WW2 resulted in a Cold War

[spidge]

Originally Posted by T34

who told you that people of USSR were "oppressed"?

http://www.gmu.edu/departments/econo...mfaq.htm#part5

What were the most important human rights violations committed by Stalin?

Joseph Stalin won a leading role in the Communist Party during Lenin's failing years, and after a few years of power-sharing he obtained dictatorial powers that exceeded even those of Lenin. In recent years, historians have gradually recognized that Stalin was personally responsible for the murder of more people than any other human being in the 20th century - and probably any other century. Stalin took Lenin's system of slave labor camps and turned it into a vast secret empire in the depths of Siberia. Lenin chose to let millions starve to death in order to sustain his war effort, but Stalin went further by deliberately engineering famines on an even greater scale. Finally, Stalin crossed the one line that Lenin would not, by ordering the executions of fellow Communists on a massive scale.

• Deaths due to extreme hardship conditions in slave labor camps
  Lenin pioneered the slave labor camp, but Stalin expanded it literally a hundredfold. Under Lenin, the inmates numbered fewer than 100,000. By 1930, they numbered 1,000,000. By 1940, the Gulag Archipelago housed fully 10,000,000 pitiful souls. The death rate was extraordinary: 10-30% per year, for the prisoners performed demanding labor such as mining and timber-cutting with minimal food and clothing in freezing temperatures. The slaves were ruled by an elite of secret police, now known as the NKVD. As Robert Conquest describes:

  In the vast empty spaces in the north and the Far East, areas as big as fair-sized countries came under complete NKVD control. There were many camps scattered through the Urals, in the Archangel area, and more especially in and around Karaganda and on the new railway being built from Turkestan to Siberia. But in these, the NKVD administered only comparatively small enclaves... The two biggest true colonies of the NKVD empire were the great stretch of northwestern Russia beyond the Kotlas, comprising roughly what is shown on the map as the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, and the even vaster area of the Far East centered on the gold fields of Kolyma. These regions had, before the NKVD took over, populations of a handful of Russians and a few thousand Arctic tribesmen. A decade later, they held between them something between 1.25 and 2 million prisoners. (The Great Terror)
  

  Who were the prisoners? Before Stalin's collectivization of agriculture, the composition was quite mixed. Anyone who opposed the Communists, from Czarist reactionary to Social Revolutionary, might be consigned to the camps. While almost invariably innocent of any definite action against their government, they were perceived as potential enemies. After 1930, the composition of the camps drastically changed. Suddenly, millions upon millions of peasant families were sentenced to Siberia. Stalin called them "kulaks," or wealthy farmers, though in fact any peasant somehow caught up in resistance to forced collectivization was labeled a "kulak." As the democratic socialist Carl Landauer observes:

  Between the persecution of the Armenians by the Turks during the First World War and the extermination of "undesirable" races by Hitler, the Bolshevik campaign against the kulaks and the former bourgeois was probably the only instance in which large masses of men, women, and children were by administrative order dislodged from their places of habitation and brought into camps where many, if not most of them, were sure to perish - and were meant to perish. (European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements)
  

