Should we praise or condemn the US for its aggressive anticommunist stance during the Cold War?

[erasure]

Originally Posted by travric

I agree and I'd like to add something.

Each country takes for itself say a psychological profile in dealing with the world and its own society especially when meeting 'threat'. Of course it's obvious that there are no die-hard Stalinists left however I'd think his 'legacy' lives on in the form of memory withinn the Russian populace. We sure know the tremendous price the Russian people paid during the war and that memory has been handed down like many others of that patriotic time time through the generations. And from that it suggests that that memory bundled up with experience points towards how Russia 'handles' its polices and politics today.

There was more to Stalin ( and his legacy) than just "winning the war."
It was Churchill who said that "Stalin came to Russia with a wooden plough and left it in possession of atomic weapons."
It's hard to argue with a fact that Stalin was at the helm when the predominantly agrarian country lugging behind European powers was turned into mighty industrial state, which in turn was a decisive factor in WWII victory.

[Linda_d]

Originally Posted by travric

I agree and I'd like to add something.

Each country takes for itself say a psychological profile in dealing with the world and its own society especially when meeting 'threat'. Of course it's obvious that there are no die-hard Stalinists left however I'd think his 'legacy' lives on in the form of memory withinn the Russian populace. We sure know the tremendous price the Russian people paid during the war and that memory has been handed down like many others of that patriotic time time through the generations. And from that it suggests that that memory bundled up with experience points towards how Russia 'handles' its polices and politics today.

Russia was always an authoritarian, very patriarchal, society in which all power flowed from the Czar (or Czarina). It never developed the kind of constitutional monarchies found in places like Britain or Denmark. It never developed a republican form of government or even a quasi-representative government, both of which take more than a few months or even a few years to take firm hold. Lenin and Stalin and Khruschev and the rest just followed the same line of autocratic rule that the Czars had instituted centuries earlier. In fact, many of the Soviets' control practices, like the secret police and the gulags in Siberia, had been employed by the Czars. The Bolsheviks just took them over.

Originally Posted by erasure

There was more to Stalin ( and his legacy) than just "winning the war."
It was Churchill who said that "Stalin came to Russia with a wooden plough and left it in possession of atomic weapons."
It's hard to argue with a fact that Stalin was at the helm when the predominantly agrarian country lugging behind European powers was turned into mighty industrial state, which in turn was a decisive factor in WWII victory.

I think it's fair to say that your average Russian citizen today is as proud of his/her country as any average American citizen. What the Soviets accomplished is amazing. That Russia has managed to ease into more or less representative government over the last 15 years or so without backsliding into outright dictatorship is even more amazing to me. Building representative, democratic institutions from almost nothing and creating a government that is decently effective is NOT an easy thing to do. We Americans had a lot more practice at it by the late 1700s than the Russians have today, and we still had a somewhat bumpy road.