Stalinist vanity...

[PikSmeet]

...or caption corner, hope this image makes you smile.
The large, bearded figure behind the youth is Harpal Brar. He is to Stalin what Nic Griffin is to Hitler.

Enjoy!

http://cpgb-ml.deviantart.com/art/Red-Youth-and-the-CPGB-ML-581675368

[Mialectical Daterialism]

...or caption corner, hope this image makes you smile.
The large, bearded figure behind the youth is Harpal Brar. He is to Stalin what Nic Griffin is to Hitler.

Enjoy!


Well, as the only non-revisionist party in the UK, the CPGB-ML is pretty cool and so's Harpal Brar, who would unironically thank you for comparing him to comrade Stalin. You on the other hand in comparing Stalin to Hitler engage in terrible historical revisonism while also mocking the millions of proletarians who gave up their lives in the struggle to defeat Fascism and the millions who were murdered by the Nazis. Non-revisionist history: Stalin was that great guy who defeated Hitler and fascism in association with the soviet proletariat and was 100% comitted to building Socialism for the proletariat of the USSR who naturally had to be completly destroyed by arch-revisionist Khrushchev and the capitalist west. Hope this helps.

[Guardia Rossa]

Stalinist gibberish.

"Blablabla everything not stalinism is revisionism blablabla millions of german proletariat died in the war so Germany must be Socialist blablabla Stalin singehandedly defeated Hitler in a tic-tac-toe competition blablabla Industrialization made by socialists blablabla Kruschev is revisionist and different from Stalin because he did what was obvious to do blablabla"

Hope this helps.

But, seriously now, your arguments on why USSR is socialist are childish. I hope you can make a quality post arguing why USSR was socialist or just stop annoying people.

[PikSmeet]

But seriously, what did you think of the picture, what were they smoking when they commissioned that one!
I think there are more youths in the painting than there are in the Red youth brigade.

Brar suffering from delusions of grandeur, surely not!
I'll probably be first against the wall now for posting this, thankfully the CPGB-ML only need a telephone box to hold their AGMs I don't think I have much to worry about.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Well, as the only non-revisionist party in the UK, the CPGB-ML is pretty cool and so's Harpal Brar, who would unironically thank you for comparing him to comrade Stalin. You on the other hand in comparing Stalin to Hitler engage in terrible historical revisonism while also mocking the millions of proletarians who gave up their lives in the struggle to defeat Fascism and the millions who were murdered by the Nazis. Non-revisionist history: Stalin was that great guy who defeated Hitler and fascism in association with the soviet proletariat and was 100% comitted to building Socialism for the proletariat of the USSR who naturally had to be completly destroyed by arch-revisionist Khrushchev and the capitalist west. Hope this helps.

Of course, it's not like Stalin didn't commit ethnically based collective punishment for groups accused of helping the Nazis or anything :rolleyes:

[Antiochus]

Yeah, I mentioned that before and Ismail just said "well it was a war!!". Like what.

[Ismail]

Yeah, I mentioned that before and Ismail just said "well it was a war!!". Like what.When the USSR was literally fighting for its life and there was widespread collaboration (http://www.revleft.com/vb/group.php?do=discuss&gmid=40486) with the Nazis on the part of a few smaller ethnic groups, there aren't many options beyond "deport said groups to areas where they cannot be a threat while at the same time preserving their existence" or "subject said groups to massacres in order to intimidate them into compliance and if that fails commit genocide." The Soviets, not being fascists, picked the former option.

I don't see the policy as much different from that which Lenin carried out in regards to the Cossacks, who engaged in widespread collaboration with the Whites.

The overwhelming majority of the nations and peoples of the USSR fought against the invaders with minimal instances of collaboration. That this is so was thanks to the consistent policy the Bolsheviks carried out under Lenin and Stalin to create an equal union and to overcome centuries of discrimination and chauvinism.

