Luzhkov, Drop the Stalin Fetish

For the upcoming 9 May, 65th anniversary of the end of the Great Ochestvenaya Voina (the Great Patriotic War or World War 2) there will be the customary hundreds, actually 2,000 to be exact, placards and billboards celebrating the great defeat of the Nazis, all over Moscow. However, unlike previous days, this year will have 10 billboards with Stalin’s image.

While there are only 10 images, that is 10 to many. If anyone had done more to make sure that millions of Soviet citizens would die needlessly and the country would come to the brink of death, it was Joseph Stalin.

Let us not forget, that it was Stalin who destroyed the Kulaks, or rather the most productive farmers of all Russia, causing wide spread famine, in his and the Soviet leadership’s misguided drive to control everything and industrialize that which should not be. This lead to the 1931 to 1933 famines, which killed millions from Ukraine through Russia and into Kazakhstan and Armenia.

He had Sergey Kirov murdered, on 1 Dec 1934, and used the murder of the 2nd face of the Soviet Union as an excuse to start massive purges of his contemporaries throughout the whole of the Soviet government, followed up by the mass murder of tens of thousands and the imprisonment of millions. Kirov, who was supposed to be Stalin’s best friend, was calm, kind and popular with the people, so much so that the 1934 Soviet voted 300 to 3 to replace Stalin with Kirov. The vote was secret and Stalin found out before the results were tallied, had them destroyed and new results giving himself a landslide. Thus was Kirov’s fate sealed and the excuse to purge the Soviet and many others, set. Well over half a million people were murdered by Stalin, in these purges. Several million more were sent to labour camps.

This period is called the Great Terror.

The NKVD Secret Operational Order n° 00447 ", of 30 July 1937, on the repression operations against ex-kulaks, criminals and other counter-revolutionary elements." This order specified the eradication once and for all, according to Nikolai Yezhov’s own words in the Preamble to Order n° 00447, of a broad range of "traditional" enemies of the regime: in particular, ex-kulaks returned after completing their sentences or after escaping deportation, recidivists, former members of non-Bolshevik parties, former czarist officials or gendarmes, anti-Soviet elements among White, Cossack or clerical groups, as well as sectarians or clergymen engaging in anti-Soviet activities (which means those not accepting state atheism). The order created quotas of individuals to be shot or sent to labor camp for ten years, amounting to a total of 76,000 "1st category elements" (death penalty) and 193,000 "2nd category elements" (ten years internment)

The Great Purge

The purges of the officer corps was the greatest crime, insuring that the Red Army would be in no shape to wage a prolonged and bitter conflict without paying for it in hundreds of thousands of dead. The Nazis, under Hitler, played an active role, creating false dossiers describing crimes and treasons that the named generals were never guilty of. Stalin’s paranoia fed on this and he destroyed all of these men, the brightest minds in the Red Army. The murderer and criminal Stalin did the most to destroy our ability to fight the Fascists.

Of the five Marshals of the Soviet Union, three were shot: Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Vasily Blyukher, and Aleksandr Yegorov. While Semyon Budyonny and Kliment Voroshilov survived, this was only a partial saving grace, since Voroshilov was a talentless hack who was promoted only by being a mindless tool for Stalin. Stalin did not stop there, murdered or suppressed by his orders were 13 of 15 Army Commanders, 8 of the top 9 admirals, 50 of the 57 Army Corps Commanders , 154 of the 186 divisional commanders, all 16 Army Commissars, and 25 of the 28 Army Corp Commissars.

No leader in any nation has ever been so fore warned that Stalin was aware of the very hour of the German attack. Stalin refused to believe it. Stalin, refused the requests of his generals to bring our military to readiness. Stalin’s refusal to see the day light beaming into his eyes led to the direct destruction of three soviet armies. Furthermore, Stalin, in the initial, critical first days, refused to allow the military to mount any major counter attacks, so as not to provoke Hitler, never mind the Germans were attacking on a broad front.

Stalin followed this with two weeks of depression, refusing to make decisions or form strategy. His mood only darkened and depression grew worse when he received news that the Germans had reached Minsk in 6 days. In the Soviet Union of 1941, after years of purges and mass murder, no one dared to make a decision and all awaited our so called “Man of Steel”, a depressed fool and mass murderer, who on this most wanting of hour, proved to be much less than our people needed or deserved.

It is only through great suffering, the death of 8 million soldiers and 20 million civilians, was our army able to destroy the Fascists, a sacrifice that was many tens of times exaggerated by the criminal actions of Stalin himself.

Finally, when those Red Army soldiers and officers, fresh with victory over the Nazis, returned home, they were faced with new purges and suppression by Stalin and his goons.

I am not bleeding heart Western liberal or NGO shill. I am an Orthodox Christians first, Russian Nationalist second and have absolutely no use or time for this new recreation of the Stalinist era, a man who ranks at the height of our list of national traitors and tyrants. The victory over the Nazis always belonged to the Soviet peoples not to the madman above them.

Stalin’s legend, as well as that of the other Soviet criminals and spillers of Russian blood, is well past the time for their destruction. It is time for these criminals and their crimes to be tried in the Russian courts, for all the evidence to be put forth. We can start with the murder of the Saint Martyr Tsar and move forward.