependent on livestock for their very survival, perished in 1930-1931. ------------------------------------------------------------ Ukrainian Famine: ------------------------------------------------------------ ibiblio.org The death toll from the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine has been estimated between six million and seven million. According to a Soviet author, "Before they died, people often lost their senses and ceased to be human beings." Yet one of Stalin's lieutenants in Ukraine stated in 1933 that the famine was a great success. It showed the peasants "who is the master here. It cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay." ============================================================ Ok so now we're up to around +/- 6/8 million dead folks. Those are some Nazi sized rocks, eh? But why stop here? As Warner Wolf used to say - "Let's go to the video tape." The Gulags, how could I forget about the Gulags? Gulags ------------------------------------------------------------ spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk After the Russian Revolution the labour camps in Siberia were closed down. These were later reopened by Joseph Stalin and opponents of his regime were sent to what became known as Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagere (Gulag). Probably the worst of the labour camps was at Kolyma. Located in north-eastern Siberia, temperatures drop to -90 degrees during the winter. About 30 per cent of the prisoners in Kolyma died each year. It is estimated that around 50 million perished in Soviet gulags between 1930 and 1950 ============================================================ 58 million? Talkin' boulders now aren't we? Ok, think these numbers a bit unbelievable? I'll knock off 10 million, just for the sake of argument. Oh! But wait! To be fair, we'd have to add back a few million from the Soviet dominated sattelites. Can't forget them. East Germany, Poland, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Albania. I could also add a few other minor pebbles like the invasion of Afghanistan, Chernobyl, and the complete destruction of the Aral Sea. So let's call it an even 50 million. Nope, I have no problems whatsoever throwing stones at the Soviet Union. None.