Talk:The Great Terror (book)/Archive 1

I have to agree with Shorne here. "Many western intellectuals" is a weasel word. And I give a halfpenny for the opinion of "intellectuals" about what happened in the USSR, especially for the opinion about these opinions. For every opinion there was a counter-opinion. Intellectuals were polarized,... no; they were spread across the whole spectrum. Let us stick to facts. This article is about the book. Here goes a summary of the book, i.e., the opinion of Conquest, but first and foremost the summary of facts he presented. Mikkalai 21:09, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Grotesque POV
This article is plainly POV, with all that crap about benighted Western intellectuals and essentially nothing about the challenges to Conquest's propaganda piece. Clean it up or I will. Shorne 21:40, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * As an alternative to having the page protected so you won't be able to touch it, let's do something different: enumerate the factual errors here (should be easy if they're so obvious), and we'll discuss. You complain about VeryVerily deleting without discussion, here's your chance to show that you're not just like him. Stan 22:18, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * Are you serious?


 * I'm really sick of wasting my time with idiots, but here is a sample of what is POV about this puff piece:


 * Not one critical word is said.
 * The article uses such blatantly slanted words as these (see the text for context; I'm not going to do a point-by-point analysis in one-syllable words for those with POV-oriented intellectual disabilities):
 * definitive
 * greatly exaggerated by hostile commentators
 * impartial
 * "confessed" [the quotation marks]
 * favourite preoccupation of western [sic] writers
 * hostile reception
 * refused to accept the assertion &hellip; followed by many western leftists
 * totalitarian
 * personal pathology of Stalin
 * horrors
 * even in the 1960s [implying that anyone who held those beliefs by the 1960s was out of his mind]
 * dupes
 * apologists
 * denying, excusing or justifying
 * The article claims that "between 12 and 20 million people" died, a whopping lie that I and others have already smashed to bits elsewhere on this site.
 * The left is portrayed as monolithic in its "anti-anti-Communism". Even if this were "true" in some sense, it would not belong in an article of this sort. Ditto the crap about "blindness".
 * Both quotations are nothing but POV-pushing. Speaking of "wicked" Stalin in particular is out of place, but so is giving Conquest a forum from which to bash Cornford.


 * You POV-pushing propagandists have one day to clean this shit up. I'll delete it if it's not a damn sight better by tomorrow. Shorne 23:41, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * One-day ultimatums is wrong idea. Please don't forget people are doing this in their spare time. Normally (i.e., when people are not trigger-happy) the deliberations at a talk page take a week, so that several people can express opinions.. Mikkalai 23:53, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * As I suspected, Shorne doesn't get NPOV. It is not the case that the article claims between 12 and 20 million people died. What it actually says is that "Conquest claimed" that the purges led to that many deaths. The attribution is critical. In fact, most of what Shorne is complaining about is attributed to one person or another, as is correct for NPOV. This article as a whole is about Conquest's book and what it says; it's not the place of WP editors to pass judgment on its truth or falsity.


 * To go on, "blindness" is properly attributed by saying "what he saw as their blindness", "dupes" is prefixed by saying "accused of being dupes", "anti-anti-Communism" is qualified with "some writers have called", and so forth. So it's a pretty sloppy reading that characterizes this as anything other than a description of Conquest's POV, which again is the whole point of the article.


 * Now there are some quibbles that I have. For instance, the "hostile reception" line. I actually did some library research on this, and while I found several recent works making passing references to a hostile reception back then, I never found a late 1960s work actually saying "the recently-published TGT is a crap book" or words to that effect. So either the hostile reception was mostly verbal and you had to be there (at AHA meetings perhaps?), or more likely, I didn't go looking in the right places, such as NYT review of books and the like.


