Inmates of a Stalin’s labor camp at work
On March 12, NewsLanc published my article about Russians commemorating Anniversary of Joseph Stalin’s Death. In the article I didn’t hide my negative feelings toward those who today praise Stalin. And to my great surprise some of the NewsLanc readers disagreed with me. Here are their comments:
“Stalin consolidated Socialism in the USSR and defeated Nazi Germany, saving millions of lives. Have some more respect.”
“… He was a human being who dedicated his life to improving the lives of the working class and peasantry. Stalin killed capitalists, Nazis, White Guardists and other reactionary scum.”
Frankly, I was shocked to read these comments. For me it was hard to believe that Americans could have such beliefs.
First: all the Russian “capitalists and White Guardists” were either killed or fled Russia before Stalin came to power. That’s why probably even though I was born and spent half of my life in Russia, there is not even one descendant of White Guardists among my acquaintances, though at least 75% of my acquaintances had someone killed or imprisoned by Stalin in their family.
How can one praise Stalin for “defeating Nazi Germany, saving millions of lives”, when all sources show that Russian casualties were more then twice higher then German? By different estimates 8,668,000 to 10,922,000 Russian soldiers were killed in the war and 4,440,000 to 5,318,000 German. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties). The “millions of lives” were lost thanks to Stalin’s terrible leadership. Russia defeated Germany, not because, but in spite of Stalin’s leadership.
There is a lot of controversy concerning amount of Russian victims of Stalin’s prosecutions. A historian Roy Medvedev published in November, 1988 in the newspaper Moscow News an article where he gave the figure of 40 million victims. The figure made a sensation. Medvedev wrote about the total number of victims of Soviet policy in 30 years. He included all the dispossessed, starved to death, sentenced, deported, etc.
Some people find this figure grossly exaggerated. By their opinion the only reliable source of the information is a KGB report given to Khrushchev after Stalin’s death. According to this document from 1921 to 1953 in the USSR 642,980 people were executed, 765,180 were exiled and 2,369,220 people were imprisoned.
Today most historians find these figures far from accurate.
Below are some figures presented lately by a well known historian and demographer Anatoly Vishnevsky on the basis of newly discovered documents.
According to Vishnevsky, the total number of Soviet citizens “who have been repressed in the form of deprivation of liberty (in the prisons, camps and special settlements)” from the end of 1920 to 1953 was not less than 25-30 million people.
The KGB report to Khruschev presents an amount of persons officially executed by the recorded courts’ verdicts. It doesn’t give such figures those who were killed in the camps. According to estimates of Vishnevsky, amount of only those who were killed or died in jails, camps and exile reached 4-6 million! More then the entire amount of imprisoned according to the KGB report to Khrushchev!
Stalin, who according to our commentator “dedicated his life to improving the lives of.., peasantry”, from 1930 to 1931, sent to “special settlements” in Siberia and Kazakhstan 381,026 peasant families, including elderly and children, total number of people: 1,803,392. From 1932 to 1940, 489,822 more peasant were sent to the “special settlements”. According to the official documents of Secret Service prepared in 1934, about 90,000 of these peasants died en route and another 300,000 had died of malnutrition and disease in exile.
Not only peasants were sent by Stalin into “special settlements”. At different times many different types of so-called “declassed elements” were exiled from Russian cities. It could be clergy, gentry, “non attractive looking” invalids of war, unemployed, homeless, just people, who happen to be caught in the streets without their internal passport. These types of exiles were called “labor re-settlers”.
The sign: “Re-settlers camp. Entering the camp and conversations over the barbed wire are punished by firing squad”.
KGB archives are still secret in Russia. Nevertheless new documents about Stalin’s time crimes appear in Russian press every year. This month a letter sent personally to Stalin in March 1933 by Siberian communist Vasily Velichko was pubished. The shocked communist described events, which he witnessed at a small island on the Ob River near Nazino village. The island was chosen as the place for resettlement of “declassed elements”.
Velichko wrote:
“The island was absolutely pristine, with no buildings whatsoever. People were dressed in the clothes in which they were taken from the streets of their cities: in spring clothing, no bedding, many barefoot. There were no tools or food on the Island. This situation had confused many comrades who brought re-settlers to the island. However, commandant Tsypkov had resolved the problem by the order: ‘Release them…. Let them graze’.
“On the second day wind had rose, and then the frost had hit. Hungry and exhausted people, without a roof, without any tools and mostly without any skills, found themselves in a hopeless situation. Covered with ice, they were only able to burn fires, sit, lie down, sleep by the fire, or to wander around the island gathering rotten wood, bark, moss, and so forth for their food. People began to die. They were burned alive in fires during sleep, were dying from exhaustion and cold, burns and dampness. It was so hard to bear the cold, that one of the labor settlers climbed into the burning hollow in a tree and died there in front of people who could not help him; there were no ladders or axes.
“Only on the fourth or fifth day, some rye flour was delivered to the island, and the labor settlers began to distribute it by hundred grams to each. The people were running to the water, mixed the flour with the water in their hats, shoes, jackets and pants and ate that mash. Many people just tried to eat their flour dry and dyed from suffocation. The hundred gram of flour did not rectify the situation. Soon cannibalism started, first occasional, then rampant. First, it started in remote corners of the island, then everywhere. Cannibals were shot by the guards and killed by the settlers themselves.”
The moment Velichko sent his letter to Stalin the one third of the island settlers already were dead. The checking of the facts in the Velichko letter showed that the tragedy was not planned: one organization had forgotten to provide proper transportation, the other did not have time to prepare food, and the third did not informed local authorities about the arrival of the party of the settlers. In general, it was the way the system worked.
