Two hour documentary about Stalin

[Larry]

I watched an interesting two-hour documentary on Stalin.  It's entitled "Stalin: Man of Steel" and was released in 2004.  It contains a great deal of interviews of ordinary people in FSU as well as video of Soviet leaders during the Stalin era.  I've never before seen video of Genrik Yagoda, head of the NKVD during the early 1930s.

The stories of the survivors are grim.  One very old rural lady was interviewed.  She had been a girl in the 1920s in a kulak family (peasants who owned some property and livestock and hence were not dirt poor), when the collectivization of farms occurred.  She told, what great clarity and passion about the men sent to take her family's possessions, land, and livestock, and how difficult it was to live afterwards.

An extraordinarily poignant story was told by an elderly white-haired lady recalling the night the police came to their home when she was a child.  Her father read her a story every night.  One night, in the midst of his reading her a story, there came a knock on the door.  The police arrested her father.  He told her, "I will be back; I am innocent, after all.  And then I will finish the story."  The daughter tearfully says, "I am still waiting.  I am still waiting today."

An old Ukrainian woman was interviewed.  She told about the extreme shortage of food during the communist-caused famine of the 1930s.  Her mother gave a piece of beet root to her healthy children, but not to her small brother who was sick and weak from hunger.  "The poor little guy climbed down with his last ounce of strength, because he was hungry naturally and also wanted a piece.  A neighbor who was in their home at the time urged her to give a piece of the beet root to the boy.  Her mother said, "no, I have to save my healthy children at least."
 
She goes on to say, "my brother started to weep bitterly and returned to his sleeping place on top of the stove.  A short time later he died. When the undertaker came he put my brother on the hearse and then he grabbed my mother and laid her on the hearse even though she was still alive.  I started to cry but the undertaker only said 'shut up.  do you want me to have to come back again tomorrow. she is barely breathing.'"

An NKVD man who was stationed in one of the labor camps that made up the Gulag was matter of fact about the death of inmates there.  He said "of course it happened that some of them croked, but that's life."

After the revelations of the ghastly crimes Stalin committed it's hard to believe that a fairly good-sized number of Russians continue to admire him.

Edit to add: This is the first time I've heard Stalin's voice.  He has an accent not really like any Russian I have ever heard.  I've read that Stalin had a heavy Georgian accent his entire life.  Maybe that accounts for it.  Any of you FSUW out there who have heard Stalin's voice: can you comment on this.

[VIP]

Yes, it is shocking. It is also shocking that they still have that Lenin thing on dispay. Lenin was just as evil as Stalin.
I will post more later. 

[Chris]

I have talked to many who lived through those times, mainly those in WU and their stories if you can get them to tell you anything at all are shocking.

[VIP]

Declassified: Joseph Stalin
History Channel film, so it is probably very mild:

Of course there are many other videos about him on youtube.

[Slumba]

Very interesting Larry, I wonder if some Russians don't like Georgians because they don't like Stalin?

[Jeffery]

After the revelations of the ghastly crimes Stalin committed it's hard to believe that a fairly good-sized number of Russians continue to admire him.

My father was in Russia during WWII. He is also one who admired Stalin as he feels if it wasn't for him he'd be dead today. My father escaped Poland with his family and fled to Russia during the war.

[Slumba]

After the revelations of the ghastly crimes Stalin committed it's hard to believe that a fairly good-sized number of Russians continue to admire him.

My father was in Russia during WWII. He is also one who admired Stalin as he feels if it wasn't for him he'd be dead today. My father escaped Poland with his family and fled to Russia during the war.

That is a fascinating perspective, I would like to hear more.

About war crimes committed by troops - it was brutal , especially for women caught by the troops of the opposite side. 

The Nazis were horrible, and (in response) the Red Army was also brutal to women:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/1382565/Red-Army-troops-raped-even-Russian-women-as-they-freed-them-from-camps.html

I can't seem to find a summary article for what the Germans did to the Russian women, but it was equivalent, from what I remember...

[VIP]

Stalin Documentary Part 1

[mendeleyev]

I've never before seen video of Genrik Yagoda, head of the NKVD during the early 1930s.

Shoot, I'm impressed with anyone in the West who even knows of Yagoda! Ironically, he was the man who on Stalin's orders personally signed the first arrest warrant for poet Osip Mandelstam, but would himself have become a co-defendant by the time Mandelstam was put on trail.

Stalin believed that no one in Russia was innocent of treason or crimes against the state. Either you were guilty of some crime already, or would find yourself guilty of a crime at some point in the future, so the arrest of anyone today was justified in his mind.

