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At least 3 million executions, deaths in Gulags and Kulak resettlement camps were actually recorded by the USSR itself. There were obviously deaths not officially recorded, and that doesn't include ethnic deportations either, where people were basically shuffled around the USSR because Stalin was paranoid minorities were going to rise up. Then the famines killed another 6 or 8 million, although those were not intentional. So bottom line it's 3+ million in direct deaths, plus another 6 or 8 million in the famines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#Calculating_the_number_of_victims
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Dec 21, 2014 07:47
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How many lives were saved due to decreases in infant mortality, and increased access to adequate medical care? Improvement of working conditions? According to the CIA "A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years." Sometimes when you want to be an instrument of History you have to break a few eggs. Rodnik fucked around with this message at 09:10 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 21, 2014 09:04
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 you're actually, unironically making the "but life expectancy rose!!!!" argumentHere's an argument: Short of being an actual European colony, the Soviet government was about the worst possible outcome for Russia, given the circumstances. It was better than being a colony, I'll grant that. But beyond that there is almost literally nothing positive that the Soviet government did that comparable states did not do better. Japan was in a very similar position developmentally to Russia in the early 1900s, and Russia ended up an impoverished shithole while Japan ended up a developed country. Most if not all South American countries did better as well icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 09:45 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 21, 2014 09:38
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icantfindaname posted:Ahahahahhahahahhahahahahah you're actually, unironically making the "but life expectancy rose!!!!" argument Don't even get me started on literacy. We will never know exactly how many lives Stalin saved. Rodnik fucked around with this message at 09:43 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 21, 2014 09:40
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icantfindaname posted:
I'm not disagreeing with you but I do think it's pretty darn funny that you're comparing the USSR to Japan when Japan wasn't all that much more developed, especially outside of the main cities. And in a lot of social ways, Japan was straight loving backwards with how the military class overtly controlled everything up to and including the Emperor. They didn't even pretend to be anything but a junta.
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Dec 21, 2014 09:49
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icantfindaname posted:Japan was in a very similar position developmentally to Russia in the early 1900s, and Russia ended up an impoverished shithole while Japan ended up a developed country. Which country would you rather have fought in the 1940s? Russia ended up a superpower that put the first man into space, while Japan up until the 1970s or so wasn't nearly as high tech as it is today. There's much more to their respective economic positions 80 years on than Stalin, is what I'm saying.
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Dec 21, 2014 11:41
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Branis posted:how many people did stalin actually kill? Looking for facts that aren't based on western capitalist propoganda. He would personally show up and strangle every single gulag inmate.
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Dec 21, 2014 12:38
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Rodnik posted:How many lives were saved due to decreases in infant mortality, and increased access to adequate medical care? Improvement of working conditions? You can't really use newborn life expectancy in a vacuum like that, it's a very misleading number. If Russia had a life expectancy of 44.4 years in 1925, and everyone else was at 70 or whatever, that still sucks, sorry. And 1958 is after the discovery of antibiotics, something Stalin had little to do with. Plus I'm sure there would have been ways to achieve that without forced labor and political execution; most western countries did after all. Your argument is basically a Russified version of "but Hitler also did some good things for Germany!" 
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Dec 21, 2014 15:50
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feedmegin posted:Which country would you rather have fought in the 1940s? Russia ended up a superpower that put the first man into space, while Japan up until the 1970s or so wasn't nearly as high tech as it is today. We probably would have nuked Russia also if they were on the other side then.
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Dec 21, 2014 16:43
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FrozenVent posted:If Russia had a life expectancy of 44.4 years in 1925, and everyone else was at 70 or whatever, that still sucks, sorry. And 1958 is after the discovery of antibiotics, something Stalin had little to do with. Plus I'm sure there would have been ways to achieve that without forced labor and political execution; most western countries did after all. (Also that's one of the reasons there was a constant struggle to find spare parts for your car -- the capacity went into building more units which looked better in reports; spare parts, or quality, were for losers)
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Dec 21, 2014 17:46
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Clearly Soviet Union was capable producing quality stuff: you can't get dude to space and back alive if you put him in a lovely spaceship. How come this quality never transferred to consumer products?
