World War II eliminated one type of totalitarianism only by strengthening another, with Soviet communism gaining territory and momentum. The U.S. and Soviet Union were the two powers left standing at the end of WWII, but their longstanding rivalry never degenerated into a direct armed conflict between the two nations. Thus, their rivalry was called the Cold War as opposed to an actual hot war, though smaller conflicts spun out of it. What lent the Cold War such urgency was that if it had turned into a hot war, it would’ve been the hottest war in history because each side stockpiled big arsenals of nuclear weapons.
Joseph Stalin, ca. 1937
Joseph Stalin, ca. 1937
Starved Peasants on the Street in Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1933
Starved Peasants on the Street in Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1933
Complicating matters, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was a sociopath of near Hitlerian proportions. As General Secretary of the Communist Party, his ruthless disregard for human life made him the idol of future Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The son of Georgian peasants, Comrade Stalin worked his way up the Bolshevik ranks as a bank robber in the czarist era. In power from 1922-53, he was probably as murderous as Hitler, killing at least 10 million Soviets through deliberate, if famine-related, starvation, including the Ukrainian Holodomor (left), Great Terror political purges, and imprisonment in Gulag labor camps. Holodomor translates to “extermination by hunger.” Some historians, including Robert Conquest in The Great Terror (1968), estimate the number as high as 20 million while others, including Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Soviet historian/political reformer Alexander Yakovlev, put the number far higher yet, at 60-70 million. If we’re keeping score, Hitler’s total should include more than just the Holocaust since he was largely responsible for the entire European theater of WWII that killed tens of millions more, including civilians in Stalin’s USSR.
For sheer callousness at least, Stalin could rival anyone. He sealed off borders and liquidated prosperous peasants (kulaks) by starving them to death to redirect their money toward industry. He famously said that “one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Like Hitler, his genocidal policies were often aimed at nationalities such as Ukrainians or nomads of Kazakhstan. Nonetheless, most historians would argue that, given the choice, Soviets and Eastern Europeans were lucky that the USSR prevailed over Germany in World War II. Remember, Hitler’s unrealized Generalplan Ost would’ve enslaved, expelled or exterminated most of the Slavic population. Under Stalin, citizens were usually allowed to live as long as they submitted to state authority and many prisoners survived the Gulags. Luckily, Stalin never fully provoked the West to the point of escalation and didn’t live to see the advent of nuclear missiles with hydrogen-bomb warheads.
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