Mussolini in any timeline is a better person than stalin. Not due to any virtues of The Moose of course, but rather due to that bastard from Georgia being a top tier piece of shit. Only the top brass of the SS and perhaps the most vicious of historic tyrants like Timur could be considered in the same bracket of monstrous as stalin. And Timur at least was a damn good general.
The Footprint of Mussolini - TL
Mussolini in any timeline is a better person than stalin. Not due to any virtues of The Moose of course, but rather due to that bastard from Georgia being a top tier piece of shit. Only the top brass of the SS and perhaps the most vicious of historic tyrants like Timur could be considered in the same bracket of monstrous as stalin. And Timur at least was a damn good general.
Timur was also a better person then Stalin, had a better relationship with his family and wasn't paranoid. Maybe Ivan IV was as much as a jerkass.
I would compare Stalin ratherly ot Ivan IV than to Timur. Medieval rulers rarely were nice people but Ivan IV didn't get his nickname without reason. He was pretty ruthless man who threatened even his relatives terrible way. Damn it, he even crushed his heir's skull because them had some argue about tsarevich's wife.
I disagree that Stalin was a bigger monster or even an equal monster to Hitler. AFAIK the latest estimates have something like 5-8 million extraneous deaths under Stalin. Obviously that's nothing to minimize, and Stalin was a grade-A son of a bitch, but that's over twenty years and much of it the result of gross incompetence. The Nazis managed to outstrip those numbers within four years and fully intended to murder tens of millions more if they hadn't been stopped. You just need to look at Eastern Europe to decide whether Soviet Russia under Stalin or Germany under Hitler was worse. After decades of Soviet domination, Poles, Czechs, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, etc. still exist, and not as dwindling, wretched slave races. You would not be able to say the same if the Nazis had won.
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Bookmark1995
Banned
Ivan and Stalin were similar this way: both started out as innovative leaders, only to give in to their paranoid urges and commit what amounts to societal self-harm.
When the two men died (both TTL and OTL), they left behind a mess that other leaders tried to clean up:
Ivan's actions posthumously destroyed his own dynasty and lead to the Time of Troubles, while Stalin's actions shredded many of the goals of the Communist Revolution and contributed to the Union's fall less than 40 years after his own death.
The way I see it, Hitler's actions were far, far worse: as they entailed not merely the acquisition of territory, but the destruction of entire races.
I think Stalin was worse on a personal level. The man stabbed EVERYBODY and ANYBODY in the back. He murdered and killed his followers, he murdered and killed other foreign communists, he sent his own daughter's boyfriend to a Gulag, he gave someone like Lavrentiy Beria a job as a secret policeman, and he brutalized his own fellow Georgians in a way that even Lenin was appalled by. The people who fought to keep Leningrad alive were also purged out of personal jealousy.
On a foreign level, he was just as horrible: more concerned with power than solidarity, he frequently shortchanged his "fellow" revolutionaries in China and Spain. He violated a non-aggression Pact and backstabbed the Poles. And yet, he happily made deals with the very Fascist enemy he claimed to despise.
I gather that self-defeating purge of Trotskyists in the Spanish Civil War didn't help their cause either.
Bookmark1995
Banned
Gets even worse: the Stalinist wing of the Spanish Republicans make really spurious attacks on the anarchists, calling them "objectively Hitlerite and Fascist."
When just two years later, the Stalinists would make a pact with those same fascists to invade and destroy Poland.
France should be getting troubles now too. The 1973 interview said France was dealing with Algerian holdouts and Corsican terrorists.
I'm still not sure whats up with Corsican terrorism. Is Corsican separatism even a thing IOTL? Im a little stumped at what it could be.
Yes, it wasn't as bad as what the IRA or ETA did, but indeed France had some troubles with them. The FLNC ceased its armed struggle in 2014 if I'm not wrong.
I am curious how the Fascist Party culture is developing in Italy. It has been more than 25 years since WWII ended ITTL, those who started their careers in the early 40s will be taking up a lot of upper tier positions, and the percentage will be younger the lower you go. What are the priorities and goals of the "Greatest Generation" Fascists, and their juniors that have started their careers in the Post Mussolini era?
How well do they play with the Old Guard like Balbo?
How well do they play with the Old Guard like Balbo?
I wonder if there's a "respectable" Fascist party in the USA ITTL that isn't well aping Nazi imagery and rhetoric? There's really not much parties that fit the bill, not even the Silver Shirts, IOTL, with the Fascist League of North America and the Christian Falangist Party of America being the two exceptions to my knowledge (less said about the alleged "Alt-Right", the better).
That may just be a overprotective dad having too much power right. What dad doesn't want to put their daughter's boyfriend in the gulag? Especially considering he was 20 years older than Stalin's UNDERAGE daughter. He didn't even allow her to be near Beria, angrily telling her to get away from him upon finding out she was at his place. The man showed an uncharacteristic concern for his daughter's well being.
When telling people how a guy was bad, listing the goodish thing is usually not the best idea.
Stalin was very loving and caring about his daughter if i remember right he was a strict and a bit overprotectiv.
Isn't this the scariest thing regarding people like Hitler and Stalin?
They weren't soulless monsters, but normal human beings that at one point or another decided mass murder was the best solition for all their problems.
Also regarding who is worse between Hitler and Stalin: when it comes to Comminism, you can argue that Stalinism is a corrupted ideology and that Marx never openly encouraged things like genocide and mass starvation.
For obvious reasons you can't do anything similar with Hitler and Nazism
Stalin had an odd relationship with his daughter. He adoringly loved her until she grew older and they increasingly drifted apart, I think the final straw came when he exiled her lover to the front in Stalingrad as a wartime reporter (later the Gulag) and seemed to disapprove of it greatly. If memory serves me right, they exchanged some words after the end of WWII though I'm not sure to which degree it rekindled their relationship.
Stalin made sure that she wasn't alone with Beria - for obvious reasons of course. She also took a liking to Beria's son if I recall. Stalin also seemed very uncaring for his sons, though he did show some emotion when he heard the news that Vasily had been taken prisoner. Stalin seemed to show Svetlana genuine affection unlike his other offspring.
As an aside Stalin used to torment his fellow party members through other ways than mass executions and torture. He put tomatoes on nearby seats and waited until his colleagues sat down on them and burst out laughing at the noise they made and liked jokes.
Hitler comes across as a rather dark personality with no warmth to him, a man who genuinely hated the world around him. Stalin for his part used to creepily put pen to paper and scribble the most hideous of sketches when sitting in meetings.
Stalin made sure that she wasn't alone with Beria - for obvious reasons of course. She also took a liking to Beria's son if I recall. Stalin also seemed very uncaring for his sons, though he did show some emotion when he heard the news that Vasily had been taken prisoner. Stalin seemed to show Svetlana genuine affection unlike his other offspring.
As an aside Stalin used to torment his fellow party members through other ways than mass executions and torture. He put tomatoes on nearby seats and waited until his colleagues sat down on them and burst out laughing at the noise they made and liked jokes.
Hitler comes across as a rather dark personality with no warmth to him, a man who genuinely hated the world around him. Stalin for his part used to creepily put pen to paper and scribble the most hideous of sketches when sitting in meetings.
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