 * So from Shorne's list of complaints, I take it that the article does not make any misrepresentations of fact as to the content of the book, or what people said about it. The only thing to fix then would be any slanted wording that is WP speaking "for itself", rather than as a participant in the debate, and I think the list of those would be much much shorter. We of course don't want to alter the words or the sense of the debate participants themselves, because that would be to misrepresent the extremes of their positions. Stan 01:36, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * That shows that you don't know what NPOV is and that you didn't understand what I wrote. Shorne 02:14, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * What else is there to understand about 'The article claims that "between 12 and 20 million people" died', which is simply not true? If you can only muster a Bushesque one-liner in response to my detailed explanations, I have to assume that you have nothing further of substance to say. Stan 03:05, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * Indeed, I have nothing further of substance to say&mdash;to you. Shorne 04:07, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * OK then; if you're not going to defend your proposed edits, I expect that you won't make them. Stan 04:42, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * I have defended my proposed edits. The problem is in your set. Please fiddle with the knobs until the picture becomes clear. If all else fails, you may need a new vacuum tube. Shorne 04:56, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * You make blatantly false statements, have nothing in response when I point out your falsehoods, drift off into vague adhominem, and you call that a defense? It's true, the technique works for Bush :-), but you're not going to get away with it here. As far as I'm concerned, you've not made the case for changing anything in this article. Stan 05:11, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Cleanup 1
Now IMO the intro contains only facts. Some opinionated words, such as "comprehensive research" and "critical inquiry" are IMO reasonable.

The section about the critique of the book remains to be written, but the critique must be verified. Thanks to Shorne, I am aware of quite a few websites that pour lots of liquid shit onto Conquest, but their credibility remains to be verified, since they reek with hatred.


 * Oh, lovely. Conquest is embraced and hailed with a puff piece full of venom for such broad categories as "leftist intellectuals", while anyone who disagrees "pour[s] lots of liquid shit" and "reek[s] with hatred". Shorne 01:05, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * which had wiped out virtually the whole of the pre-Stalin Communist Party and intelligentsia 

Is this a Conquest's claim? It is false. Mikkalai 00:17, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * Yet another Conquestian conquest of the truth. Shorne 01:05, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * The word "Conquestian" does not answer the question. Is it Conquest's own or Conquest's followers/interpreters? Mikkalai 15:55, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

As for western intellectuals, I have no knowledge. Lenin in 1919 wrote about intellectuals:"Intellectual power of workers and peasants grows and strengthens in the struggle for the removal of borgeouisie and its helpers, petite intelligents, lackeys of capital, who delude themselves into being the brain of the nation. In fact, thay are not brain, but shit." (Letter to Maxim Gorky by Sept. 18, 1919) Read and learn communism. :-) Mikkalai 00:41, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

POV!!!!!
Keep in mind this article is about THE BOOK The Great Terror. If Conquest makes the claim IN THE BOOK THAT 20 MILLION DIED this is not POV, it is RESTATING WHAT CONQUEST SAYS IN THE BOOK IN AN ARTICLE ABOUT THAT SAME BOOK. Its no different than writing a plot synopsis of a novel for an article, say, on the Great Gatsby. Thank you.Marlowe 16:12, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Conquest's bogus scholarship
Someone keeps reverting a change in which I merely pointed out that Conquest has been proven wrong. I wish to know exactly why. Shorne 23:01, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * I was just writing it up. Your addition "Fucking fool Conquest, however, was proven quite wrong when the Soviet archives were opened. See, for example, Collectivisation in the USSR, which refutes his grossly exaggerated claims of deaths from famine and gulags." has several fatal flaws:


