Poor Uncle Joe.
I miss him so.
Posted on 03/05/2013 5:59:06 AM PST by Borges
About 1,000 devotees of Josef Stalin laid flowers Tuesday at his tomb by the Kremlin wall to mark the 60th anniversary of his death, while experts and politicians pondered the reasons for the Soviet dictator's enduring popularity despite his purges that killed millions.
Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov led zealots who lined up at Stalin's grave, praising him as a symbol of the nation's "great victories" and saying that Russia needs to rely on this "unique experience" to overcome its problems.
Stalin led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. Communists and other hardliners credit him with leading the country to victory in World War II and turning it into a nuclear superpower, while critics condemn his repressions. Historians estimate that more than 800,000 people were executed during the purges that peaked during the Great Terror in the late 1930s, and millions more died of harsh labor and cruel treatment in the giant Gulag prison camp system, mass starvation in Ukraine and southern Russia and deportations of ethnic minorities.
The liberal Moskovskie Novosti's cover Tuesday read "Stalin. Farewell" with the dictator's face scribbled over with childish graffiti, while staunch Communist daily Sovetskaya Rossiya ran a cover story on Stalin headlined "His time will come."
(Excerpt) Read more at philly.com ...
While half of the US celebrates “Stalin’s” birth.
while experts and politicians pondered the reasons for the Soviet dictator’s enduring popularity despite his purges that killed millions.
um... that’s one of the expected upsides when you basically kill everyone who doesn’t like you...
There are people everywhere that will mourn a man like Stalin the way a daughter mourns the death of a cruel abusive father.
That, and having strong, violent leaders is ingrained on the Russian psyche, going all the way back to the Varangian chieftans and then the Mongol Khans. I have a very good Russian friend who’s no communist but yet curiously idolizes Stalin. The feeling is apparently widespread throughout Mother Russia.
They mourn him because he gave the people free phones to use while they were waiting to be killed or enslaved.
It's Russian thing. You wouldn't understand. We invented it first!. .........
No tyrant should ever be allowed to die of natural causes.
Did they finally bury that old butcher? I thought his rotting mummy was still on display in the Kremlin.
A lot of speculation that Stalin did not die of natural causes.
Wow a whole 1,000 people out of an entire population of over 140 million.
Stalin killed nearly as many Russians as the Russian Army killed Germans in WW II.
Russians defeated the Germans in spite of Stalin.
The reviewer said “Stalin was responsible for a 1946-47 famine in Eastern Europe and Ukraine that killed more than a million people, an act as deliberate and political as the famines of the 30s.”
The book is from Knopf Publishers, by historian Robert Gellately.
Stalin Kicked the Bucket--Ray Anderson (1953)
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