Posted on 05/07/2005 4:37:28 PM PDT by Lessismore
MOSCOW, May 7 (RIA Novosti) - The Soviet people not only defended the Motherland from the Nazi aggression, but also liberated 11 European countries during World War II, announced Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday during the opening ceremony of the memorial on the Poklonnaya Hill dedicated to the Victory in the Great Patriotic War.
"During fierce battles on the front that stretched from the Barents Sea to Caucasus, the Soviet Union broke the backbone of the German military machine. It was on the Eastern front where the Nazis suffered three-quarters of their losses," Putin said.
"Courage, resilience and unity of the multi-national people became the major force that destroyed Nazism," Putin stressed.
He said the world has never seen such an example of mass heroism, such a spread of partisan movement, such enthusiasm and effort of workers at the home front that provided the army with all necessary means to defeat the enemy.
"We will always remember and respect the feat of the generation of victors," the Russian President stated.
"They defended our right to live, to preserve our statehood and culture. They defended the future of our children. Their heroic deeds will always serve as a moral model for us," Putin said.
The Russian President concluded his speech with the words, "May the glory of those who perished for the freedom and independence of our Motherland live forever! We bow deeply to the veterans of the Great Patriotic War!"
The new memorial is a gigantic colonnade consisting of 15 bronze steles.
Ten of them represent the feats of Red Army soldiers and officers. Three are dedicated to courage, resilience and heroism of the Navy personnel. One of the steles is dedicated to fearless partisans and members of underground resistance, and the last one - to workers at the home front.
Are you seriously suggesting that that wasn't the Communist goal? Enslaving is what they did to everyone unfortunate enough to fall into their grasp.
The Molotov Ribbentrop Pact. Signed August 23rd 1939. Generally referred to as The Non-Agression Treaty. It was on the assurance of Molotov/Stalin, that Hitler attacked Poland. Russia also had the division of Poland in mind- some of it for themselves.
It might be appropriate to bring back my own memories as a child. The Evening Standard newspaper had a front page in Oct/Nov 1939. The picture showed gaunt buildings afire. Figures of people in the foreground. I asked my mother what it was. She said wicked people were bombing a city.
The city was Helsinki, Finland. The bombers were Russian.
Oh well, back to the London Daily Mirror and its slavish worship of Russia. Beggers waited for nearly two years though.
I would call anyone in the Gulag a slave, sure, especially those in Kolyma. But the Nazi goal was to put every Russian or Ukrainian in a prison work camp and to repopulate the area with German families instead. The Russians only put those in the Gulag who dissented from the party line, which was a great number indeed. But as long as you never dissented, and walked on egg shells, you could still have a job, raise a family, etc. On the other hand, there's nothing a Russian could have done to prevent his eventual enslavement in a prison camp under a Nazi regime no matter how many SS butts he kissed.
I just wish both sides could calm down and acknowledge that they both were needed to destroy the Nazis. Without the USSR, it is doubtful if the Western Allies would have tolerated losing millions more men. And without America and Britain, it was highly unlikely the Soviets would have been able to survive 1941 and 1942 without American aid and operations in North Africa.
In fact the 8th Army Air Force over Europe had more casualties than the Marines in the Pacific.
A lot of Croats joined the Partisans and fought the Germans and Italians (part of Croatia was given to Italy when the pro-Nazi puppet state was set up in the remainder). Tito was a Croat.
On the contrary, it was an attempt to wipe out the entire Polish Army officer corps class. The Soviet-Polish War was over. The Soviet Union simply wanted this particular class of people exterminated from their newly conquered territory.
Did it include whole families? Was the end goal to kill all Poles?
Another example of the Soviets exterminating an entire class of people, including entire families, was the extermination of the kulaks.
The Nazis end goal was to kill all Jews as the final solution to the "Jewish problem". The scales still tip toward the Nazis on my "evilometer". Don't get me wrong. I am not condoning anything the communists did. I'm just saying the Nazis were worse.
To me, arguing if Hitler or Stalin or Mao was worse is like arguing if Scott Peterson or O.J. Simpson was the worse husband.
By absolute numbers, Mao killed the most (40 million) followed by Stalin (8 - 20 million) and then followed by Hitler.
Absolte numbers, however, merely mean that Mao and Stalin had larger populations to kill and therefore racked up higher numbers.
The Nazis marked people for death based on ethnicity. The Communists, like the French Revolution, marked people for death based on social class.
Mao, Stalin and Hitler were all monsters and, given unlimited time, population and technology, each one could have racked up his death toll into the billions without losing a night's sleep over it.
The Soviet system undougtedly did "mellow out" after the death of Stalin.
How a Nazi system would have developed if it had survived into the late 20th Century is, fortunately, a historical question that was never answered..
