“People before me were shit, so I’m allowed to be shit as well.”
Cheka/NKVD/Statsi/etc
Tyler Williams
Jeremiah Thompson
I'm sure you'd have saved the revolution with flowers and chocolate boxes.
Dominic Lee
Not him but i think no respect should be given to the methods of previous socialist authorities, i mean we already know torture is less effective than other methods. At the very least i guess we should defend the soviet state by arguing conditions were dire.
Alexander Johnson
If the conditions were dire enough to warrant it, then respect in the sense of understanding they did what they needed to do should be given.
Kayden Johnson
That wouldn't really be respect, not sympathy either, i don't know the word exactly but i guess "understanding" is a much better term, to take them as not justifications, but rather as explanations of why they did it.
Evan Anderson
Reading Kotkin's biography of Stalin made Tsarist Russia seem like the Wild West.
Carson Price
This tbh. Whether it was pogroms, the forced labour camps (oh you don't think the bolsheviks invented the GULAG did you?), the general banditry, or landlords killing their serfs for stealing loves of bread: Tsarist Russia was as violent and repressive as the worst of Stalin era russia.
Cameron Peterson
A good comparison tbh: mostly because of Russia's rural nature a lot of it was. Like Makhno was an outlaw-style bandit, and he lived in "civilised" Ukraine.
Robert King
The Russian Federation alone has more policemen than the whole USSR used to have. The policemen per capita has basically more than doubled. I don't know why people have this pathological belief that (secret) police in socialist countries are worse than capitalist ones.
Oliver Mitchell
Bullshit that's physically impossible, not to mention counter-productive
Never read anything like that being done by the Cheka. The Nazis DID do this during WW-2 to soviet soldiers however, such as General Karbyshev and 400 of his men.