Stalin Power

From the MT:
"Russian Human Rights Group Wants Ban on Glorifying Stalin"

The Russian human rights group Memorial has called for a ban on publicly glorifying Soviet leader Josef Stalin, a news report said Tuesday, just days Russia before commemorates the 70th anniversary of the allied victory over Nazi Germany. “Stalin's crimes are unparalleled in the country's history. Their scale was such that the appearance of his image in the public space in any positive context is unacceptable and should be banned by law," the group was cited as saying by news agency Interfax.

Memorial added that every year in the Russian regions attempts are made to establish monuments or hang posters of Stalin ahead of Victory Day. Portraits of the Soviet leader are also a common sight at Victory Day rallies on May 9 in Moscow. While the human rights group acknowledged the role that Stalin played in Russia's 20th-century history, it added that this did not justify his public glorification.

"We are in no way talking about deleting Stalin from history … But the place of a dictator belongs in museum halls, books, and in historical monographs in the context of their actions — not in city squares,” the statement said. Stalin, who ruled from 1929 his death in 1953, took the position of supreme commander of the Soviet army in 1941. The Nazi army was defeated four years later, but the Soviet Union lost millions of soldiers and civilians in the process. Stalin also had millions of his own people murdered in political purges throughout his time in power. His regime additionally oversaw a famine in Ukraine that lead to the deaths of millions of people, according to historical accounts.

 

^ I will never understand why Stalin is still so beloved by so many in Russia and across the former Soviet Union. I can sort of understand the elderly loving him as they tend not to like change and grew up under him. Stalin created the famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s that killed millions of innocent men, women and children there. He also started the gulags  and mass deportation of Soviet people to Siberia. Russians also tend to forget that Stalin and Hitler were allies from September 1939 to June 1941. When Hitler invaded the USSR in June 1941 Stalin felt so betrayed by his ally (Hitler) that he couldn't address the Soviet people to tell them they were at war - it was done by someone else. After the war, Stalin had any Soviet soldier who "allowed" him/herself to be captured by the Germans sent to the gulags. So a Russian soldier fighting for the Russian Motherland who got captured, sent to a German concentration, labor or death camp (they weren't sent to POW camps like the other Allies) and were later freed only to be sent directly to a Soviet gulag. Soviet civilians who lived in German-occupied territory were also punished. Some went to the gulags, others to prison and all had to fill out questionnaires for decades after the war ended about their role. Even the liberating Soviet soldiers who were never captured were often punished when they returned home because Stalin was afraid of what the soldiers would tell their friends and family about the riches of western Europe. Stalin killed more of his own people  - the Soviets - then Hitler did during World War 2 (and that doesn't even include the millions upon millions of non-Soviet eastern Europeans that fell into the Soviet area after the war. People who like a man like Stalin 62 years after his death and 24 years after the collapse  of the Soviet Union are either too ignorant of the truth or lovers of a mass  murderer. ^

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/russian-human-rights-group-wants-ban-on-glorifying-stalin/520205.html