Posted on 01/24/2016 9:50:21 AM PST by Navy Patriot
Russians pretty much now see Stalin as a modern-day “Ivan The Terrible”. A ruthless leader who did accomplish great things. Stalin idolized him.
They don’t think of him as a Communist.
Lenin, Brezhnev, Gorby, etc. they dismiss as Communists, but not Stalin.
It was pretty good lip service, considering the rise of Communism worldwide from the 1930's through the US NY Times whitewash and demonization of "McCarthyism" in the 1950's, all Soviet promoted.
The Communist purges ALWAYS occurred in all Communist systems as that the first thing they do is get rid of anyone that might be able to replace the ones IN power. It's SOP for Commies to purge Commies.
Even pretty much gave Hitler carte blanche to wipe out the German Communist Party.
Yeah? Like Hitler (the Communist that took Germany for himself rather than turning control over to the International Communists in Moscow), needed Stalin's permission to rub out anyone threatening his personal (used to be Communist) Socialism.
(Tito was a Croat on his father's side and was born in Croatia, but his mother was Slovene. His tomb is in Serbia. He always downplayed his ethnic background in favor of Yugoslav identity.)
His case isn't entirely comparable to Lenin's--he died much more recently, his brutal Stalinist-type rule gave way to a milder dictatorship decades before his death, and he was seen as a war hero for fighting the Nazis. Lenin's war record was just one of civil war.
And don't forget that Trotsky was the true organizer, the man who put together the nuts and bolts of the international communist "revolution."
As an observation, Tito was also noted for standing up to Soviet orders and running a more independent or “rogue” Communist state, and for keeping order among the Balkanized Yugoslavian states during the post war Soviet era.
Even though he was a “Communist”, I look at Tito kind of like Franco, authoritarian but perhaps necessary for the times. I hate the fact that Yugoslavia broke up, and those who encouraged her breakup. In the end, it didn’t do anybody any good, other than to give the Wahabbists an inroad into Europe.
True, which earned him a "Mexican vacation".
By then, Lenin was dead and Stalin, a third-rate samovar-tender, had appropriated the movement. But being the paranoid megalomaniac he was, Stalin wasn’t content to exile one of the authors of the Revolution, he had to have him silenced.
Yugoslavia is a unique case in point - the Communist-led Partisans were a national resistance movement to the Nazi occupation and their selfless sacrifice for national independence won Yugoslavs over to their side.
The Yugoslavs liberated their country without Soviet help and it stuck in Stalin’s craw Tito owed him no real debt and its understandable they didn’t want to come under Moscow’s thumb.
Stalin misread them and he wasn’t willing to risk war to subjugate them because it would have been ruinous to the Soviet Union, then still struggling to emerge from the devastation of World War II.
Trotsky was killed on Stalin’s orders because he represented a threat to his rule.
That and Trotsky stood against the “socialist road in one country” that Stalin had propagated at home.
Wit him died the notion of a worlwide Communist revolution.
Yugoslavia was an idea cooked up by intellectuals, to combine several nationalities with different traditions into one country, just because they speak the same or very similar languages. Before 1941 it was a dictatorship run for the benefit of a small elite among the Serbs. After WWII it was a dictatorship run for the benefit of the Communist Party elite.
I am reminded of the story in the Bible after the death of Solomon. The people come to Rehoboam and ask him to lighten up--they had found Solomon's rule oppressive. Instead he says his father beat them with whips and he would beat them with scorpions, so 10 of the 12 tribes revolted. After Tito's death the other republics wanted greater autonomy and less central control. If Milosevic had been willing to grant that the country might have held together but he wanted greater centralization, so the country broke up. The tragedy is that so many lives were lost.
The Islamic threat in Europe is much more from Muslim immigrants from non-European countries. There may be some Wahhabists who remained in Bosnia but I think most Bosnian Muslims are MINOs--Muslims in name only.
During the war Tito played down the Communist angle—he cast it as a war for national liberation. People were unhappy when the war ended and they found themselves under a Stalinist dictatorship (which continued until the early 1950s—even after 1948 Tito wanted to prove that he was a good Communist). Tito wanted to industrialize Yugoslavia following the Soviet model, but Stalin just saw Yugoslavia as a source of raw materials for the USSR. Tito was too independent—Stalin told Khrushchev in 1948 “I will shake my little finger and there will be no more Tito.” It didn’t work out that way.
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