Even after World War II, the anti-religious campaign stormed on for decades, with Bibles forbidden and little to no religious education. Culturally speaking, urban Bolsheviks had had little in common with rural peasants who made up much of the general populace.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. Political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann has highlighted three significant factors in Russian society.
Russian attitudes to Stalin have changed over the decades. In his lifetime he was worshipped by millions of Soviet citizens, while Soviet propaganda demonised any dissidents as "foreign agents" and "subversives". In , after Stalin's death, came a watershed moment: Communist leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced the Stalin personality cult and dictatorship, in a secret speech to the 20th Party Congress.
That led to a temporary thaw in political repression, as thousands of prisoners were freed from Stalin's labour camps. But in the following decades the Soviet authorities covered up the true scale of Stalin's crimes.
Dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn chronicled the harsh regime in Stalin's Gulag camps, and was persecuted for it. Many Russians were shocked to learn the truth in the late s, when former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev lifted the veil on Stalinism, with his "glasnost" openness policy.
We also know that, as in the early s, the main victims were the peasants, many of them survivors of hunger and of concentration camps. In all, , people were killed during the Great Terror, to which might be added a few hundred thousand more Soviet citizens shot in smaller actions.
The total figure of civilians deliberately killed under Stalinism, around six million, is of course horribly high. But it is far lower than the estimates of twenty million or more made before we had access to Soviet sources.
At the same time, we see that the motives of these killing actions were sometimes far more often national, or even ethnic, than we had assumed. Indeed it was Stalin, not Hitler, who initiated the first ethnic killing campaigns in interwar Europe. Nazi Germany began to kill on the Soviet scale only after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in the summer of and the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland that September.
About , Polish civilians were killed between and , with each regime responsible for about half of those deaths. It was this policy that brought asphyxiation by carbon monoxide to the fore as a killing technique. Beyond the numbers killed remains the question of intent. Most of the Soviet killing took place in times of peace, and was related more or less distantly to an ideologically-informed vision of modernization.
Germany bears the chief responsibility for the war, and killed civilians almost exclusively in connection with the practice of racial imperialism. Germany invaded the Soviet Union with elaborate colonization plans.
Thirty million Soviet citizens were to starve, and tens of millions more were to be shot, deported, enslaved, or assimilated. Such plans, though unfulfilled, provided the rationale for the bloodiest occupation in the history of the world. The Germans placed Soviet prisoners of war in starvation camps, where 2.
A million Soviet citizens also starved during the siege of Leningrad. Some , German soldiers died in Soviet captivity. Suitcases that belonged to people deported to the Auschwitz camp.
This photograph was taken after Soviet forces liberated the camp. Auschwitz, Poland, after January Hitler came to power with the intention of eliminating the Jews from Europe; the war in the east showed that this could be achieved by mass killing. By December , when it appears that Hitler communicated his wish that all Jews be murdered, perhaps a million Jews were already dead in the occupied Soviet Union.
Most had been shot over pits, but thousands were asphyxiated in gas vans. As the Holocaust spread to the rest of occupied Europe, other Jews were gassed by hydrogen cyanide at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Overall, the Germans, with much local assistance, deliberately murdered about 5.
He was also adored. During his lifetime he was glorified in newspapers and films, cities and streets were named after him, and statues of him were put up around the USSR. He was seen as the man who turned an undeveloped and divided nation into an industrial super-power. The USSR became strong enough to help defeat Germany during World War 2 and after the war was one of the most powerful nations in the world.
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