 * Use of profanity. The people we write about can use profanity, but we can't.
 * Calling Conquest a "fool". Fine for Communist Party websites, but an unprofessional ad hominem that's not fine here. (In fact, our quoting of Conquest as calling other people "fools" clearly conveys to readers he is more partisan than the usual scholarly historian.)
 * The claim that he was "proven wrong". He doesn't think so, nor do many other people, so we need an authority to say he was proven wrong, and we'll quote them.
 * Other Wikipedia articles are not themselves authorities. If there is an authority in the other article, that authority has to be cited here also. The link to the other article is fine as a supplement, but unavailable when this article is printed out, for instance.
 * This is all undergraduate-level scholarship, I don't understand why it's so hard to get right the first time. Stan 23:10, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * I don't see why Conquest, or rather his benighted supporters here, gets a bully pulpit from which to call his opponents "Fucking Fools" when I can't use the very same words in reference to him.
 * I'll copy the material from the other article, if that's what you want. And, yes, as a matter of fact, he was proven wrong. Shorne 23:31, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * Actually Conquest long ago answered the claimed "proofs" - I'm not even interested in the subject, and I know that already. Also consider that a bunch of unprofessional-sounding quotes helps makes the case that Conquest should not be considered a good historian, and undermines the book's credibility, while being still totally factual - so why is it you want to get rid of them? Better to let people discredit themselves with their own words. Stan 23:46, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * I agree that calling people "Fucking Fools" marks Conquest for the sleazy propagandist that he is. I have nonetheless removed the quotation because of its POV. Consider that my gift to Conquest. Shorne 23:49, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Conquest
Conquest was a spook for the British, and he wrote anti-Soviet propaganda for the Foreign Office. Why is he being called a "historian"? He is not a historian. Ruy Lopez 23:26, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * Amazing cheek, for some pipsqueak WP editor with zero credentials presuming to judge a professional historian. Conquest is paid to study history, ergo he is a historian. Doesn't matter what you think about his methods or his results, if you can find somebody other than a Communist Party website to say he's incompetent, let's get the quote (but do it at Robert Conquest). Ditto for material about this book. Can't anyone do any better than the amazingly biased plp.org? I would be embarassed to admit using it as my source, they're a bunch of way-out-there conspiracy theorists. If so many people think this is all bad work, it should be possible to find dozens of scholarly works discrediting. Where are they?
 * Incidentally, I would like for somebody to turn up more details about what being a "spook" meant in his case - I've seen wild claims about this IRD, but nothing that is properly researched by an objective scholar. Stan 23:46, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * If you bothered to look, you would see that the source in question is not plp.org but author Ludo Martens. I have cited the English translation of his book because 1) it is conveniently available on the Web; 2) most readers here probably cannot handle the French original. Shorne 23:50, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The amount of Communist whining here is incredible. Whats next? We revise articles so we have the "alleged slave trade" recorded by "Africans with an axe to grind"? Good going, whiners.

NPOV notice
A disagreement posed by adherants of a splinter group perspective does not create a POV dipute. Fred Bauder 23:37, Oct 15, 2004 (UTC)


 * How the hell did you ever become an arbitrator? Your bias reeks from every pore. Shorne 23:51, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

