This week marks the 70-year anniversary of the funeral of Joseph Stalin, the Marxist dictator who led the Soviet Union during World War II and the height of its terror state.
Stalin, who followed in Vladmir Lenin’s bloody footsteps, suffered a stroke and died at his Kuntsevo Daach on March 5, 1953. He was 74. A state funeral in Moscow took place days later—on March 9—and in typical Soviet fashion, even the funeral turned into a disaster. When hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens turned out to “pay their respects” (more likely they were afraid to draw attention of state police for not attending; the level of fear and paranoia in the USSR was high, as the below clip from the 2017 film The Death of Stalin comically shows), a human crush formed, killing hundreds of people, perhaps thousands.
“The Soviets suppressed the news,” Vanity Fair reported decades later.
It was a tragic but fitting end to Stalin’s gruesome reign.
Soviet historians would later estimate that some 20 million civilians died under Stalin’s regime from famine, executions, forced collectivization, and in labor camps.
Despite these atrocities, Reuters recently ran an article exploring Stalin’s “mixed” legacy in the nations he once terrorized.
“Why should I have a bad attitude towards [Stalin]?” a Moscow resident identified only as Andrei told Reuters, explaining the Soviet dictator should be lauded because of his war-time achievements.
Readers of course can determine for themselves whether Stalin was a Communist hero or an evil tyrant. While we believe the historical record speaks for itself, here are some (sourced) quotes from Uncle Joe himself that might help readers decide what kind of man Joseph Stalin truly was.
“There is no actual starvation, or deaths from starvation…[T]o put it brutally, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” -This quote is commonly misattributed to Stalin, but it actually belongs to Stalin sympathizer Walter Duranty of The New York Times, who uttered these words in March 1933, at the height of the Ukrainian Holodomor, a manmade famine that killed millions.
Content syndicated from Fee.org (FEE) under Creative Commons license.
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