All well and good. You are preaching to the choir. The communists were bad guys, no one disagrees with that. The question under debate is not about pre-war Russia, but about if the post-war communists in occupied Eastern Europe were "just as bad" as the war-time Nazis they replaced. I disagree with that premise. I don't think they were. Do you?
Well said. No disagreement there.
Okay, I'll buy that one.
Well, as I noted, "just as bad" is a pretty slippery concept to define when you are dealing with human enedvours.
Is it to be measured by numbers killed, by willingness to kill, by who they kill?
As I also said, after the death of Stalin in 1953, the Soviet Union did "mellow out".
The pattern for both the Nazis and the Stalin-era Soviets is that they would come into a territory, exterminate whichever population they deemed necessary to exterminate and then rule whatever population was left over.
In post-war Eastern Europe, the Soviet extermination campaign involved both German POW's and German civilians and even anti-Communist Eastern Europeans who had fought the Nazis.
After World War II, the Soviets kept German POW's for years in their slave labor camps. About 1.5 million German POW's died in the Gulag and hundreds of thousands of German civilians, including women, who were also shipped out of East Germany to the Soviet slave camps were never heared of again.
The Eastern Europeans marked for slaughter did not only include the anti-Communists left behind the Russian lines but even those who had escaped to the West. Stalin demanded the return of these people and the Allies complied in "Operation Keelhaul":
By the time that Stalin died in 1953, the Soviet extermination work in Eastern Europe had been almost completed and, if you were a member of a population class that had not been targeted for extermination, you settled down to the sad but relatively peaceful existence of life in a totalitarian state just as say, a non-Jewish civilian in Nazi-occupied Denmark or Norway had done.
How you fared under Nazism or Stalinism in Eastern Europe depended on your ethnic, religious and social class.
If you were a Jew or a Gypsy you were surely to be exterminated by the Nazis.
If you were a Polish Army officer or an Eastern European that had shown themselves to be anti-Communist, you would be exterminated by the Soviets.
In either case, the numbers on both sides totalled into the millions.
The ideal solution would have been a Nazi victory over the Red Army followed by a Western Allied defeat of the exhausted Nazis leading to a real liberation of both Western and Eastern Europe in the 1940's. The Manhattan Project would have ultimately assured such an outcome if the Red Army had been destroyed.
That, in turn, would have avoided a Red China, a Korean War, a Vietnam War, a Cold War and the looming danger that our grandchildren will face from Red China in the rest of the 21st Century.
Such a scenario, but in reverse, is what Stalin looked forward to when he signed the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact. Stalin envisioned Nazi Germany destroying the West thereby leaving only a weakened Nazi Germany standing between the Soviet Union and the Soviet domination of all of Europe.
It is an indication of the idealism of America that it never carried out such a realpolitik strategy against the Soviets but, rather, treated the Soviets as a true ally rather than as the future enemy that the Soviets proved themselves to be.
MISMANAGEMENT AND ATROCIOUS LEADERSHIP BY STALINIST FOOLS CONTRIBUTED GREATLY TO THE HORRENDOUS SOVIET WAR DEAD IN THEIR FIGHT AGAINST THE NAZIS - MUIR_REDWOODS
sorry for the caps
Ethnic Cleansing and Soviet Crimes Against Humanity
As I said, before, one major difference between Nazi and Soviet mass murders is that the Nazi actions were revealed to the World by Allied photographers in 1945 while the Soviet mass murders occurred far beyond the cameras.
And Restorer's post at #2 agrees with me: "However, most Soviet citizens quickly and correctly realized that the Nazis were even worse (for them) than the Commies, regardless of how hard that is to believe."
But notice Restrorer's caveat " (for them) " and how he referred to the Soviet Union's own citizens. Even those Soviet citizens had been the survivors of the Soviet Union's own internal extermination phases and were therefore the more docile and "Politically Correct" members of Soviet society. Everybody else had already been killed.
For the other East European countries, they first had to undergo the extermination phase of the Nazis and the survivors of that Nazi phase then had to undergo the extermination phase of the Soviets.
Both the Germans and the Soviets labeled their conquests as "liberations".
In reality, since the extermination criteria for the two regimes differed, it meant that, in each case, the survivors of one set of extermination criteria were then subjected to a second and different set of extermination criteria.
First the Soviets spare you because you are a Jewish Bolshevik, then the Nazis exterminate you because you are Jewish regardless of your politics.
First the Nazis spare your life because you are a non-Jewish anti-Bolshevik, then the Soviets exterminate you because you are an anti-Bolshevik regardsless of your religion or lack thereof.
The best outcome would have been for both the Nazis and the Soviets to have annihilated each other on the battlefield to the very last man who had a single political thought in his brain.
But they didn’t taught that Soviet Union few days after Nazi Germany invaded Poland, I suppose? Or about common Nazi/Soviet military parade?
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