State
Shorne has yet to justify his edits in discussion as per previous discussion, so I put the article back to its state before he mangled it with his POV. Fred, the NPOV marker needs to stay until the disagreement is resolved - if even one person has an honest disagreement with the neutrality, I think it should stay. Now I think there is some tweaking to be done, but wholesale deleting of factual material cannot possibly be the correct way to go. What I would like to see is a little bio of Ludo Martens for instance, and some scholarly opinion of him. Also I notice plp.org excerpts the book rather than translating in full, which makes me wonder what's been left out - the excerpted parts are Ann-Coulter-style polemic, not anything I would expect to see from a professional. And surely if Conquest is so bad, there must be universities full of leftist professors writing book after book on Conquest's errors and failings. What I found interesting when visiting the library is that not too many historians of the Soviet Union actually had much to say about Conquest, either for or against - he would be footnoted, but not much more. That suggests that other historians don't consider Conquest necessarily incorrect, but that for real historical study, it doesn't really matter whether his results are accurate or not. Stan 07:22, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * Shorne has justified his changes, whereas no one has justified the outrageous POV stuff that Shorne listed in detail several days ago. If you have any specific questions, ask them; otherwise, leave them alone.
 * If you read French, you can get hold of Martens's book. I gave the ISBN, didn't I? His sources are readily available, for the most part; feel free to look them up.
 * Conquest has been discussed elsewhere on this site. I'm tired of repeating the discussion every time someone cites his crap on a new page. Shorne 08:00, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * By the way, don't undo my changes again. It was you who recently said that we add rather than deleting, so practise what you preach. (The truth is that you have nothing to say because you know nothing about Conquest and his mass-market sensationalism.) Shorne 08:02, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * I told you at the time you hadn't satisfied me as to the validity of your proposed changes, and you said you had nothing to say in response, so you're not going to get your way. Loudly and repeatedly declaring the ignorance of everybody who disagrees with you is not a valid debate technique, and I'm not going to let you get away with it here. Stan 08:13, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * What are you talking about? You still haven't disputed anything specific in my changes. Shorne 08:17, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * I already pointed out that Conquest gets paid to study history, ergo by definition he is a professional historian. In what version of reality is that not a very specific point? Stan 08:35, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * A little further poking on the net shows that Ludo Martens is a politician in the Workers Party of Belgium, not an actual scholar. That explains the polemics anyway. If Conquest's only opposition is a guy in a Belgian communist party and some pseudonymous WP editors, then I don't think it's accurate to represent his work as controversial. To see what a real controversy looks like, see the article on From Time Immemorial, which has well-known figures arguing both sides of its claims. Stan 08:04, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * That's no way to argue. Talk facts, not personalities. Shorne 08:09, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * By the way, you're also wrong about Martens. But I refuse to get side-tracked onto this non-issue. Shorne 08:19, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * What facts? Ludo Martens makes one claim, Conquest makes an opposite claim. Both trot out various facts in support of each, but neither has accepted the other's claims as true, ergo neither claim is agreed to be factual. WP cannot therefore take a position as to whose claims are true. Now if it's fair to mention Conquest's intelligence background as a way of suggesting that he's partisan, then it's equally fair to point out that Ludo Martens is a politician in a party so small it has no actual seats in Belgium's parliament. One unimportant critic does not a controversy make. (how unimportant is Ludo Martens? I have four times as many Google hits as he does). Stan 08:35, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Tweaking
Incidentally, I would like to do a careful wordsmithing of this article that will answer some of the complaints; but there is little point when Shorne deletes entire paragraphs of factual material that doesn't fit his POV. Stan 08:48, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * I deleted a long section of stuff whose raison d'être was to call "leftist intellectuals" a bunch of "Fucking Fools". If I find an article half of which is a diatribe against the "Fucking Fools" that are rightist non-intellectuals, I'll delete that stuff as well, whether it matches my POV (probably) or not. It's just inappropriate here. I don't see why that is so difficult to understand.
 * It's relevant because it's describing the time when the book was genuinely controversial, and actually debated by leading intellectuals. It does impart a particular tone, and that's part of what I wanted to tinker with. The book is not actually controversial any more, if only one unimportant Belgian Stalin-apologist is even bothering to say anything about it.