[PikSmeet]

I see the artist who created this masterpiece has a "Cultural revolution" tarot deck for sale. I wonder what it says about Brars' future? Not that he will lead the proletariat in the UK to a socialist paradise?:laugh:

http://www.jamesbattersby.co.uk/store/c1/Featured_Products.html

But seriously, if any artists had drawn Stalin in this way, they'd have been sent to Siberia without any Winter clothing.
Do you think he is a secret social democrat, trying to undermine the dear leader?

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Ismail 4 problems - (1) Nazi Germany was already losing the war by the time many of the deportations were committed and these groups did not pose a real threat (As evidenced by the ease with which they were rounded up), (2) communists must take as a principle opposition to all forms of ethnic discrimination precisely because we're not fascists or imperialists, (3) little old Tatar ladies or Tatar children hardly posed a threat to the Soviet union in the first place, only really military age men and (4) these groups were not allowed to return to their homes after the war was won, which would have been logical if the deportations were nothing more than a short term solution to a strategic deficiency.

[PikSmeet]

Ismail 4 problems - (1) Nazi Germany was already losing the war by the time many of the deportations were committed and these groups did not pose a real threat (As evidenced by the ease with which they were rounded up), (2) communists must take as a principle opposition to all forms of ethnic discrimination precisely because we're not fascists or imperialists, (3) little old Tatar ladies or Tatar children hardly posed a threat to the Soviet union in the first place, only really military age men and (4) these groups were not allowed to return to their homes after the war was won, which would have been logical if the deportations were nothing more than a short term solution to a strategic deficiency.

But can we get back on topic!
What did you think of the picture?

[PikSmeet]

Look at the size of his upper body in that picture! Wow, those forearms, I won't speculate as how they got that developed;)but the bourgeoisie will be **** scared of those powerful arms!

[Antiochus]

Ah Ismail shilling for Stalinist ethnic cleansing. Why is this not surprising what-so-ever? Lets conveniently forget that in said "humane deportations" tens of thousands died. Nearly 40% of the Tartars deported fucking died because of it. What kind of demented scum could shill for this kind of behavior? A stalinist of course.

Let us also not forget, that coupled with deportations, there were often settlements of "more loyal" populations (usually Russians) in said areas. Are we seriously going to debate this? Not even conservative trash defend the Indian Removal Act and the genocide against the Cherokee, but somehow people in the 21st century agree with this. And naturally, the Soviets KNEW it was wrong, which is why they obfuscated and lied about it for several years, claiming it was a voluntary thing. The pathology of Stalinism is lies on top of lies to cover more lies.

Even things that would be 'justified' (i.e Katyn) in some contexts; they lied about, denied it, blamed others, for many years and so on. Till this day there are Stalinists who claim the Germans killed the polish officers. Simultaneously they also display the officers as worthy of death. This is the same pathology as holocaust denial (and no, I am not placing both acts anywhere near the same spectrum, merely the pathology behind modern revisionism), "Jews are the worst! They deserved to die. That is the only solution" [....] "The Nazis certainly did not kill them, it is Jewish propaganda".

[Ismail]

Ismail 4 problems - (1) Nazi Germany was already losing the war by the time many of the deportations were committed and these groups did not pose a real threat (As evidenced by the ease with which they were rounded up), (2) communists must take as a principle opposition to all forms of ethnic discrimination precisely because we're not fascists or imperialists, (3) little old Tatar ladies or Tatar children hardly posed a threat to the Soviet union in the first place, only really military age men and (4) these groups were not allowed to return to their homes after the war was won, which would have been logical if the deportations were nothing more than a short term solution to a strategic deficiency.1. The Soviets were still actively fighting the Nazis by the time the deportations occurred. The task of securing the rear areas was still important.
2. Again, there was widespread collaboration on the part of a few smaller nationalities. There was no discrimination against nations and nationalities within the USSR, as the prior two decades leading up to the Nazi invasion showed.
3. As Furr noted in the link I gave in my last post, "In the case of the Chechen-Ingush and the Crimean Tatars, collaboration with the Nazis was massive, involving most of the population. To try to isolate and punish 'only the guilty' would have been to split the nation up, and would likely have indeed destroyed the nationality... It would have meant depleting these groups of young men, through imprisonment and execution, leaving very few young men for the young women to marry."
4. They were not sent back because they were still seen as representing a security threat. There is no evidence that there was some "Great-Russian conspiracy" or whatever to specifically target Chechens, Tatars, etc.


