Did Stalin commit genocide, or just mass murder?

Does it really matter?

An interesting book review by Illya Somin:

Absent Stalin’s malign influence, Naimark contends, the regime probably would not have committed mass murder or genocide on such a large scale. There is little doubt that Stalin’s paranoia and sadism influenced Soviet policy. Nonetheless, I think Naimark overstates the importance of Stalin’s personal role. Most of the major repressive policies and institutions — including the secret police and the Gulag slave labor camps — of the Soviet state were begun by Lenin, not Stalin. As historians such as Richard Pipes have shown, even the terror famine was a reprise of the first Soviet effort to collectivize agriculture in 1918–21 (which also led to a famine in which millions died). Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s main rival for power after Lenin’s death, attacked Stalin on the grounds that his policies were too generous to “bourgeois” elements and otherwise not repressive enough. Had Trotsky defeated Stalin, life for most Soviet citizens might have been just as bad or even slightly worse. One of the very few ways in which Stalin was harsher than Trotsky was in his much greater willingness to kill and imprison members of the Communist Party elite. Here, Stalin’s extreme paranoia about possible rivals for power really did make a big difference. Under Trotsky, the party comrades would have suffered a lot less; the rest of the population would not have been so fortunate.

More generally, Stalin’s policies were far from unique in the communist world. Almost every other communist regime engaged in very similar mass murders, including in countries like China and Cuba where the rulers had a high degree of autonomy from Soviet control.

Check out the discussion in the comments.

The New York Times and Stalin

During Stalin's forced starvation of Ukranian peasants, New York Times reporter Walter Duranty  falsely refuted the true stories of starvation by other Western reporters. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his lies.

The New York Times recently ran a puff piece on Marxists pontificating and playing in New York City. It is unthinkable that the New York Times would run a puff piece on "Fascists pontificating and playing" in New York City.  But Mussolini's brand of fascism, for example, was far less destructive and brutal than Marxist communism has been (though the two ideologies held much in common in both theory and practice).

 One begins to get an impression of the hold that Marxism has had on our intellectuals for so many decades.  If only the right people had tried it, utopia would be have been achieved.  But since the West won't accept revolution, it's better to socialize Western countries a little at a time.

UPDATE: Video at the link - Marxist study groups and games in NYC. Yes, there are still REAL Marxists in America. Who read Stalin's works for ideas.