 * I note that you deleted all of my stuff without even discussing it. Shorne 08:54, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * Your "contribution" consisted of deleting other people's work, plus a claim of controversy based solely on a massively biased and unprofessional work by a obscure non-scholar. Find an actual professor of history at an accredited university that says the same thing (hint: there is an ongoing research project, alluded to on another talk page), then you have a basis for claiming controversy exists today. Stan 09:21, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Re-re-re-re-reverting
The edit history on this article is getting ridiculous, and the people doing it seem incapable of rational discussion of the content, so I'm washing my hands of this for now. Don't get too attached to the deletions however, it's all in history and I expect to bring it back in the future, along with some additional material I'm collecting. Stan 19:06, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Deletion
Once again, it is not correct to simply delete half of the article's factual content just because one doesn't like it. All the objections raised in the past have been shown to be based on misreading of the article or misunderstanding of NPOV, so I'm left with the conclusion that the goal is to turn the article into the collection of slanders by two-bit partisans at plp.org, and I'm not willing to go along with that. If the problem is that wording is not neutral, then that can be fixed by wording changes, not wholesale deletion. Stan 19:37, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * I didn't delete anything about the book's content. What I deleted was a personal screed against people who dare to question the book. That cannot stand. Shorne 19:56, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * Furthermore, the objections have not been addressed, let alone "shown to be based on misreading of the article or misunderstanding of NPOV". See above for a long list of objections. Shorne 19:58, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * Which I answered, and then you ignored the answers. The section you're deleting says things like "Conquest argued that", "Conquest said", "Conquest's sharp criticism", "Conquest's comment that", and "Conquest responded". This is perfectly correct attribution as per NPOV - to call it a "personal screed" betrays a serious lack of reading comprehension. It's also seriously biasing to delete Conquest's own words from an article about his book, while leaving in the crude partisan slanders from plp.org ("Nazi", geez, it's like something from junior high school). I take it you still haven't found the actual professors I mentioned two weeks ago; what's the matter, too much like actual research work? Stan 20:15, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * Quotations can still be POV. Imagine doing the same thing with the page Mein Kampf: "Hitler argued that", "Hitler said", "Hitler's sharp criticism", "Hitler's comment that", and "Hitler responded". All that in the context of blackening the entire opposition with a single brush (Jewish communists, let's say), the whole capped with the assurance of Der Führer that they're all "fucking fools". That's what is being done with this article. Shorne 03:12, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * Did you actually read the Mein Kampf article? It has several paragraphs describing Hitler's POV as expressed in the book, plus links from those to additional articles describing Hitler's POV at greater length. It would be pretty hard to understand why "Nazis are bad" if people started deleting all their statements of their beliefs because "quotations are POV". In fact, if Conquest is so bad, why would you work so hard to delete the testimony that demonstrates his badness out of his own mouth? Readers on both sides of the spectrum will find that kind of direct evidence much more convincing than the lame material on plp.org. Stan 05:09, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * You really don't get it, do you? Why don't you put your thinking cap on, compare this article to Mein Kampf, and report back to us on the differences? Shorne 06:00, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * In my opinion two last Stan's message are a brilliant example of comprehension of the NPOV policy and of rational and unprejudiced thinking. Shorne seems to lack arguments and in response he resorts to comments such as the one above. Boraczek 13:20, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * Heh, I think if you compare my contributions for a week to Shorne's for the same week, it should be pretty clear who's the thinker and who's the partisan! But pity Shorne - WP work entails dealing with many points of view, both admirable and reprehensible, and it's clearly beyond his abilities; whenever that becomes obvious, he resorts to trying to belittle everyone who disagrees with him. Stan 20:35, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Attribution
I may have been somewhat clumsy in rewriting the paragraph regarding Marxist-Leninist criticism of the book. Particularly in attributing views advanced by Wikipedia editors to Marxist-Leninists as a movement. I would welcome revisions and additions, provided they are properly attributed. Fred Bauder 12:30, Nov 1, 2004 (UTC)


 * I wonder why Shorne is so determined to delete the reference to Ludo Martens; it's very unscholarly. I've been doing some research in preparation for writing the article about Ludo, so that readers will be able to find out more about just who is doing the criticizing. Of course, I'm planning to praise him as the last true champion of the Stalinist ideal, which should make Shorne very happy. Stan 07:27, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

