<< I'm not denying that 5 million would be horrible. It would be. But it would also be different, in that it would suggest a fundamentally different conception of Stalin's regime as one that killed periodically, instead of one that used mass murder routinely and comprehensively in order to create an atmosphere of fear in its subject population - the essence of what totalitarianism is.>>
I don't know how you get that. Five million people IS "mass murder" used "routinely and comprehensively." What else could it possibly be? If I were arguing that it Stalin killed "only" 500,000, maybe. But five million is still unimaginably horrible. What difference does it make if it was 5 or 20? Can any of us comprehend what all that suffering really was like? In any case, my point is that arguing for a lesser number (as long as one really is not trying to substitute something absurdly low for tendentious purposes) is not and should not be considered politically motivated. It is possible to be objective about this. It is also possible to be wrong (in either direction). Tom Beck Me: Tom, I'm not saying that you are doing this, but Soviet apologists have regularly made exactly the argument that you are making, so it is worth rebutting on that ground alone. Also, I tend to be stubborn when I'm sure I'm right, but that's beside the point :-) But I think making the sheer scale of what happened in the Soviet Union clear, and the extent to which we now know this beyond any real question, is worth the time I'm devoting to it. Five million in the end just feels subjectively different, I guess, than 20 million, or even the 40 million that I'm now starting to think of as a more reasonable figure than I did before I spent some time researching it today. Five million would be the Ukrainian famine and a few executions here and there - not that different from any number of other dictatorships. As a proportion of the (large) Russian population spread over 30 years, not that different from the tin pot despots who ran much of Asia and Central America. But we do know that Stalin and the Soviet Union were different, and the question is why? The answer lies in part in the sheer scale of the murder - murders so vast that no conceivable policy beyond simply glorying in death could be responsible for it. As Solzhenitsyn reported, executions were conducted by _quota_ in Stalin's USSR - 100,000 here, 200,000 there, piece by piece. Murder for the sake of murder and for the sake of the terror that murder produced - murder that allowed a government to control every facet of the lives of its citizens with a pervasive grip that even the Nazis never contemplated, much less achieved. That was what made the Soviet Union different and uniquely horrible. I'm not sure whether the Holocaust was worse than what Stalin did - I think that word tends to lose all meaning, in all honesty. It was certainly unique in its evil and its goal. There really has never been anything like it - Stalin exterminated people wholesale, without any interest in race or religion, or even politics, in the end. Is that better than focusing on Jews, as Hitler did? I'm not sure that question has any meaning. There was one critical difference between the _reaction_ to the two, though. Western intellectuals never had any tolerance for Hitler. Much of the Western left eagerly apologized for Stalin, and that's something that they still haven't faced, and is really, I think, the reason that we're having this discussion, because that massive failure of judgment - of morality, in truth - is the reason that so many people still try so desperately to deny the magnitude of what happened in the USSR. Gautam
