Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Stalin’s Paranoid Military Purges - The Great Terror | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1938 Part 4 of 4" video.

@pawelzybulskij3367 Are you saying Yezhov was ever in the picture? Asking for a comrade.
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@PejmanMan Many have argued that his actions in Ukraine met the definition of genocide. He also carried out smaller genocides against minority groups like the Cossacks and Tatars, and practiced ethnic cleansing on probably the greatest scale in human history both before and after WW2. He deported so many Balts to Siberia and replaced them with ethnic Russians that ethnic Russians actually became a majority in Estonia, where they had been a tiny minority before 1940.
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The scale isn't at all comparable.
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@unbearable9770 Nazism and Bolshevism were both perversions of Darwinism. The third great perversion of Darwinism that powerfully influenced the 20th century and today was the social Darwinism than found its ultimate expression in Ayn Rand: capitalism as survival of the fittest, in which the poor and unfortunate have proved themselves inferior and should be allowed to starve for the benefit of the more productive.
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It didn't, though. The post-Stalin Soviet Union was a nasty bit of business but the mass denunciations and purges on the scale of the Great Purge were never repeated.
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How do you feel they are distorting the record on Stalin?
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Purges and terrors like this have always been a risk in large societies with powerful governments. Wherever great power exists, the temptation to abuse it has existed. 1500 years before the Inquisition, Rome had the purges of Tiberius/Sejanus, Caligula, and Nero, which went about the same way.
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Khruschev survived partly because he was to low level to get caught up in the early stages of the purges (before 1937) and because he was very enthusiastic about denouncing other people. When he did attain higher authority he always exceeded the quotas he was given for arrests and executions.
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@fclp67 Russia was always destined to become a superpower. It was industrializing rapidly before WW1 and fear of its rising power was probably the main reason von Moltke, Falkenhayn, and the other top German generals were so determined to engineer the showdown with the France/Russia Entente in 1914 while Germany still had an economic advantage.
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I think socialism is a bad idea, but socialism has always encompassed a broad spectrum of ideologies and you must understand that most socialists were never communists. The democratic socialist movement emerged in the 1890s specifically as a reaction against the authoritarian turn Marxism took with people like the Bolsheviks. The bedrock principles of democratic socialism have always included rule of law and respect for human rights, in direct contrast to Bolshevik Communism in which the dictate and the good of the Party supersedes all laws or individual rights. Tarring all socialists with the brush of Soviet Communism is like trying to tar the William F. Buckley - Ronald Reagan tradition of American conservatism with the brush of fascism. The worst you can really say about democratic socialists in this regard is that they did not sufficiently recognize the danger posed by Soviet Communism.
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No. Lenin had way too much prestige, he was the virtual embodiment of the revolution as well as being much more politically savvy than Trotsky. Stalin would never have dared move against him openly. He might have had Lenin discretely assassinated, though, if Lenin had lived much longer after he started realizing the danger Stalin posed.
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@MrRjh63 I do hope you've seen the fantastic black comedy "The Death of Stalin". It's not terribly accurate to the details of history but I think it perfectly captures the absurdity of a paranoid police state with a mass-murdering lunatic at the top.
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