Circling Back On Joseph Stalin

After Nick Fuentes told Tucker Carlson that he was a “fan” and “admirer” of Joseph Stalin, Carlson told the young antisemite that they’d have to “circle back” on that point. But like Jen Psaki before him, Carlson failed to do so.

So, I reached out to Aaron MacLean, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the host of the School of War podcast. He’s also a Marine who deployed to Afghanistan, a former professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, and, perhaps most importantly, was once my editor at the Washington Free Beacon, where I learned his encyclopedic knowledge of European history first-hand.

Is there anything to admire about Stalin? It’s a question that I think Daily Wire readers know the answer to, but one worth circling back on nonetheless. —Brent Scher

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When Adolf Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker in 1945, he was directly responsible for the deaths of more than ten million men, women, and children.

That includes the millions he had murdered in the network of camps he had constructed across Europe. Toward the end of the war the typical method was to order large, terrified groups to strip naked at gunpoint, inform them they were to be disinfected from lice, and then asphyxiate them with cyanide gas in a sealed room mocked up to look like a shower.

The gassing itself took about 15 minutes. Early in the war many were shot, until questions of troop morale compelled the Nazis to invent techniques that would be less traumatizing for the executioner.

Europe’s Jews hold the unhappy distinction of having been the largest population of Hitler’s victims, with about 6 million killed in a campaign of deliberate destruction. Millions more deaths than these can be directly attributed to Hitler’s orders, without even broaching the question of his responsibility for the overall death toll of World War II in Europe, which he started and prosecuted almost until the end.

It’s remarkable that even with so steep a butcher’s bill, Hitler does not hold first place among the 20th century’s murderers. That position is occupied by Chairman Mao Zedong, whose efforts to bring socialism to China killed more than 40 million Chinese, the vast majority of whom starved. Hitler must compete among historians for second place.

His rival is the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin.

Like Mao, Stalin led a revolutionary leftwing regime that sought to bring equality and justice to one of the most economically and socially backwards nations on earth. Like Hitler, who was born in Austria, Stalin also came from the outer reaches of the empire he would come to terrorize.

Taking power upon the death of Lenin in 1924, Stalin inherited an incomplete communist revolution. The elimination of private property and Sovietization of major cities was well underway. But the Russian countryside was vast and it had been virtually impossible to impose the rule of enlightened science with any kind of scale or efficiency. In practice, independent farmers and landowners still lived their lives much as they had before the revolution.

Stalin ordered that this capitalist inertia be halted, and “collectivized” (that is, stole) these farms and gave them to “the people” (that is, the Soviet government he dominated). Hundreds of thousands of the farmers were murdered summarily; many more of them and their families died of starvation, disease, and other conditions of deportation from their land. As violent as this consequence was, it was not the worst outcome of collectivization. That was the death by starvation of millions as the food supply, predictably, faltered when those who had grown and sold the food were replaced by entirely new and untested systems of production and distribution.

As food shortages grew, rather than acknowledge his mistake, Stalin blamed those producing the food, and accused selfish locals of hoarding rather than participating in the new communist system in good faith. Brutal punishments and the confiscation of local food supplies abounded.

In Ukraine, this campaign of deliberate retaliation, remembered today as the “Holodomor,” caused the deaths of about 3 million, as Ukrainian-grown grain was taken and transported to feed the people of Moscow and other Russian cities. Whole villages died, but not before eating their pets, boiling shoe leather for soup, and grinding bones to make flour. Many went mad, their bellies distended, their limbs withered and strengthless. Cannibalism was far from unheard of, to include within families, to include mothers and their children. All in accordance with Stalin’s orders, all in the name of science and progress.

(For those who wish to know more about the Holodomor, Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows is a brilliant examination of this episode by an eyewitness.)

Meanwhile, back at the regime’s center, among Soviet elites, Stalin feared dissent and plots to displace him from power — some real, most imagined. Such fears are the fate of any absolute dictator. To allay them, Stalin unleashed waves of purges of various elites in the state, the military, and the professions, culminating in the late 1930s in a period now known as the Great Terror. Over half a million Russians were executed during this period, many of them taken from their families in the middle of the night and shot in the basement of Moscow’s Lubyanka prison.

The overwhelming majority of them were guilty of absolutely nothing. Sometimes spectacular show trials were held for the accused, in which the captives would be compelled to theatrically “confess” their participation in nonexistent and cinematically traitorous plots against the state, lest their families also be murdered. In this period, the “luckier” victims were the many millions arrested and deported to the gulags in the east — concentration and forced labor camps where over a million died over the lifetime of the system.

(The work of Robert Conquest in his “The Great Terror” and the eyewitness accounts of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag Archipelago” and “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” are outstanding ways to learn more about Stalin’s actions in this period.)

As the Second World War loomed, many expected an apocalyptic clash between the great leftwing revolutionary power, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and the great rightwing revolutionary power, Nazi Germany. The world was then shocked when in August of 1939 Stalin agreed to a non-aggression pact with Hitler, giving the Nazi dictator a free hand to fight a war in the west while also dividing Eastern Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence. When Hitler invaded Poland in September, Soviet troops marched in as well, dividing the country in two.

Setting aside the unique horror of the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust which was still to come, Soviet rule was hardly any less brutal than that of the Nazis, with widespread liquidation (that is, murder) of Polish elites who might resist Soviet imperialism — famously, the execution in the woods near Katyn of over 20,000 Polish military officers, police, intellectuals, and other elites. A small number in comparison to other bloodbaths of the day — an immaterial observation to the families of the dead.

Hitler betrayed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, in one of the Soviet dictator’s most notable lapses of judgment: a man who never trusted another living soul in his own country bizarrely trusted Adolf Hitler. The cataclysm that ensued very nearly wiped Russia out as an independent country, not least because the Soviet military’s officer corps had been decimated by waves of purges, leaving mediocrities and yes-men overrepresented among the survivors.

Nevertheless, the blood of the common Russian soldier, the snow of the Russian winter, and the steel of the American industrial machine prevailed in defeating Hitler in the east. The United States saved Soviet Russia due to a common interest in defeating Nazi expansionism, only then to have to deal with Soviet expansionism, as Stalin postwar imposed iron rule on Eastern Europe and sought opportunities for global communism to expand wherever the free world showed weakness, from West Berlin to South Korea. The terror and expansionism only moderated upon his death in 1953 — and the regime he did so much to shape continued to destabilize the world and oppress its own people for another 40 years.

Why anyone, let alone anyone like Nick Fuentes, who claims to be on the Right, would “admire” Joseph Stalin seems at first a mystery — but the solution to the puzzle is in the fact that he seems to admire both Hitler and Stalin. The particulars of the revolutionary ideologies in question matter less than the sheer gleeful desire for destruction for its own sake. The terrain of the 20th century is made up of rivers of blood and mountains of murdered innocents, piled to the heavens. America’s heroic role in that period was to draw a line and defeat the terror of Hitler, and then contain that of Stalin.

Unfortunately the world is again a dangerous place; it is important to remember who the monsters were, and are.

Aaron MacLean is host of the podcast School of War and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.