Lets conveniently forget that in said "humane deportations" tens of thousands died.Nobody called the methods humane, they couldn't have been given the context of a war in which the best means of transport were dedicated to getting soldiers from the rear to the front and vice-versa, and to moving about industry from one part of the country to the next. But insofar as the intent was to still preserve these nationalities, yes, it was the most humane option available.


there were often settlements of "more loyal" populations (usually Russians) in said areas.Well yes, usually you don't leave regions depopulated without a good reason. And since the vast majority of the peoples of the USSR were loyal to the war effort, it isn't surprising that they would take the place of those deported nationalities.


And naturally, the Soviets KNEW it was wrong, which is why they obfuscated and lied about it for several years, claiming it was a voluntary thing.I see nothing about it having been voluntary. A June 1946 decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR declared that: "During the Great Patriotic War, when the USSR fought against the German Fascist invaders, many Chechens and Crimean Tatars, at the instigation of German agents, joined volunteer units organised by the Germans and, together with German troops, engaged in armed struggle against units of the Red Army; also at the bidding of the Germans they formed diversionary bands for the struggle against Soviet authority in the rear; meanwhile the main mass of the population of the Chechen-Ingush and Crimean ASSRs took no counter-action against these betrayers of the Fatherland. In connection with this, the Chechens and the Crimean Tatars were resettled in other regions of the USSR, where they were given land, together with the necessary governmental assistance for their economic establishment."


Even things that would be 'justified' (i.e Katyn) in some contexts; they lied about, denied it, blamed others, for many years and so on. Till this day there are Stalinists who claim the Germans killed the polish officers. Simultaneously they also display the officers as worthy of death.There's no contradiction here. The Soviets and Nazis both had reasons for carrying out Katyn. On the Soviet side, the officers were servants of a viciously anti-Communist and anti-Soviet regime. Whether the Soviets "did the deed" or not is ultimately immaterial. They certainly didn't mourn the officers.


This is the same pathology as holocaust denial (and no, I am not placing both acts anywhere near the same spectrum, merely the pathology behind modern revisionism), "Jews are the worst! They deserved to die. That is the only solution" [....] "The Nazis certainly did not kill them, it is Jewish propaganda".Your disclaimer aside, I'm sure the placing of anti-Semitic officers and Jews together isn't silly at all.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

When the USSR was literally fighting for its life and there was widespread collaboration (http://www.revleft.com/vb/group.php?do=discuss&gmid=40486) with the Nazis on the part of a few smaller ethnic groups, there aren't many options beyond "deport said groups to areas where they cannot be a threat while at the same time preserving their existence" or "subject said groups to massacres in order to intimidate them into compliance and if that fails commit genocide." The Soviets, not being fascists, picked the former option.

I don't see the policy as much different from that which Lenin carried out in regards to the Cossacks, who engaged in widespread collaboration with the Whites.

The overwhelming majority of the nations and peoples of the USSR fought against the invaders with minimal instances of collaboration. That this is so was thanks to the consistent policy the Bolsheviks carried out under Lenin and Stalin to create an equal union and to overcome centuries of discrimination and chauvinism.

And of course, it's not like the Soviets and Nazis were on such agreeable terms that they carved up Poland, and then altered the demarcation line by a few hundred yards to allow Goering his own personal hunting grounds (source: archives of the German Historical Museum, Berlin. Seen the original document with my own eyes, signed by Stalin).

