As Stalin murdered the officer corps of the Red Army in the 1930s and replaced it with his sidekicks, who were completely incompetent as generals and showed they were incompetent when the nazis invaded; Stalin starved to death or murdered 11 million people who could have fought against the nazis; as he continued to arrest, imprison and murder people, including frontline soldiers, and guard them with superbly armed troops throughout the war; He deported several Nations and their millions of people on spurious accusations of "treason" to their death at a time when the Soviet Union was fighting for its life and needed every soldier it could get; as over a million Soviet citizens disliked Stalin and his henchmen so much that they fought against them through the war, while fighting Hitler.

After the concentration camps were being liberated by russian troops. The russian forces raped the jewish women of these camps and any russians found their were sent to the russian labour camps.

It shows that human society turns a blind eye to evil if your allies carry it out, but makes mass media out of evil that is your enemy.

Why is this an either / or question - surely both were evil despots?

Atrocities are carried out by all sides during wartime (part of the war process is demonising / de-humanising your enemy making atrocities appear unimportant to those carrying them out as they are not being carries out against 'real people') but the fact of the matter is history is written by the winners!

Originally posted by evildrneil
Why is this an either / or question - surely both were evil despots?

Atrocities are carried out by all sides during wartime (part of the war process is demonising / de-humanising your enemy making atrocities appear unimportant to those carrying them out as they are not being carries out against 'real people') but the fact of the matter is history is written by the winners!

Yes. But Stalin murdered millions not just during WW2, but while allied to Hilter

Originally posted by Liquid
Yes. But Stalin murdered millions not just during WW2, but while allied to Hilter

I don't think you will find Stalin marked down in any books as a great paragon of humanitarianism anywhere so why the attempt to diiferentiate the attrocities of Hitler and Stalin (or for that matter Pal Pot, Mao, Mengistu, Francois Duvalier etc. etc. etc.) They are all evil despotic rulers who slaughtered and terrorised their own people - hardly polite dinner companions any of them!

Dr Neil is the evilest.

It's a bit misleading to say , "History is written by the winners ".
If this were true we wouldn't be criticising Stalin now , would we ?
It's true that in the immediate aftermath of a victory , the victor is in a powerful position to give their version of events but usually as , "history " or time moves on , some sort of truth begins to emerge , as in the case of Stalin ; or let's say more and more facts are uncovered as time goes on and then we have to try to make sense of those facts and/or put them in perspective. That's part of the fascination of History.
In the case of Stalin , his debunking as an all-wise , God-like figure began in 1956 , in Russia itself , by Kruschov , in his famous , "secret " speech , although any non-biased observer of the Soviet Union would have known much earlier than that , that Stalin was ruthless and had his blind spots.
I don't think one can blame Stalin much for the behaviour of some Soviet troops in Germany in 1945. They had seen terrible things that the Germans had done in their own country , far beyond what we experienced in the West.It's interesting to note that whenever Western Allied troops came across Nazi atrocities in Germany , quite often their first reaction was hatred and disgust of all things German , at least for a time. Many Russian soldiers had experienced Nazi atrocities for 3 years !
When Britain was threatened with invasion we arrested loads of Germans and Italians , including Jews and those who had fled from the Nazis ! At the time of the deportations in Russia , the Russians were in a much more dangerous situation than we were. Many of the deportees died of starvation but the food supply in Russia , even for soldiers , was meagre , so deportees would come very low down on the list. Many Japanese were imprisoned in America during the war , who were in no way sympathetic to Japan's war effort. Unfortunately things like this often happen when people are frightened and in conflict.
Not every Soviet prisoner of war was sent to Siberia., although all of them were under various degrees of suspicion. They were usually screened and ----yes----any "evidence"of collaboration with the Germans or criticism of Stalin usually meant Siberia.
Stalin was a very complex man and there is surely no doubt that he made blunders and was responsible directly and indirectly for the deaths of millions of people. For this very reason , there is no need to , "gild the lilly". He 's got all the bad reputation he can use as it is !