timing
Western does not mean American, it means Western Europe as well. While the US was passing Taft-Hartley, starting the Cold War, purging leftists from their jobs, beginning a Red Scare and McCarthyism and the supposedly dormant 1950s, with no real leftist activity until the civil rights and anti-war movements picked up in the 1960s, Europe was not the United States. As soon as WWII ended, the English booted Churchill out and elected a Labor Prime Minister who began nationalizing everything - a Labor Party that still sang "The Red Flag" at its conventions. Diplomatic and intelligence sources showed the left was going to win the 1948 Italian elections and the US massively intervened to prevent it. The largest political party in France in 1956 was the communist party. The KPD was banned in West Germany in the 1950s. Conquest's regurgitation of the British propaganda office would have been shown for the nonsense they are at any time. Ruy Lopez 07:44, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * It would do a lot for your credibility if you actually wrote up some details about this IRD and provided some sources for what it did and how it operated, preferably books written by professional historians and not websites of partisan propagandists. I don't even understand what communist parties in France in 1956 have to do with a book appearing in the next decade. I find it interesting that a few paragraphs about one book have generated so much angst, when there are literally hundreds of other scholars and books deserving of similarly detailed treatment. What about Getty's works for instance? Instead of working so hard to smear one person, why not tell us about the constellation of Conquest's opponents? That will carry far more weight with readers than the wording of a couple sentences here. The link to Neal Ascherson has been sitting empty for months, a leftwing journalist I believe, surely he is worth knowing more about? Stan 08:12, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * BTW, the Nineteen Eighty-Four article does not say it is primarily a parody of British propaganda. WP articles should at least make a feeble attempt to be consistent with each other. Stan 08:15, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)
 * BTW, it was not exactly "primarily", but the article "Nineteen Eighty-Four" does mention someting along these lines, if you read carefully. Mikkalai 08:31, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)
 * Yes, it does. I'm no literary critic, but I think Orwell's underlying point was that the various evils could occur in any society, that it was not uniquely British or Russian or whatever. It's a pretty serious misrepresentation to suggest, especially in this context, that Orwell was singling out the Brits; the nature of the mirror he holds up is such that everybody looks in it and says "nope, not me - but clearly resembles the people I hate the most". Alas, the people most in need of the insight are also the ones most sure that they're looking through a window, not into a mirror. Stan 09:17, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * Another brilliant comment by Stan. Let me add that Wikipedians are not suppposed to impose any interpretations of literary works on visitors. A literary work speaks for itself. That kind of unilateral interpretation is raping the literature. Boraczek 09:51, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * One more bit of irony; the text that Ruy Lopez characterizes as an "American-centric view of the world" was originally written by an Australian, heh-heh. Tricky to throw those stereotypes around! Stan 08:21, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Saying that Orwell's book is primarily about the British propaganda definitely overstates the case. And the leftist sentiment was very strong in Western Europe as well. For example, the Frankfurt School was enormously popular among the students and professors in the sixties. Even if the Frankfurt School were not fans of communism, they were obviously leftist. I'm reverting. Could you please suggest another wording? Boraczek 09:15, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Russian writers criticize Conquest for minimizing death toll!
As Conquest himself notes, he's been criticized by Russian scholars including "the respected A. Adamovitch...[who has] criticized me...in Literaturnaya gazeta '[for] always lowering the number of the repressed, he is simply unable to understand the true size of these fearful figures, to understand that one's own government could so torment the people.'" Conquest comments upon Adamonvitch's statement: "It is true that I have always decribed my figures as conservative; but, hithterto, I have been more used to objectors finding them unbelievably large." (The Great Terror: A Reassessment, page 487)

For those seeking more facts, The Black Book of Communism by Courtois, et al (a group of former French communists and radical Leftists who have renounced their errors) is highly recommended. The book's section on the Soviet Union by Nicolas Werth upholds Conquest in nearly every detail, differing only on the number of those murdered by Stalin. To dispute over whether it was six, twelve or twenty million is, to quote Frank Herbert, "the ferocious quibble over a comma."