[Ismail]

And of course, it's not like the Soviets and Nazis were on such agreeable terms that they carved up Poland, and then altered the demarcation line by a few hundred yards to allow Goering his own personal hunting grounds (source: archives of the German Historical Museum, Berlin. Seen the original document with my own eyes, signed by Stalin).That has literally nothing to do with my post, but the Nazis had already resolved to invade Poland before the pact. What the pact did was prohibit the Nazis from occupying lands east of the Curzon line in the event they did invade the country. The Soviets sought to safeguard Polish independence before then but the reactionary leadership of that country was not interested in such safeguards, and in fact had preferred to meet with Nazi officials to discuss the Polish conquest of the Ukraine.

See: https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/mlg09/did_ussr_invade_poland.html

[PikSmeet]

I'm crying now and not with tears of laughter at that picture.
It's even worse than the shitty art they have of the Kims' in DPRK...now that is some feat.
Why does Brar not have any legs in the image? What drugs has the youth on the left taken? He looks like a zombie or has he just listened to a speech given by Brar?

[PikSmeet]

http://cpgb-ml.deviantart.com/art/Communism-has-never-been-so-cool-583174348

Words fail me! :laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh:

[Antiochus]

In connection with this, the Chechens and the Crimean Tatars were resettled in other regions of the USSR, where they were given land, together with the necessary governmental assistance for their economic establishment."

Which is a lie. A fucking lie. If they really were given these 'necessary assistance', you wouldn't have upwards of 30%+ attrition rates (without fighting I mean). 30-40% of people don't just die from nothing.

Mass deportations have been used since time immemorial. And of course, lets remember the elephant in the room: MANY WERE NOT ALLOWED TO RETURN, LOL! So tell me how exactly Tartar 70 year olds were a risk to the USSR in 1950 onwards? Of course they weren't.


Well yes, usually you don't leave regions depopulated without a good reason. And since the vast majority of the peoples of the USSR were loyal to the war effort, it isn't surprising that they would take the place of those deported nationalities.

Funny how these arguments are, more or less, the same arguments Israel has used and still uses to justify the extirpation of Palestinians. Or the U.S in Vietnam for that matter. Fact is, they were resettled well into the 1950s.

[Ismail]

Which is a lie. A fucking lie. If they really were given these 'necessary assistance', you wouldn't have upwards of 30%+ attrition rates (without fighting I mean). 30-40% of people don't just die from nothing.Can you give me information on this occurring in the areas they were resettled to? Obviously the amount of "necessary assistance" in wartime conditions is a bit relative, considering how utterly destroyed the Ukraine and Byelorussia were as well as the Soviet famine that started the same year as that Presidium decree you and I have quoted. I rather doubt these attrition rates lasted into the early-mid 50s.


And of course, lets remember the elephant in the room: MANY WERE NOT ALLOWED TO RETURN, LOL! So tell me how exactly Tartar 70 year olds were a risk to the USSR in 1950 onwards? Of course they weren't.Because it makes no sense, especially not demographic sense, to populate a region with old people. Either the whole nationality had to return or you're depriving it of both its older generation and its women, in which case you would still have to "colonize" areas with non-Tatar males and the result would be, unlike real life, the extinction of the Crimean Tatars as a nationality.


Funny how these arguments are, more or less, the same arguments Israel has used and still uses to justify the extirpation of Palestinians. Or the U.S in Vietnam for that matter.No, the Israeli argument is fundamentally based on the Zionist belief that Palestine doesn't actually belong to the Palestinians because of religious reasons. The Palestinians were and are compelled to resist the Israeli state because of its inherently chauvinist policies. You're free to try and draw similarities between the USSR of the 1920s-30s and the State of Israel from its founding to the present, I assume any you find will be incredibly flimsy at best.

The comparison to the US in Vietnam is similarly stupid. In that case the US was relocating peasant villages in order to make sure that the Vietcong could not influence and organize them. The character of the war was entirely different (the US was occupying a foreign country), as was the rationale (as the Soviets sought to safeguard the war effort of the 100+ peoples of the USSR against fascist aggression.)

