Stalin was responsible for more deaths than Hitler (WWII, war, 1930s)

[other99]

Jozef Stalin (USSR, 1932-39) 23,000,000 (the purges plus Ukraine's famine)

Adolf Hitler (Germany, 1939-1945) 12,000,000 (concentration camps and civilians WWII)

However the media and people demonise Hitler more than Stalin. I dont know any anti Stalin movies are out there but lost count on the amount of anti Hitler movies there is out there. Why is this so?

[annika08]

I've wondered this myself. I've always thought that Stalin was far more evil than Hitler. Stalin killed off his own people, even Red Army soldiers when they returned defeated from the war. The purges and the way he built his economic and industrial machine (by slave labor and the Gulags) is absolutely horrifying-and so few know about it.

They were our allies during WWII. I also know that alot of documents have been destroyed (those records that were kept, they weren't as detailed and proficient as the Nazis were). I've only recently started delving into the fascinating history of the Soviet Union. I'm interested to see what others input is.

I can't think of any Stalin movies, or any about the Gulags or the Terror.

[WIHS2006]

I too have long wondered about this. When I was in K-12, it was all about how Hitler did this, this, and that and anyone on the far right is an evil Nazi, etc etc. But yet their was NOT ONE mention of Stalin and his purges, the Ukranian Holdomor, etc. If it wasent for my love of history I never would have known that Stalin made Hitler look like an amateur.

I have some theories:

- alot of Stalins crimes were known at the time (ex. we knew the Russians carried out the Katyn Forest Massacre), but FDR ignored the intelligence agencies and instead blamed on the Germans. Im not saying FDR was a communist, because he wasent and in fact I believe that the New Deal is what prevented us from having a full blown communist revolution in the 1930s. However, I do think that FDR allowed Stalin to take advantage of him and was too quick to concede to his demands.

- It is well known that many Hollywood directors (especially back in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s) supported the Communist Party and were very far to the left on the political scale (even more so then today).

- Academia too is very far to the left on the political scale. Virtually every college professor I have had has been Democrat or left leaning Independent. These are the same kind of people who thought Bush was the next Hitler and that he was going to suspend free elections in 2008 and remain in power for life ... people that delusional usually see Stalin, Mao, Lenin, Marx, Che, etc as heroes.

[markg91359]

Alexander Solzhenistyn claimed in his multi-volume work the "Gulag Archipelago" that Stalin was responsible for approximately 61 million deaths. I have no reason to dispute Solzhenistyn's claim. That men like Stalin and Hitler represent the closest thing to pure evil that mankind has encountered also cannot be disputed.

I think the reason that Stalin has received better treatment than Hitler has from some historians can be explained in this fashion:

1. The USSR was an ally of the USA during World War II. Whatever the truth was about Stalin what is undeniable is that one heckofalot more American soldiers would have died in the war if we had had to fight this war without Stalin's Soviet Union. The Soviets lost 20 million people fighting the Germans and this created a certain "sympathy" among some Americans for the USSR.

2. Germany declared war on the United States in December of 1941 and thus represented a direct threat to our country. The Soviet Union never declared war on our country despite the blustering and saber-rattling that went on during the "Cold War" years.

3. Left wing intellectuals who either did not discern (or who refused to recognize) the full truth about Stalin until after his death.

4. Many Holocaust survivors came to the USA and shared their experiences. Very few survivors of the Soviet regime came to America and did something similar.

[kevxu]

Originally Posted by other99

Jozef Stalin (USSR, 1932-39) 23,000,000 (the purges plus Ukraine's famine)

Adolf Hitler (Germany, 1939-1945) 12,000,000 (concentration camps and civilians WWII)

However the media and people demonise Hitler more than Stalin. I dont know any anti Stalin movies are out there but lost count on the amount of anti Hitler movies there is out there. Why is this so?

There are, no doubt, many contributing factors, but three that come to mind:

1. The extent of Nazi atrocities became fully known after WW II and were in large measure shocking there to be seen by the world. Knowledge of the extent of Soviet Communist atrocities seems to have grown more slowly over time, and to have lacked the kind of visual impact of photos and newsreels of Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, etc. No foreign armies burst into the heart of the Soviet Union taking photos and making newsreels of the gulags for all the world to see, for example.

2. I think the idea that the Nazis would systematically attempt to eliminate entire ethnic and religious groups simply because of who they were strikes people as more diabolical than the mass elimination of uncooperative peasants and poltical enemies.

3. There is also the effect of Zionism to be considered. The extent of Nazi atrocities received ongoing emphasis during the efforts to establish a Zionist state in Palestine.

[noetsi]

Where is the source for the dead? I have never seen 23 million listed for the Soviet Union.

Ten million is commonly listed as the number who died in the Ukraine. It should be noted that relatively few of those were deliberately killed. They starved through incompetent Soviet policies. I am not sure if incompetent policies are evil, although Stalin was evil enough by any definition.

The wars that Hitler started killed far more, which has to be added to his balance I guess. Chosing between hitler and stalin in terms of evil is an exercise in scholasticism in any case.

[thelogannator123]

one major reason might be that because Germany was defeated movie makers could make any anti-Hitler movie they wanted without offending anyone. however if they had made an anti-Stalin movie the Soviets would get angered. Why they don't do it now is anyone's guess.

[noetsi]

In the late forties and fifties US film industry made many openly anti-communist films. The reasons they did not make films about the Gulags or the Ukraine famines is that 1) few knew of them and 2) hollywood rarely makes films about such - even less in an era where independent films were much rarer than today. There are very few films about the death camps or other atrocities either.

[MotleyCrew]

Some of the best books are out of print. I found in my dads old box of conspiracy theory books a very good one that I will soon dive into. It is called The Harvest of Sorrow, which covers the Soviet Collectivization of the pheasants and then followed by the Terror famine. Robert Conquest is the author. I suspect the numbers of people killed is closer to the high mark than the lower mark. New mass graves are discovered all the time.

[eloy]

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