Talk:Joseph Stalin
Nice stub! Concise, clear, funny... humanbe in 21:26, 18 September 2007 (EDT)
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[edit] ibid
Does not work as a wiki citation. please use "ref name = blah". Fix Now! Please. ħuman
08:09, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
- I've done it manually now, because I saw no way to use the same ref ID while still referring to different pages. Is there any more elegant way to do this? Röstigraben (talk) 09:13, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
[edit] Stalin and the Pope
The Papacy outlasted Stalin.
Stalin's last victims died at Katyn April 2010. 82.44.143.26 (talk) 18:31, 17 January 2011 (UTC)
[edit] Copy-Paste from Conservapedia?
Seriously, guys. If you want to became Conservapedia II, go for it. As is - this article is full of quazi-patriotic butthurt and propaganda.
1) Stalin weakened army before WWII. As in : eradicated "cavalry tactics" specialists and put in charge people who actually studied military tactics and innovations. Majority of "experienced officers" got their experience during WWI or Civil War and never been actually educated.
2) "General Winter" saved Stalin's butt. Ahem. Reich overran France, Poland and the rest before going east. Only "General La Manche" saved Churchill's butt. And what conclusion do we draw from this? Everyone except Stalin just was unlucky, but Stalin failed due to his idiocy. And even if he managed to beat Hitler in the end, it was pure luck. Right.
Let's face it : German army was the best in Europe. USSR managed to beat it. Ergo : Soviet government couldn't be much worse then the rest of Europe. Especially if you remember effectively lost WWI, Civil War and economic sanctions.
3) Stalin trusted Hitler. Too much facepalm to seriously react. a. Stalin was preparing for war with Germany and with Non-Aggression Pact he managed to postpone start of war by 2 years. b. Stalin did not have reliable information when Hitler will attack. FYI, his spies were reporting practically non-stop "Hitler will invade Russia next day/week/month/year" since 1939. c. Logistics of Russia did not allow effective mobilization of army. Whatever Stalin tried - Germans will do it first, two-three weeks before he finishes. The very same problem Hitler faced when he invaded Russia and got beaten. Russians suffered from it as well.
The list goes on and on...
Stalin is a political figure even now. Especially in Russia, where he is a symbol of eradication of corrupt officials. Not "clever manager" or "wise tsae" or whatever you might think.— Unsigned, by: 81.198.234.213 / talk / contribs 19:27, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
- It's a wiki. Biased as this article may be, you can just step in and correct it. - LucidFox (talk) 12:57, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
This is fact. Get over it. Stalin wanted to join the Axis and in November 1940 and sent Molotov to Berlin. He just never got a response. Stalin ordered 20,000 Polish to be killed in March 1940. He had several trade agreements with the Germans. These are all facts. Stalin was a bad man. Moonshot926 (talk) 06:56, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
[edit] suspect?
There are at least two very suspect areas in this article. It is a well documented historical fact that the Holodomor was a deliberate genocide. Perhaps in 1997 people were unsure, but I would suspect historians today would overwhelmingly side with me on this one. Secondly, Mother Theresa did not have "numerous positive contributions" to society or humanity. She perpetuated poverty and absolutely opposed women's rights, and by the by basically stole charitable donations by preventing it from being used. — Unsigned, by: 184.94.115.177 / talk / contribs 05:23, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
- Well BoN feel free to add this with relevant cites and cram it in somewhere. 05:27, 12 May 2011 (UTC) C®ackeЯ
Also you might mention that many of his opponents were incarcerated as having a 'mental disorder' or a 'brain disease' or a 'genetic abnormality'. He shared this trait with Hitler and other oppressive regimes that attempted to 'rationalise' human behaviour. Dirk Steele (talk) 03:30, 31 October 2012 (UTC)
[edit] Davies and Wheatcroft
Actually, no legitimate historian believes that the Holodomor was genocide. Robert Conquest, the originator of the myth, later backed down and admitted it was not intentional. There does not exist a single document which shows the Soviet government or Stalin ordering the famine. Furthermore, according to "Years of Hunger" by Davies and Wheatcroft, by far the best book on the subject, in February 1933 "the Politburo authorised the issue of over 800,000 tons of grain as seed to North Caucasus, Ukraine, the Lower-Volga Region, Urals and Kazakhstan; and a further 400,000 tons was issued before the end of the spring sowing. ... Between February and July no fewer than thirty-five Politburo decisions and Sovnarkom decrees - all secret or top-secret - authorised in total the issue of 320,000 tons of grain for food." This included 194,000 tons of food aid for Ukraine. A total of 'nearly 2 million tons' was issued for seed, food and fodder.
Makes no sense why the government would send aid to the area they are trying to exterminate.
Nobody seriously believes that it was genocide except for extreme Ukranian nationalists. Most Ukranians don't even consider it to be genocide either... I am Ukranian and the genocide idea is one shared by a small minority of people back in my home country.
112.215.36.178 (talk) 02:58, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
- Extreme Ukrainian nationalists include the US, Canada, EU, and UN apparently. But that's drifting into argumentum ad populum.
- The Nazis never "officially" ordered the Holocaust either - that doesn't excuse intent. Even if it was just the consequences of forced collectivization, it effectively nuked the Ukrainian intelligencia, something the Soviets had always wanted in the first place. What I want to know is have these statistics been reproduced elsewhere? Why do every time you search for D&W you get a bunch of pro-Stalinist articles praising them? They could be accurate, they could not...the problem is you only have four historians debating it when there should be more. Osaka Sun (talk) 04:36, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
[edit] what is this I don't even
"Stalin had many Soviet POWs captured and later liberated by the Germans executed or sent them to Siberia as spies" — Unsigned, by: Hmmph / talk / contribs
- It's historically accurate but in dire need of a few commas and removal of them. "Stalin had many Soviet POWs, captured and later liberated by the Germans, executed or sent to Siberia as spies." How's that? SophieWilder
10:42, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
[edit] Kill count
I'm writing a paper on history's worst dictators. How many people did Stalin kill? I've got 200,000,000 but I wanted to double check. --Let Them Eat Cake (talk) 21:50, 9 November 2013 (UTC)
- Two hundred million would be more than the entire population of the Soviet Union. Twenty million would be a better approximation. Online sources give 3 to 60 million, 20 to 60 million, six million... Pick a number, but cite it. SophieWilder
22:01, 9 November 2013 (UTC)
Thanks. I thought 200,000,000 seemed a bit excessive, even for him. The Communists over on Wikipedia won't say so I thought "Well at least the Communists over at Rational Wiki are honest." --Let Them Eat Cake (talk) 01:31, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
[edit] Stalin and the seminary
Currently Stalin is listed as a cult leader; should he be listed as a minister as well? There seems to be some debate as to when and how he got kicked out, it might have been the very last exam. [1]
- I don't think that Stalin's time at the Orthodox seminary merits the title minister, since he apparently didn't study very hard, but spent much of the time reading revolutionary tracts, if I remember Montefiore's Young Stalin correctly. You could call Stalin a "minister" in his own personality cult, but that's already covered by the cult lead label. ScepticWombat (talk) 17:20, 31 December 2014 (UTC)
[edit] Footnotes
[edit] Atheist fundamentalist?
Does Stalin and Mao qualify as true atheist fundamentalists? In the case of Stalin, he actively prosecuted priests and sent quite a lot of them into the gulags. 75.82.181.255 (talk) 05:37, 16 January 2015 (UTC)
- Yes and no. Stalin is probably the best case, given that his persecution and destruction explicitly targeted Orthodox institutions and clerics, whereas it seems that the destruction of Buddhist and other religious institutions under Mao was part of the general destruction of the Chinese past, particularly during the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution. However, even in the case of Stalin, persecution of Orthodoxy was part of the general persecution of any potential centres of power that might foster an alternative to Soviet one-party totalitarianism. Stalin was just as vigorous in persecuting monarchists or anarchists as in persecuting priests, and in all three cases this persecution was adjusted to circumstances: Anarchists were treated as allies in the revolution and Russian Civil War, then stamped out when the Bolsheviks had destroyed the White forces. Tsarist officers were accepted into the Red Army to bolster its efficiency early on, then purged during the 1930s, then, following Operation Barbarossa, those who weren't already dead were brought back from the gulags to fight the Nazis. The Orthodox church, a cornerstone in tsarism (Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality[wp]), was persecuted as part of that system, then shown more leniency during WWII, then another crackdown followed after the war. Likewise, it's hard to distinguish Stalin's persecution of Muslim and Buddhist clerics as specifically religious persecution from Stalinist persecution of alternate centres of power (these religions were central to potential opposition in the non-Russian Soviet provinces of the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Far East).
- A more accurate description of Stalin and Mao would be to call them "fundamentalist communists". ScepticWombat (talk) 07:55, 16 January 2015 (UTC)
- "In the case of Stalin, he actively prosecuted priests and sent quite a lot of them into the gulags." I think that would qualify someone as more of an "anti-theist" (or at least anti organized religion) as opposed to an atheist. --Inquisitor (talk) 08:09, 16 January 2015 (UTC)