Have we really to have this kind of conversation ? Comparison of the horrible records of the two most horrible regimes in history is really distastaful, however apology of Leninist-Stalinist regime cannot ever be left standing, and arguing that it was a preferable alternative to Nazism is such, the vicious lie that Communist propaganda has been spreading for decades in order to pick a flimsy justification to their horrible record.
The Soviets imposed a brutal regime on their own people... the Nazis did that and then when out and murdered millions of other people, with far less time in their favour.
The Soviets imposed a brutal regime on their own people that killed millions following lunatic and untenable sociopolitical theories, picking victims among scapegoat social classes, national minorities, everyone that could be remotely suspected of harboring a bad opinion of the regime, and at good amount of random victims picked to terrorize the others into abject obedience. The Nazis pretty much left the bulk of their own people alone, if in a brutal police state, and killed millions following lunatic and untenable racial theories, picking victims among scapegoats minorities and foreign nationalities, part in order to wipe them our for their loony colonization projects, part in order to terrorize the others into abject obedience. The amount of victims that were systematically killed during the rule of Hitler and Stalin is wholly comparable, and the span of time they were allowed to rampage is comparable, too. To this we must add the victims of Red Terror under Lenin, on one hand, and the victims of Nazi war crimes, on the other.
When did the Soviets establish extermination camps?
They did, they just chose the slower method of working the inmates to death (to exploit them to the fullest) instead of gassing them. That's why more survived.
When did the Soviets make the obliteration of arbitrary villages a policy?
Ask the kulaks.
Something that you don't seem to get is that most GULAG inmates survived.
Many Soviet statistics are tainted by the decades-long Communist effort to tribute a very large part of the body count for Leninist-Stalinist atrocities to the Nazi invasion, both as mass atrocities and as war casualties. While no doubt the genuine body count of Nazi atrocites in Russia was huge, both as war crimes and purposeful mass murder (mostly aimed on the Jews, however) go, if the statistics of the Soviets were genuine, the Nazi soldiers would have been invincible war gods killing enemy peasants and soldiers 24/7. Giving the blame for Katyn to the Nazis was not an isolated occurence. One has to keep this in mind when claims about "fourth Belarusian" and such are uttered. Hitler killed a lot of Belarusians, but so did Stalin. The unfortunate Soviet peoples had the terrible lose-lose choice of being trapped in between.
The Nazis had plenty of lunatic succesors,
There were several potential successors (Speer, the vast majority fo the generals, probably Goring too) that didn't really care about implementing Hitler's and Himmler's lunatic Lebenstraum plans and would have preferred to keep the Slavs as vassals, if they had been giving the orders. In a victorious post-Hitler Nazi Germany, with the Heer racking the most of the prestige thanks to the victory, and the Nazi empire facing a lot of economic problems, it is most likely that the succession would have fallen to a moderate, pragmatic technocrat or general figure, which would have cut off the extermination programs like the horribly expensive, difficult, exhausting thing it was and switched to brual vassallage not very different from the WarPact. This fits the evolution pattern of totalitarian regimes when the charismatic founder figure dies.
it would be a step from planning to murder every single Russian to keeping them all in a state of debased and uneducated slavery of the body and mind. Whereas the Soviets went from a brutal police state where you could get a trip to Siberia if you were unlucky to a brutal police state where you generally didn't. Still no comparison.
Despite the lunatic socio-economic theories of Hitler, it is very difficult to make your exploited work force any productive in a modern state if you keep them wholly debased and uneducated, and the pragmatic successor of Adolf would have been going to realize it.
And the 30s purges weren't a genocide by any stretch of the imaginations.
If you listen to Soviet apologists, sure.
For one thing, many of their victims wiped the blood from their faces and went to take command again during the GPW.
Yeah, a tiny picking of useful generals, technicians, and scientists was pardoned when Barbarossa began, but it did not change the fate of millions.
What other regime has based its whole state policy on enslaving and destroying other nations,
Assyrians, Mongols...
The Russian Civil War got bad, but it wasn't state policy. The Bolsheviks were trying to end the destructive chaos as quickly as possible, and willing to be extremely callous in doing so.
Yeah, sure all the "enemy social classes" were actively fostering the social chaos and were caught within the ranks of the White armies.
It's not like those Slavs matter or anything.
They do. It's just the rebuttal of your outlandish claim that the Nazis wanted to "destroy civilization". Like the Bolsheviks, they wanted to build a different civilization, one that unfortunately for the world would have been built on a pile of scapegoat corpses and doomed to collapse in the long run anyway. The worse about the Nazi/Communist atrocities it is they were ultimately futile, since the society that they killed to build could not stand, even if they had conquered all of Eurasia. What may be blamed especially on the Nazis is the especially loony quality of the scapegoat choices they picked (if there ever was a "model minority", it would be the Jews).
The Purges killed every fourth Soviet and planned to kill all the rest?
Believing Soviet claims on the demographic losses from 1917 to 1953 is bad for your health.
It changes dramatically, however, when I am gassed to death/fulfill my time and am released.
Rather gassed to death or worked to death.
Stalin wanted to make Germany independent and united.
This is farcical. Stalin wanted to make all of Germany its exploited vassal, the Stalin note was a trap.
Germany's economy was not destroyed.
They tried hard.
Collective punishment was kept to a practical minimum.
Mass rapes are so practical.
And while I'm against collective punishment, the real world is the real world, and I know what I'd have thought as a Czech in 1945.
The Poles had no excuse, they were ethnically cleansing to grab land that had never belonged to them for almost a millennium, with scarce a single Pole in it.
And I can absolutely see why it was necessary to enter Germany and destroy all traces of Nazism.
And so it happened. But neither the ethnic cleansings, nor the national division, nor the brutal Soviet occupation were any necessary. Japan had an almost as bad war record, and was rehabilitated fine without any of that.
If anything, this wasn;t done thoroughly enough.
Please, are you turning into an Hurgan clone, and going to claim that present Germany is secretely run by cabals of Neo-nazis ? Have you noticed that Germany is the European country where the far right is most shunned and reviled ?
If the German people had been offered a conditional surrender humane peace, it is almost sure that teh German generals would have managed to get theri act together and off the Nazis in 1943, saiving a helluva lot of Jews and Slavs.
Seriously, though, never mind the Slavs. Nobody even cares about them...
Making a D-Day in the Balkans liberates them first and foremost.
Oh, yeah, the plan that wasn't ever implemented because it was absurd.
So it was Generalplan Ost, its attempted implementation would have broken the back of Germany economically and militarly. or much more likely, it would been dropped like a hot potato as soon as Adolf succumbed to progressive neurodegeneration in the late 1940s.
