Stalin Voted Third Most Popular Figure By the Russians…. Today

A funny post happened over at the Opinion Forum:

Imagine reading this headline: “German People Vote Adolf Hitler Third Most Popular German Historical Figure.”

Can you really imagine that? The international condemnation against such an act would be immediate, forceful, and united. It would be a major news story in newspapers, on TV, and the internet. Such an unthinkable action would warrant official statements from virtually every government in the world, absolutely infuriate the Jewish community, and might even generate a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the act. Germany’s international credibility as a serious power in the world would disappear in less than 24 hours.

Hitler’s name and legacy are toxic. Just thinking of him immediately brings images of human suffering, brutality, death, war, and hate. In some parts of Europe it is a crime punishable by going to prison to deny the Holocaust. The thought of anyone from anywhere, including Germany today, any public official, person in academia, historian, business professional, farmer, homeless person, factory worker publicly defending Hitler, or any of his actions, would be inconceivable. No reasonable person would ever do it…never!

And yet Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin, the Russian Adolf Hitler, was voted by the Russian people as the third most popular Russian historical figure. The Rossiya state television channel organized a contest called “Name of Russia”. Over six months in 2008, more than 4.9 million Russians voted by internet, phone and text message for who they believed was the most famous Russian ever.

519,071 Russians voted for a man who, according to Professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii R.J. Rummel, murdered 43 million people. Stalin’s atrocities, which include the Ukrainian famine known as the Holodomor, the Great Purge of 1937-38, the gulag labor camps, mass deportations and executions, and the terror imposed on citizens of Russia and other captive nations, are on the same scale, if not far greater, than Hitler’s.

There’s no question that these voting results are deplorable, as are the thought processes, or the lack of them, behind such voting.  Still, it seems to me completely understandable.  For one thing, what else do the Russians have in terms of the history , that you don’t have to reach back over 100 years for?  Secondly, it seems to me rather obvious that the ones who were doing the voting, are the ones who were left following the rule of Stalin.  Of course is going to be popular; the only ones that were left were people that would have supported him anyway.

Here’s the thing; Hitler was defeated.  The Soviet Union never was.  It collapsed from within, not from without.  And therein lies the difference.  The Nazis lost.  The Soviets won.
History, it is said, is rewritten by the vectors of conflicts.  Apply that to your question.

Clearly, what is happened in terms of reeducation of the Russian people for their new freedoms, has not been up to the drill of competing with 70 years of Soviet propaganda.  That reeducation process would have been far simpler, had the Soviets had their butts kicked following WWII as  George Patton advised us to be doing.  It’s far easier to educate somebody away from something that’s a proven failure.  The Soviet system, of course was a proven failure, but not in ways that the majority of the Soviet people could understand.  The struggles in wartime, are relatively easy for anyone to understand.  The struggles of maintaining an empire, and keep it from crumbling, are another matter altogether, and above most people even in the west, let alone in the undereducated Soviet empire.

Ask, do we see the voting results we have in front of us.

Or perhaps, the polling has been  manipulated to to present the image that those voting really want Soviet rule to return ?  It’s something I wouldn’t put past the supporters of communism… communists manipulating the news media for the purpose of reinforcing their own position?  Who would have thunk it?

Trevor goes on saying that the legacy of Stalin and that history can repeat itself.  I submit that’s exactly what the pollsters had in mind when they jiggled the numbers.