WI The Soviets built extermination camps

Not a new Shoah, but a lot of dead Jewish intellectuals with the rest left freezing and hungry in Amuria.

I wasn't referring to what it would have looked like as a standard purge, but what it would have looked like as my hypothetical industrial genocide (which I'm less and less inclined to support as anything but the most handwavey thought experiment.)
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
Ah, he's in (or looking to get into) the publishing wars is he; on the lookout to break through with an Edgy New Take.
Nope. He writes about Kazakhs, is middle-aged, and already has tenure. He's got nothing to prove.
Because she's racially bigoted (to use Ian's parlance) against all Russians?
No, because she probably wants to dismiss the atrocities of a fellow Leftist as being the results of mental illness.
If you've been taught to debunk the idea that Stalin was paranoid to any extent then I think you've been lead down the garden path.
I didn't say he wasn't paranoid at all; see the thing about his aversion to doctors. But you have failed to provide a single example of something that would prove that Stalin was "paranoid" rather than a ruthless, supremely cynical, archly-manipulative, fanatically autocratic bureaucrat from Hell.
 
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Wolfpaw

Banned
I wasn't referring to what it would have looked like as a standard purge, but what it would have looked like as my hypothetical industrial genocide (which I'm less and less inclined to support as anything but the most handwavey thought experiment.)
Ah, I see.

Well, if it was intended genocide...shit, I dunno. The Soviets seemed to prefer shooting people, but this creates morale problems for the executioners. Working them to death takes too long and leaves too much room for error.

Frankly, I could see Stalin trying to rear a small army of Blokhins; men who were willing to kill thousands within a few days time with their own two hands, averaging 1 execution every two minutes in shack with sound-proofed walls, a drain and a hose.

Or they'd just copy the Nazis and use poison gas, or put them all in a camp in the middle of a nuclear testing ground somewhere in Kazakhstan.
 
Leaving aside the question of Stalin's precise mental state isn't it the simple answer that racial purity was the cornerstone of the Nazi ideal, ideological purity was the essence of the soviet system; they didn't have the ideological driver needed to create death camps.
 
Death in the Soviet camps was generally a byproduct of exposing humans to lethal mixture of extreme weather, severe malnutrition, diseases, violence, oppression and hard labour. Yet it was never the explicit goal of this system, as has been numerously pointed out already.
 
No, because she probably wants to dismiss the atrocities of a fellow Leftist as being the results of mental illness.

Ouch, you're going a bit too old school anti-EuroLeft there, Wolfpaw.

You don't know this women.

But you have failed to provide a single example of something that would prove that Stalin was "paranoid" rather than a ruthless, supremely cynical, archly-manipulative, fanatically autocratic bureaucrat from Hell.

What evidence do I have apart from the huge wealth of both mainstream and specialist anti-Stalinist historiography, from the pioneer Robert Conquest to my personal favourite, Roy Medvedev?

I take all that as being sufficient substitute for the clinical diagnoses of Stalin that could never exist for obvious reason (Uncle Joe would have had any shrink who tried to diagnose him sent to Lubyanka).
 
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