As a descendant of Holocaust survivors, can I say “fuck you” for throwing Soviet Jews under the bus to serve your disgusting agenda? A majority of Jews and Romani in Europe died in the Holocaust, which ramped up enormously while Hitler and Stalin were fucking allies. Maybe the 3 million Polish Jews who died during the Holocaust might still be alive if Stalin never made a deal to chop it in half with Hitler. Did you consider that? At best the Communists cleaned up their own mess for allowing millions of us to die.
You might also want to read up about Soviet Oppression of Jews. There was a reason why so many Soviet Jews tried to get out of the country for decades. It wasn’t because they didn’t like the weather.
You do not have our permission to use our dead to erase the oppression of our fellow Jews. You don’t get to exploit the Holocaust to erase the sins of Stalinism.
If you use genocide as a litmus test about whose hands are clean, you might want to take a look at all the people who died because of Stalin’s crimes. The death toll is in the millions.
That is all true and anyone who defends Stalinism is either an idiot, a racist or a crazy on person.
One more remark though: Jews have a very rich communist history, they played a huge role during the Revolution – including after it was hijacked by Bolsheviks. Even before, in the end of the 19th century they were the biggest members it revolutionary organizations, they fought for equality for everyone – of education gender, labor, land (they understood that as the marginalized group they would suffer as long as the lower-class majority continued to live in unbearable conditions; because the fury and frustration this majority felt would be directed at them), protection of them as Jews, freedom of movement for Jews as they lacked it, freedom of choosing a job as well as they were restricted in it, and so on. They wanted a revolution, they threatened to start a revolution and they participated actively in the revolution. In Bolshevik party they has a whole section for them, they supported a lot of Bolshevik policies concerning education (literacy rised up greatly), gender equality in education and job, taking the land from landlords and giving it to people and so on, all nice things. Unfortunately there were also tons of ugly things and even more of them after Stalin took the power.
Stalin hated Jews with passion, during his time it was when an active and bloody persecution of them started again, if in Imperial Russia there were pogroms and a suffocating restrictions of everything, then in Stalin’s era and later there were GULAG’s and executions. Mostly it came to it after the WWII, when Stalin stopped holding himself back I guess, it was the worst time with him in general as many people died horribly or were imprisoned for life for nothing, including a huge number of Jews.
Many Jews either tried to flee or hide – my best friend’s family is a good example. Her great-grandfather was arrested one night and lived for years and died in a camp. His family – great-grandmother and kids – changed their surname from a Jewish one to a Russian one. Then changed it again. They hid their identity and married to Russians. My friend’s grandmother already didn’t hold into her Jewish identity and my friend’s mother identifies as Russian as well as my friend. Though by all accounts my friend is 100% Jewish. And she’s not alone, I have many friends like this, it’s easy to see because Jews have distinctive features and people recognize them. Some of them don’t remember their Jewish ancestors that much, they just know there were Jews before, other know – like my friend. And most lost their Jewish identity.
There’s no excuse for those who excuses Stalinism. Though I also saw a lot of people excusing Nazism using Stalinism and it’s no better. As my history professor (who specialized on the history USSR during Stalinism) told me when I asked her: Stalin was as bad as Hitler, if not worse. Because Hitler killed off and used genocide against those people who he clearly named an enemy, while Stalin killed off people who he considered a part of Soviet Union’s population, so his own people.
There’s no excuse for any of them but I wish people stopped excusing either of them using the other one as an argument. That’s manipulative, erases history and fucked up.
And while Jews had a rich communist history and played a huge role in the Revolution they also were one of the most persecuted groups in the USSR during and after Stalin’s rule. They only had a very short moment of relative piece and they endured a lot.
Just wanna add that Stalin was a fucking terrible person but the idea that all communists belong to a Stalinist monolith is a joke. SO MANY communists denounce Stalin, and I’d wager that most don’t even follow the same ideology that was endorsed by him.
The USSR at its core was still as capitalist and exploitative as the Tsars were. After Lenin died, Stalin flipped on and betrayed his people, and reversed any progress that had been made in the prior years. The only good thing he’d go on to do was kill Nazis, and that’s it.
And for those comparing Antifa to Stalin: don’t even kid yourself. Anarcho-communists hate Stalin’s guts. Anarcho-communism at its core is anti-authoritarianism in that it denounces the notion of a traditional state.
Fuck tankies.
Actually that’s true about anarchists, if you know an anarchist who loves Stalin, that person is lying to you and to him/herself, he/she is not an anarchist.
I can’t say that the whole Lenin’s little “experiment”, how he called it, was that successful as it really fucked a lot of things up, I do not believe that Lenin really understood what exactly he was doing to people and economy, but Stalin is a whole new other story – the dude it just plain Evil. I mean, even my family has a history of relatives “taken” in the middle of the night by people in black in black cars – after that the family who were fist prominent party members never owned a party ticket ever again because this accident opened their eyes. And if you had no party ticket in the USSR you had problems with finding a good job and so on.
And about Nazis – Nazis were killed mostly not thanks to Stalin but despite Stalin’s involvement in making decisions (and killing off all experienced army generals right before the war). After years of studying history and talking to people who studied it their whole life I truly believe that the main responsibility for fighting off Nazis belongs to the Soviet people – meaning all the people from all over the USSR who fought that war either on the front line or worked on the home front building and providing the army, moving whole huge industrial complexes from the West to the East of the country and so on. Stalin often was wrong in his estimations and failed to predict the moves of the enemy, he had wrong priorities and also implemented some draconian laws that only helped to get more soldiers killed. People though persevered through all of that.
You summed it up perfectly.
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A Middleground 