Holocaust Denial

[Rev. Rye]

So the Ukranian business was the only "Genocide" stalin ever really did?

Did he really kill 50 million people? I somehow doubt the USSR could cover 50 million casualties from him, 20 million from WW2 and still be a functioning nation.

Just went back and looked back at my copy of The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, a book compiling the 100 biggest atrocities in history written by someone who's made it his job to figure out how many bodies got buried by what world leaders. Noting that the estimated number who died under Stalin's hands varies really fucking wildly (from 600,000 to 65 million, a very wide spread indeed) depending on who's saying it, he eventually settled on a death toll of about 20 million, tying for the #6 place with the Taiping Rebellion and falling just short of the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, famines in British India, Chairman Mao, Genghis Khan, and World War II (with the Holocaust included in the final number because he considered it so tied up in the war that if he gave it its own entry, there would have to be 12 or 13 other incidents in WW2 that would have merited their own entries.)

On the note of the Holodomor, I have to admit I'm not as well-read on Stalin as I am on Hitler, but I'm kind of on the fence as to whether it counts as a genocide or a mere national tragedy that shows how bad the USSR was for the Ukraine, due to the very complex mix of details that make me wonder how much of the damage was due to Stalin's deliberate planning and how much of it was just due to the horrible execution of grand social projects endemic in Communist regimes, but, that said, the issue is largely academic, and regardless of whether or not it was malice or incompetence, or what mix of both it was, the result remains the same: millions of Ukranians dead due to actions forced on them by the Soviet government.

But one thing's certain to me: even on the off chance that it was purely due to incompetence, I've found no indication in my research that Stalin would have cared one iota for all the millions who died because of his bullshit.