A Helluva Guy
Funny, as the US recovers from a few misguided years of tearing down statues of men we once revered as heroes, Russia just unveiled a new monument to, unquestionably, one of the worst human beings ever to walk the earth, never mind lead a country.
On May 15, a new memorial to Joseph Stalin was unveiled at Moscow's Taganskaya metro station and, somewhat incredibly, Muscovites have been flocking to it, with many of the propaganda victims placing flowers to honor the brutal Soviet dictator who was to blame for more misery and death than any Russian leader in history.
This was a dude who orchestrated mass murder through purges, forced famines, and his massive gulag system.
From 1936 through 1938, he orchestrated the Great Terror, during which he directed the execution of as many as 1.2 million of his perceived enemies, including Communist Party members, intellectuals, military officers and everyday citizens.
As many as 1.2 million people were executed, and millions more were sent to the gulags, a network of forced labor camps.
Show trials and quotas for arrests fueled the terror, decimating the Red Army and eliminating dissent within Soviet society, while Stalin’s cult of personality enabled him to consolidate his absolute power and obscure the scale of the state’s atrocities.
From the early 1930s until it was dismantled during Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign, the gulag system held upwards of 5 million prisoners, including dissidents and ordinary citizens.
An estimated 1.5 million died do to the brutal conditions at the forced labor camps.
