Putin’s similarities to Stalin; the greatest mass murderer in Europe

The only thing more dangerous than a nut with nukes is a nut with nukes who idolizes Joseph Stalin who was a bigger mass murderer than Hitler.

Putin has been busy purging Russia of honest historians. In December, a puppet court in northern Russia extended the prison sentence of Yuri Dmitriev to 15 long years on trumped-up charges. His real offense? Documenting a few of Stalin’s countless crimes against humanity. Putin’s government then outlawed the academic movement called Memorial, which supported Dmitriev’s work and that of other scholars.

Putin’s two obsessions — absorbing Ukraine and whitewashing Stalin — share a tangled history.

A historian would look at Stalin’s brutality in Ukraine (as elsewhere) and realize they failed to achieve its objectives. Millions of deaths and forced relocations did not solve the question of Ukrainian identity in the way Stalin had in mind. Instead, if anything, it deepened the desire of Ukrainians to be free.

“Stalin killed more people in Ukraine than Hitler killed Jews in World War II. They basically worked them to death for the bread and the food that they made in Ukraine.”

Known as the Holodomor, the massive famine in 1932–33 was brought on by Stalinist collectivization policies. During the famine, Moscow insisted on increasing production quotas and confiscating seed grain while peasants starved.

While it affected citizens across the Soviet Union, Ukraine was hit especially hard. While millions starved to death, the exact tally of victims has been a matter of dispute. Some scholars, such as Ukrainian-Canadian historian John-Paul Himka, have placed the number at around 4 million, while Ukrainian nationalists claim more than twice as many.

Stalin killed millions

Even historians of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, thus placing themselves under greater pressure to stress the special character of the Holocaust since this is what made the Nazi regime worse than the Stalinist one.

The Great Terror and other shooting actions killed no more than a million people, probably a bit fewer. The largest human catastrophe of Stalinism was the famine of 1930–1933, in which more than five million people died.

Of those who starved, the 3.3 million or so inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine who died in 1932 and 1933 were victims of a deliberate killing policy related to nationality. In early 1930, Stalin had announced his intention to “liquidate” prosperous peasants (“kulaks”) as a class so that the state could control agriculture and use capital extracted from the countryside to build industry. Tens of thousands of people were shot by Soviet state police and hundreds of thousands were deported. Those who remained lost their land and often went hungry as the state requisitioned food for export. The first victims of starvation were the nomads of Soviet Kazakhstan, where about 1.3 million people died. The famine spread to Soviet Russia and peaked in Soviet Ukraine. Stalin requisitioned grain in Soviet Ukraine knowing that such a policy would kill millions. Blaming Ukrainians for the failure of his own policy, he ordered a series of measures — such as sealing the borders of that Soviet republic — that ensured mass death.

Stalin was willing to help Hitler too

Declassified documents have revealed that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was prepared to send nearly a million troops to the German border to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed to an “anti-Nazi alliance” — an arrangement that could have changed the course of 2 history.

In fact, the offer of a military force to help contain Hitler was made by a senior Soviet military delegation at a Kremlin meeting with senior British and French officers, a fortnight before the war broke out in 1939.

Then there was the massacre of Polish Officers

The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD (“People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs”, the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered.

In 1989, Soviet scholars revealed Joseph Stalin had indeed ordered the massacre, and in 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev admitted the NKVD had executed the Poles and confirmed two other burial sites similar to the site at Katyn: Mednoye and Piatykhatky.

Putin is Stalin reincarnated?

The corrupt and often ruthless system Putin has maintained in Russia is clearly a killer.

Since Putin came to power, 25 journalists were killed for work-related reasons. Many of them had been investigating corruption by Putin-appointed officials or exposing injustice by Putin’s billionaire friends — like Mikhail Beketov, the editor of a small paper in the Moscow suburbs that opposed a highway project led by Putin crony Arkady Rotenberg. Only three journalists have been murdered in the U.S. in the same period, and two of them were victims of a terror attack.

Russia is in trouble, make no mistake about it. Most of the wealth in the country is concentrated in a select few and at any time the KGB can knock on a Russian citizen's door and take them never to be seen again.

Mr. Putin’s revisionist and absurd assertion that Ukraine was “entirely created by Russia” and effectively robbed from the Russian empire is fully in keeping with his warped worldview.

Instead of paving Russia’s path to greatness, invading Ukraine would ensure Mr. Putin’s infamy by leaving his country diplomatically isolated, economically crippled, and strategically vulnerable in the face of a stronger, more united Western alliance.

Mr. Putin must know that a second Cold War would not necessarily go well for Russia — even with its nuclear weapons. Strong U.S. allies can be found on nearly every continent. Mr. Putin’s friends, meanwhile, include the likes of Bashar al-Assad, Alexander Lukashenko, and Kim Jong-un.

Ukraine is entitled to its sovereignty, no matter who its neighbors happen to be. In the modern era, great countries accept that, and so must Mr. Putin. That is the message undergirding recent Western diplomacy. It defines the difference between a world governed by the rule of law and one answerable to no rules at all.