  After Stalin crushed peasant resistance, the enormous death rate in the slave labor camps ensured that the number of inmates could not remain steady - unless more and more people were declared enemies of the people and sentenced to Siberia. Stalin claimed to find conspiracies and enemies everywhere. "Kulaks" were blamed for all agricultural failures, while "wreckers" bore responsibility for industrial disasters. Intellectuals, ethnic leaders, and officers in the military became targets. Anyone with contact with foreign countries could be easily declared a spy. Then Stalin began to target fellow Communists, purging them for left deviations, right deviations, treason, and espionage. As Conquest notes, at the 1939 Party Congress, "Of the 1,966 delegates to the [1934] Congress, 1,108 had been arrested for counter-revolutionary crimes." (The Great Terror) Sentences to Siberia were their typical fate. Foreign Communists living in the USSR, especially foreign Communists from non-democratic countries, almost invariably wound up in Siberia. Even the NKVD itself was purged, so that the secret policeman of today might be the inmate of tomorrow.
  After Stalin was satisfied with the composition of the Communist Party, new waves of victims arose. Millions of Poles were sent to slave labor camps in 1939 when Stalin and Hitler divided Poland. In 1940, Stalin annexed the Baltic states and sent 2-4% of their populations to the slave camps. During World War II, any ethnicity deemed disloyal was likely to be deported en masse: ethnic Germans - including the Volga Germans who had lived in Russia for centuries - were deported to Siberia, along with Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and other nationalities. With the end of World War II, the prison population was replenished not only with German POWs, and German civilians (including ethnic Germans scattered across Europe), but with Soviet POWs. Stalin considered captured Soviet soldiers to be traitors, so they had the opportunity to perform slave labor for Stalin as well as Hitler.
  Stalin's slave empire lasted so long and went through so many waves of victims that one is left speechless. So many millions perished within the Gulag Archipelago for so many reasons, or for no reason. With a minimum of 5,000,000 slave laborers from 1931 to 1950, and a minimum death toll of 10% per year - both improbably low figures - one can conclude that Stalin's camps claimed a minimum of 10,000,000 victims, and easily two or three times as many.
• Deaths due to man-made famine.
  Lenin knew that his agricultural policies might cause widespread famine, but implemented them anyway. Stalin went further. Not only did he know that his policies would cause widespread famine; he turned famine into a political weapon by deliberately and selectively amplifying its horrors. Lenin nominally gave peasants the title to their land, while effectively expropriating them by forcing them to sell their crops for a pittance. Stalin went further by ordering the forced collectivization of agriculture. The peasants lost their land and became employees of the state; moreover, they had to obtain government permission to quit their jobs, which was often impossible to obtain. State-owned serf plantations had returned to Russia after a 70-year lapse.
  Naturally, reducing landed free peasants to serfs required massive application of government force. Wealthy, prominent, or recalcitrant peasants were dubbed "kulaks" and deported to Siberia. Still the peasants resisted; food production drastically declined, farm animals were slaughtered, and surplus grain ferreted away. In 1930, the peasants' reaction to forced collectivization was so extreme that even Stalin backed away. But this was only a tactical retreat, and by 1934 90% of sown acreage in the USSR was owned by collective (i.e., government) farms.
  Food production of all kinds drastically declined. Slave labor in the fields proved far less efficient than free labor; the harvest of grain and other crops shrank. The herds of livestock often declined by 50% or more by either slaughter before collectivization, or neglect after collectivization. But Stalin was not interested in total food production, but in how much food he could squeeze out of the peasants without compensation. The collective farms were ordered to surrender their quota of food to the state, under severe penalty. As Conquest explains, "The basic principle was that a certain amount of grain must be delivered to the state regardless, and that this demand must be satisfied before the needs of the peasantry could be taken into consideration. A law of 16 October 1931 forbade reserving grain for internal kolkhoz [collective farm] needs until the procurement plan was fulfilled." (The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine) If production declined, it could be taken out of the hides of the peasants. This was precisely what Stalin had in mind.
  From the outset, the quotas set for delivery were far too high, especially considering the decline in total production. As the peasants began to face severe hunger, in 1932, one might have expected the quotas to be reduced - especially since Stalin actually had grain to export. But instead, in early 1933 Stalin demanded still more food from the desperate peasantry. Yet his exactions were uneven: they were particularly inhuman for the Ukraine, Don, Kuban, and lower Volga - regions where popular sentiment against Communist oppression and Russification was strong. As Conquest notes, "Nor is it the case that the famine, or the excessive grain targets, were imposed on the most productive grain-producing areas as such, as a - mistaken or vicious - economic policy merely. There was no famine in the rich Russian 'Central Agricultural Region'; and on the other hand the grain-poor Ukrainian provinces of Volhynia and Podilia suffered along with the rest of the country." (The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine)
  All of the facts point to a deliberate effort to use starvation as a tool of genocide. Seed grain in 1932 in the Ukraine was for the first time taken from the peasants and stored in urban granaries: officials realized that once starvation set in the peasants would try to eat the seed grain. The Ukrainian-Russian border was carefully guarded to keep Russian grain out of the famine-stricken Ukraine and starving Ukrainians out of Russia. Government grain stockpiles were available, but unused.
  This mixture of ruthless methods resulted in the starvation deaths of about 7 million people: 5 million in the Ukraine, 1 million in the North Caucasus region, and 1 million elsewhere. On top of this, a similar collectivization campaign carried out against the nomads of Kazahkstan led to 1 million further deaths.
  The famine in 1933 was the worst under Stalin's rule, but not the last. Famines swept Eastern Europe and the USSR again after World War II, although here the Nazis bore part of the blame. Stalin also shares responsibility for the deaths - again mostly through hunger - of ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe with the Red Army's advance. The Communist-dominated governments of Poland and Czechoslovakia shared with Stalin the blame for some 2 million unnatural deaths of ethnic Germans. (see Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944- 1950)
• Executions On April 7, 1935, Stalin issued a decree authorizing the death penalty for children as young as 12 years old. While far more of Stalin's subjects died in slave labor camps and man-made famines than from execution, even here the numbers are startling. There were approximately one million executions during the Great Terror of 1936-1939, and probably over five million for his entire reign. The executed were often Stalin's opponents within the Party, or his less eager friends, or foreign Communists. Large numbers of officers were executed. Polish POWs taken in 1939 were executed en masse in Katyn and elsewhere. Almost all of Stalin's comrades in the Russian Civil War were executed or assassinated at his orders: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Kamenev, Rykov, Tomsky, and (as recent discoveries confirm) Kirov. Many of these were tortured, bullied, and threatened into condemning themselves in the so-called "show trials," where they absurdly confessed to large-scale espionage and subversion. The poetic justice of the trials of Stalin's ex-comrades is palpable, since a Nuremberg-style trial of the Communist leadership for crimes against humanity would have condemned most of them to death. So numerous were Stalin's victims that amongst the oceans of innocents executed, justice occasionally accidentally descended upon the guilty.