What is clear is that between 14 and 21 million people were murdered between 1929 and 1953 to establish the absolute power of one man. Another 10 million murders can be laid to Lenin's charge. Another 1 million were murdered during the pacification of Stalin's new slave states in Eastern Europe, so cravenly surrendered to him by Churchill, Roosevelt and Truman. Former Soviet dissident Roy Medvedev puts it best, it was the "fearful abuse of human dignity" (The Great Terror: A Reassessment, page 487) that is most striking about the Terror Famine, the Great Terror, and the post-WWII Terror that Stalin was clearly preparing before his death. The "Jewish Doctors' Plot" and the near annihilation of the Leningrad "cadres" immediately after the war, were merely dress rehearshals.

Finally, the Soviet archives themsevles have corroborated almost everything Conquest asserted in the original edition of The Great Terror. To my mind, to deny these facts, to abuse Conquest over trivia is to make one's self an accessory after the fact.

Stalin made himself the most powerful human being whoever lived. That he did so at the cost of millions of lives is irrefutable. Russia and the former Soviet "republics" are one vast graveyard. It is simply obscene to dispute the confirmed, to reject the established, the ignore the irrefutable. The greatest crimes ever committed by a human being can be laid at the feet of that "wonderful Georgian" as Lenin called him once before the October coup.

That there are still people who defend Stalin is testimony to the willingness of some people to overlook anything to support their opinions, however warped they may be. There are still people in the United States who deny Alger Hiss's treason--despite the proof of it found in the Soviet archives! Ditto with the Rosenburgs--Jews who betrayed their country to help an anti-Semitic tyrant who was actively murdering Jews during their treason (quoted from an FBI agent who helped investigate the Rosenburgs' perfidy.) Hitler was Stalin's student in mass murder, but the pupil never came close to equalling the master in bureaucratic murder.

Conquest's Reflections on a Ravaged Century is also highly recommended. It should be noted that Conquest further revises downward his estimates of the number murdered by the Soviet Death Machine.

As a footnote:, I've read both the original and revised versions of The Great Terror, the original is superior. I can still remember the chill of horror down my spine at the revelations, far worse than any fiction I've ever read. The original edition had an entire chapter devoted to an estimate of the number of victims; this is now reduced to a section of a chapter in the "Reassessment."

I feel it should be pointed out that the most up to date (in English) and authoritative (at the time of writing) story of the Gulags is Anne Applebaum's work: "Gulag". In this work she estimates a death toll of roughly 4.5 million throughout the whole history of the Gulags. Death tolls of 21 million (let alone the 60 million I have seen elsewhere) deaths under Stalin are literally insane as only 25 million Russians (absolute maximum and probably a lot less than that) were ever in the Gulag throughout the history of their existence. Only 18 million were in the Gulags throughout the entirety of Stalin's reign. Now it is true that as well as this Stalin was personally responsible for many famines (some of which led to the deaths of millions), but we start to move away from deliberate murder in this case. It seems that as of the time of writing the absolute maximum death toll attributable to the entire Communist system (included Lenin, Stalin etc. up to Gorbachev) is roughly 9 million and possibly quite a few million less than this (depending on how you add up the figures).

By any possibly way of adding up the figures Hitler killed many many many more people than Stalin (Hitler murdered 6 million Jews, but also 6 million others (Poles/Ukrainians/homosexuals/Romany): also he must take the majority of the blame for the 2nd world war (death toll: 50 million plus)).

BScotland


 * Question for BScotland: Anne Appllebaums' figure of 4.5 million I assume refers to those incarcerated in Gulags, not deaths attributed to malnutrition outside Correction Camps. Thank you.  nobs 17:41, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Oh dear! i was going to reply to 'Nobs' comment but then I notice he has been banned. Oh well, such is life.

In any case, IMHO this piece is still subtly biased towards Conquest. No i don't think he was a CIA stooge, and no I don't think he was a vulgar fraud, but there is no real question amongst serious historians that he grossly overestimated (and overestimates) the deaths caused directly by Stalin. It is also true, of course, as I pointed out, that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of many more millions indirectly (i.e. via famines) but this is a slightly different issue: are we happy to lay the death toll of the Bengal famine at door of Winston Churchill? And yet he, ultimately, was to blame.

