Was Stalin worse or better than Truman and Roosevelt?
The Allies were fighting with the Japanese civil population in 1942-1945 in a similar fashion. The Japanese in Pearl Harbor, Singapore, Darwin, Colombo and other places attacked only military targets and did not touch residential quarters. Well, the Yankees, by contrast, preferred large cities of Japan. In Hiroshima, there were no military objects. But U.S. strategists were not interested in those objects. They targeted the density of the housing development of the city and a large percentage of wooden houses.
Noteworthy, by August 8, 1945, the Japanese army was occupying much larger areas than during the beginning of the war. The Red Army for a month, from August 9 to September 9, defeated the million-strong Kwantung Army and occupied the entire Manchuria. Our tanks were about 100 km from Beijing. And what did the Americans do during that month? By tradition, they bombed Japanese cities.
How many millions of civilians in North and South Vietnam did the Americans kill in 1960-1970's?
But let's get back to our anti-Stalinists. Their favorite argument is as follows: "Would you like to be thrown in the Gulag?" No, we wouldn't. But if I had to choose between the Solovetsky monastery prison of the XIX century, a British concentration camp in 1918 on the Kola Peninsula and in Arkhangelsk, a Solovetsky camp in 1920-1930s or a modern American secret prison in Guantanamo Bay, I would not hesitate to choose a Solovetsky camp. And, of course, not out of reverence for Stalin, but out of the sense of self-preservation. There were more chances to survive there.
Thousands of articles and dozens of books have been written about how the prisoners were building Belomorbalt, Moscow and Volga-Don canals. There was a mass of creepy, but, alas, technically illiterate details. For some reason, no honest man has ever compared them to the construction of Panama and Suez canals. How many people were employed there? How many of them died? Alas, Russian anti-Stalinists have no interest in any canals whatsoever. They only want scary stories.
For example, the Volga-Don Canal was built by Turkish sultans, and Peter the Great was building it for ten years. It was Stalin who completed the construction in 3.5 years.
As with the construction of other canals, prisoners' labor was used massively. As many as 236,778 prisoners were involved in the works. "Of these, 114,492 people were released, 1,766 died and 1,123 escaped. The maximum number of slave laborers fell on January 1, 1952 - 118,178 people ..."
Thus, during three years of hard work, a half of the prisoners was freed; 3,000 of them were decorated with government awards.
I'm curious how the prisoners of colonial prisons of the first half of the twentieth century of Britain and France react to the proposal to go to the construction of the Volga-Don? I'm afraid they all would rush to the Gulag.
There is a paradoxical situation. "Stalinists" demand all archives of the NKVD should be exposed, without exception, to learn the truth about Stalin's crimes, the number of prisoners, charges against them, and so on.
Anti-Stalinists, who were foaming at the mouth before 1992 demanding transparency and open archives, suddenly changed their mind. They are strongly opposed to the opening of NKVD archives. How not to be afraid? The lists of prisoners are full of hundreds of thousands of Trotskyists, Ukrainian, Baltic and other nationalists. There are hundreds of thousands of honest people there too. But the cases say who reported what and against whom. This is what our "refined" intelligentsia does not need to have exposed. The lists of informants include their idols, teachers and relatives.
Here is what one of the leaders of Russian anti-Stalinists, Marietta Chudakova says in response to the requirement to open the archives. "They say that archives are closed, and nothing is known. How is that?" And then lists a long list of books of her adherents. Chudakova offers a pile of unscientific literature, stipulating that archives do not matter at all.
Imagine for a moment what would happen if people like Chudakova win. Stalin and his legacy would be cursed. Well, were Peter the Great, Ivan IV and Ivan III better? They destroyed a lot more people than Stalin. Or did they observe human rights? The Russian people would then have to acknowledge that their state was created by monsters of the human race. And we should all be on our knees in front of the "civilized world" begging forgiveness.
The Kuril Islands, Karelia, Smolensk, Krasnodar, Russian sector of the Arctic - take it all, Russia is large enough!
One can go to a bookstore and buy there a book titled "The Beast on the Throne." This is a biography of Peter the Great. By the way, 90 percent of it is true. However, if you compare our "blood-thirsty tyrants" with the rulers of the East and West at the same point in time, the two Ivans, Peter and Stalin would look bloody, but quite moderate rulers.
Is it time to recall that there are hundreds of monuments to Napoleon in France and Italy, that many squares and streets are named after him?
In the U.S., Roosevelt and Truman are regarded as national heroes. They were the presidents who ordered to kill millions of women and children.
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