Hacker News Reader

Comment by jokethrowaway | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't call deaths in the USSR "accidental". Starving and executing kulaks was no accident, they were punishing the rich. People worked to death in the gulags were not an accident.

They may have killed less people per year compared to Nazis but that doesn't make them less deadly. In terms of sheer human loss for society, they were 4 times worse than the Nazis (according to your estimate). If you consider how much freedom and how many lives they ruined with forced labour, it's even more egregious.

I've always considered Nazis and communists to be in the same bucket: authoritarian killers.

Communists often get a moral pass somehow, unlike Nazi and I wonder if it's because most schools and history teachers are biased; they teach about Nazi concentration camps but don't teach about gulags. I had to read books and books in school about Nazis and I didn't even know Solzhenitsyn existed.

View on HN

The difference is that the nazis were killing people based on who they were; the communists purged people based based on their belief that they had committed crimes against the state or were working against it.

One can dispute this belief, and no doubt they were both brutal, but there is a difference between a genocidal policy with the aim of extermination, and the state exerting its power to punish those it thinks are working against its interests.

Put another way, you could, in theory, avoid punishment in the Soviet Union by avoiding certain actions (although I know this is stretching things quite a bit), whereas those who were targeted by the nazis had no hope of escape.

>you could, in theory, avoid punishment in the Soviet Union by avoiding certain actions (although I know this is stretching things quite a bit),

sure, as long as we admit that in practice you really couldn't because punishment, although supposedly for crimes, was irrational enough to be essentially random.

No, you're seriously misrepresenting history there. First, the Nazis were also convinced that the Jews and certain other minorities had committed crimes against the state and the German people, so there's not a meaningful difference between Hitler's and Stalin's motivations. Second, calling the murdering of the kulaks

> the state exerting its power to punish those it thinks are working against its interests

is as bad and wrong as saying the same thing about the Holocaust.

> Put another way, you could, in theory, avoid punishment in the Soviet Union by avoiding certain actions

No, you couldn't. You're implying that the millions of people murdered, tortured, dispossessed, and imprisoned in gulags under Stalin somehow had it coming and could have avoided their "punishment" by just behaving better. Stop spreading lies, and stop trivializing the crimes against humanity committed by the early Soviet Union.

> First, the Nazis were also convinced that the Jews and certain other minorities had committed crimes against the state and the German people, so there's not a meaningful difference between Hitler's and Stalin's motivations.

This does not explain why the Nazis were also targeting the disabled and blacks, for example, does it? What crimes had the disabled and blacks committed against the state? Also, how could people not living in Germany, the Poles and Slavs, have committed crimes against the German state?

See, the Nazis were not motivated by any good faith belief that the groups they targeted had committed any specific crimes against the state. They believed that these groups should not exist at all, and they were prepared to, ultimately, hunt them down for extermination anywhere in the world.

I think equating the Communists and the Nazi is rather repugnant. Yes, both were brutal, but to downplay the unparalleled evil of the Nazi regime betrays a lack of critical analysis of what actually happened.

> One can dispute this belief, and no doubt they were both brutal, but there is a difference between a genocidal policy with the aim of extermination, and the state exerting its power to punish those it thinks are working against its interests.

The whole system was set up to routinely fabricate absurd evidence against innocent people and send them to Gulags (or straight against the wall). It was needed, because the rulers needed their population to be terrorized (less chance of a rebellion) and also because it provided huge amounts of free labor for the Gulags.

I don't think anybody up high believed for a second that any significant fraction of people they condemned to death, torture or lives destroyed in Gulags were guilty of anything.

In other words the Nazis had bad intentions but the Russians meant well...

I see echoes of this kind of thinking everywhere in the present.

> Communists often get a moral pass somehow, unlike Nazi and I wonder if it's because most schools and history teachers are biased

I think there is a simpler explanation (assuming you went to school in a Western country). The USSR under Stalin was allied with the western powers during WWII. Presenting Stalin as "just as bad" as Hitler would cast doubt on the whole moral justification of the war and would undermine the image of the western powers as the good guys who fought the evil Nazis to save the world from tyranny.

Also, one closely guarded secret nobody cares about: currently amount of people in prisons in USA is almost equal to the number of people sent to prisons and camps by Stalin.

So, who's more evil?

The one who did this:

"This contained official records of 799,455 executions (1921–1953),[7] around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag,[8][9] some 390,000[10] deaths during the dekulakization forced resettlement, and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported during the 1940s,[11] with a total of about 3.3 million officially recorded victims in these categories.[12] The deaths of at least 5.5 to 6.5 million[13] persons in the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 are sometimes, though not always, included with the victims of the Stalin era.[2][14]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet...

Wikipedia is also a propaganda tool. Are [9][9][12][13][14] written based on historical documents? On the documents from the Soviet/Russia archives? I seriously doubt so. Pretty sure, they contain same bullshit as Solzhenitsyn books: "I saw 2 millions prisoners walking to the camp and it was only one of Stalin's forced labor camps"...

> how much freedom and how many lives they ruined with forced labour, it's even more egregious.

How many exactly? West operate lies of notorious propagandists like Solzhenitsyn (which never had access to any statistics).

E.g. in the books published on the west you can find absurd numbers like "Stalin sent two millions to the camp X", and later historians prove that you can't place more than 1200 persons in camp X, and there weren't enough houses even for the guards for such absurd amount of people and there weren't roads or waterways to transport that many people, and there're no even you know payment sheets for the number of guards required to guard two millions prisoners.

But the West continue to regurgitate the same old lies over and over because who would want to know the truth? The best truth is that USSR was evil, so every tiny piece of evidence saying otherwise should be well hidden from public.

It's not like in the contemporary Russia there are powers willing to open that truth either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com