Stalin’s mass murders of 20 Million were ‘entirely rational’ says new Russian textbook praising tyrant

Stalin acted ‘entirely rationally’ in executing and imprisoning millions of people in the Gulags, a controversial new Russian teaching manual claims.

Fifty-five years after the Soviet dictator died, the latest guide for teachers to promote patriotism among the Russian young said he did what he did to ensure the country’s modernisation.

The manual, titled A History of Russia, 1900-1945, will form the basis of a new state-approved text book for use in schools next year.

It seems to follow an attempt backed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to re-evaluate Stalin’s record in a more positive light.

Vain: During his reign Stalin also enforced his own cult of personality

Critics have taken exception, however, to numerous excerpts, which they say are essentially attempts to whitewash Stalin’s crimes.

In the West, it has been widely accepted that in the 1920s millions were shot, exiled to Siberia, or died of starvation after their land, homes and meagre possessions, were taken to fulfil Stalin’s vision of massive ‘factory farms.’

Holodomor Facts and History:

1928 
Stalin introduces a program of agricultural collectivization that forces peasants/farmers to give up their private land and livestock, and join state owned, factory-like collective farms. Stalin decides that collective farms would not only feed the industrial workers in the cities but would also provide a substantial amount of grain to be sold abroad, with the money used to finance his industrialization plans.

1929 
A policy of enforcement is applied, using regular troops and secret police. Many Ukrainian peasants/farmers, known for their independence, still refuse to join the collective farms. Stalin decides to “liquidate them as a class” and accuses Ukrainians of “bourgeois nationalism.” 

1930 
Hundreds of thousands are expropriated, dragged from their homes, packed into freight trains, and shipped to Siberia where they are left, often without food or shelter. In the end, 1,000,000 Ukrainian peasants are seized and more than 850,000 deported to the frozen tundras of Siberia, where many perished.

In the 1930s millions more whom he considered or suspected a threat to the USSR were executed or exiled to Gulag labour camps in remote areas of Siberia or Central Asia, where many also died of disease, malnutrition and exposure.

Historians believe up to 20 million people perished as a result of his actions – more than the six million killed during Hitler’s genocide of the Jews.

The manual informs teachers that the Great Terror of the 1930s came about because Stalin ‘did not know who would deal the next blow, and for that reason he attacked every known group and movement, as well as those who were not his allies or of his mindset.’

It stresses to teachers that ‘it is important to show that Stalin acted in a concrete historical situation’ and that he acted ‘entirely rationally – as the guardian of a system, as a consistent supporter of reshaping the country into an industrialised state.’

When that food was gone and the people had puffed up with watery edema, they shuffled off to the cities, begging for bits of bread and dying like flies in the streets. In the spring of 1933, when the previous year’s supplies were gone and before the new vegetation brought some relief, the peasants were dying at the rate of 25,000 a day, or 1,000 an hour, or 17 a minute. (In World War II, by comparison, about 6,000 people were killed every day.) Corpses could be seen in every country lane and city street, and mass graves were hastily dug in remote areas. By the time the famine tapered off in the autumn of 1933, some 6 million men, women and children had starved to death.

Malcolm Muggeridge was there that terrible winter and spring. As a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in Moscow, he was one of the few Western journalists who circumvented Soviet restrictions and visited the famine regions – and then honestly reported what he had seen.

Shortly before Mr. Muggeridge’s articles appeared in the Guardian, the Soviet authorities declared Ukraine out of bounds to reporters and set about concealing the destruction they had wreaked. Prominent statesmen, writers and journalists – among them French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, George Bernard Shaw and Walter Duranty of The New York Times – were enlisted in the campaign of misinformation.

The conspiracy of silence was largely successful. For years to come Stalinists and anti-Stalinists argued whether a famine had occurred and, if so, whether it was not the fault of the Ukrainian peasants themselves. Today, as Ukrainians throughout the world (except in the Soviet Union, of course, where the subject cannot even be mentioned) commemorate the 50th anniversary of the famine, the events of 1933 are still largely unknown.more

The controversial manual is produced by the country’s leading school book publishers Prosveshenije, a state-supported company that was a monopoly supplier of classroom texts in the Soviet era, and appears to be returning to that role.

The company boasts: ‘We are proud that we brought up generations of Soviet people – and today we keep on improving our textbooks.’

Worked to death: Although millions perished in Siberian Labour camps like this one, the textbook says that Stalin only did this to push through modernisation

With close links to the Kremlin, the company’s website states: ‘Prosveshenije remains one of the few effective instruments of national consolidation, a centre of forming and distributing Russian educational values.’

The teaching manual could not have been produced without the support and approval of the Russian government.

Prominent Russian historian Roy Medvedev dubbed the manual ‘a falsification. Stalin by no means acted rationally all of the time, and many of his actions damaged the country.’

Before World War II, he said, ‘many in the military ranks were arrested, like my father, for example, and their children, little boys, were sent to the front.’

Alexander Kamensky, head of the history department at the Russia State University for the Humanities, said the manual was, ‘sadly,’ a sign that teaching history in schools has become ‘an ideological instrument.’

But it seems to echo Putin’s remarks to a group of history teachers in June 2007 when he said while Stalin’s purges were one of the darkest periods of the country’s history, ‘others cannot be allowed to impose a feeling of guilt on us.’ Read more: