Joseph Stalin and his regime are so horrible that they are still giving us goosebumps.
I briefly wrote about Joseph Stalin a couple of weeks ago, but I didn’t manage to cover the whole “story” in it. However, here’s the link for those who didn’t read the article.
When someone discusses the atrocities of Joseph Stalin, keep in mind that the list is lengthy, difficult to speak about, and filled with unimaginable death and misery. Following the Russian Revolution in the early 1920s, Stalin strengthened his influence as the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. When it came to murdering those who were under his rule, he was remarkably brutal. He went on to become the undisputed and legitimate leader of the Soviet Union, yet not many books or documentaries talk about them as much as they talk about Hitler.
Why? It’s not my place to tell, but in this article, we will approach this topic at a larger, comprehensive level without minimizing the gravity of the atrocities committed.
The great famine
Even though communism was supposed to benefit the nation by giving everyone equal rights, it was just another deception. Stalin’s misguided and frequently intentionally brutal policies caused millions of people to starve to death.
This happened during its entire regime but mostly during the Holodomor between 1932 and 1933, in which almost 14 million people died because of starvation, with Kazakhstan and Ukraine being the most severely affected.
Additionally, Stalin’s plans toward industrialization and away from small-scale farm food production were contributing factors in this catastrophe, in contrast to past famines when drought was the primary reason.
Stalin also made strategic use of the food shortages to ensure that some regions were more impacted than others. Many of the fatalities, particularly those of state opponents, “kulaks,” and “idlers” (those who did not labor on the collective farms), were blatantly applauded by him. According to Lenin, “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.”
Many people hold Joseph Stalin and his regime responsible for the Great Famine, which they view as nothing less than a genocide.
Labor camps (also known as the GULAG system)
Among all the crimes of Joseph Stalin and his regime, the GULAG system sits at the top. For those who don’t know very much about it, GULAG stands for Main Administration of Collective Labor Camps in English, and it was established by Lenin. This was a system of jails and forced labor camps spread across the Soviet Union.
Stalin, however, used them for his most cruel and at least somewhat successful purposes. The camps housed convicts, just as jails around the world. To pull the Soviet Union from its rural past into an industrialized society, the GULAG’s main goal was to instill fear in the populace by incarcerating, torturing, and executing dissidents, communist critics, and anybody who opposed Stalin.
According to one source, between 1931 and 1953, more than 3.7 million Soviet residents were compelled to live in camps, many of which were located in the most isolated and desolate regions of the nation. There were nearly 800,000 of them shot.
At one point, the GULAG had around 500 camps. For a far longer period, more prisoners went through the GULAG system than were ever detained in Nazi Germany’s death camps. Although the GULAG system wasn’t designed to murder people, in fact, it was built to “discipline society,” history tells us the opposite. And the scary number of all those people who perished there… I am speechless.
Collectivization, or how to be left without your land
If back in the day you were a farmer living in the Soviet Union when Joseph Stalin and his regime were in full bloom, terrible luck: everything you owned was transformed into collective land, and you would have ended up working for them instead of being independent and selling your own stuff. If you were fortunate, you would have avoided becoming a laborer in the GULAG. After all, nobody should have been richer than Stalin himself, eh?
But that’s not everything that happened during Joseph Stalin and his regime. Fearing that there would be subversive elements within Soviet boundaries, Stalin also ordered the forced relocation of entire populations—individuals of particular nationalities who were either deported or relocated to isolated regions of the country—into what some refer to as “special settlements.”
Stalin’s “dekulakization” campaign essentially destroyed a whole class, severely harming the economy’s agricultural sector and adding to the Great Famine’s death toll of millions more.
Order No. 227
Joseph Stalin’s violence was not limited to Communist Party rivals and civilians. It even reached those who were defending him and the nation. One of Stalin’s most famous and heartless decrees, Order No. 227, was issued in 1942 as the Germans advanced on Stalingrad in the early stages of World War II.
The directive also stipulated that “guard units” at the rear of the line would prevent cowards from fleeing, and punitive battalions—less dangerous men were transferred to the front lines. The number of Soviet soldiers who perished at the hands of their comrades at Stalin’s command is unknown.
The Great Purge
Stalin launched “The Great Purge,” a campaign to purge the Communist Party of some of his most ardent opponents and critics, in 1936. At first, Stalin’s NKVD (secret police) detained hundreds of thousands of people. Many were taken to the GULAG or executed. They executed 81 out of the 103 Communist Party leaders.
The Great Purge ultimately resulted in the deaths of over one-third of the Communist Party, which also terrified the broader populace. To avoid certain death or the GULAG, many people betrayed friends and family. Even Nikolai Yezhov, the chief of the NKVD, was ultimately not spared. He was put to death in 1940.
However, Yezhov and other powerful NKVD officers vanished from pictures as well as from reality. Stalin knew how to use images for propaganda and recognized their historical significance. Stalin went so far as to remove Yezhov and other of his adversaries from photos using photo retouchers, thereby erasing him from history.
War crimes? Heh…there is no such thing
Finally, Joseph Stalin excused war crimes as if they had never occurred. Stalin did not care about how they fought or the consequences of “admirably” winning wars. After learning that Soviet soldiers were abusing women in Germany and other countries, he reportedly responded, “What is so awful in having fun with a woman after such horrors?”
Stalin led the Soviet Union with a firm grip for the majority of his life. In reality, in 1953, the year he passed away, the GULAG still housed over 2.5 million prisoners. But following his passing, Stalinism and the GULAG fell apart.
Stalin’s role in Soviet history is still unclear today, even though he killed millions of his people. After all, he was on the winning side of the last major world war, helped defeat Nazi Germany, and pushed the Soviet Union to the level of a giant.
There is another thing that left me speechless; even if I were to say anything more, I would hold back. According to a 2019 Levada Center survey, 51% of Soviets said they liked, admired, or respected him.
Are you interested in more information regarding this dark chapter of humanity’s history? This article was just brief, but I promise to write more about this topic if our readers are interested, so feel free to ask more questions in the comments section below.
The book Gulag Voices: An Anthology, written by Anne Applebaum, covers more about the other side of the story of what happened in the Gulag, the prisoners, what torture they endured, and, most importantly, a few notable things about the criminals themselves. It’s available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions. Disclaimer: The book is highly descriptive and graphic, detailing the torture victims’ experiences in detail, making it not suitable for those who are easily offended.
