Joseph Stalin - unhappy birthday

On this day........134 years ago, Joseph Stalin was born. The Russian Communist dictator went on to be one of the greatest mass murderers in history, being responsible for the deaths of perhaps 30 million people.

In 1928, he embarked on a forced collectivisation of Soviet agriculture, but millions of peasants would have nothing to do with it, often slaughtering their animals rather than hand them over to the state. Hundreds of thousands of villagers died as they were marched off to Siberia.

Even when famine swept through the Ukraine in 1932, the government carried on seizing grain from farmers. How many died? ‘No one was counting’, shrugged Khrushchev, then one of Stalin’s aides. An official estimate in 1990 put the number at four million, but many believe it was far more.

Then came the purges - intellectuals, artists, engineers, army officers, police chiefs, communist officials, people who had made an unwise comment.  Millions were sent to the gulags, where the commandants were given a quota of inmates - 28% - who had to be shot or otherwise punished for anti-state agitation.

For more, see A Disastrous History of the World.

Continuing disaster in Iraq - 9th anniversary bombings

As the US and UK governments gear up for their next Middle Eastern war - most favoured venue, Iran – a reminder of the continuing bloody disaster we unleashed on Iraq.   On the 9^th anniversary of the invasion, at least 30 people have been killed in a series of bombings in the country.

Two car bombs in the mainly Shia city of Karbala are said to have killed at least 13 people, while another in the northern city of Kirkuk caused the deaths of at least seven.   A pregnant woman died in Fallujah.

Bombings are now part of the daily pattern of life in Iraq.    In January, a suicide bomber killed 53 people in an attack on Shi’ite pilgrims in Basra in the south.   Then a few days later another suicide bomber killed 31 mourners at a Shi’ite funeral in Baghdad.

Nearly 5,000 soldiers in the invading armies were killed, but we have no real idea of the number of Iraqi civilians who have paid with their lives.    Few now contest that it is well over 100,000, but we will probably never know the true number because, as Nikita Khrushchev said of the authorities’ indifference to those who died in the great Soviet famine of 1932-3: ‘no one was counting.’

Darfur + Stalin

The International Criminal Court has indeed issued a warrant for the arrest of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan (see yesterday’s blog). He is accused of two counts of war crimes and five of crimes against humanity.

The people of Darfur - a region in the west of Sudan that is about the size of France – have suffered six years of murder, rape and destruction, and up to 300,000 have died, while more than two and a half million have fled. The ICC already has a warrant out for Sudan's humanitarian affairs minister (!). President al-Bashir has responded predictably – expelling foreign aid organisations who do what little they can to keep the remaining Darfuris alive, while China and Ethiopia have protested against the arrest warrant.

On this day....56 years ago, Josef Stalin died. The Soviet dictator was one of history’s worst mass murderers – responsible for the deaths of up to 30 million people. The ways in which they died were many and varied. The forced collectivisation of agriculture in the 1930’s killed millions, though as Stalin’s then henchman Khrushchev said later, we do not know how many, because “no one was counting.”

As Stalin grew more and more paranoid, he began an orgy of show trials, with loyal Soviet citizens executed wholesale after admitting imaginary crimes. Then there were the gulags – the labour camps in the bleakest parts of the country – where people were sent to die for the most trivial offences, or for none at all. Many believe that Stalin was on the point of launching another purge when death claimed him.