Lenin and Stalin are to Russians what Washington and Lincoln are to Americans. They also served similar roles in both countries, though the gap between Washington and Lincoln was much wider and they obviously didn’t fight together in the revolution. Washington upended the political order and replaced it with a new one, and Lincoln resolved the problems that Washington and his peers failed to address. But the way Lincoln resolved it was controversial, and not everyone is happy with the outcome. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not that there are Americans who want slavery to come back. They’re unhappy that Lincoln cemented a loose, theoretically voluntary coalition of equal sovereign states into a centralized dictatorship. The dictatorship established by Lincoln only got more authoritarian since then. This needed to be done, but it is important to understand why not all Americans are happy about it, even now.
The controversy surrounding Lenin and Stalin is roughly equivalent. When a Russian complains about something Stalin did, he’s not suggesting that Nazi Germany should have won, or in any way implying that Stalin and Hitler were equivalent. It is true that Stalin is controversial, and it’s not all NATO propaganda. There was a huge moral shift and it wasn’t just in Russia, but global. The exact reasons why this moral shift happened can be debated, but it is most likely because World War II was the single biggest man-made disaster in history, both East and West.
In 1945 all of the world’s major cultures concluded that genocide is bad. Up until that point, war and genocide came hand in hand, and were practically the same thing. Basically every wartime leader had committed something that could be construed as genocide, and no one saw anything wrong with this. When you win a war you convert the population to your way of thinking, or at least something compatible to your way of thinking. If there’s a group of people who are too obstinate, you physically remove them one way or another, and throughout human history everybody has done this.
Realizing that genocide is bad was a great moment for human cultural evolution, but it didn’t happen smoothly or flawlessly. This realization that genocide is bad also didn’t end genocide, just like realizing murder is bad didn’t end murder. Or perhaps a better example, realizing slavery is bad didn’t end slavery.
Throughout most of human history, slavery was fine and nobody even thought it was bad. More importantly, people were fine with being slaves. It was just the way of things, some people were owners, and some people were slaves. But after the widespread realization that slavery is bad, the genie couldn’t be put back into the bottle. No one wants to be a slave and will actively resist slavery, or at the very least passively resist by not working hard, making the system impractical. Furthermore, any country that openly practices institutional slavery instantly becomes a pariah. According to the Global Slavery Index, the number of slaves around the world as of 2023 was roughly 50 million, which is a microscopic portion of the human population. Also, the GSI is extremely political, and their criteria for who counts as a slave make little sense. Slavery, in the practical sense of what slavery actually meant historically, has been all but eliminated.
Now for genocide. We already had the idea of “trinitarian warfare,” a conflict that recognizes a society as three somewhat distinct parts – civilians, government, and military. Up to and during World War II, if an army was struggling to win against the opposing government and military pillars, the solution was to just destroy the civilians, knowing resistance would eventually collapse if you caused enough destruction. But after the collective disdain for genocide, this solution became increasingly difficult, and no longer had a near-100% success rate like in previous eras. Modern armies are obligated to make at least moderate effort to only target the enemy military and spare civilians. Even targeting government infrastructure is frowned upon.
There are American commentators who insist that NATO interventions would go better if we just “took the gloves off” and started exterminating people indiscriminately. But these people are hopelessly divorced from reality. American occupations in the Middle East are tolerated for the exact reason there are limits to American violence. The average modern American citizen is not capable of calculated genocide. And even if he was, the US military is not nearly big enough to do it. The passive local population would no longer be passive if they were being indiscriminately killed, and international forces would no longer be passive either if the US attempted a classic genocide.
What’s happening now in Ukraine is interesting, and perhaps the logical conclusion of these threads. It is without a doubt the cleanest large-scale peer-on-peer war in history. Now I know the NATO trolls reading this are already smashing their keyboards in pure rage, but it’s true. The civilian fatalities (inflicted by both sides, mind you) are a fraction of even the most conservative estimates of Russian military losses. Can you think of even one modern military that showed such restraint?
Denazification, as elaborated on by Putin in his Tucker Carlson interview, is the dismantling of of the Ukraine’s pro-nazi political institutions. Denazification is not killing Ukrainian civilian who sympathize with nazism. Trinitarian warfare indeed.
With all this in mind, let’s circle back to Stalin. He put people in camps, and he forcibly relocated people. Both of these acts meet the modern criteria for genocide, it is true. And so what? He was a man of his time who faced a cataclysmic, civilization-ending crisis, and preserved the country the best he could. He was far from the only one with dirty hands among the allies. Churchill deliberately starved millions of Indians to death – which was worse than anything the Soviets did, as this was intentional starvation to break the Indians’ will to resist (that genocide thing I mentioned earlier), and FDR wholesale locked up ethnic Japanese citizens in concentration camps.
Painting Stalin, and Stalin specifically, as the same as Hitler was useful to post-WWII NATO propaganda, and it was pretty easy to do. NATO propaganda was, ironically, just an extension of Hitler’s propaganda – Germany was simply defending itself from “unprovoked Russian aggression.” By agreeing that Hitler was telling the truth, Stalin and Russians became the big baddies of WWII. But… this propaganda came at a cost, which I’ll explain.
American political discourse is just variations of this:
-Bush is literally as bad as Hitler!
-No, Obama is literally as bad as Hitler!
-But Trump is literally as bad as Hitler too!
And so on. Needless to say, that’s not normal or healthy. What exactly went wrong? I think it started with the “Stalin was just as bad as Hitler” narrative. This required, in part, exaggerating the scale Stalin’s misdeeds, but just as importantly, required downplaying Hitler’s. See, concentration camps were very common throughout history, but actual extermination camps like Auschwitz were rare. By equating all camps as like Hitler’s, we’re diminishing the scale of Hitler’s atrocities. There’s yet another problem with this logic. The western allies sided with Stalin and the Soviet Union against Hitler and Nazi Germany. If we declare that the Soviets were no better than nazis, then this means that allies of the Soviets were also no better than nazis. You cannot accept one of these statements without accepting the other. Shitting on the Soviet victory over nazism is shitting on the American and British victories too, because they were a joint effort.
Declaring that Stalin and Hitler were one and the same took us down a pretty bad rabbit hole. If a world leader who commits an act that could be construed as a genocide on any scale is the same as Hitler, then that just means that practically all world leaders throughout history were like Hitler. Is this a useful lesson? Is it an actionable lesson? Most importantly, is it even a true statement? Was every world leader who fought a war just as evil and depraved as Hitler? No, I don’t think that’s true at all, and more than a little insulting.
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Ian Kummer
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