Wikipedia on Hoxha and Stalin

Nice job on the Wikipedia article on Enver Hoxha, hardline Communist leader of Albania until his death in 1985, whereupon he was succeeded by Ramiz Alia, who led the country to multiparty elections and a move to a market economy.

Hoxha’s record is definitely mixed, and when he died in 1985, there were permanent shortages of even the most basic foodstuffs. That doesn’t seem like any way to run an economy.

On the other hand, Albania had little trade, since Hoxha had alienated or been alienated from the entire capitalist world and most of the Communist Bloc, who, since Mao’s death, he regarded as impure Communists or revisionists. I don’t really go in for this autarchy stuff.

There were quite a few significant accomplishments made during Hoxha’s rule, which are outlined in the Wikipedia piece. The article previously was the predictable hatchet job, but a user named Mrdie did a nice job of fixing it.

I really do not think than an encyclopedia, which is what Wikipedia claims to be, should be the place for standard rightwing anti-Communist hit pieces, which is what this Wikipedia article on Stalin reads like, by the way.

Stalin was a very controversial figure, as most well know, but to call him the biggest murderer of the 20th Century is perverse.

Stalin set a world record in doubling life expectancy in the shortest period of time for any country. The death rate under the Czarism so beloved by Alexander Solzhenitsyn was fully three times higher than even under Stalin. So the “worst murderer of the 20th Century” was responsible for 7

A good book on Stalin, through from a sympathetic author, is The Stalin Era, by US Communist journalist Anna Louise Strong. At one point in the book, describing the development of the USSR up from nothing in the 1920’s and 1930’s, Strong notes, “Never before in history had so great an advance occurred so swiftly.”

Although it was at quite a cost, I would think that that is worth something at least. I have the book on my drive and I need to make it available for download on my download site. Remind me if you want to look at it.

References

Strong, Anna Louise. (1956). The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream Publishers.
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0 thoughts on “Wikipedia on Hoxha and Stalin”

  1. Stalin WAS the biggest murderer of the 20th century. Few others folowed him very closely ( Hitler, Mao tse Tung, Pol Pot etc).
    I do not understand this fascination with Stalin in the West.
    I think it is pathetic. Pathetic and pitiful.

    1. Stalin killed 3.3 million people, but he also set a record by doubling life expectancy in the shortest time. Therefore, by the latter index, Stalin was actually the greatest humanitarian of all time.

      Capitalism kills far more than any Communist ever did. There are many ways to kill a man. You don’t always need a bullet.

      1. I’m sure the improvement of modern medicine in the 20th cen had a lot to do with the increase in Russians’ life spans.

        1. Not really. The improvements started immediately after the USSR got started. Albania and China in 1949 had the same lifespan ~35 years, as Russia had pre-revolution. There was nothing inevitable about it. Antibiotics did not come until after WW2. It’s all about improved standards of living, better diet, a decent life. Before the Revolution, your average Russian hovered between life and death. They had little food, were often sick, had no access to health care, housing, education, decent work, sanitation, nothing, There were regular famines and epidemics especially among the peasants in the countryside.

      2. wow, that’s something new. You live, you learn.
        “Stalin was the greatest humanitarian of all time”.
        ,Are you a stand-up comic or are you planning to be one??
        I see potential.

      3. @Robert Lindsay

        I thought you said 1.4 million before or was that before WW2?

        State archives say that nearly 700,000 people were sentenced to death by the state during Stalin’s rule.

        I know there were killings of the books were gangs of mostly Jewish commissars and criminal gangs killed civilians, stole property and abused their power but Stalin introduced regional court systems to try and control/limit these abuses.

        Even the head of the NKVD Stalin appointed to find Trotskyite conspirators who planned to overthrow the Stalinist government responsible for the great terror was sentenced and killed a year later for his crimes.

    1. Careful Sono, you’re going to piss off Robert with your anti-Stalin posts. This is one of his touchy subjects.

      Just thought I’d let you know ahead of time.

