WI The world knows about Stalin´s crimes

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What if one reporter or even a group manage to get some video material and even live witnesses out of the USSR at the height of the Holodomor? (1932/33)Pictures and videos of the Soviet Gulags, of the transports and deportations and of the Millions of dead starved by Stalin.Hundreds or sometimes thousands of corpses beeing thrown into mass graves by tractors and plows - and NKVD officials executing peasants that resisted to give their food away.How would this have altered history had this been revealed in 1933/34?Would Germany and the Nazis have been seen more as a bullwark than a thread and would Western Europe have viewed the USSR as the greater monster?would people say: Sure the Nazis are brutal and they discriminate the Jews and have even conzentration camps. But they killed perhaps a few hundred people from 1933-1935.But that Stalin guy with his Millions of dead? Or wouldnt this have changed much?
 
There are a few problems with the assumption. First: The west was not blissfully unaware of the horroirs Stalin committed in secrecy. The facts about Soviet atrocities were well publicised. howevber, this was the early twentieth century, when propaganda was laid on with the trowel. Enemies of the USSR were happy to invent far more outrageous tales (I mean, come on, taking away peoples' food? colonial powers oversaw monstrous famines regularly). I recall a German publication that recountred in lurid detail how Soviet policy was to nationalise white women as shared property (one wonders how that would have gone over with Comrade Kollontai). There was a glut of stories that would make your hair stand on end. Most people didn't believe any of it, for good reason.

Second: the degree to which Hitler was regarded as a bulwark, a kind of continental swordarm or defender of Christendom against the Red Hordes was retconned down massively port-WWII. A lot of respectable Western conservatives were quite willing to support him as the lesser evil, if not an actual good.

Third: The Nazis started their reign with a pretty horrific death toll. Not in the millions yet, but certainly in the tens of thousands.
 

Replicator

Banned
There are a few problems with the assumption. First: The west was not blissfully unaware of the horroirs Stalin committed in secrecy. The facts about Soviet atrocities were well publicised. howevber, this was the early twentieth century, when propaganda was laid on with the trowel. Enemies of the USSR were happy to invent far more outrageous tales (I mean, come on, taking away peoples' food? colonial powers oversaw monstrous famines regularly). I recall a German publication that recountred in lurid detail how Soviet policy was to nationalise white women as shared property (one wonders how that would have gone over with Comrade Kollontai). There was a glut of stories that would make your hair stand on end. Most people didn't believe any of it, for good reason.

Second: the degree to which Hitler was regarded as a bulwark, a kind of continental swordarm or defender of Christendom against the Red Hordes was retconned down massively port-WWII. A lot of respectable Western conservatives were quite willing to support him as the lesser evil, if not an actual good.

Third: The Nazis started their reign with a pretty horrific death toll. Not in the millions yet, but certainly in the tens of thousands.

First: But was there video footage of the Gulags and the mass executions and the mass graves and the Gulags? Were there live witnesses especially in Britain und France telling their stories to the French/British newspapers?A Nurenberg like proof-footage would have done a lot - and I dont recall hearing of something like that making it out of the USSR.Third: I recall reading that from 1933 to the start of the war the Nazis killed "only" a few hundred people. The maximum I ever read was 20 000 from 1933 to 1939. Still horrendous -even for a dictatorship - but at the same time period what? Some 4 Million people died in the USSR - 200 times as many.Do there exist any sources on Nazi crimes prior to the war from 1933-1939?
 
First: But was there video footage of the Gulags and the mass executions and the mass graves and the Gulags? Were there live witnesses especially in Britain und France telling their stories to the French/British newspapers?A Nurenberg like proof-footage would have done a lot - and I dont recall hearing of something like that making it out of the USSR.

The technology of the era dictates that there would not have been video (you cannot surreptitiously shoot film with 1930s cameras unless you can stage the area), but there were eyewitness reports and photographs in circulation. Of course a Nuremberg-like exposure would have changed more mindas, but to get that, you need a Nuremberg-like situation, which requires the USSR to lose a world war. Otherwise, it will always be word against word. You may want to look at the bibliographies of robbert Conquest's works on the holodomor and the purges to get a sense of the competing narratives in circulastion then. They are not the newest and best scholarship, but they are accessible and he did some thorough research.

Third: I recall reading that from 1933 to the start of the war the Nazis killed "only" a few hundred people. The maximum I ever read was 20 000 from 1933 to 1939. Still horrendous -even for a dictatorship - but at the same time period what? Some 4 Million people died in the USSR - 200 times as many.Do there exist any sources on Nazi crimes prior to the war from 1933-1939?

Thzey most likely got to ten thousand in the first years of running the KZ system. Exact figures are difficult because in the early years, deaths had to be either extralegal or hidden, whereas during the war years, they were systematically inflicted and counted for bureaucratic reasons. And yes, there are reports, the most commonly used one being that of the SoPaDe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sopade
 
Also do not forget that in the early years, a large part of the Nazi euthanasia program was targeted at the mentally retarded and similar types, and this was adopted from the United States, where a similar fairly large scale sterilisation program and a limited euthansia program took place through the 1920s and 1930s. The Nazis were simply adopting such theories and programs from the US. There was widespread support for such concepts at the time.

Events in the USSR were well known but the leftist apologists for the USSR simply glossed over them. And as has been mentioned, the colonial famines in this period killed millions - there were some huge famines in India for example. And do not forget that as late as 1917-1918, HALF the population of Persia (Iran) died off in a famine that was inflicted by the Allies - who took Persian oil without paying for it and commandeered all transport / rail to support the military, making it impossible to move food shipments (if they had existed) to the starving rural population. No outrage there either.

The Bengal Famine in WW2 killed millions. This was more or less acquiesced to by Churchill, who refused to release shipping to ship rice to Bengal or take other measures. There was some disagreement within the British Govt over this one, but nobody protested particularly strongly or did much - and this was in the midst of WW2.

So no, I doubt more publicity would have made any difference.
 
And don't forget that this is in the midst of the Great Depression. When you got lots of unemployed people in your own country worrying how to pay for enough food (and maybe developing ideas like revolution) stuff happening in some faraway nation tends to be of rather low importance.
 
Usually when dictators are seen to be committing great acts of oppression nothing happens. Even if the world sees not a lot happens. People will tut and think how bad it is but overall nothing really happens. Tiananmen square is a great example. Lots of people were shocked but nothing changed.
Even if the the entire world populace knew of Stalins brutality he still would've been our ally against the Axis powers.
 
Walter Duranty was a reporter for the New York Times (I think) who left out the horrors of the Holodomor from his reporting on the USSR during this period.

For this, Comrade Stalin gave him drugs and access to loose women. He got a Pulitzer that he should never have received.

Maybe if Duranty is more honest, we get confirmation of Stalin's horrors from a respectable source. Given how many people were inclined to believe the worst about the USSR anyway, not sure what effects that would actually have though, beyond maybe shutting up the hard-left famine-denialists who think everything critical of the USSR in this matter is "Nazi propaganda."

(Seriously, there's a book called "Fraud, Famine, and Fascism" that basically states this.)
 
As I recall there is a significant amount of speculation that Holodomor was more the result of astounding incompetence and poor administration than any sort of deliberate policy. Plenty of areas that at the same time followed lock-step with Stalin's collectivization policy were themselves stricken with famine at the time of Holodomor.
 
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