History /
70th anniversary of 1943 Wołyń/Volhynia and Eastern Galicia Massacre - controvercies [454]
Committed atrocities on Russians in name of good.
The atrocities were not committed in the name of any good. If we leave aside the Soviet Union, and refocus on Poland - Katyn was not done for any "good".
Katyn was done as a cold and hard calculation that if you remove the "head" of the Polish people - they would no longer be able to meaningfully resist. As it happened, it worked quite well. Without their officer corps and their political leaders, Poles became rudderless and malleable.
The reason it was done so? Because that's how it was done in Russia, and it also worked well. Because Poland was a smaller country, it was enough to remove 150,000. In the much larger Soviet Union the count ran into the millions. But the process was more or less the same.
People like Mao and Pol Pot learned from our methods, during this period.
Later, when mentally normal people came into power, Mao and Pol Pot type people began to despise us and eventually stopped working with us altogether. Why? Because repudiating Stalin's methods made those butchers look bad.
Mao hated Khrushchev and Brezhnev because they showed it was not necessary to be a cannibal to effect systemic change. He accused us of revisionism, and going back on the teachings of the "Great Stalin". His Cultural Revolution, was an absolute horror show and he could no longer point to Moscow and say - "that's how they do it too".
The good things I listed came after Stalin.
The only "good thing" about Stalin was him industrializing the country - but even that could have been done differently. Maybe also the surprising speed with which he ended the American atomic monopoly.
The bad things Stalin did:
1) Destroyed our creative and intellectual elite
2) Turned the country into a nation of snitches and emotionally stunted people.
3) Nearly lost us the war through his catastrophic mismanagement in the first months, and through his blind faith in Hitler. Also through killing our most capable military leaders.
4) Created famines through his economic illiteracy.
5) Finally - made us enemies out of people like you Poles and Romanians.