    2. There was no terror famine. The harvest collapsed for a variety of reasons. Few people starved, most died of disease. The terror famine line says that Stalin deliberately starved the Ukrainians due to their opposition to collectivization. It’s not true. The harvest collapsed, there was a famine harvest. The rest was that yes a lot of people died, but it was not done deliberately. There simply was not enough food around to feed the people that year.

      The Ukrainians made it worse by killing 50% of the livestock in the USSR. They also burned a lot of crops and harvested crops and let it sit out in the rain to mold and rot. They also raided collective farms, killed farmers, raped their women, killed their livestock and burned their crops.

      There was a crackdown and 390,000 Ukrainian were killed. You can complain about that if you wish. But there were no 5-10 million killed a terror famine. Never happened.

        1. I believe that most modern historians no longer believe in the terror famine or deliberate famine lie.

          Even Robert Conquest says it’s not true.

          Most of those photos are fakes. Most of them are from the earlier famine during the Russian Civil War which did kill 7 million people. Not intentional there either.

          There were 390,000 Ukrainians killed, not starved or anything like that, during that period. If you wish to complain about that, be my guest.

          The famine was worst in the pro-Soviet east of Ukraine, and it was milder in the anti-Soviet west of the Ukraine. To the East, in the Volga, the peasants were 100% pro-Soviet, and the famine was devastating. People starved all over the country. 1 million died in Siberia. People starved in Moscow.

          There was no “terror famine” targeting the Ukrainians. It’s just a stupid Ukrainian lie.

      1. Where your resources come from?? Stalins’s diaries??
        I’ve heard about people in the USA loooving mr. Stalin. I’ve never actually met one. I guess it is just about time.
        oh well, some love Hitler, some love Mao, some love Stalin, some love Ted Budny, some love Charles Mason, and some love candy.
        I guess that why America is called a free country.

        1. Sources for what? You need to bone up on recent historical scholarship. Check out Wheatcroft and Davies for one. That’s pretty much the bottom line these days.

          Even Robert Conquest, CIA agent, doesn’t believe in the Holodomor, and he’s as anti-Soviet as they come.

        2. @sono

          Wheatcroft has done some excellent research and analysis on the famine outbreaks from Tzarist period and the outbreak of the civil war to the big one in 1932-33 showing that there were continual almost yearly large scale outbreaks of famine that killed millions in Russia’s South and areas of Ukraine and across the entire USSR because there were no centralised agricultural after the famine of 32-33 there was not another large scale famine outbreak until during WW2.

          http://www.melgrosh.unimelb.edu.au/famine.php

          The Stalin famine terror myth was debunked at the time as being a hoax based on Nazi and Hearst media propaganda with a fake journalist and doctored images.

          The Stalin narrative that he deliberately decided to kill millions of Russians and mostly pro Russian Eastern Ukrainians prior to WW2 especially if you know about the Jewish issue and the geo-political history of the region makes no sense.

          The problem is that Stalinist history is 100% political with the “research” in Russia controlled by the CIA and Britain mainly through NED funded Memorial organisation and is used as a geo-political weapon today.

          @Robert Lindsay

          Even Robert Conquest, CIA agent,

          He was initially a British intelligence agent who work for the British Foreign Offices anti-Communist propaganda unit like the leading British historians at the time lead by the biggest anti-Stalinist propagandist George Orwell.

          Do you believe that Stalin had total control of the USSR and there were not ethnic enclaves or real conspiracy against Stalin and his government lead by Trotskyites and foreign governments prior to WW2?

          Personally I don’t see how that is possible at all and the litmus test for this was WW2 were German countered fierce resistance and heavy Soviet manufacturing output.

          Why facing constant outbreaks of wars in the East and South and a rising German threat who wanted to build a more nationalist Russian USSR to counter Jewish domination who started a 5 year industrialisation program why would he deliberately kill of workers needed to work in the factories and destroy agriculture sector needed to make it possible?

          Conventional Stalin narrative make absolutely no sense.

  2. As one can tell from my name, I’m a big fan of great Comrade Stalin, as well as the Fuhrer. Rob, why are Maoists sensitive to anti-semitism charges? What is about Mao that makes them pro-jew?