[Tim Cornelis]

God, how can someone be so delusional as Ismail? Words fail me, hence this flame.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

God, how can someone be so delusional as Ismail? Words fail me, hence this flame.

He gets away with it because he is probably the world's only friendly Stalinist. He often argues things I find problematic if not offensive but at least he seems nice enough to not purge me if he becomes General Secretary. Well, I hope. Perhaps that's why we give him a pass?


1. The Soviets were still actively fighting the Nazis by the time the deportations occurred. The task of securing the rear areas was still important.


Yes they were still fighting the Nazis, but that doesn't mean deporting these people was necessary to win the war. It was clear who was winning by the time 1944 rolled around. For one thing, deporting large numbers of people requires a huge drain on logistics and resources - at least as much as leaving a quarter of a division to occupy an area.


2. Again, there was widespread collaboration on the part of a few smaller nationalities. There was no discrimination against nations and nationalities within the USSR, as the prior two decades leading up to the Nazi invasion showed.


Well there WAS discrimination against nationalities within the USSR as deporting Tatars regardless of whether they were pro-Soviet or pro-Nazi (or just trying to survive) showed.


3. As Furr noted in the link I gave in my last post, "In the case of the Chechen-Ingush and the Crimean Tatars, collaboration with the Nazis was massive, involving most of the population. To try to isolate and punish 'only the guilty' would have been to split the nation up, and would likely have indeed destroyed the nationality... It would have meant depleting these groups of young men, through imprisonment and execution, leaving very few young men for the young women to marry."

"most of the population"? All we have to go on regarding this are pro-Stalinist sources. It's like when Zionists say "well, most Palestinians before the Nakba wanted to destroy Jews in Palestine". How is that even determined during a war?

Splitting the nation up would have been less harmful than herding them all onto cattle cars and sending them to an alien environment, with many dying on the way.



4. They were not sent back because they were still seen as representing a security threat. There is no evidence that there was some "Great-Russian conspiracy" or whatever to specifically target Chechens, Tatars, etc.

Except the fact that their former homes and lands were appropriated.

There's also the other question - if so many of these people supported the Nazis, WHY??? And why would they have continued to pose a threat after the war? This is a question which is never answered. It is simply stated "well, they were just a bunch of Nazi sympathizers" (of course, East Germans were not deported to Siberia like the Tatars were ... somehow a few hundred thousand Tatars were a bigger threat than several million Germans? It is worse than implausible).

If anything, such one-sided authoritarian approaches only hardened any anti-communist sentiments which would have contributed to their supporting of the Nazis. This is quite understandable - if some political movement sent me away from my home, gave it to people of another ethnic group (while insisting this had nothing to do with nationality or ethnicity), sent me to some desert I'm not at all familiar with, gave me insufficient means to survive and just left me there for several decades, I'd probably resent them too.

Ismail, we get you like Stalin, but even you must admit not all his policies were justified ... right?

[The Idler]

Is this supposed to be a trivial topic poking fun at CPGB-ML or an in depth discussion on Stalin?

[PikSmeet]

Is this supposed to be a trivial topic poking fun at CPGB-ML or an in depth discussion on Stalin?

The former...though I hope it is anything but trivial.

[Ismail]

Yes they were still fighting the Nazis, but that doesn't mean deporting these people was necessary to win the war. It was clear who was winning by the time 1944 rolled around.Do you have any evidence this was the position of the Soviet leadership? Even if what you say is true, the Soviets still would have had to shoot tens of thousands of collaborators, which would have caused demographic problems.


Well there WAS discrimination against nationalities within the USSR as deporting Tatars regardless of whether they were pro-Soviet or pro-Nazi (or just trying to survive) showed.It is a bit strange to argue that Soviet nationalities policy was discriminatory based on an exceptional case during wartime.


