Hitler was also a swell guy!

December 29th, 2008 – A Russian television station held a month-long poll to determine who the greatest Russians were, as seen by the people. Close to 5 million votes propelled Alexander Nevsky at the very top of the 12 place chart. The Western World does not know much about Saint Alexander; simply put, he defended the Russian territory from invading Germanic and Mongol armies during the thirteenth century. He was a great man of the people and a paragon of Christianity. Second on the list is another relative mystery for the rest of the world, Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin. In office for a short period before the communist revolution (1906-1911), he is remembered for his vastly successful reforms in agriculture as well as his clever and brutal repression of revolutionaries. Once again, he is a valued man of the people and a symbol of stability. Further down on the list are the writers Pushkin (4th) and Dostoyevsky (7th), Revolutionary Lenin (6th) and a few of Russia’s most provocative and reformist politicians such as Peter the Great (5th), Ivan the Terrible (10th) and Catherine II the Great (11th).

Here is normally the part where I criticise and analyse the choices of the Russian people. Specifically, I would comment on the questionable prioritisation and incomplete public memory of these larger-than-life figures with my western glasses of capitalism, consumerism and greed. This would surely provoke Russians into brushing off my comments as random hatred by someone who knows nothing of Russian culture. It could also convince my western readers that I have no right to criticise the memory of History as seen by a different culture than mine. I would then promptly state that they are both wrong and that it is both my business and my duty to criticise the third rank on this TV poll, with 519,000 votes: Josef Vissarionovich Stalin.

Firstly, Stalin was not Russian; he was Georgian so I think it should disqualify him immediately. Secondly, Stalin is very much a part of world history and I have studied him through the goggles of the Russian revolutions, his reforms of the twenties and thirties, World War 2, his interaction with the Russian people, his command of the Red Army and his short-lived political legacy; I thus propose that the scope of Stalin’s actions goes well beyond Russia. Finally, when his successor Nikita Khrushchev renounced Stalin and all his accomplishments in 1956, it was not out of political gain but out of pure hatred for a man who is a stain on Russia, Georgia, Europe and the whole of Human history.

Let me expose some of the exploits of the great comrade Stalin. Immediately at Lenin’s death in 1924, he began his first of many political purges that saw the execution of many and notably the expulsion of Leon Trotsky, co-instigator of the Revolution. The Russians had just begun to elaborate their communist, egalitarian Utopia when Stalin decided this would be a secret dictatorship based on propaganda and the enrichment of himself and his friends. In the late 1920s and 1930s, Stalin forced the collectivisation of farming and agriculture. More than the immediate displacement and deportation of millions from Ukraine to Siberia, this policy resulted in the deaths of over 6 million of his own people from famine. Also around this time, Stalin was not satisfied by his initial political purge and therefore sent over 2 million political dissidents and counter-revolutionaries (these accusations were exclusively decided by Stalin) to Siberian work camps (gulags) and to the gallows for execution.

We will now transition into his greatest achievement, the repelling of the Nazi army and their ultimate victory during World War II. I can accept that some less educated or attentive Russians would think he was a notable character for this accomplishment but they must have stopped reading or listening right after ‘Stalin was the leader of the USSR during Berlin’s defeat in 1945…’. I think they would be quite surprised if they read on. Notably in Stalingrad, Stalin held back the Nazis with a pretty simple solution: if I send hundreds of thousands of hungry and mal-equipped soldiers towards the German bullets and tanks, they will eventually run out of ammo and will find it difficult to manoeuvre atop mountains of Russian corpses. The life expectancy for a Red soldier here was less than a day but there were plenty more where that came from. Stalin ordered the execution of 500,000 Prisoners of War (another courageous and moral policy) but in a way, he ordered over 20 million of his people to their deaths by arbitrarily throwing them at the German war machine for three years.

Quick math will let us bedevil the Nazis for the extermination of 6 million Jews, homosexuals and gypsies yet somehow Stalin gets a post-mortem crown of laurels for…I don’t know what exactly. Directly and indirectly responsible for the death of over 30 million of his own people, the Russians must be masochistic in their remembrance of history and their cultural heritage. Thankfully some hosts from the TV station in question pleaded for people to vote for others because Stalin was at the top of this chart ‘the Greatest Russian in history’ up until last week.

Next week, Nixon becomes America’s greatest president and the ultimate Frenchman in history will be the Marquis de Sade.

(Pictured: A mugshot from Stalin's youth; maybe people thought the award was for best mustache - These two were conspicuously missing from the poll)


End.