Quote:
Originally posted by Spanky
I think he did a lot of murdeing between 1945 and his death. Not only executing all the German sympathizers, but moving all those people around. After 45 there may not have been as many deaths from the purges, but the general population and the nonrussians really got it.
In addition, if we had taken out the communist regime in Russia, I think we could have prevented China falling to the communists. That would have saved at least 100 million deaths. We could also have stopped North Korea, Vietnam and Pol Pot. I don't believe communists ever took over with popular support. Sometimes they had some but never a majority. They always had to take over with force of arms. In China many of the peasants may have supported them at first, but they never had support in the cities.
If we took out Stalin, we could have nipped communism in the bud and prevented hundreds of millions of deaths.
In hindsigh we should have treated communsim like Nazism. Competely unacceptible. We should have stamped it out before it got really bad.
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Remember-- the point I was answering was NOT whether we should have killed Stalin (if possible) after WWII.
I agree that would have been good -- although his successor might not have been much better right away (in the mid to late 1940s, it might well have been Beria). I think it took the post-WWII purges and internal puschts, inclduing the "Jewish doctors" thing to convince some substantial portions of the surviving Communist elite that Stalin had gone nuts by the end and that they had to go in a different direction.
The very specific point I was addressing was whether the U.S. should have threatened (and then presumably followed through with) nuking every location where we thought Stalin might be hiding until the USSR withdrew from the nations it occupied. I think not.
Also as to China -- killing Stalin and taking out the communist regime in Russia are two different things. In my view, the U.S. had neither the ability nor the will to do the latter immediately after WWII (would have taken another war of the magnitude of that just completed). Might have enabled us to defeat the Communist Chinese, but I'm not at all sure of that. Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang were corrupt, oppressive, and not exactly popular. The Communists were damn popular among the peasantry --as you noted -- which was 90%+ of the Chinese population then.
Killing Stalin in 1945 could not have saved China from Mao.
The Vietnamese Communists had significant popular support -- that truly was a civil war in many ways.
S_A_M
