• aleph@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    He is also quoted as saying

    Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.

    True, Stalin was a more nuanced character that he is usually given credit for but he was still a paranoid and brutal man who was responsible for the deaths of a lot of innocent people.

    Let’s not fall into the trap of either lionizing or demonizing historical figures.

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      He is also quoted as saying [blahblahblahbollocksbollocksbollocks]

      No he isn’t. Maybe you should actually verify instead of spreading complete and utter bullshit with such confidence?

      Let’s not fall into the trap of either lionizing or demonizing historical figures.

      Yet here we are, with you attempting to demonise a historic figure by spreading bullshit.

      responsible for the deaths of a lot of innocent people.

      Every single US president in world history is too. Every single supporter of capitalism is responsible for 100million deaths every 5 years, what’s your point? You’re making an emotional attempt to demonise in one breath while pretending otherwise in the next.

      You’re full of shit mate.

      • aleph@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        If you read my comment properly, I specifically said “he is quoted as saying …”, which is undeniably true.

        Yet here we are, with you attempting to demonise a historic figure by spreading bullshit.

        Saying that that Stalin was a brutal and paranoid man, amongst other things is a historically accurate statement.

        If you think I’m promoting the standard, one dimensionals view that Stalin was evil incarnate, then you have completely failed to understand my point.

        • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          If you read my comment properly, I specifically said “he is quoted as saying …”, which is undeniably true.

          Oh fuck off. Weasel words. How fucking slimey are you?

          Saying that that Stalin was a brutal and paranoid man, amongst other things is a historically accurate statement.

          Stalin was a soft kind grandpa compared to Lenin.

          • Rod_Blagojevic [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            I like how the people actively pursuing plots against Stalin then also criticize him for being paranoid. I would be paranoid too if all of the richest people and institutions in the world were organizing nazi collaborator opposition against me.

        • ScrewdriverFactoryFactoryProvider [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          @aleph@lemm.ee once said “I kick puppies for fun”.

          Now, I’m clearly lying, but it would be hard to be argue that anyone claiming you’ve been quoted as being pro-puppy-kicking is anything but “undeniably true”, as you say.

          You’d think anyone disputing that quote would clearly be disputing the accuracy of the quote itself rather than the fact that it was, indeed, quoted somewhere. But I guess not.

        • zkrzsz [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          If you read my comment properly, I specifically said “he is quoted as saying …”, which is undeniably true.

          Source where? I always have big doubt when someone claims very confidently something is undeniably true.

      • WoofWoof91 [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        he never did, it’s from a novel

        This one
        it predates every non-fiction instance of the phrase being used to my knowledge

        This phrase is from the novel “Children of the Arbat” (1987) by Anatoly Naumovich Rybakov (1911 - 1998). This is how J.V. Stalin speaks about the execution of military experts in Tsaritsyn in 1918: “Death solves all problems. There is no person, and there is no problem. Later, in his “Novel-Memoir” (1997), A. Rybakov himself wrote that he “may have heard this phrase from someone, perhaps he came up with it himself.” That was the Stalinist principle. I just, briefly formulated it.

        from here

      • aleph@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Many biographers have cited it, including Simon Montefiore is his book The Red Tsar, which was very well researched and shows Stalin as multi-faceted and charismatic, albeit deeply flawed.

        The idea that Stalin was brutal is ridiculous.

        Um, have you ever read a book about the man? The Great Purges between 1936-1938 and his policies towards the Soviet peasantry are just two examples of his ruthlessness.

          • aleph@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            The great purges removed undesirable elements from the CPSU.

            Undesirable from Stalin’s point of view, certainly.

            You can’t name a single ill action taken towards Soviet peasants.Stalin brought them nothing but benefits

            Hoo, boy. I would advise you to research how many people died during forced collectivization and how much death was caused by the confiscation of grain by the NKVD and the Red Army before you start making statements like that.

            • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              how much death was caused by the confiscation of grain by the NKVD and the Red Army

              None. None was caused by this. The death was caused by the hoarding of it for profit. The confiscation was a response to that hoarding.