"most of the population"? All we have to go on regarding this are pro-Stalinist sources. It's like when Zionists say "well, most Palestinians before the Nakba wanted to destroy Jews in Palestine". How is that even determined during a war?Relative to other peoples of the USSR, there was indeed a high percentage of collaborators among Chechens, Crimean Tatars, etc. There are Russian-language sources but you condemn them as "pro-Stalinist" (even if they aren't.)


Splitting the nation up would have been less harmful than herding them all onto cattle cars and sending them to an alien environment, with many dying on the way.No, it wouldn't have. Splitting a small nation up almost invariably kills it after a few generations.


Except the fact that their former homes and lands were appropriated.Again, unless you think the regions should have become ghost towns/villages, it only makes sense to repopulate them in the absence of the original inhabitants.


There's also the other question - if so many of these people supported the Nazis, WHY??? And why would they have continued to pose a threat after the war? This is a question which is never answered. It is simply stated "well, they were just a bunch of Nazi sympathizers"As one bourgeois source (not at all inclined towards "Stalinism" or whatever) notes: "Whereas in western Ukraine, or Belorussia, or the Baltics, the Soviets defined their main enemies as ‘kulak’ [wealthy peasant] opposition, anti-Soviet organizations of ‘bourgeois nationalists’, ethnic separatists in the Northern Caucasus resisted such easy labelling. As the Soviet officer in charge of keeping the peace in Chechnya in the Civil War era reported: ‘Even the glimmer of class consciousness has not been found among the Chechen people’. The situation was no better by 1925: ‘There has never been any sort of class struggle in Chechnya, just banditry’. Indeed, it often seemed to Soviet military and party cadres sent to fix the situation that the Soviet struggle in Chechnya was one endless stream of struggle against banditry. As regional military commander S.N. Kozhevnikov reported: ‘In Chechnya, as in Karachai, we have had not separate bandit, counterrevolutionary actions, but actual insurrections of whole raions . . . in which almost the entire population took part in armed actions’." (Burds, "The Soviet War against ‘Fifth Columnists’: The Case of Chechnya, 1942–4," p. 283.)


Ismail, we get you like Stalin, but even you must admit not all his policies were justified ... right?This policy was justified. The Soviet revisionists ranting that it was "anti-Marxist" and "anti-Leninist" (and Mao's echoing of their views, describing national policy under Stalin as "very abnormal") were those who actually carried out national oppression under the state-capitalist system they established.

[Homo Songun]

Of course, it's not like Stalin didn't commit ethnically based collective punishment for groups accused of helping the Nazis or anything :rolleyes:

Grouping the Holocaust into the category of "ethnically based collective punishment" just seems so completely bizarre and insufficiently descriptive to me. Besides being the most pathetic confirmation of Godwin's Law in the history of Revleft, I mean. :lol:

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

It is a bit strange to argue that Soviet nationalities policy was discriminatory based on an exceptional case during wartime.


Why? If ethnic discrimination and collective punishment is rejected on principle, wartime shouldn't affect that.


No, it wouldn't have. Splitting a small nation up almost invariably kills it after a few generations.

Losing your national culture is one thing - of course, 20-30% of your people dying on cattle cars will also do damage to a nationality. However, more importantly, I think the survival of actual people and their right to live in their homes should be prioritized over the survival of a nationality.


Again, unless you think the regions should have become ghost towns/villages, it only makes sense to repopulate them in the absence of the original inhabitants.


Or just wait until the war is over and give them the keys back to their old houses? It's better than doing what Israel did, and just kick the Palestinians out never to return.


