Who was worse and why: Hitler or Stalin?

Evil is evil- it just is. Stalin and Hitler were both horrible men, horrible leaders, and they did horrible things to their own people and others. That said, I think Hitler is the more evil of the 2.

Asking this question is kinda like asking “what’s worse dying of rabies or being lit on fire”. They both just really suck. I’m not a fan of historical antler measuring contests but regardless- it’s a common question so let’s address it.


Hitler took power in 1933 and reigned in Germany as dictator until 1945 when Germany fell. During this period of time

  1. He started the largest war in world history where some 60 million people would die
  2. He would spearhead and order the largest genocide in human history
  3. He would destroy his own nation and in the end, his final orders were for SS units to destroy the remaining German infrastructure because “the German people failed me”

Now Hitler really stands alone when it comes to horror.

During WW2 the Nazis would directly kill 35 million civilians. This is an insane number. Now, these are not people killed by accident when a factory was bombed nor are these indirect deaths from German actions. No- I mean Germans shot, gassed, tortured, and intentionally killed 35 million civilians.

  • 6 million Jews were either killed in camps by gas chambers, worked to death, or murdered by mobile killing squads. At Treblinka, entire trains full of children arrived and were gassed and killed on the spot.
  • 20 million Russian civilians were killed by Germans. In many (if not most) cases the Germans just slaughtered any civilians they found. In other cases, they besieged their cities and let them starve.
  • 2.5 million Poles were killed in camps, murdered by mobile killing squads, or shot to death.
  • 3 million Soviet POWs were killed inside German concentration cams
  • 300,000 disabled people were murdered by Nazis in their infamous T4 program.

These are just the primary crimes against humanity Hitler ordered and inspired.

In his 12 years in power 35 million died. This means that for every year that man ruled Germany, 3 million civilians died on average. These deaths were intentional, horrific, and make your blood run cold


Stalin was no angel either though.

He made his name in the communist party by committing various crimes to raise funds. He was known as a violent sociopath with little regard for human life.

When Lenin died though Stalin quickly found himself in power and from 1922 to 1953 Stalin would rule the USSR as its absolute dictator.

Stalin would cause famines, kill political enemies, and kill innocent civilians alike. He maintained power through fear, torture, brutality, and ruthlessness.

How many died under his rule though? Well this is hard to say.

Now, most of you will say “20 million” but that number is a bit tricky. First off there is no evidence for 20 million being valid. In order to get to 20 million you have to include every possible famine, wildly overestimate realistic death tolls, and stretch the truth.

The only historians to conclude “20 million” as the number are famously anti-socialist and this is important to note.

I conclude that 10,300,000 were killed due to Stalin.

  • 4 million in the Holodomor which was a famine in Ukraine.
    • Note that famine is different from genocide. It’s debated if Stalin intended for famine to occur or not. I think he likely did so I include it but there is a strong debate that he did not intend for this to happen. Intent matters- it’s the difference between murdering your room ate and accidentally killing someone in a car crash.
  • 300,000 in the Decossakization (arguably genocide)
    • Some estimates peg this number as low as 10,000 though
  • 1 million in The Great Purge
  • 200,000 in Operation Lentil
  • 50,000 in the deportation of Crimean Tatars
  • 500,000 killed in Kulak Deportations
  • 100,000 additional killed in Gulags (most are already included in the above events)
  • 4–5 million Germans were killed in WW2
    • 2.5 million civilians were killed due to war crimes
    • 1 million POWs killed
    • 600,000 killed after post-WW2 deportations
  • 150,000 Polish POWs killed

Now many of these were extremely brutal. After German atrocities in the USSR the Reds wanted revenge and brutalized the German civilian population.

Moreover, life in the USSR was terrifying for many. Stalin’s government was horrifyingly cruel and often killed at random simply to inspire fear.

My total of 10 million can be debated though. Famines are disasters and its hard to include them as intentional killings. Additionally, records are really incomplete here and while I am not on the high end- I am also far from the low-end estimates


Every year Hitler was in power 3 million people died on average

Every year Stalin was in power 300,000 people died on average.

Hitler is responsible for 3 times more killings than Stalin and he achieved this number in 1/3rd the time.

Also, Hitler intended to kill every single civilian that died– in fact, he wanted to kill many more but was thankfully stopped. With Stalin, it is not so clear. We can attribute many millions of deaths to him- but not all were intentional or desired.

Either way they were both horrible people.

Anne Applebaum, “Red Famine”

A columnist for The Washington Post and author of the Pulitzer-winning Gulag, Applebaum has been writing about Russia since the 1990s. Her fifth book is a detailed study of Stalin’s 1929 policy of agricultural collectivization, which set off the worst famine in European history. Some five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. Of these, roughly three million were Ukrainians, and Applebaum definitively shows that they died due to deliberate government policy. Drawing on newly opened archives and personal accounts not previously translated, Applebaum substantiates the stories that Stalin suppressed Ukrainian uprisings by closing the borders, stopping food shipments, and letting the rebellious peasants starve.

 

(32 min): wrote about the Ukranianism of American politics with Paul Manafort

Search out far left and far right. They don’t invent, but they do fund.

Question: how do we divide people.