              • aleph@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                This theory is pretty roundly discredited in academia, though. The consensus view is that while there was a drought that lasted several years, the starvation that occured was exacerbated by the policies set by the Politburo, including:

                • Excessive quotas leading to the reduction in crop rotation and leaving land fallow, which in turn lead to weaker crop yields

                • The fall in livestock numbers following forced collectivization

                • Poor quality harvest resulting from an unsettled agriculture industry that resulted from political upheaval

                So yes, nature itself was partly to blame but the refusal to deviate from the unrealistic goals set by the people in charge was the reason why the grain shortages and resulting famines were so much worse that they ought to have been.

                • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  You’ve missed out the main cause, which was a lack of oversight over figures that were being reported by the farms. They trusted the numbers they were being given which proved to be false reporting, which led to the incorrect quotas and crop rotation mistakes, which led to all the other mistakes.

                  This was a blunder that was corrected later (with extra third party checking of numbers). Solving it.

                  Keep in mind this was the very first time central planning had been applied to a task like this. The notion that the numbers reported would be wrong was not something anyone expected because there was no precedent to go on. All of these “incorrect policies” that you blame them for are a product of the incorrect figures that they had. Figures that were incorrect because kulaks were grain hoarding to sell for profit then reporting incorrect figures.

                • UnicodeHamSic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  Are you telling me a group of men with an 1800s education didn’t have the most up to date agricultural science? Sounds like the fault of the people who educated them to me.

              • aleph@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                Asked and answered: I cited the specific book that referenced it, among others.

                For the record, I am more than capable of recognizing the positive aspects of the USSR - I just don’t like the simple-minded good vs bad binary thinking that often plagues these discussions.

                • Alaskaball [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  Asked and answered: I cited the specific book that referenced it, among others.

                  You just waved a few titles around without actually citing evidence.

                  Evidence is when you type out directly the material you’re talking about, followed by the source you got it from, the page(s) and paragraph(s).

                  You want an example of what actual quality citations look like please take a brief moment to read through some of the citations in this post

                  Edit: user I was replying to says they cited multiple sources. Just wanted to say they only cited one author - who’s more a story-teller than a historian - while handwaving about “many authors saying it’s true” without listing anyone. They completely rely on hearsay and vibes for evidence and not concrete source material for their worldview.

                • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  I am more than capable of recognizing the positive aspects of the USSR

                  Like what? You’re only saying negatives. Let’s get your positives.

                  • aleph@lemm.ee
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                    1 year ago

                    That’s fair.

                    As for the pluses, I’d list:

                    • Women’s rights
                    • Improvements in health care and social services
                    • Progress in education and the sciences
                    • Economic growth
        • star_wraith [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          I’m probably less enthused about Stalin than your average Hexbear user. While I’ll fully recognize Stalin’s faults and harmful actions, what bugs me about liberal “Stalin bad” takes is a refusal to acknowledge the objectively impossible problems the USSR had to address in the 20s and 30s. With the peasants, for example, you can’t just let them continue on with small plots and wooden tools. You do that and eventually the cities starve, industrialization never happens, and the Nazis steamroll them back past the Urals (killing tens of millions in the process). The rollout of collectivization was a shit show but it’s not unreasonable for a socialist country to push for collective ownership of land.

        • LiberalSoCalist@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Kotkin’s first volume on Stalin is a far better work that I’d recommend as far as biographies go. Kotkin is very obviously an anti-communist, but even a turbo Stalinite like Grover Furr finds few academic faults with that particular work. The other volumes are less stellar though.

          There’s also the recently authorized re-translation of Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend by Demenico Losurdo which has a free PDF available. It offers insight on a perspective of Stalin that seeks to de-mythologize the “monster.”

          As for Montefiore and authors of his ilk, I wouldn’t rely too much on narratives spun by pop history writers and journalists.

    • Tankiedesantski [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Don’t you find it a little strange that this short bit of quote is so often repeated but we never hear the context for it?

      When you hear it out of context it sounds callous and cruel, but it would be a very different statement if (for example) he said it in response to finding out Hitler killed himself or that some enemy had died of cancer or something.

      And that’s not even taking into account the fact that it’s inherently very suspicious that nobody seems to be able to produce a source for the original context and attribution of the quote.

      • aleph@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Whether the quote is aprocyphal or not, it seems fitting because of the way Stalin dealt with political opponents. The list of early Bolsheviks were rounded up and shot during Stalin’s purges is quite lengthy.