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Dec 21, 2014 18:30
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Fish of hemp posted:Clearly Soviet Union was capable producing quality stuff: you can't get dude to space and back alive if you put him in a lovely spaceship. How come this quality never transferred to consumer products? The Soviet Union was fairly good at producing an elite capable of managing major scientific and technical projects. The same types of people are not necessarily good at designing consumer products - good consumer products are designed around what consumers want and how they will actually use them, which requires a good system of information feedback not readily available in the Soviet Union.
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Dec 21, 2014 18:43
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Consumer goods were consistently under-produced, with higher priority being given to other sections of industry. Combined with a portion of the final production potentially being siphoned off before hitting stores, you end up with far fewer goods than you need to meet demand. Quality was a combination of poor materials and poor organizational practices which encouraged quantity over quality and/or only really cared how many units were produced at the end of the month. This resulted in things like "storming," where the first part of the month workers would be recovering from the previous rush, spend the middle portion producing goods at a casual pace, and spend the last week busting out unit after unit of sub-standard goods to meet the quota. Compounding this was the fact that Soviet factories were far from consistent, so you do not only have variation with factories, but across the entire industry as well! That, of course, is for consumer goods that people wanted and the government acknowledged there would be a demand for. There's no real way to handle (as Disinterested notes) demand for consumer goods that comes suddenly, or to handle sudden shifts in taste. The Soviet Union therefore not only suffered from not having enough goods produced (due to the aforementioned priority being given over to other industries) but also from consumer goods lagging behind Western countries (since you have to go through the whole planning process before, say, televisions can hit the market) and not always being the most consumer friendly products. One of the things that is most interesting to me about the Soviet Union is that there was a lot of genuine belief in the system and the state during the Soviet Union's early years, during the first few Five Year Plans. Yes, there were plenty of people that suffered from it or who hated it - and I will make no apologies for the cost in human life - but you also get Soviet citizens willingly putting up with some of the shittiest conditions around when constructing a factory, or accepting that there are not enough coats to go around, sucks but we have to make sacrifices. The state put out genuine efforts to improve the lot of citizens as well, trying to ensure that workers had access to education and healthcare. It was often scattershot, but people accepted that things would be poo poo for awhile until everything is up and running. Then that largely goes away as the years progress slowly into and more completely into Stalinist terror. You see the same cycle during the Great Patriotic War and immediately after.
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Dec 21, 2014 20:38
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The level of industrialization during Stalin's Five Year Plans is astounding. Even taking into account the inflated production figures from factory managers that knew how to play the game, the speed and rate at which the USSR went from backwards, agrarian society to space-exploring, nuclear capable superpower is incredible. I hate to acknowledge that Stalin did anything correctly, but the New Economic Plan was designed to make USSR (primarily Russia) competitive with the rest of the industrialized world, and that's exactly what it did. Of course, millions of people died on the kholkozi and during the construction of Gulags, but you can't deny that Stalin's plan for industrialization worked because the end goal was to put the USSR on par with Western Europe at the very least in terms of industrial output and by the end of WW2, the USSR was the world's second largest economy (only behind the USA) despite having suffered the most damage and destruction during Operation Barbarossa. None of that would have been possible without the NEP and Gulag system, as terrible as that was. For reading, I suggest Gulag by Anne Applebaum. She goes into incredible detail about the Gulag system and how it was used as a Fifth Column for industrial output, as well as how as many as 2/3 of the USSR's population cycled through one Gulag or another, and what the conditions and society were like inside the camps. Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is also a great read if you're interested in this topic. HonorableTB fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 21, 2014 20:47
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Speaking of consumer products, I think this is the best of Soviet legacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Kiev
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Dec 21, 2014 20:49
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FrozenVent posted:You can't really use newborn life expectancy in a vacuum like that, it's a very misleading number. The life expectancy of South Africa today would indicate that the invention of antibiotics does not automatically make everyone live longer. A nation that can produce and distribute antibiotics when 50 years ago it was still a near feudal economy does though! And of course comparing Stalin to Hitler is the most ridiculous argument. The most obvious part being that Stalin won. Rodnik fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 21, 2014 23:18
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HonorableTB posted:I hate to acknowledge that Stalin did anything correctly, but the New Economic Plan was designed to make USSR (primarily Russia) competitive with the rest of the industrialized world, and that's exactly what it did. Of course, millions of people died on the kholkozi and during the construction of Gulags, but you can't deny that Stalin's plan for industrialization worked because the end goal was to put the USSR on par with Western Europe at the very least in terms of industrial output and by the end of WW2, the USSR was the world's second largest economy (only behind the USA) despite having suffered the most damage and destruction during Operation Barbarossa. None of that would have been possible without the NEP and Gulag system, as terrible as that was. Basically you're full of poo poo and / or trolling, idk. quote:Clearly Soviet Union was capable producing quality stuff: you can't get dude to space and back alive if you put him in a lovely spaceship. How come this quality never transferred to consumer products? pigdog fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 21, 2014 23:22
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Branis posted:how many people did stalin actually kill? Looking for facts that aren't based on western capitalist propoganda. Maybe like one or two, at most.
