Gibburt

History would have looked different without mr. Joseph Stalin. Several massive events this man can write on his resume, like the Great Purge in the late thirties, during which at least 600,000 people where sentenced to death. And although quite considerable in number, this was just part of Stalin’s great labor: the Gulag camps, deathtraps for more than a million people.
Nevertheless Stalin also played an essential part in freeing Europe from the Nazis, but only after getting some of the pie for himself (under protection of the Molotov-Ribbentrop-pact he annexed Finland, the Baltic states and part of Poland).
After the Second World War Stalin thanked the Soviet prisoners of war that were freed from German POW camps by sending the filthy cowards to labor camps in Siberia.

Anyway, we cannot deny that Stalin was a great man, few man have had as great an impact as he had. And besides that, did you know Stalin also was a family man? His grandson Yevgeny Dzhugashvili still thinks much of grandfather Joseph. He even filed complaints against one of the last independant newspapers in Russia, the Novaya Gazeta, because they dared to claim that granddaddy personally signed execution orders the thousands of Soviet and Polish citizens that were shot by the predecessor of the KGB during the Katyn massacre in 1940.

Currently Russia is undergoing a Stalin revival, and since this has happened before in history, we only have to wait until the next Stalin downfall is a fact.
What strikes me here is not that a newspaper gets sued because someone is offended by what they write, or that people try to rekindle idols and symbols from some glorious past. I find it rather sad that in a country with a history and culture as rich and powerful as Russia, people choose a symbol of brutality like Stalin as one of their greatest.

Filed under: History, Politics by Cédric | Social tagging: Freedom of Press > Gulag > Katyn > Russia > slavery > Stalin > terror