Did Stalin do the right thing by killing so many Russians?
Was he right all along?
>>77032124
THANKS FOR KILLING SLAVS, STALIN!
also genocided karelian people
>>77032124
(((NKVD)))
It's a very complex subject. Stalin also turned the declining Russian population around with pro-natal policies.
The purges were more aimed at establishing control and routing out Trotskyite (Marxists) and non-conformists which allowed for the total mobilisation of the USSR, generally it was the non-Russians who were most at risk or the Jews. I don't think he had a problems with Russians, and his policies although cruel transformed Russia from a backwards Marxist shit hole to a disciplined super power with nuclear capabilities which destroyed 80% of German forces and had a greater industrial capacity than that of a combined Europe.
Should also mention the NKVD did get over zealous, which led to the removal of Yezhov, Stalin had far from total uniform power, he was just good at playing the game.
>>77032124
I never considered it from that point of view, i guess he was really based all along.
Thanks based Stalin!
>>77033316
Stalin's interference made the war such a disaster in the first place. He removed Tukhachevsky and isserson along with any one with a coherent doctrine for incorporating mobile forces into the soviet strategy and also prevented his lower level commanders from redeploying their troops in response to the german buildup on the border. WW2 would have been significantly costly without his direct meddling to remove any source of competitors, and furthermore, if he didn't agree to a nonagression pact, it may not have even started.
>>77033316
>>77033565
Remember that he also used Russian history in his propaganda and had a gigantic boner for the Russian Tsar Ivan the Terrible.
All the land he annexed after the war apart from East Prussia and that part of Japan had also belonged to Imperial Russia.
>>77034845
You got to remember that Stalin lacked the hindsight we got today, and that things were quite pressing. As the French and Britts both let Hitler take what he wanted and was slow to reach any diplomatic agreement he feared they would let Germany attack his country or maybe even ally with them.
Managing to Ally Germany then turned out to be a pretty good idea from his perspective, as that would both give him a pact of non aggression with a rising power as well as some new land between himself and the enemy.
Without the pact there was no guarantee the Germans would take all of Poland and come even closer to the heartlands of the SOviet Union.
Stalin did actually count on that the French and Brits would be able to stand up against Germany much longer in a war of attrition and give the USSR some years to arm up and grow their economy, not lose all of France in a few months.
>>77034845
Tukhachevsky failed in the Soviet-Polish war, and couldn't be removed easily from power. The motives for his removal were quite vague, besides just paranoia, he didn't really believe he was a Trotskyite anyway. So perhaps it was his previous failure.
The molotov-ribentrop pact allowed the Soviets time to claim the Baltic states and Beserabia. With hind sight it's different, but given the allies had been dropping mustard gas on the Soviets not that long ago it was reasonably to be suspicious of them, and they would be of the USSR. I understand the plan was to join the allied attack on Fascism, it just happened that the French fell too soon.
>>77036033
Right, I think he was predicting a war in the west would resemble the prior war and would take significantly longer at a much higher cost. That would give him time to redevelop the military as a force solely dependent on him personally, while they had a freehand to expand in the much weaker eastern european states, and eventually into the war damaged west.
I'm much more skeptical that germany would have started a war without the explicit guarantee of a single-front war and the critical supply of oil from the USSR. It's more logistically and strategically unwise to start a conflict with those conditions.
>>77036978
The problem is, I think, he didn't really know what the Allies would do. As the anglo is pointing out, it wasn't that long since they dropped Mustard gas at the soviets.
Maybe he wanted to make sure to make any alliance between them and Germany impossible by speeding up Germany's actions, not giving them time to befriend each other?
>>77032124
>Did Stalin do the right thing by killing so many Russians?
that's both nazi and mcartyist propaganda.....Stalin never killed many russians
>>77036424
Tukhachevsky wasn't purged for his failure decades earlier. He was a serious rival in the soviet military and stalin wouldn't allow for anything like that until roughly 1943.
The relevant diplomatic tension in the period was the spanish civil war and the emergence of popular front governments as a policy of the comintern to combat the rise of fascism in the west. If anything France and the allies would have been the far preferable alignment. In fact, they proposed an alliance with GB that was rejected, which incentivized them to sign the Molotov Ribbentrop pact.