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Dec 22, 2014 13:18
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100 million herds of goats died during the five year plan for agriculture. Not 'people' as such...
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Dec 22, 2014 13:36
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Fish of hemp posted:Clearly Soviet Union was capable producing quality stuff: you can't get dude to space and back alive if you put him in a lovely spaceship. How come this quality never transferred to consumer products? Because there was a hell of a lot more political political capitol invested in putting a man on the moon, than say manufacturing shoes. The problem was there wasn't any real feed back from consumers, so a party official put in charge of a shoe factory would be told from up above they had to produce 10,000 shoes a month. That would be a tall order, so the easiest way to accomplish that goal was to just make 10,000 mens shoes, all in size 10. Technically, they met their quota, so the person in charge of the shoe factory kept their job, even if it sucked for everybody who had feet that didn't fit into size 10 shoes. At times, the people above them would demand that the shoe factory also produce women's shoes. That was an easy fix, just keep on doing what you were doing and relabel half the men's size 10 shoes as women's size 14, same difference. And again the quota was met. But since the people wearing those shoes had no real say in shoe production, they just had to take whatever was available whenever they could buy some shoes. Party leaders could get bespoke suits from terrified tailors and custom made shoes from terrified cobblers. Everybody else had to wear off rack numbers, and had to hope that the rack had anything.
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Dec 23, 2014 11:10
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I know next to nothing about Soviet history. Reading this thread lead me to read the wikipedia article on the Stalin's Great Pure, and that is sickening. It did raise a question though. The article mentions that Staling wiped out a lot of the intelligentsia, which seems to mostly include artists (writers, poets, theater owners, etc.). Did this part of the purge also get academics? If so, how did they so quickly recover to bootstrap themselves into space in a period that's basically a generation later?
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Dec 24, 2014 05:06
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Grifter posted:I know next to nothing about Soviet history. Reading this thread lead me to read the wikipedia article on the Stalin's Great Pure, and that is sickening. It did raise a question though. The article mentions that Staling wiped out a lot of the intelligentsia, which seems to mostly include artists (writers, poets, theater owners, etc.). Did this part of the purge also get academics? If so, how did they so quickly recover to bootstrap themselves into space in a period that's basically a generation later? I believe scientists - especially those involved in space and defence - were often forced to live in secret cities with implicit threats about what might happen to their families should they not wholeheartedly dedicate themselves to their work for the program. One of the later purges had rather ironic results. In these years Stalin's health began to decline, in part due to the constant stress and paranoia - supposedly he rarely slept. So doctors encouraged him to take it a bit easier. This resulted in his paranoid belief in a conspiracy of doctors (Jewish doctors primarily) who, he believed, were trying to keep him out of politics. So he started having prominent Jewish doctors arrested. And so, once Stalin actually had a stroke, it took longer than it otherwise would have to get a decent doctor out to his dacha.
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Dec 24, 2014 05:21
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Grifter posted:I know next to nothing about Soviet history. Reading this thread lead me to read the wikipedia article on the Stalin's Great Pure, and that is sickening. It did raise a question though. The article mentions that Staling wiped out a lot of the intelligentsia, which seems to mostly include artists (writers, poets, theater owners, etc.). Did this part of the purge also get academics? If so, how did they so quickly recover to bootstrap themselves into space in a period that's basically a generation later? The purge targeted the educated classes, who Stalin saw as too politically active. So yes, engineers and doctors and academics were purged as well. That said, writers and poets and such were generally more politically-oriented, and most of those purged were probably identified as dangers to the state before the runaway murders started. Enough educated Soviet citizens survived the purge to work during WWII to design and produce materiel in WWII. Apart from the earliest, and highest-profile targets, the purges were used as a terror tactic rather than a means to an end. If you'd like to read more about anti-intellectualism in the Soviet Union, read up about "Lysenkoism", a pretty heinous example of politicising science.
