Comments by "Helen Trope" (@heliotropezzz333) on "War & Peace: Trailer - BBC One" video.

  1. +sylv sylv You need to compare it to what went before. A small very rich elite governed a large class of people who mostly lived in abject poverty and slavery. They were sent into wars to die and saw how much better people in other countries lived so it made a political movement that espoused more equality sound attractive to them. The revolution threw up "unexpected" problems as it basically created a different elite which was murderous by the time that Stalin was leader. Karl Marx did not foresee that communism would take off in poor rural countries like Russia. He always thought that developed industrial countries with more democratic institutions would be the first to espouse communism.
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  2. +Anastasia Novikova Tell us some authors names so we know. I like Turgenev, Gogol, Solzhenitsyn as well as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
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  3. +sylv sylv About 60 million people died in WW2 - 20 million of them in Soviet Russia. It's estimated that Stalin was responsible for another 20 million deaths on top of those who died in WW2. So ultimately Hitler is responsible for more deaths than Stalin but it's not an enviable record in either case.
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  4. +ladoga1506 Stalin wanted to wipe out all opposition and being paranoid he saw opposition everywhere. Lenin, before he died, criticised Stalin and so did Krushchev who " denounced Stalin for “despotism.” He accused Stalin of “repression and physical annihilation, not only against actual enemies, but also against individuals who had not committed any crimes against the party and the Soviet Government.” Khrushchev pointed out that in the late 1930s, 98 of the 139 members of the Communist Party’s Central Committee were arrested and shot. Furthermore, he said, more than half of the Seventeenth Party Congress was arrested on trumped-up charges of counterrevolutionary actions. - See more at: http://blog.oup.com/2012/02/khrushchev-denounces-stalin-speech-soviet-communists/#sthash.gsOJObHx.dpuf
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  5. +ladoga1506 I agree Nazism is the worst ideology because it advocates genocide and practised genocide too. I don't think communist ideology was to blame for Stalin's murderous excesses. I think that was more down to Stalin's paranoid personality. Stalin ordered the elimination of "affluent" peasants, called Kulaks, as a class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak. He was also responsible for the death of many captured prisoners of war in WW2 including those Russian and other prisoners of war liberated from German prisoner of war camps. They either died on the marches back to Russia or in the gulags afterwards.
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  6. +ladoga1506 Here is the history of dekulakization and Stalin's part in it.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak As for the gulags, Solzhenitsyn has written extensively about those as well as prisoners who smuggled out information though they were writing later than WW2 . The families of those who never came back from the camps after WW2 are aware of the deaths and disappearances. Stalin and assumed that every Russian who was captured by the Germans was a traitor but it was not so. Russians soldiers generally hated the Germans for what they did in Russia and were treated very badly by the Germans when captured. They were lucky if they survived German camps and then they were killed by their own side (Stalin) after being "liberated"poor wretches.
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  7. +Андрей Петров and what a great body of literature you have! :)
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  8. +lpuck43 As it's a British production with British and American actors it would sound a bit comical if they were trying to copy Russian accents. It's better as it is because bad attempts at Russian accents don't detract from the story. In any case the Russian nobility were known to speak French.
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  9. No one can talk to Reagan, except through a medium. He died some years ago.
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  10. +TheOelun Do you mean Bezukhov? (not sure of the spelling). Bolkonsky is quite a reserved character.
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  11. +You Yuber AND PEACE :)
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  12. +Queen Elizabeth II This was made by the BBC.
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