[plant-pilot]

Originally Posted by T34

who told you that people of USSR were "oppressed"?

There an amazing amount of people from the former Soviet Union and Poland now settled in Germany. For a long time many lived very close to me and we used to have some interesting dicussions on military matters as almost all of the older men had served in the Soviet Armed Forces.

It is they who said that they were oppressed. They also said that the system was corrupt, services such as health and housing inadiquate and oppertunities for advancement (other than criminal) non-existant. Basically, if you weren't 'in' you were going nowhere.

Now I admit that these are people who have left and they have a polorized view when compared to what they have now, but it was a common view and not one that was countered by anyone in my presence. I have no other evidence than that, but unless the views of people who were actually living in the Soviet Regime count for nothing it seems like a fair basis for an opinion.

[Owen]

Originally Posted by T34
who told you that people of USSR were "oppressed"?

Ask Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians, ex-USSR countries, if they were oppressed.
I think you will find the answer is YES.

Wow! Jimbo mate,i have to say i agree with practically everything you say. However, i must pick a few bones as this is my area of expertise coming up:

Originally Posted by jimbotosome

The US adhered to and still does adhere to the Marshall Plan doctrine/philosphy in which if you allow nations lie in ruin, their natural path is to return to war out of survival. Ignoring their plight or exacerbating it in any way is akin to declaring war on them.

That's why we're still paying for it. Ho hum.

Originally Posted by jimbotosome

Who then cannot look at the lives of the people of China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba, over the years and not see the deadness in their eyes, the desperation to escape these lands, and not realize that it had nothing to do with geography, resources, etc? If it did, then Britain would have been the most communist and socialist society on the earth because they are so limited in natural resources being an island.