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Dec 24, 2014 05:25
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Grifter posted:I know next to nothing about Soviet history. Reading this thread lead me to read the wikipedia article on the Stalin's Great Pure, and that is sickening. It did raise a question though. The article mentions that Staling wiped out a lot of the intelligentsia, which seems to mostly include artists (writers, poets, theater owners, etc.). Did this part of the purge also get academics? If so, how did they so quickly recover to bootstrap themselves into space in a period that's basically a generation later? The purges were of people involved in politics and public life. A bunch of mathematicians sitting in a room cranking out ICBM designs don't have to interact with politics at all
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Dec 24, 2014 11:32
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icantfindaname posted:The purges were of people involved in politics and public life. A bunch of mathematicians sitting in a room cranking out ICBM designs don't have to interact with politics at all Look at how wrong you are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev#Imprisonment Nobody was immune from the purges, although the politburo was the single worst place to be under Stalin. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 11:42 on Dec 24, 2014 |
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Dec 24, 2014 11:38
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Post Stalin how long was it before the courts started to judge some cases based on evidence and were actually willing to find people innocent for 'non-political' offenses ? Or did it stay 'if you are arrested then you are guilty' ?
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Dec 24, 2014 11:43
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Baconroll posted:Post Stalin how long was it before the courts started to judge some cases based on evidence and were actually willing to find people innocent for 'non-political' offenses ? The show trials were meant to destroy the public image of Stalin's most powerful opponents. They were war heroes and distinguished statesmen, who were widely held in esteem by different parts of society. The whole point of locking up dissidents and torturing them was so they could reveal their treachery in a kangaroo court and shock Josef Q. Publicov. The trial of Vladimir Vladimirovich, accused horse thief, doesn't call for such measures. In fact, his trial is so politically inconsequential that nobody cared what the outcome was. The Soviet judicial system wasn't systematically engineered to produce guilt for crimes that didn't concern the state. For others, there might not be a trial at all. The judicial system wouldn't be involved in assigning guilt, especially during the most frenetic parts of the purge. I'm talking days where some NKVD goon would head off to work, murder some suspected traitors, and return to find a new NKVD man sitting in his desk, Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 13:07 on Dec 24, 2014 |
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Dec 24, 2014 12:57
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I don't think you understood his question, which I really take to be: (a) How often were people accused of political offences after Stalin? and (b) Was the accusation of a political crime enough to tarnish an individual? and (c) How serious was it? I think you'll find that in all cases there was a marked improvement in the Soviet Union after Stalin, but that after that things still went through phases of being better or worse on some or all of the parts of this question, partly related to policy and partly related to crisis. Repression is often dialled up in line with the strength of resistance. What I think you'll find is that in any society where lack of belief in the superstructure of belief is a crime, given the inherent unprovability of this and how it often boils down to the word of one person against another, accusations of this variety are often abused. The parallels with witch burning trials are to some extent useful here: if you want to gently caress some guy so you get your promotion instead, you can machinate unpleasantly against him using this sort of system. I believe this was a general problem in the Soviet Union and other associated Republics. In addition, in Soviet society and other related Eastern-Bloc countries, there were substantial apparatuses of surveillance (most notably in East Germany). As such, a great many people are often subject to the arbitrary will of the surveillance apparatus. In many cases the way this manifested itself is that your position in society permitted you a certain latitude to bend the rules, but that the inevitable infractions against the rules gave the state ammunition to take you down with if it was felt to be necessary or depending on what person is policing you that day. Political monitoring was stronger in some areas of life than others, most notably in the military apparatus. I can't give a more complete picture as unfortunately I am not qualified.
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Dec 24, 2014 13:11
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From what I have read, Kruschev of course continued to have people arrested for political crimes and have his political opponents removed, but after Beria's execution (which, really, he had it coming) he refused to actually have anyone else killed for political crimes, rather he'd just have them reassigned somewhere unimportant and far out of the way. But of course that could be a pack of lies.
