[paulklenk]

Hope this hasn't been double posted...

[paulklenk]

Something to help Saddam get to know one of his potential hell-mates.

[VadeRetro]

"I like old Joe. Joe is a decent fellow, but he is a prisoner of the Politburo."

Spectacularly wrong. A joke. Stalin killed off the only Politburo he didn't own outright. They were among the first victims of what was misnamed the "Yezhov Terror." It should have been the "Stalin Terror."

[Cicero]

Interesting how much the NY Times admired Stalin.

[Mind-numbed Robot]

And the purpose of this 50 year old article is.......????

[sonofatpatcher2]

Darn! Franco still dying,
Adolph tooling around Paris. Now Joe is gone. What is this world coming to?

[TheErnFormerlyKnownAsBig]

Stalin took and kept the power in his country through a mixture of character, guile and good luck.

That's my favorite line in this pile of crap.

[gavriloprincip]

history ping!

[genefromjersey]

Notice the almost-worshipful tone ?

[Billthedrill]

But those who survived the purges hailed Stalin as a supreme genius.

It wasn't many. Of the 1996 delegates to the Bolsheviks' 1934 "Congress of Victors" 1108 dies during the terror. Prior to WWII Stalin purged: 3 of the 5 marshals, 13 of 15 army commanders, 8 of 9 fleet admirals and admirals grade 1, 50 of 57 corps commanders, 154 of 186 divisional commanders, all 16 army political commissars, 25 of 28 corps commissars, 58 of 64 divisional commissars, all 11 vice commissars of defense, and 98 of the 108 members of the Supreme Military Soviet. (Gosh, I wonder why the Wehrmacht walked all over them?)

I have a couple of FReepers to thank for recommending to me a truly bloodcurdling treatment of "Uncle" Joe - Martin Amis's Koba the Dread - Laughter and the 20 Million. The number refers to the number of people killed by good ol' Joe during the collectivization campaigns and the Terror. I quote its opening lines:

Here is the second sentence of Robert Conquest's "The Harvest of Sorrow...": "We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book." That sentence represents 3040 lives. The book is 411 pages long.

I do not think I shall be celebrating anything about Stalin, thanks - my only regret about his passing is that it was from natural causes.

[bray]

Ol Joe was a fairly decent fellow. Only murdered about 20 million of his own citizens. Far better fellow than President Ronald Magnus Reagan, according to the NYPravda Times.

Pray for GW and Our Troops

[tet68]

. All that became known of the daughter was her name, Svetlana, and her intellectual interests.

As I recall she moved to the United States.??

[plusone]

"Stalin kept his grip on power through a combination of character, guile and good luck..." Who wrote this drivel? Stalin kept his grip on power by murdering millions. He managed to kill more Soviets then Hitler, and considering the inefficiencies of the Soviet system, this was an accomplishment. Some estimate that he murdered over 30 million of his own citizenry. Stalin took his name from the Russian word for steel--'stahl'. His name means approximately in English 'made from steel'. During the Ukrainian Holocaust of the early 1930's, various western journalists traveled thru Ukraine to investigate whether these unbelievable rumors (at least to the leftist press) were true. One of the worst of the lot was Charles Durranty. He was a kept man, bribed, and pandered to by Stalin, who gave him a Moscow apartment and access to pretty Russian girls. Duranty wrote at length in the NY Times (IIRC) about the paradise that papa Joe was creating, and that rumors of attrocities were just capitalist propaganda. Keep in mind that during the early 30's, the politcal/economic system of the west was not very popular amongst the working class. Duranty fed into this distrust and helped cover up one of the biggest crimes in history, the systematic murder of perhaps 9 million Ukrainians, the Kulaks--private farmers who resisted Stalin's genius plan to collectivize agriculture. To this day, the Times has refused to acknowledge their complicity in this crime, a precursor to the Jewish Holocaust ten years later.

[Drew68]

bttt