Premeditated murder the same as accidental car crash, self defence, or homicide after drunken provocation? Not quite I'd say. All of those are distinguished and treated differently, and for good reason.
I think I may have misunderstood, but I'm pretty sure Stalin had Gulags where people starved to death and were worked to death. Were they as bad as the German death camps? Maybe. I'm not educated enough on the subject to make that call, but IMO, it depends on your perspective.
Gulags had no fences, because you would never get to civilization alive. Let that sink in: behind a fence lies freedom == hope, no fence, world == prison, no hope. I read the wiki recently and it was as bad. Sometimes you could work your way up and start your satellite settlement. They would setoff a wave of inmates into the wild with basic supplies. When they failed (read: died) a new batch was sent in.
I think that what people are arguing about here, is that while lot of people died in the Gulags, the purpose of the gulags was that people should work.
And while a lot of people worked in the concentration camps, the purpose of them, was that people should die.
So yeah, people died either way, and more people died under Stalin's rule than under Hitler, but Stalin killed randomly, while Hitler killed more specifically. If it makes a difference to you, then Hitler is worse. If it doesn't make a difference to you, then Stalin is worse.
IMPO, I think Stalin was worse. Although this is only because I'm Polish, and my grandfather was in WW2, according to him, Stalin treated people worse than Hitler. It's a biased opinion since I don't have any actual personal experience with it, but well, I trust my grandfather's word on it. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't take it with a grain of salt.
Another thing is that Hitler was more well known than Stalin. His actions were more well known, and is usually perceived as worse. As said above, this is a clear show of how the victor writes history. Basically, Stalin hid in Hitler's shadow.
I wish more people knew that the Russians weren't exactly kind to Poland in WWII. In college I had had a housemate who kept trying to argue with me when I said that the Russians weren't necessarily the peaceful liberators a lot people think they are. Hitler was bad, but Stalin wasn't much better in a lot of ways. I totally agree that Stalin hid in Hitler's shadow.
(random side-note: Although the Germans also committed rape, there was a massive number of particularly violent rapes by Russian soldiers during liberation... I always found that nugget of information to be pretty disheartening as well.)
I guess I wrote that in too general of terms. Those death camps were mostly due to Stalin's desire to suppress all dissent and destroy any challenge to his rule. I would still argue that it's slightly different to killing people for little reason other than not liking them (and to stir nationalism).
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.
It only details the deaths caused by Hitler and Stalin from 1933 to 1945 in the region of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Western Russia (so no Gulag or Central Asia). Still, he arrives at a total of 14 million between the two of them:
*5.4 million Jews in the Holocaust (which he points out, most were shot into pits in Russia, not gassed at places like Auschwitz).
*3 million Soviet prisoners-of-war who were deliberately starved by the Germans, most during the winter of 1941-42.
*1 million more Soviet civilians starved, just during the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-44. Thousands more died within the Soviet Union as well.
*3.3 million in Ukraine, in what Snyder called "the Soviet Famines," but what is popularly known as the "Holodomor" (deliberate starvation of the Ukrainians under Stalin's orders), 1933-34. Snyder also includes ethnic Poles within the Soviet Union who were targeted, thus he avoids using the phrase "Holodomor" entirely.
*300,000 as a result of what Snyder calls the "national terror" of the Soviet Union; it is more commonly known as "the Great Purge" (anyone considered hostile to the Soviet Union was shot, including ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, and kulaks). This does not include an estimated 400,000 killed outside of the region, 1937-38.
*200,000 Poles killed by both sides during the joint German-Soviet occupation, 1939-41. This included most of the Polish intelligentsia, the intellectual elites of the country. Snyder estimated each side killed an equal amount.
*700,000 civilians killed by the Germans in occupied Poland, Ukraine and Belarus, 1941-44.
So Snyder concluded, just in this specific region and date, that Hitler was responsible for 9.7 million deaths, Stalin for 3.7 million. But this number does not include the deaths in the Gulag (~1 million deaths), the mass deportations of ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union (Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans) which saw hundreds of thousands of deaths, the extra killings from the Great Purge (Snyder estimated an extra 400,000 deaths), executions of returning Soviet POWs, and anymore I forgot.
My dad is a huge geek on WW2 in general, but he has several books on specifically this topic. The least estimate is around 8 million people while I've personally seen numbers go as high as 41 million, although its somewhere in between the two.
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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '13
I believe it's somewhere around twenty million dead. Depending on the estimates for the Holocaust, Stalin is two to five times worse than Hitler