Greetings from California

Stalin was Georgian!

And he was no friend of Russia.

Welcome Aramonik.

I rather doubt many actually fought for Stalin, just like no Kiwi SAS soldiers killed in Afghanistan today would have the name John Key on their lips as they died.

Most owed their position to Stalin and as long as you kept your nose clean and you head down you were OK but he was not really someone to look up to.

I agree his militarisation of the Soviet Union certainly prevented a lot of the stupid nonsense that occured in Russia in WWI where soldiers went to the front with no rifle.

During WWII at the start there were shortages of armour piercing ammo for tanks and at certain stages of the conflict there were problems but nothing like what you see in western movies like Enemy at the gates.

In fact there was only one unit known to have been rushed into combat in Stalingrad that was not fully equipped and they went in with one in ten not armed with a rifle.
The reality was when they got to the other bank there was a stack of weapons german and soviet... the shortages were food, ammo, and men. I have read of combat in Stalingrad where every window had Soviet and German weapons piled up and the men simply moved without weapons from window to window to deal with the threat.

Without Stalin most of the peasants wouldn't know what an engine was let alone a tractor, truck or tank.
Of course without Stalin the Soviet Army might have been less prepared to fight, but also more willing to use their initiative.

It is like saying Adolph Hitler is not so bad because he got the German economy going and dragged the Germans out of an economic depression, and he invented the motorway and the VW beetle.

Of course Hitler was responsible for the deaths of 70 million people while Stalin was responsible for the deaths of less than 2 million. I would rate Pol Pot as worse than Stalin. The thing was that Hitler was trying to kill everyone who was not Germanic, while Stalin seemed to be more random and most of the people caught up in his purges (nice word for murders) suddenly reappeared in 1942-43 when they released a lot of former military people from prison and sent them to fight for a regime that had put them in prison in 38-39. The west likes to count them as dead even though they were sent to prison.


This is a welcome thread so I will shut up now.

With Stalin the Soviet Union survived WWII, with someone else it might have been worse or better. Would Beria have been a better leader? There were some very hard men there and the big soft cream puff wasn't going to keep the job very long.