Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Experiment: A Conversation with Ronald Grigor Suny, PhD

Perhaps no figure in twentieth century history is as well known, but poorly understood, as Joseph Stalin. One of the world’s leading scholars on Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union, Ronald Grigor, PhD, joins Institute Historian Jason Dawsey, PhD to discuss this critical figure.

[@iamnotpablo]

Stalin was a great man!

[@igorlobkovenko9480]

Probably but he was a paranoid man who never sacrificed for Russia but ended too many innocent lives. Just look up the 1937 purges of the military.

[@ekesandras1481]

in hell he is one of the greatest, together with Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun.

[@jdm4198]

@@ekesandras1481 now say it without crying

[@akacadian3714]

Stalin as a very good mafia boss. Best line of the video. Stalin as Tony Soprano on the streets of Kearny and Down Neck Newark? He could have been somebody.

[@LeftistUprising]

Ioseb Vissarionovich Djugashvili did a lot of amazingly good things and also a lot of amazingly bad things. He did trillions of things, and, from Mao Dezong, 70% of those actions were good, and 30% of the trillions of a ruins were bad.

[@ekesandras1481]

what were the good things?

[@LeftistUprising]

@@ekesandras1481 * Doubled life expectancy * Fastest economic expansion EVER (until the chinese surpassed this record) * women's emancipation! This was started before he got there, however. * defeated fascism in the world's greatest war. * led a country that was riding donkeys, and left a country with atomic bombs. * developed moscow. it's the biggest city in Europe, and it wouldn't have been a great city if it weren't for Stalin.

[@ekesandras1481]

@@LeftistUprising all that would have also happened if Kerenski would have stayed in power, or anybody else and Russia would have been a democratic Republic instead of a one-party police state. The technology was available, electricity, cars, trucks, peniciline, etc. At the end of Communism in 1991 life expectance for males was still 20 years below Western Europe. And concerning fascism: without the Hitler-Stalin pact, without the order to the French communists not to join a popular front against Hitler, without sabotaging the Left in the Spanish Civil war, the war would not have happened the way it did. Stalin even started WWII, by attacking Poland together with his ally the Third Reich. And than he attacked all the states between Russia and Germany: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, he coerced Romania to give up Bucovina and Bessarabia and than he attacked Finland.

[@jdm4198]

@@ekesandras1481 Sources: Arial 12

[@biswadipdasgupta4204]

@@LeftistUprising * he considerably shortened the lifespan of 6 of the 8 members of the first Politbureau constituted after the Revolution (as well as most of the whole generation of 'Old Bolsheviks' who had made the 1917 revolution) - not to mention the mass starvation accompanying the collectivisation programme and the mass murder of the Great Purges in the thirties. * Economic expansion was certainly fast quantitatively in terms of expansion of steel and coal and iron ore production but what was produced in many cases under the system of bureaucratic fiat was shoddy in quality and barely qualified as useable. * Women's emancipation was severely retarded by the abolition of legal abortion in 1936. * Nazi Germany was defeated but let us not forget the many German and Austrian communists like Margarete Buber-Neumann who had sought refuge in the USSR and were delivered to the Nazis under the terms of the 1939-41 Stalin-Hitler pact. The Soviet army was considerably weakened by the murder of many members of its General Staff like the Civil War hero Marshall Tukachevsky on trumped-up charges and the German army was able to easily advance hundreds of miles into the USSR by the general unpreparedness of the Soviet army and the reluctance of Stalin and his gangsters to believe the warnings of Western intelligence that the German army was about to invade in 1941. The Soviet military campaigns were characterised by huge waste and sacrifice of the lives of their own soldiers who were in many cases treated like cannon fodder prodded into clearing minefields by bayonets behind them. It is well documented that the Soviet army during its advance into Germany also engaged in the rape of hundreds of thousands of German women. * The atomic bombs were largely developed courtesy of German scientists and scientific facilities brought back after the war, turning the USSR into 'Upper Volta with rockets'. * Moscow has been a great city since before Napoleon set eyes on it in 1812.

[@2CheKapone]

Not bad for a bourgeois historian

[@55TheOracle55]

Actually it is bad. His interpretations are liberal as hell and of course concedes the same generic cold war anti Stalin tropes that were debunked by other historians. Just for an example, he failed to even mention how exactly Stalin was taking the USSR into a bloody dictatorship when in 1936 he helped draft a constitution that would be considered the most democratic in history. Those are two mutually exclusive points that should've given him and everyone else pause for thought, yet doesn't even get mentioned.

[@biswadipdasgupta4204]

​@@55TheOracle55many thanks - we will try to keep in mind the beautiful words of the Soviet constitution when thinking about Stalin and his acts. btw wasn't Bukharin the author of the 1936 constitution - what happened to him (oh I remember - he ended up 'confessing' to conspiring with nazis and trotskyists to blow up Soviet trains - right?)?

[@HBlack-wf4nj]

@@biswadipdasgupta4204 Thank you!

[@lloydchristmas1086]

@@55TheOracle55 lmao u are delusional

[@Doc_Tar]

@@lloydchristmas1086 He's too far gone to be reasoned with much less embarrassed for swallowing Soviet propaganda whole.