First, between 1914 and late 1917 unequipped-under equipped Russian soldiers were killed or died of wounds and sickness in the millions. The slaughter was so bad the Russian army fell apart. Then following this disintegration of Russian society there was a civil war, foreign intervention, plague, flu, famine, you name it. Millions more died, including millions of civilians.
Now with this huge loss of vital population between 1914 and 1922, if that many people had died during Stalin's reign between 1924 and 1941, then the Russians could never have fielded or supported an army capable of defeating the most modern and organized military machine in the world!
They just wouldn't have had the numbers to do it.
I also don't doubt that Stalin whacked a lot of his fellow -ists and -ites.
Tom Lehman
Justin Schwartz wrote:
> there ARE
> >people who have made an ideological cottage industry out of exaggerating
> >the figures of deaths under Stalin. They are unsatisfied with the level of
> >ideological service that the truth would perform, so they proceed to make
> >up wild figures about 8-10 million or even 20 to 30 million deaths.
> >
>
> Since this was directed at me, I will say just two things: (1) I was
> alluding to the Ukrainian famines involved in forced collectivization, where
> there are credible estimates of up to 7 or 8 million deaths from
> malnourishment and disease of people who were never even arrested; (2) in
> Sovietological circles, of which I was once a sort a marginal occupant, I
> was sometimes criticized as an apologist for Stalinism because I defended
> the Getty figures, actually in their earlier incarnations, against the
> figures bandied about in the 1980s and before of 8-20 million, which were
> not "wild" in their day, but which I believed to have been wrong.
>
> My point was not the general evils of totalitarian repression but the
> specific failure of Stalinist economic planning. That is why I picked the
> Ukraining famine and not the Yezovshchina of 1937.
>
> Yours in abject servitude to the imperialist bourgeoisie,
>
> jks
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