I believe in socialism, but I feel Stalin shouldn’t be idolised due to things like the Gulag.
I would like more people to become socialist, but I feel not condemning Stalin doesn’t help the cause.
I’ve tried to have a constructieve conversation about this, but I basically get angry comments calling me stupid for believing he did atrocious things.
That’s not how you win someone over.
I struggle to believe the Gulag etc. Never happened, and if it happened I firmly believe Stalin should be condemned.
How do you define what a Nazi is?
Do counter revolutionaries deserve to be sent to worker camps where the conditions are so bad many die?
“Send people who don’t agree with my world view to worker camps” Doesn’t feel like a good thing
We’re talking about WWII, so actual Nazi’s. You define them by the uniforms they wore and the allegiances they swore, it’s not some mystery.
sophistry, and the more sophistry there is the more my
beeps
This is an odd question in the context of the USSR and WWII. It’s not like we’re debating about Milo Yiannopoulos on Twitter and whether it’s correct to call him a Nazi because technically he wasn’t a member of the party from the early 20th century. “Nazis” here refers to members of the Wehrmacht and the Nazi party. It may also include, as a shorthand, people who were not formally party of the Nazi party but provided material aid to the Nazis. That’s treason in any country, especially during wartime.
No. To the extent that imprisoning people is necessary, they deserve humane conditions. The goal should be rehabilitation, but that’s not possible in all circumstances. It’s my understanding that the harsh conditions of Soviet prisons were largely due to wartime scarcity and improved as time went on.
“disagreeing with my world view” is a weird way to say “stealing vast swaths of wealth” or “enslaving people” or “invading a sovereign nation” or “committing mass murder of Jews, Romani, queer people, and socialists”. I’m not going to pretend that 100% of Soviet prisoners deserved to be there or that everyone who died deserved to die. For example, the USSR was very progressive on queer issues at its inception, but Stalin later criminalized homosexuality. That was clearly wrong. But to act like the entire system was a systemic way to imprison people for thought crimes is disingenuous. Probably not your intention, but rather because that’s the framing of decades of propaganda surrounding Soviet prisons.
After WW2 when the whole country was experiencing a mass casualty event caused by Nazis (defined as members or supporters of the NSDAP and their political project, or anyone who materially supported them even if they later professed to be ideologically opposed to them, since I guess “what’s a Nazi, exactly” is something you want to nitpick about), prisoner death rates were very high. Again, free civilian and soldiers’ death rates were also very high. There was limited food and Nazis were killing everyone.
Once the Soviets had a few years of industrialized society during which nobody was trying to commit a genocide against them, death rates in prison plummeted. I reject the idea that “gulags” are different in a meaningful way from prisons as understood by most modern westerners.
Which government are you aware of that doesn’t imprison those actively working to overthrow their government?
The inadequate conditions in many camps had more to do with wartime conditions and the consequences thereof than ruthlessness or sadism.
Unfortunately, Moscow, because of the stressful conditions of the 1930s and the fear of an anticommunist reinvasion, did indeed cause collateral damage in some of its attempts to suppress counterrevolutionaries. Such overreactions are the inevitable consequences of a revolution regardless of it agenda. Even so, the way that Moscow handled disagreements was complex.
There is more that I could add, but I don’t see the point.