No resources? Excuse me? Dude, Britain is an island of coal, floating on a sea of oil, surrounded by fish (well it was before Spain got here) This island has the richest geology on earth. The only thing we don't have is precious stones, and who needs that when you have coal? This island has enough top grade coal left to last us another century. They are now considering reopening the mines.
This country created a huge empire because of our natural resources. I now end this particular rant.

Originally Posted by jimbotosome

Though not always so noble, Britain’s history is nobler in that they have spread democratic ideals throughout the world beginning with the Magna Charta, ideals whose seeds led either directly or indirectly to the existence of the true civilization and democracies of the United States, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, et al. These two contrasted sets of ideals being diametrically opposite are so consistent in bearing their respective fruit, and serve as lessons that beg to be forgotten by the next generation who seem destined to relearn them in some brutal and lamentable way.

True, our history is a bit bloody in places, but so is everyone elses. America ain't exactly spotless, even though it is so young compared to us. So the Magna Carta led to the existence of the true civilisations and democracies? Other democracies and civilisations, yes, but true ones? What are we then? Jimbo, i think you are a really good bloke, but sometimes your passion for history leads you to whack in a few words that you shouldn't. Britain is the mother of democracy (even though TB is trying to stop it) so please remember it in future, otherwise i will probably have to go for another lie down in a darkened room.
Other than that, top post mate!
Kitty

Originally Posted by mosquito617

No resources? Excuse me? Dude, Britain is an island of coal, floating on a sea of oil, surrounded by fish (well it was before Spain got here) This island has the richest geology on earth. The only thing we don't have is precious stones, and who needs that when you have coal? This island has enough top grade coal left to last us another century. They are now considering reopening the mines.
This country created a huge empire because of our natural resources. I now end this particular rant.

I stand corrected!

Originally Posted by mosquito617

True, our history is a bit bloody in places, but so is everyone elses. America ain't exactly spotless, even though it is so young compared to us. So the Magna Carta led to the existence of the true civilisations and democracies? Other democracies and civilisations, yes, but true ones? What are we then?

Actually that was supposed to be complimentary. I didn't mean to say that Britain was excluded from their own list of beneficiaries. The commonwealth nations are often accused of catering to the ideals of the US in the acts of trying to democratize the whole world but the fact is they are/were the originators of that idea, not the US. If Germany in WWII couldn't manipulate Britain, what makes people think the US could? I have always thought of the British as the most independant people on the face of the planet. Never seen anyone push them intimidate them.

To me the Magna Carta represented the shift of power from the government back to the people. It is unusual that power is ever relinquished. It represents the possibilies and hope for even totalitarian nations of today. As Lord Acton said, "Power corrupts, Absolute power corrupts absolutely". I didn't mean to imply Britain wasn't a democracy now. Heck, I catch the House of Parlament on CSPAN whenever they have it. It is the most hilarious zing-fest going. The US Congress is boring and pointless. Makes you want to fall asleep. The incredibly dry British humor just begs for a good political debate where anything goes as long as it is implied and prefaced with "could the distinguished gentlemen from <region inserted her> explain why <zinger inserted here>". Hey, don't be so hard on Tony, he takes a good zinger as well as anybody. He can dish them out too. There is a lot to be said for that.

Originally Posted by jimbotosome

Actually that was supposed to be complimentary. I didn't mean to say that Britain was excluded from their own list of beneficiaries. The commonwealth nations are often accused of catering to the ideals of the US in the acts of trying to democratize the whole world but the fact is they are/were the originators of that idea, not the US. If Germany in WWII couldn't manipulate Britain, what makes people think the US could? I have always thought of the British as the most independant people on the face of the planet. Never seen anyone push them intimidate them.

I remember when we used to push back harder. Sigh.

Originally Posted by jimbotosome

To me the Magna Carta represented the shift of power from the government back to the people. It is unusual that power is ever relinquished. It represents the possibilies and hope for even totalitarian nations of today. As Lord Acton said, "Power corrupts, Absolute power corrupts absolutely".