As one bourgeois source (not at all inclined towards "Stalinism" or whatever) notes: "Whereas in western Ukraine, or Belorussia, or the Baltics, the Soviets defined their main enemies as ‘kulak’ [wealthy peasant] opposition, anti-Soviet organizations of ‘bourgeois nationalists’, ethnic separatists in the Northern Caucasus resisted such easy labelling. As the Soviet officer in charge of keeping the peace in Chechnya in the Civil War era reported: ‘Even the glimmer of class consciousness has not been found among the Chechen people’. The situation was no better by 1925: ‘There has never been any sort of class struggle in Chechnya, just banditry’. Indeed, it often seemed to Soviet military and party cadres sent to fix the situation that the Soviet struggle in Chechnya was one endless stream of struggle against banditry. As regional military commander S.N. Kozhevnikov reported: ‘In Chechnya, as in Karachai, we have had not separate bandit, counterrevolutionary actions, but actual insurrections of whole raions . . . in which almost the entire population took part in armed actions’." (Burds, "The Soviet War against ‘Fifth Columnists’: The Case of Chechnya, 1942–4," p. 283.)


That in itself doesn't explain why they would support the Nazis. On the contrary, we know that many actually made for effective Soviet soldiers.


This policy was justified. The Soviet revisionists ranting that it was "anti-Marxist" and "anti-Leninist" (and Mao's echoing of their views, describing national policy under Stalin as "very abnormal") were those who actually carried out national oppression under the state-capitalist system they established.

I'm not here to defend Khrushchev.


Grouping the Holocaust into the category of "ethnically based collective punishment" just seems so completely bizarre and insufficiently descriptive to me. Besides being the most pathetic confirmation of Godwin's Law in the history of Revleft, I mean.

WTF are you even talking about? I didn't even mention the holocaust.

[Ismail]

Why? If ethnic discrimination and collective punishment is rejected on principle, wartime shouldn't affect that.Ethnic discrimination was never practiced. The Chechens weren't deported because they were Chechens, but because they as a group collaborated en masse with the enemy. You would have to show instances of ethnic discrimination against Chechens.

For example, Japanese internment during WWII followed decades of discrimination against them, including calls for their expulsion from the country, restriction of their job prospects to "coolie" labor, and of course the usual things that go with discrimination (insults, threats to their lives by racists, efforts to prevent "race-mixing," restrictions on "Japs" entering certain establishments, etc.) The interment of the Japanese wasn't based on reports of widespread collaboration, it was based on prejudice.


Losing your national culture is one thing - of course, 20-30% of your people dying on cattle cars will also do damage to a nationality. However, more importantly, I think the survival of actual people and their right to live in their homes should be prioritized over the survival of a nationality.Considering the options the Soviets had at the time, it was either the destruction of the nationality or widespread deaths (without destroying the nationality) owing to the inadequacies of the transportation system and limited supplies in war. Any policy which only targeted active collaborators (i.e. overwhelmingly men in their 20s-40s) would have been disastrous for the continued existence of the Chechens, Crimean Tatars, etc.


Or just wait until the war is over and give them the keys back to their old houses? It's better than doing what Israel did, and just kick the Palestinians out never to return.There is no indication that they would have never returned. That being said, I am reminded of a person who met a Chechen veteran of the war who said one of the reasons for the deportations was because, owing to the high degree of collaboration, they were likely to face reprisals from neighboring communities once it ended.


That in itself doesn't explain why they would support the Nazis. On the contrary, we know that many actually made for effective Soviet soldiers.Yes, there were those who fought in the Red Army. In fact there used to be a RevLeft user whose family were Crimean Tatars and who were treated quite well owing to the fact that their grandfather (or great-grandfather) was a war hero.

[GLF]

Stalin was a man of steel. He did the hard things that had to be done in order to save the world from Fascism.

Yes, he had imperfections. He was human.

Socialism in one country is not a betrayal of communism. I am an internationalist like comrade Stalin, and like comrade Stalin I realize that true communism cannot be realized until international capitalism be eradicated and the last capitalist nation be replaced with socialism. A socialist bloc is the best we can hope for now. And to look inward and do the best we can with our own socialist nation.

So I for one salute comrade Stalin for his vision and commitment. And I would side with Stalin over Trotsky any day.