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Comment by hershel | Hacker News Reader

Stalin is a bad example. By forcing industrialization on the ussr, he has increased average life span of the population by something like 15 years ( measures in 1958) and enabled the ussr to defend itself against the Germany which saved countless lives, and increased living standards, education, female equality greatly.

In his case, and the case of Chinese communism, it somewhat debatable whether a strong government is preferable.

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As someone borne in the USSR, I am sad that Stalin lived to an old age and died without suffering. If there is hell, I hope he is in it right now.

I would further never trust any statistics from the old USSR. For instance, the communists were able to dramatically "reduce" infant mortality by simply not recording births until the first birthday, when the child became one.

If you think Stalin was good for USSR you are an ignorant idiot. I am sorry to be so touchy on the subject, but Stalin killed more of my people than Hitler.

While this might be true, as a European I'm eternally thankful for USSR saving us from the claws of nazi tyranny.

Soviet people laid down their lives to win WWII, then, after WWII a lot more Soviet people lost their lives due to the tyrannical rule of a completely insane and evil man. I don't even want to dive into the pros and cons of communism. The only point I am making is that Stalin was an utterly evil fuck head.

> Stalin was an utterly evil fuck head.

...as many important historians have said

As a West European I presume. Because as a East European you would have ended up in the claws of Soviet tyranny for 50+ years and they made the nazis look like amateurs when it came to abuses and persecution.

I didn't mean no disrespect to the great pain that stalin inflicted.

And my view is based upon this thread in reddit /r/askhistorians which is managed by professional historians and is generally a reliable source for historical analysis :

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sxp7k/russia...

Uh, Stalin is responsible for more suffering than possibly anyone in recent history. He probably killed more russian people than the german soldiers.

His policies screwed up a significant part of the world for decades.

He also gave Communism a bad name, and, by proxy, Socialism. These systems of government did not have all of the answers, however we now have free market economics everywhere with anything vaguely socialist being absolutely taboo.

We have not a lot of diversity in government, government is nowadays about managing a country rather than anything ideological. Some diversity is better even if other systems are not how one would want to live.

with anything vaguely socialist being absolutely taboo

This is not true, at least not in Europe. Most countries have some form of universal health care, and there are benefits for people who do not work, etc. That is more than vaguely socialist, and is definitely not taboo.

Those things are not inherently socialist, which is why you see capitalist countries embracing them. Socialism isn't a group of government policies, it's an economic system where there is not a profit motive and generally implies public or cooperative ownership. What you see in Scandinavia is not socialism, it's capitalism with welfare.

> He also gave Communism a bad name, and, by proxy, Socialism.

You should read the things Lenin did, and the many more things he advocated doing. Read his pre-revolution material as well, he was one of the leading theorists.

> These systems of government did not have all of the answers

That's not true, read anything by Marx, Engels, Trotsky, or Lenin and not only did they have an answer for almost everything, they (especially the latter two) believed maximally that there is "only one way".

I appreciate where you are coming from, however, from my childhood reading of Das Kapital I cannot recall a great deal about Peak Oil, the merits of a surveillance state and much else that is pertinent to today's world. That is what I mean by 'not having all the answers'.

You ignore the damage Stalin did to the Russian armed forces with his paranoid purges. Russian defences would have been stronger, and fewer would have died, if Stalin had died a few decades earlier.

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