I really don’t get it, Robert, why do you hate Trotsky so much? Moreover, killing someone who already has lost all power is the equivalent of shooting POWs. According to Boris Bazhanov in Ich War Stalins Sekretär, Stalin was extremely vindictive and held life-long grudges. That’s what the murder of Trotsky was, Stalin’s personal revenge against a former rival who crossed him too often, who intellectually overshadowed him, and who never liked him.
I certainly don’t see Stalin’s record as totally negative, but it can’t be denied that Stalin had a nasty character and that a lot of the people killed during his rule were not killed for political reasons but to satisfy Stalin’s personal ignoble motives.
Stalin was generally very good at killing people but one mistake he made was not killing Beria. I’m amazed that he neglected to do so. Also he neglected to kill Zhukov. Not that Zhukov was actually that dangerous but someone that popular definitely needed killing.
Still Stalin did tend to overdo the killing. Stroessner stayed in power for 35 years and probably killed less than 5,000 people. Of course Paraguay was a much smaller contry than the Soviet Union.
There are some Stalin fans, who claim the murders, were in response to foreign attempts (Nazis, the west) to topple the Soviet government. Sound familiar? Venezuela, Cuba ring a bell?
At one time the NKVD listed something like half the urban population of the Soviet Union as German spies. If this had been true tthe payments to German spies would have been by far the greatest thing the Soviet economy had going for it and would have quickly lead to the economic collapse of Germany.
Trotsky was way ahead of his time. You didn’t see that kind of goatee and look, until the 1960s.
I really don’t get it, Robert, why do you hate Trotsky so much? Moreover, killing someone who already has lost all power is the equivalent of shooting POWs. According to Boris Bazhanov in Ich War Stalins Sekretär, Stalin was extremely vindictive and held life-long grudges. That’s what the murder of Trotsky was, Stalin’s personal revenge against a former rival who crossed him too often, who intellectually overshadowed him, and who never liked him.
I certainly don’t see Stalin’s record as totally negative, but it can’t be denied that Stalin had a nasty character and that a lot of the people killed during his rule were not killed for political reasons but to satisfy Stalin’s personal ignoble motives.
Which surely isn’t to say that the millions of political or ideological killings were okay either.
Stalin was generally very good at killing people but one mistake he made was not killing Beria. I’m amazed that he neglected to do so. Also he neglected to kill Zhukov. Not that Zhukov was actually that dangerous but someone that popular definitely needed killing.
Still Stalin did tend to overdo the killing. Stroessner stayed in power for 35 years and probably killed less than 5,000 people. Of course Paraguay was a much smaller contry than the Soviet Union.
Stalin killed way too many people. We are still living it down.
Climbing the power heirarchy of any primate society generally involves killing rivals or potential rivals. But Stalin seemed obsessed with killing.
There are some Stalin fans, who claim the murders, were in response to foreign attempts (Nazis, the west) to topple the Soviet government. Sound familiar? Venezuela, Cuba ring a bell?
At one time the NKVD listed something like half the urban population of the Soviet Union as German spies. If this had been true tthe payments to German spies would have been by far the greatest thing the Soviet economy had going for it and would have quickly lead to the economic collapse of Germany.