38:12
[Stalin] writing in private you know what he
writes to Kaganovich and these other
sidekicks he believes his ideology and
one of the things that’s important about
them about the Bolsheviks is they
believed that Marxism wasn’t just some
kind of theory and it could be money
they believed that it was a science and
it was true
and it’s even more common
because it’s science and it’s true and
we define what it is and that means that
whatever we’ve said you know is true
and
this is this is how things are going to
be and if it doesn’t work out in reality
the way we thought it was going to then
somebody else is responsible and who’s
responsible saboteurs wreckers kulaks
enemies of the people enemies of the
state you know and I actually believe
now that a lot of the you know a lot of
the violence the kinds kind of cycles of
violence you have in the Soviet Union
1932 and 33 you had the famine a few
years later you had the purges of 1937
and you have cyclical violence and
that’s almost always a response to
policy failure
you know it hasn’t worked
the revolution hasn’t brought prosperity
and made us happy there has to be a
reason for it
okay you know let’s find the let’s find
the the parasites who are sucking the
blood of the revolution and get rid of
them
and so that was you know and so the
so so your point you know your logical
point okay well look this agricultural
policy hasn’t worked let’s change it
that’s not how they thought you know it
wasn’t let’s change it love wheat you
know it’s not our policy that needs to
change it’s you know
the people in reality that has to adjust
our way of thinking and anyways I said I

What is Putin’s IQ? Is he a genius? Were Stalin and Peter the Great geniuses?

Putin

.. His speaking style is typical for any experienced, high-level bureaucrat: leaden, colourless, but occasionally interspersed with locker-room jokes, sex-related similes and street-smart threats.

.. Stalin .. What we know from media about his political decision-making shows the full toolbox of every advanced spy and secret police organization throughout history. Its obsession with secrecy, careful preparation, deep layering, multi-option planning, highly sophisticated tactical thinking. How much of this is attributed to himself, and how much to his aides and government organization, is unknown.

What is clear, though, is that Putin is a very good judge of character, and a skillful manager of human relationships. To this day, no one from his close circle has turned against him with compromising information, or by heading political dissent.

Putin’s Medieval Dreams

As much of the world makes amends for social and political injustices of the past, Russia is lionizing its despots, raising statues to the worst of them. Behind this phenomenon is an ultra-nationalist brand of conservatism that seeks to take Russian politics back to the Middle Ages.

While much of the world is busy dismantling monuments to oppressors, Russians are moving in the opposite direction, erecting statues to medieval warlords who were famous for their despotism. Understanding this revival can shed light on the direction of Russia’s politics.

In October 2016, with the endorsement of Russia’s culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky, the country’s first-ever monument to Ivan the Terrible was unveiled in the city of Orel. A month later, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, called for Lenin Avenue in Moscow to be renamed Ivan the Terrible Highway. And in July of this year, President Vladimir Putin christened Moscow’s own tribute to the tyrant, declaring, erroneously, that “most likely, Ivan the Terrible never killed anyone, not even his son.”

Most historians agree that Ivan lived up to his name; not only did he kill his son and other relatives, he also ordered the oprichnina, the state-led purges that terrorized Russia from 1565 to 1572. He also presided over Russia’s defeat in the Livonian War, and his misrule contributed to the Time of Troubles and the state’s devastating depopulation.

.. Joseph Stalin initiated the modern cult of Ivan the Terrible. But, since the mid-2000s, Russia’s Eurasia Party – a political movement led by the pro-fascist mystic Alexander Dugin – has moved to position Ivan as the best incarnation of an “authentic” Russian tradition: authoritarian monarchy.

Dugin’s brand of “Eurasianism” advocates the embrace of a “new Middle Ages,” where what little remains of Russian democracy is replaced by an absolute autocrat. In Dugin’s ideal future, a medieval social order would return, the empire would be restored, and the Orthodox church would assume control over culture and education.

.. Eurasianism, which was marginal in the 1990s, has gained considerable popularity in recent years by contributing to the formation of the so-called Izborsky Club, which unites the Russian far right.

.. Putin has referred to Eurasianism as an important part of Russian ideology

.. members of the Eurasia Party, who consider political terror the most effective tool of governance and call for a “new oprichnina” – a staunchly anti-Western Eurasian conservative revolution. According to Mikhail Yuriev, a member of the political council of the Eurasia Party and author of the utopian novel The Third Empire, the oprichniks should be the only political class, and they should rule by fear.

.. Cultural vocabulary is also reverting. For example, the word kholop, which means “serf,” is returning to the vernacular, a linguistic devolution that parallels a troubling rise in Russia’s modern slavery. Data from the Global Slavery Index show that more than one million Russians are currently enslaved in the construction industry, the military, agriculture, and the sex trade. Moreover, serf “owners” are also happily identifying themselves as modern-day barins.

.. Nostalgia for serfdom compliments the desire for a return to autocracy.

.. Putin’s tacit support for the Eurasian vision of a neo-medieval Russia invokes the historical memory of Stalinism. According to Dugin, “Stalin created the Soviet Empire,” and, like Ivan the Terrible, expresses “the spirit of the Soviet society and the Soviet people.” No wonder, then, that monuments to Stalin, too, are multiplying in Russian cities.

.. Neo-medievalism is rooted in nostalgia for a social order based on inequality, caste, and clan, enforced by terror.

The lionization of historical despots reflects the contemporary embrace of such pre-modern, radically anti-democratic and unjust values. For Ivan’s contemporary champions, the past is prologue.