Okay, I'm a bit hazy on this area of history as i never covered it at school. The Magna Carta was forced upon King John (I think it was) by the nobles of the land who were a little bit hacked off at the way he was running the country in Richard's absence (please don't quote me on any of this).
This led to the establishment of the House of lords, and eventually the house of Commons as well as the elected representatives of the common people. The COmmons represented the people, the Lords represented the land as they owned most of it after 1533.

Originally Posted by jimbotosome

I didn't mean to imply Britain wasn't a democracy now. Heck, I catch the House of Parlament on CSPAN whenever they have it. It is the most hilarious zing-fest going. The US Congress is boring and pointless. Makes you want to fall asleep. The incredibly dry British humor just begs for a good political debate where anything goes as long as it is implied and prefaced with "could the distinguished gentlemen from <region inserted her> explain why <zinger inserted here>". Hey, don't be so hard on Tony, he takes a good zinger as well as anybody. He can dish them out too. There is a lot to be said for that.

Now TB, who you think is a Right on Chap (Jeez) has dissolved hereditory peers in the Lords. Great, you may say, but it ain't. They repesented the land and the interest of everyone who relied on that land. He then filled it whht his cronies through an Honours for Cash scandal which is currently growing out of all proportion, all to get his own way. Good Ol' TB has totally screwed us over.
As to the Commons being a good show. It is when they get going. PMQ's can be hilarious when the insults start flying. Ever seen Sir Nicholas Winterton MP for Macclesfield when he starts? Goes up like a Jack Russel. Hilarious.
I now feel this particular lesson completed and closed. Back to topic.

[Herroberst]

Just be happy T-34 that Curtis LeMay didn't have his way with the Russians as he did with the Japanese.

[T34]

Originally Posted by spidge

Stalin's slave empire lasted so long and went through so many waves of victims that one is left speechless. So many millions perished within the Gulag Archipelago for so many reasons, or for no reason. With a minimum of 5,000,000 slave laborers from 1931 to 1950, and a minimum death toll of 10% per year - both improbably low figures - one can conclude that Stalin's camps claimed a minimum of 10,000,000 victims, and easily two or three times as many.

a very, very biased point of view. and i'm very suspicious towards the sources that use terms like "slave empire" which USSR certainly never was.
after all, no dictatorship or tyranny have a capability of "oppressing" own people, because only minority of them can be "oppressed", whereas the majority should stay quite happy with what's going on.
i mean that stalin, whatever he did, had massive support from russian people and after he died, he was mourned to such an extent that they asked themselves "how we are to go on living without him!!?".

[T34]

Originally Posted by plant-pilot

There an amazing amount of people from the former Soviet Union and Poland now settled in Germany. For a long time many lived very close to me and we used to have some interesting dicussions on military matters as almost all of the older men had served in the Soviet Armed Forces. It is they who said that they were oppressed. They also said that the system was corrupt, services such as health and housing inadiquate and oppertunities for advancement (other than criminal) non-existant.

immigrants are not the ones you can trust and respect, you know.
they would say whatever you want in order to make you help them.
as for corruption and criminal situation i, for instance, have never been a victim of them, and from my own experience, soviet medical service was the best in a world.

[plant-pilot]

Originally Posted by T34

immigrants are not the ones you can trust and respect, you know.
they would say whatever you want in order to make you help them.
as for corruption and criminal situation i, for instance, have never been a victim of them, and from my own experience, soviet medical service was the best in a world.

The statement that you shouldn't 'trust or respect' immigrants could be classed a 'racist' statement, at the very least it is an inaccurate generalization. If you have to make such a generalization what weight should I put on your other views?

As for the view that the Soviet Medical Service was the best in the world? I find that hard to believe as again have heard neumerous accounts of the system "doing it's best" while suffering from severe shortages. It may not have been quite as bad as they made out, but 'Best in the World' is also quite a claim.