Many of the sentences handed down in those days were either a "20 years of hard labour without correspondence" meaning no contact with family for 20 years (long enough to be a death sentence under those brutal conditions) or a sentence that in some cases was called a "minus twelve" meaning that one would serve a term in the Gulag, typically 5 years, and then be required to live in a city that was not part of the twelve largest Russian population centres thus the reason for the term "minus twelve."


He often exempted only his departed mother as being innocent of any crimes. Stalin believed her to be the only true Russian saint because she had tried to protect him when his drunken father would beat both of them in Stalin's childhood. However he would reveal later that at times she beat him also.

Stalin was evil incarnate. He was also certifiably insane. Like many other insane, he spoke of himself always in the third person as if describing someone else. The only difference between Stalin and Hitler was that one lived in Russia and the other in Germany.

He was an avid reader and the history of the French Revolution convinced him that intellectuals and artists/poets made up the "fifth column" which would turn against him after Hitler invaded just as had happened in France. He knew Hitler would invade and intensified his campaign of repressions in the late 30s/early 40s as preparation for the coming invasion. Yet at the same time he refused to believe that Hitler was invading when the war began in 1941.

His mistakes and inaction at the outset of the war almost got him jailed by his own inner circle had it not been for Marshall Zhukov who in a moment of weakness spared Stalin. Stalin would turn on Zhukov later at the end of the war out of jealously.

Yes, he spoke with a Georgian accent.

I'm looking forward to watching these programmes at some point in the future.

[Millaa]

About war crimes committed by troops - it was brutal , especially for women caught by the troops of the opposite side. 

The Nazis were horrible, and (in response) the Red Army was also brutal to women:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/1382565/Red-Army-troops-raped-even-Russian-women-as-they-freed-them-from-camps.html

I can't seem to find a summary article for what the Germans did to the Russian women, but it was equivalent, from what I remember...

Does he look like russian?


Slumba, try to read not the only sourse of information  and use some logic
this one for example http://statehistory.ru/32/Mif-o-millionakh-iznasilovannykh-nemok/

[Slumba]

About war crimes committed by troops - it was brutal , especially for women caught by the troops of the opposite side. 

The Nazis were horrible, and (in response) the Red Army was also brutal to women:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/1382565/Red-Army-troops-raped-even-Russian-women-as-they-freed-them-from-camps.html

I can't seem to find a summary article for what the Germans did to the Russian women, but it was equivalent, from what I remember...

Does he look like russian?


Slumba, try to read not the only sourse of information  and use some logic
this one for example http://statehistory.ru/32/Mif-o-millionakh-iznasilovannykh-nemok/

Milllaa, my point was that the Germans were brutal first, then the Red Army was brutal also in return.  It was a war that never should have been fought in the first place and was completely unnecessary.

The black soldier was probably in response to the stationing of Congolese or Senegalese troops by the French occupation after the first World War.  It was called "The Black Shame" and it was believed that the French did it on purpose to further humiliate the Germans.  see:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Rhineland 

There are some propaganda coins that were produced called "Die Schwarze Schande"  (the Black Shame in German), but they might be seen as offensive, so I won't post the pictures here.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote a long poem called Prussian Nights about his experiences as captain in the Red Army, and what he describes as happening during that time.  However, we cannot depend on the experience of just one person to "prove" the behavior of the entire Red Army.

[mendeleyev]

Thanks to Larry for alerting me to my date typo. Corrected. 

As to Stalin knowing that the Nazis would eventually invade, it of course had more to do with Hitler writing about it in Mein Kampf than any brilliance on the part of Stalin.

[Jeffery]

After the revelations of the ghastly crimes Stalin committed it's hard to believe that a fairly good-sized number of Russians continue to admire him.

My father was in Russia during WWII. He is also one who admired Stalin as he feels if it wasn't for him he'd be dead today. My father escaped Poland with his family and fled to Russia during the war.

That is a fascinating perspective, I would like to hear more.

I never really heard much about my Dad's war story until recently.

I knew he was one of the lucky ones, escaping relatively unscathed. But the details were never provided.

My Dad recently was interviewed while in Chicago and told his war story. It was recorded on DVD and he sent me a copy.

Shortly after the Germans invaded Poland my Dad and his family headed by train to the northeast of Poland.
They stopped at Bialystok and slept in a field there for a few nights.

They were then permitted to enter the USSR and headed to Odessa.

My Dad credits Stalin for gaining entry into the USSR and thus sparing his life and the rest of his immediate family.