This does not, of course, alter the fact that Stalin was a psychotic mass murderer.

User: BScotland

Dispute tag
There having been no "dispute" about this article since November, I am removing the dispute tag. In any case it was only "disputed" by the communist POV-pusher and troll Shorne aka Ruy Lopez etc etc etc. Adam 9 July 2005 16:04 (UTC)
 * that is a particularly hysterical link at the bottom, though i suppose it was left in to quell further edit wars. J. Parker Stone 08:38, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
 * In fact, this link is irrelevant to the aricle: it is about "the harvest of sorrow". I am removing it. mikka (t) 20:58, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

No real doubt that Lenin was as bad as Stalin and Hitler
''Conquest argued that Stalinism was a natural consequence of the system established by Lenin, although he conceded that the personal character traits of Stalin had brought about the particular horrors of the late 1930s. Neal Ascherson noted: "Everyone by then could agree that Stalin was a very wicked man and a very evil one, but we still wanted to believe in Lenin; and Conquest said that Lenin was just as bad and that Stalin was simply carrying out Lenin's programme."''

No one can seriously deny that Lenin was just as brutal and genocidal as his eventual heir Stalin. Nor that Stalin did not carry out Lenin's plan to "communize" Russia and export revolution to the world. While one might argue plausibly that Lenin would not have brutalized that party itself, especially its upper echelions, as Stalin did, that doesn't eliminate Lenin's guilt for many other blood-curdling atrocities. E.g. having the "Red Army" cross the borders of the Baltics and round people up, basically at random, and murder them in the most bestial manner. Further, the Soviet archives have Lenin's signature on the order to murder the Czar's children. Even if one accepts--which I do not--that that great idiot Nicholas II deserved death, certainly murdering his school age children and idiot wife can never be excused.

Further, Lenin's commitment to violence cannot be doubted (nor that he drew it from the Messiahs of Communism: Marx and Engels themselves). One need only read his own writings or speeches and, best of all, review his actions. The mass murder of the SRs following the "assassination" attempt by a nearly blind woman can serve as merely one example of Lenin's blood-thirstiness. The expropriation of the peasants and the fictional "kulaks" was only halted by Lenin because it threatened to destroy his fledgling totaliarian state. It's great fun reading Soviet and western apologists' attempts to portray this move as anything other a dictator's hypocritical about face to save his own ass.

Finally, Stalin had to attack the party with the same terror apparatus Lenin created for use against his enemies (the liquidation of the Kronstadt "rebellion" and the crushing of the "Worker's Opposition"), and the population, because he did not have the personal credibility that Lenin did with the leading "cadres." Destroying those old cadres, and any remnant of the oligarchy under Lenin (the dubiously titled "proletarian democracy"), was necessary to establish "that wonderful Georgian's" absolute power. And no human being as ever wielded as much power as he did. Not Mao, Hitler or even Lenin. Though Lenin's premature death was probably the only thing that prevented him from accumulating the power that Stalin did.

For an insider's perspective on the horror-show and farcical elements of the Soviet "compound" I recommend the books of the late Lt. Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov. He was fired from his job by "Smilin' Mike" Gorbachev for daring to expose the regime's crimes. He was apparently immune to "Gorbasms" as so many fools in the West weren't. He nobly stated that, "freeing myself from Leninist dogma [was the greatest achievement of my life.]"  Indeed, it would be of any life. PainMan 01:45, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

There is much there to agree with, although not much that can be usefully added to this article. That Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky were all ruthless authoritarians is true, and I agree that whichever one of them became the long-term ruler of the USSR would have ruled in much the same way. That this is the inevitable logic of Marxist-Leninist regimes is shown by the striking parallels in the careers of Stalin, Mao, Ho, the Kims, Castro and Hoxha, despite the great differences in their countries. The one exception was Tito. But I doubt either Lenin or Trotsky would have conducted the purges of the 1930s. Adam 05:06, 18 July 2005 (UTC)