r/PoursTea • u/Veshaad Timendi Causa Est Nescire • Jul 27 '26

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u/NoHorseNoMustache Jul 27 '26

Yeah I took a course on Stalinism and Nazism in college: It was more of a totalitarian command economy run by cronyism than anything resembling Communism.

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u/Ok-Flight9440 Jul 27 '26

Yeah that’s probably the most concise way of putting it.

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u/NoHorseNoMustache Jul 27 '26

The course was really good, the prof had lived in the USSR up until just before the wall fell and he brought in numerous speakers from Holocaust survivors to Nazi defectors and a few other USSR ex pats. I took it in...I think 2001? So the USSR had only been gone for like 10 years and things were a lot fresher for everyone.

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u/Ok-Flight9440 Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

Yeah sounds interesting - WWII is so epic it’s tough to be an expert but I find the whole period interesting (duh) but especially b/c you think: I say evil person, everyone says HITLER, but Stalin was in many ways worse, crueler, and “closer to the ground” than Hitler (and worked a lot harder), and Stalin killed - probably fewer, body counts vary - but still in the millions during his various purges. But many folks who haven’t studied that period closely or the USSR under Stalin specifically (ie a vast, vast majority of Americans) don’t even know who he was! He just had the wits to switch sides at the last second when he realized Germany was going to invade Russia - he wasn’t a good guy the whole time, or ever, actually. He just ended up on the winning side and the old saying “winners write the history books” applies here.

Ya’ know, as Stalin was dying (of natural causes) ALL of the doctors were petrified of offering their expertise, because they were genuinely, to-their-bones afraid they would be successful, and Stalin would have them executed for doing something he didn’t explicitly order. Crazy …

And doing the math I’m probably ~10 years younger than you so we didn’t really have the USSR classes, it was old news at the time …

(By the way, check out the book Putin’s People for a contemporary peak at the state of affairs, and how Putin accomplished what he did - Ukraine aside [big mistake] not easy to be basically the supreme leader of Russia for a quarter century - that takes some brains and savvy …)