Why does everyone hate stalin

In the s Stalin's communist terror engulfed the USSR, sending millions to labour camps or firing squads. But the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany is a source of national pride. The Levada poll in Russian is the highest rating for Stalin in the past 20 years - a period that has seen his portrait reappear across Russia, often with official approval.

New Stalin statues have gone up in various places. One Russian newspaper carried the news with the headline: "Stalin the Superstar". So why this love affair with a leader who caused so much suffering? Political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann has highlighted three significant factors in Russian society. Russian attitudes to Stalin have changed over the decades. Stalin intended to turn the economy around and make the USSR competitive with capitalist countries. To bring about this huge change, he acted ruthlessly.

He was hated and feared as a dictator. He was also adored. He was hopeful that the Americans would withdraw their troops from Europe, return to their prewar isolationist policies and allow him maximum room for maneuver. When this did not happen, he sought to forward the interests of communism, especially in those areas under his control, but always with the view of not antagonizing the West to the point of being drawn into a military conflict.

What made the years and such a watershed in the history of the Cold War and the division of Europe? Several important — irreversible — events happened that changed the character of the relationship between the East and West. The Berlin Blockade in , followed by the establishment of the West and East German states in , cemented the growing division of Berlin and of Germany itself. Can you share an example of how Stalin succeeded, and also how he failed, in these efforts?

Stalin failed as often as he succeeded. Finland, for example, remained free of communist influence on its domestic policies and was able through skillful diplomacy to carve out a space for independent development.

On the other hand, Stalin succeeded in imposing his will on Poland. Soon after liberation, an emaciated child survivor is carried out of camp barracks by Soviet first-aid workers. Auschwitz, Poland, after January 27, In the second half of the twentieth century, Americans were taught to see both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as the greatest of evils.

Hitler was worse, because his regime propagated the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust, the attempt to eradicate an entire people on racial grounds. Yet Stalin was also worse, because his regime killed far, far more people—tens of millions, it was often claimed—in the endless wastes of the Gulag.

For decades, and even today, this confidence about the difference between the two regimes—quality versus quantity—has set the ground rules for the politics of memory. Even historians of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, thus placing themselves under greater pressure to stress the special character of the Holocaust, since this is what made the Nazi regime worse than the Stalinist one.

Discussion of numbers can blunt our sense of the horrific personal character of each killing and the irreducible tragedy of each death. As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, the difference between zero and one is an infinity. Though we have a harder time grasping this, the same is true for the difference between, say, , and ,—which happens to be the best estimate of the number of people murdered at Treblinka. Large numbers matter because they are an accumulation of small numbers: that is, precious individual lives.

Today, after two decades of access to Eastern European archives, and thanks to the work of German, Russian, Israeli, and other scholars, we can resolve the question of numbers. The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought.

The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did. That said, the issue of quality is more complex than was once thought. Mass murder in the Soviet Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations. Drawing of a solitary confinement cell by artist Jacques Rossi, who spent nineteen years in the Gulag after he was arrested in the Stalin purges of — It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive.

Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between and , while both Stalin and Hitler were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more. The total figure for the entire Stalinist period is likely between two million and three million.

The Great Terror and other shooting actions killed no more than a million people, probably a bit less. The largest human catastrophe of Stalinism was the famine of —, in which more than five million people starved. Of those who starved, the 3.

Tens of thousands of people were shot by Soviet state police and hundreds of thousands deported. Those who remained lost their land and often went hungry as the state requisitioned food for export.