This re–settlers’ island was dabbed by today’s Russian press “Cannibal’s Island”.
The case materials show that many people came to the island by accident. Here are two examples from the Velichko letter:
Novozhilov Vladimir. A car driver from “Compressor” plant in Moscow. Three times honored. After a day of work he planned going to the cinema with his wife. While she was dressing, he went out for cigarettes without his interior passport and was arrested. His wife and child were left in Moscow.
Voykin Nickolas. Member of the Young Communists Organisation since 1929, a worker of “Red Textilschik” factory. Member of the factory’s Young Communists Bureau. He was three times an award winner. On the weekend he went to a football match. He left his passport at home.
Guards of the settlement knew that among the re-settlers were many “good Soviet people”, but did not respond to their complaints. The documents, with which re-settlers tried to prove the validity of their claims, were taken away from them. That was the way the Stalin’s system worked.
After Stalin received Velicko’s letter nobody was punished and none of the island settlers was set free.
This cross was erected lately at the “Cannibal’s Island”
Stalin died broke no assets his children just as broke. He solved complicated problems with the means that he was attacked with. I have a huge family in the Caucasus. No one got sent to a camp.
EDITOR: You are correct that Stalin never enriched himself or his family. He even refused to give up a well weathered overcoat. He believed in Communism. He just didn’t practice it.
Stalin is my role model for how to treat fellow members of Government if you win an election. Purge em good and the rest fall in line!
Stalin is the inevitable outcome of Communism, not an aberrancy. The terror of 37/8 should have been enough to prove to the world that collectivism kills.
Josef Stalin was an evil genius. He outmaneuvered the Communist Party hierarchy after Lenin’s death and made himself supreme dictator. Hardly a “withering away of the State” envisioned by Karl Marx. Stalin presided over a totalitarian government that rivaled the Third Reich.
Stalin had a deep distrust and animosity towards Jews. It was theorized that at the time of his death, he was about to launch a giant pogrom against Soviet Jews and imprison them in specially built gulags in Siberia. Fortunately for them, he died before this could be carried out. NOT a nice guy!
Stalin was one of the greatest SJWs (Social Justice Warrior) that ever lived..He saved many Ukrainians from high lipids and high cholesterol related vascular and heart disease by putting the Ukrainians on a very low calorie diet in the 1930s.
Millions died of starvation or were executed, but that is a small price to pay for a SJW who meant well.
It’s history. Learn it, or repeat it!
Propoganda isn’t history.
Joseph Stalin purged his military of high-ranking qualified officers before World War 2. As a result during the beginning of the war he had officers in charge of units who did not speak the language. There was a language barrier, big problem. That’s why the Germans handed them their ass until Stalingrad.
Stalin set up machine guns and killed his own people for running from the Germans. Then the Russian soldiers figured if we’re going to die we might as well Killing Germans. Plus the winter. The Germans were not prepared for it so he got lucky.
Communism has not worked in any country it’s ever been tried but the idiots in our colleges toda want Bernie because Bernese going to give them free college and free medicine …. Your medical costs are not even 2% of your cost in a lifetime. Be a good citizen and pay for what you get. Save your money for retirement like the rest of us and don’t count on the government…because the government is not coming to your rescue
I share your sentiments.
In the Philippines,the dictator Marcos was also being honored as a hero despite the crimes and corruption in his 20 year rule, what bothers us is that his son is running for the 2nd highest position in the country. His minions used social media to attack the incumbent president whose father happened to be his father’s nemesis. He is gaining support from the youth who were not born yet at the time martial law was declared.
Am I suppose to feel better with this article and reaction from people?
…Stalin created a command economy installing himself as the new Czar. Under socialism there would have been equal ownership.
Stalin points out that command economies lead by sociopaths fail.
(Instead) Look at Mormon collectivism. The United Order enabled Mormons to settle in the West because collectivism allowed Mormons to create largest public works projects like irrigation.
..he Myth of holodomor, was created by sadistic Ukrainian war criminal Mycola Lebend who after WWII, lived in Queens NY, in the employ of the CIA. In 1987 they made a film about Holodomor called “the harvest of despair” in which they used pictures from the Volga famine of 1921-1922, and they presened them as if they had hapened in 1932-1933, pretty much like the Belgian News shown pictures from ISIS bombing of Moscow as being pictures from the Belgian bombing.
A Canadian Scholar named Douglas Tottle discovered the fraud and wrote a nook : “Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard”
And a note from me: like the Volga famine, all this geographic region covering Ukraine to the east oh Moscow down to Caucasus, are amenable to physical disasters occurring from extreme heat and dry periods, but it is a travesty and dishonesty to try to blame this on Stalin.
I believe the Mormons are now skilled business people in a free market economy. Communist and communal cults work for a while under external stress, but people revert to their personal good when the stress ends.
Stalin, may he rest in peace, was admired by Western liberals to the end of his life. Today’s Socialists insist Stalin was an outlier in the world of gentle socialism.
Lenin executed the kulaks and the Russian Orthodox clergy Trotsky was a force in the Red Terror and we all know the social justice practiced by Stalin. Lenin, may he rest in peace, called his Western liberal supporters “useful idiots.”
My Ukranian grandmother and her family endured nine terrible years under communism before escaping in 1929. Their chilling, first-hand accounts of the horrors of communism confirmed Stalin’s ruthless ways.
You could say Stalin was to Communism what Hitler was to Democratic Socialism.