The best scholarship holds that Stalin killed 40 milion of his own people. That does not include war casualties.
Yup. But most of the people he murdered were murdered before WWII.
40mil, maybe more, "not including war casualties" - correct. Check out Richard Pipes book “The Russian Revolution”.. I have noted that some (not this thread, but others) are not quite anti-Stalin, in that they gloss over just about all the dark deeds that this monster did and can not bring themselves to see the truth. It seems to many on FREEp that Stalin did no wrong and was an innocent little boy scout just helping us out. Some of these people belong on DU….
Conservative Russians NEED to turn up the historical heat on absolutely everything the Bolsheviks did from 1917 all the way up to Stalin. An American, Richard Pipes (Harvard), in "The Russian Revolution" put the death rate at around at least 60-80m. It was probably much higher due to the Communists' hiding their genocides, killings of Kulaks, towns, labor (death) camps etc. If one includes the atrocities of both the Bolsheviks and Stalinists (from 1917 up until March 6, 1953 - Stalin's death) the death toll is probably well over 80-100m. That's just Russia. Mao was probably good for a similar number, including Tibetans and others.
Careful documentation of all the mass murders, genocides and homicides perpetrated in the name of Communism from 1917 forward must be done to bring some balance into the historical picture.
One forfeits the right to discuss human rights, if one clearly "tows the Party line" and ignore crimes perpetrated by any and all parties. Some (not all) FREEPers are like that.
True objectivity is hard to find. The scales of Justice imply balance, and a careful weighting... There is nothing balanced about how so many gloss over Stalin's atrocities or just write them off with a shrug "ho hum it was 'just Russians". Utold numbers of Russian people suffered under Stalin and the full Truth may not come out due to how effective the Communists were at killing and imprisoning their own people en masse.
That is probably why only God Himself will have to Judge all of the Nations in the End at the Great White Throne of Judgment. We mere mortals are too mixed up in this mess to be perfectly objective and make strictly objective observations about every single case.