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Dec 24, 2014 16:34
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Baconroll posted:Post Stalin how long was it before the courts started to judge some cases based on evidence and were actually willing to find people innocent for 'non-political' offenses ? Generally speaking the USSR's bureacracy was thoroughly corrupt, which to be fair is also the case in most developing countries. I imagine the court systems were heavily overloaded, and if you were going to trial for a non-political crime you could just pay off the judge. If you couldn't, well, then expect a lovely third world bureacracy that may or may not ever get around to trying you. I'm not sure what crime rates were like in the USSR, but I imagine they were significantly higher than whatever was reported As for political crimes they mostky stopped after Stalin unless you really went out of your way to be annoying like Solzhenitsyyn et al. I believe no party members were executed after the 1950s, just shuffled around and given dead end posts if they fell out of favor icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Dec 25, 2014 |
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Dec 25, 2014 04:33
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What do you think of Gorbachev?
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Dec 25, 2014 05:00
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Fish of hemp posted:Clearly Soviet Union was capable producing quality stuff: you can't get dude to space and back alive if you put him in a lovely spaceship. How come this quality never transferred to consumer products? You may find this interesting http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage
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Dec 25, 2014 05:00
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Tony Homo posted:What do you think of Gorbachev? Gorbachov was a good guy, but the USSR's problems ran so deep there was no fixing them. There could have been a China style economic liberalization without political liberalization, but Gorbachov wanted political liberalization first and foremost. If he had stayed in power I guess he might have been able to fix Russia's economy more successfully than what happened IRL (complete failure) but I don't really think it would have been possible for a former Party member to remain in control of the post-Communist Russia icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 06:15 on Dec 25, 2014 |
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Dec 25, 2014 06:11
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You guys are real weird thinking the thread is somehow glorifying Stalin. It doesn't strike me like that at all. OP - I wish that the current Russian govt wasn't so loving lovely, because I find Russian art, history, architecture fascinating... But I can't give them my tourism money. What's the modern impression of films like Russian Ark? What do modern Russians think of those interested in seeing Chernobyl ruins or other abandoned USSR structures? I hate suffering tourism, but I am fascinated by the structures and their history... I did a paper on Gulag Archipelago in 7th grade and it's never escaped me.
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Dec 25, 2014 08:00
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MAKE NO BABBYS posted:You guys are real weird thinking the thread is somehow glorifying Stalin. It doesn't strike me like that at all. Huh? MAKE NO BABBYS posted:OP - I wish that the current Russian govt wasn't so loving lovely, because I find Russian art, history, architecture fascinating... But I can't give them my tourism money. What's the modern impression of films like Russian Ark? What do modern Russians think of those interested in seeing Chernobyl ruins or other abandoned USSR structures? I hate suffering tourism, but I am fascinated by the structures and their history... I did a paper on Gulag Archipelago in 7th grade and it's never escaped me. Just go to another former Soviet or Eastern Bloc country you don't dislike then. They all have the wreckage of the communist era to look at. Tony Homo posted:What do you think of Gorbachev? Given way too little credit in general.
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Dec 25, 2014 10:19
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Earwicker posted:... but after Beria's execution (which, really, he had it coming) You. Don't. Say.
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Dec 25, 2014 16:41
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I think we all just have to count our blessings that D&D's Russian thread hasn't discovered this one yet.
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Dec 25, 2014 16:56
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Disinterested posted:I think we all just have to count our blessings that D&D's Russian thread hasn't discovered this one yet. Well, now you've jinxed it.
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Dec 26, 2014 14:39
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icantfindaname posted:Gorbachov was a good guy, but the USSR's problems ran so deep there was no fixing them. There could have been a China style economic liberalization without political liberalization, but Gorbachov wanted political liberalization first and foremost. If he had stayed in power I guess he might have been able to fix Russia's economy more successfully than what happened IRL (complete failure) but I don't really think it would have been possible for a former Party member to remain in control of the post-Communist Russia Did the coup plotters stand a chance or was that enterprise doomed from the start?
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Dec 27, 2014 02:04
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A good friend of mine is a Soviet born Estonian and she hates Russians with unmatched fervor. Like she spends her free time fantasizing about the genocide of their people.
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Dec 27, 2014 06:00
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