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Edi wrote:

Stas Bush wrote:And in any case Confederates, Stalin, Mao have something in common - they weren't physically annihilating entire nations in war of conquest. So Japan and Germany are in a league of their own.

Leaving the confederates out of it, but with regard to Mao and specifically to Stalin, what is the material difference between annihilation during a war of conquest and annexation followed by mass deportations to prison camps where nearly everyone sent there died? Because that's the kind of ethnic cleansing that happened in the Baltic states and in other territories annexed by Sovet Russia and it was always accompanied by a policy of Russianization of the territories in question, which is why so many former Soviet republics have such a large Russian minority. Mao admired Stalin and followed his example in many ways. The Soviet Union belongs very much in that same league, even if most of its atrocities were internal (so far as ethnic cleansing of violently annexed territories can be considered internal).

There is a very good reason why Stalin is often spoken of in very much the same tone as Hitler is. Because he was a mass-murdering asshole.

Stas Bush wrote:The difference is measured in dozens of millions of people. The USSR deported hundreds of thousands internally from annexed territories, mostly as a purge of political opposition. The Nazis and satellites killed dozens of millions from directly conquered territories. That's basically it - purge of political opposition doesn't equal total annihilation. All nations incorporated into the USSR or Soviet sphere are now reasonably industrialized, Second World nations with their populations still there. The Nazis were about to cleanse the territories wholesale and recolonize them after the inhabitants are, well, dead. That's really different. The scale of deportations is not even comparable to what the Nazis did. Do you think deporting 1-2% of a republic's population like say with Estonia, is similar to destroying physically 1/3rd of it's population like in Belorus? The scale is even irrelevant; but it belays the mechanism - political purge versus ethnic annihilation.

Edi wrote:Granted for the most part, but it seems to me that you have some of your numbers a little on the small side wrt the Baltics. Before WW2, there were nearly as many Estonians as there were Finns. Now there are less than two million and that includes the Russian minority which comprises over 30% of the population. So their current numbers are half of what it was prewar. The combined number of people killed or sent to death camps in Soviet purges and exiles who fled to avoid the same fate totals far more than the 1-2% of the population.

Stalin killed millions all told with his reign of terror, but he spread it out over more than 30 years from the 1920s to until he died instead of having it all concentrated in a few short years the way Nazi Germany did. His policies toward many of the non-Russian minorities were those of slow strangulation rather than instant extermination, but I see it as a difference of degree, not a difference of kind.

However, in the interests of keeping this thread on track, I suggest we either continue this over PM or email or in a separate thread altogether.

So here's the problem:

Estonia's population 1939: 1,136,400
Estonia's number of population lost due to conscription, execution or deportation: 59,732, of them deported during the June deportation 5978, plus arrested during a parallel June crackdown 3178, and put into Soviet penitentiary system prior to June 1941 - around 1500 arrestees max. The rest which would constitute over 40 thousand, were lost due to forcible conscription or the USSR forcibly evacuating them after the onset of war. That is a large number of repressed for such a small republic, but it's not overwhelmingly large.

To compare, 80000 people fled from Estonia by sea to Finland and Sweden, becoming war refugees and later, expatriates. 25,000 Estonians reached Sweden and a further 42,000 Germany. During the war about 8 000 Estonian Swedes and their family members had emigrated to Sweden. The USSR in 1945 found the population of Estonia, which it left as over a million strong nation, being around 850 thousand. In essence, more people were lost in Estonia in wartime due to flight and war than due to Soviet repressive activities.

The USSR deported Estonians in 1949 as well, around 20,000.

In total, the USSR deported 32 540 Estonians in 1940-1953. (Deportee data from P.Polyan, "Not of their own will", it's basically archival data on deportees). That is around 2,8% of the Republic's total population. In total, among the deportees around 4594 maximally died (most of them from the first deportation, because they suffered high wartime death rates, up to 60%, in the second 20,000 strong deportation less people died).

It re-settled Estonia with Russians as well, due to a large population loss, but deporting 2,8% of the population, and of those, a 0,4% of population died, doesn't sound as total destruction.

Comparing that to the actions of the Germans against subhumans - say, Belorus - is completely out of proportion: 2,230,000 dead in mere 3 years of occupation. Even seeing as population is higher than Estonia, one could see that the Republic's population even scaled down to Estonia's would result in between 250,000 and 300,000 dead only in Estonia, were the USSR even comparably, remotely intent on destroying the Estonian nationality physically.

Of course, one can select a greater territory, but Poland, Russia and Yugoslavia - the nations where Slavic subhumans and Jews were slated for mass destruction, would also yield rates of six-to-10% of population dead only, the number of those transferred, deported to slavery or otherwise moved would be outside of that scope (but it was also pretty high).

In essence, it's hard to honestly say that the Germans' actions were not unusual and unparalleled in the regard of ethnic cleansing.

Also, Finland had 3,5 million humans in 1939 - thrice Estonia's population, and close to the population of Leningrad in the same time. Considering what Germans did to Leningrad, you could see how they basically had no qualms about exterminating entire cities. In fact, I have not seen anything remotely comparable to the German plans for Leningrad and Moscow, comparable in the terms of complete annihilation slated for multi-million megapolis cities. Perhaps the Pnom Penh terror comes close. And even that's a singular case. That was like the ancient siege where the entire population of a city could be destroyed physically. The age of WMDs brought the ability to plan about destruction of cities, but so far WMD use has also been very constrained.

There's a large difference between resettling half-a-million Russians into a territory to "assimilate" the local population without destroying the locals physically, and simply killing the local population. It's a difference of a kind in my view. Deportations have existed before the USSR, and prior to; deportations were a more common policy for less advanced multi-ethnic nations; decapitation strikes against "suspected resistance" where you deport thousands of people you think are possible enemies was also done by many nations, including the West even though it was very advanced; but total physical destruction was Germany's high mark.

Thank you for the detailed post, Stas.

We can consider the matter closed in that regard and I concede the point to you. I seem to have been working off of an incorrect memory for the numbers. I've probably conflated the numbers of the deported and the refugees who escaped to become expatriates and exiles.

I've read some accounts of the Leningrad situation and I know how bad that was. The Germans actually asked Finland to help take the city and had we done so, their plans would have been successful. Which was precisely the reason why the Finnish High Command stayed the hell out of it. They knew, I think I read it somewhere, that the Soviet Union would ultimately prevail over Germany and that if we wanted to remain as an independent nation, we could not take part in such an atrocity. Had we done so, Stalin would have crushed first Germany with the help of the Western Allies and then ground us under his heel without any possibility of reprieve.

Most numbers relating to post-war Russian deportations were horribly inflated ; Most of them were not supported by archival evidence (since Russian archives were closed until recently, duh). Right now, historians are digging through recently declassified documents and revising a lot of them.

It doesn't help that these discussions are inevitably influenced by nationalism, for obvious reasons.

Polyan's work on deportations is publicly available, at least in Russian and partly in English. It also details basically almost every major deportation happening in the USSR during the Stalin era, and the rehabilitation and repatriation of the deportees as well to some extent, as well as giving a summary tally of all deportations.