Putin names regional Russian airport Stalingrad

APA ^ | 4/30/2025 | Staff

[ek_hornbeck]

Stalin and Mao's victims are harder to tally than Hitler's, because most (but not all) of those who died under Stalin and Mao did so out of indifference as opposed to outright murder.

Based on Soviet archives, Stalin's regime ordered the execution of roughly one million people. Of the millions sent to Gulags, rather few were murdered outright, many died of exhaustion while many others survived (i.e. Stalin and Mao's camps were primarily slave labor camps, not extermination camps like Hitler's).

By the far the largest death toll under both Stalin and Mao was mass starvation of peasants due to collectivization. The collectivization was carried out for ideological reasons - the abolition of private property under communism. Of course it failed and caused mass starvation - Stalin and Mao didn't care, as far as they were concerned you need to crack eggs to make an omelete. While completely amoral and sociopathic, this is still qualitatively different from an active program of mass extermination directed at certain populations.

Many Ukrainians like the claim that their mass famine was an ethnic genocidal policy directed at them, but that doesn't hold up. Many Russian and Belorussian peasants died of hunger during forced collectivization, and as a proportion of the population (as opposed to total number), the largest death by starvation occurred among the herdsmen of Kazakhstan who were forced onto collective farms in unproductive wasteland. This wasn't a planned ethnic genocide of Kazakhs, but rather deaths due to insane economic policy followed by complete indifference to the damage that those policies caused.

[Verginius Rufus]

I think Stalin casually mentioned to Churchill that 10 million died during collectivization.

3 million Polish Jews died during the Holocaust. 3 million Polish Catholics also died during the Nazi occupation of their country, but we aren't supposed to care about them because the Germans weren't trying to kill all the Polish Catholics.

[ek_hornbeck]

3 million Polish Catholics also died during the Nazi occupation of their country, but we aren't supposed to care about them because the Germans weren't trying to kill all the Polish Catholics.

Hitler's Ostplan for Slavic nations to the east (Poland, Ukraine, Russia) was to turn 1/3 into slave labor, kill about 1/3, and deport the rest to reservations in Siberia. Because the war wasn't going well for Hitler by 1942 and he was so focused on Jews, he wasn't able to implement most of Ostplan. However, it would be accurate to say that killing Polish Catholics was his goal - or rather, killing about 1/3 and turning the remaining 2/3 into either slaves or de facto prisoners.