      1. Maoists are supposed to be peasant revolutionaries right? Kikes are the epitome of everything urban and cosmopolitan.

      2. @Robert Lindsay

        At lot of the most prominent senior Jews like the Neocons seem to be very anti-Chinese plus Hollywood is notorious for pumping out pro Tibet/anti-Chinese propaganda films.

  3. “Amicus Plato, amicus Socrates, sed magis amica veritas “.
    Plato is dear to me, Socrates is dear to me,Robert is dear to me, but dearer still IS TRUTH.
    Those Greek’s knew it all

  4. Historians are just historians. They also twist the truth to fit certain propaganda. We know it, for example, in the the debate about how many Jews actually died in the WWII. Some say 6 millions, some say less than a million. Don’t get me wrong Ukrainians are not my favourite people. Ukrainian’s In surgent Army killed tens of thousand Polish people during WWII. They were exterimely brutal, often beyond the point of any comprehension. I know the stories personally because my late granfather and his closest family personally experienced it . So trust me I have no personal reasons to defend Ukrainians ,and I do not have particular warm feelings towards them either. But as I wrote somehwere ,” Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas”. I do not like to twist the truth to fit my personal agenda. I try to go beyond that. With different results of course, but I try.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia

  5. Robert, the extent of Stalin’s crimes (or lack thereof, in your view) can always be openly debated.

    However, with all due respect, when you call Stalin the “greatest humanitarian of all time,” you really don’t acquit yourself well.

    1. That’s sort of a joke in a way. I mostly just say that to piss people off and outrage them. But in a way it is true. Stalin set a world record by doubling life expectancy in the shortest period of time. That figure includes the folks that he killed. So, yeah, he killed a few, but he saved so many more lives. He saved more lives and prolonged more life than any man in human history up to that point. So on that point right there, he’s definitely the greatest humanitarian that ever lived. But he was also a killer. 🙁

        1. But it’s about intent, Robert. That tyrant Stalin didn’t want anyone opposing his rule and kept things that way by any means necessary.

  6. I guess Robert meant to write ,”the greatest totalitarian “dictator of all time.
    It was late and his mind kind of slipped.

  7. Yes, there are many ways to kill a man. What this has anything to do with Stalin?? People die everday all over the world, and they are not even killed. They just die form many different reasons. We are taking here about socio-economical opressive, bolshevic regime , under Stalin’s rule, that killed millions, deprived many more millions of a chance to live dignified, respected lifes, scarred many generations forward with its virulent, utopian ideology and contaminated minds of many more naive followers.

  8. You anglo-saxons always tend to use a name to speak about a period of time. I mean, Stalin was not an emperor nor a king, he was elected by democratic centralism, and was one member of the goverment. That´s why many you don´t understand socialism, you live in a very individualist society although ignorance is another point of view.

    He really had difficulties to create the 1936 constitution, which was the most democratic ever seen in the world. People who didn´t take part in the communist party could be elected by everybody over 18. Yes! There were elections in the USSR, there are in Cuba as well, I´m sure that many of you don´t even know. Please, stop watching TV and visit Cuba.

    I remember what people said when the USSR was about to fall:

    “When the KGB files open up, we will see the real Russian horror, we will know about the authentic communist massacre”

    Well, the KGB files were open in 1991, but it seems that fascist historians didn´t realize yet.

    Wasn´t it supposed that we, communist are crazy burocrats who write down everything we see? That we control the life of everybody, even when they are sleeping? Not in this case, right?

    I just was doing an investigation and I found this blog, very interesting. I like it and I´ll keep visiting it, even if this is not my language for normal communication. That´s why I want to apologize for my bad english.

    Have a nice day everybody, even if you are not communists 😉

    Good evening from Spain!

  9. Everybody knows Stalin was a dictator, I don’t need to give you a source, America is the ultimate democratic nation in the world and I have unicorns in my backyard.

    This sounds stupid? Well, I heard the first one around 20 times in a 10 minutes conversation with one of my history professors, it sounds unrealistic, but is true.
    Our current system is a zombies factory.

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