Joseph Stalin Genocide

Stalin’s initial political purge occurred on December 1st 1934, when Sergey Kirov, secretary of the Leningrad Soviet, was assassinated by Leonid Nikolayev. Some soviets believed that Stalin ordered the assassination of Kirov; however Stalin used this event as an opportunity to arrest thousands of his opponents, whom he alleged may have been responsible for the murder. The NKVD were ordered to initiate the investigations of suspects in order to arrest them, send them to concentration camps and carry out death sentences and by the end of December 1934, numerous of Kirov’s followers in Leningrad, as well as the assassin Nikolaev, were all shot on the same night, December 29th. As a consequence, this impacted the public as society became terrified of saying the wrong thing and feared being prosecuted and executed.

¬¬Marissa Bracey World History and Voices Ms. Phillips & Mr. Cline May 5, 2015 Holodomor: The Eight stages of Genocide Genocide is a term that was created in 1944 to describe violence against a specific ethnical, racial, national, or religious group with the intent to destroy or wipe out that entire group. This is an unfortunate event that has caused millions of casualties and left even more in grief. The famine-genocide of Ukraine took place over the span of 16 long years, killing over 7 million farmers and families, over one third of the lives lost were children. Joseph Stalin is to blame for the horrors caused in Ukraine, his communist ways and power hungry drive allowed him to force millions of farmers out of their land and into poverty.

Genocide is one of the worst crimes against humanity and it still continues today. The definition of the word genocide is the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation. Compared with war crimes and crimes against humanity, genocide is generally regarded as the most offensive crime. Unlike war, where the attack is general and the object is often the control of a geographical or political region. Genocide attacks go after an individual’s identity and the object is control, or complete elimination, of a group of people. The history of genocide in the 20th century includes the 1915 genocide of Armenians by

The Holocaust was a mass murder of millions of individuals’ primary to and during World War II. “Only 54 percent of the people surveyed by the Anti- Defamation League (ADL) in a massive, global poll has ever heard of the Holocaust” (Wiener-Bronner). The Holocaust was from 1933-1945 and was run by German leader named Adolf Hitler. Hitler was a man who wanted to create his own race of people. Therefore to create this race, he wiped out anyone who did not have the specific descriptions that he wanted. For people to fit into his race, they had to have blue eyes and blond hair. This excluded the Jews and from then on Hitler slowly dehumanized them. In the concentration camp the first thing they had to pass was the selection test. The selection test was what the SS man (German soldiers) used to determine who was fit for work. Usually children, mothers, and elders were the first to die because they were not mentally fit for the work they were going to be given. People who passed the selection process either died of starvation, disease, fatigue, or assassination. It took twelve years before anyone intervened and by then it was too late for millions of people. Even though over twelve million people died during the Holocaust, genocides have still happened in Rwanda, Darfur and Cambodia.

Genocide is the destruction of an ethnic, racial, or religious group. The most famous genocide, conducted by the Germans, is the extermination of the Jewish population known as the Holocaust. There are other genocides such as the Armenian or Darfur genocide, but the Holocaust is the one talked about and studied the most around the world today. Museums exist in Washington D.C, Los Angeles, and parts of Europe that focus primarily on this dark time in history. Vast amounts of books, movies, and documents concentrate on the Holocaust. Why is this chapter, between 1939 and 1945, discussed and examined? The answer lies within people who experienced the Holocaust such as Elie Wiesel, Jay Frankston, and Franks Shatz. These men have gone through hell and back, but they believe in one thing. That is, the notion of never again. The goal is to educate future generations on what really happened, so history does not repeat itself. Never again should people of any race, religion, or ethnicity, go through the horrific past of the Holocaust. In their writing, Wiesel, Frankston, and Shatz do a great job using pathos, logos, and ethos to convey their message of never again for future generations.

Hated has always been part of human nature, it is an inevitable emotion that can consumes the souls of men. The genocide in Ukraine during the early 1900s caused incredible suffering. Referred to as Holodomor which translates to killing by hunger, the Ukrainian starvation was a man made famine in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Ukraine and the traditional Cossack territories starved to death due to Stalin’s government seizing of crops resulting in the countries denial of the genocide and even cannibalism.

“Whenever the power that is put in any hands for the government of the people, and the protection of our properties, is applied to other ends, and made use of to impoverish, harass or subdue them to the arbitrary and irregular commands of those that have it; there it presently becomes tyranny, whether those that thus use it are one or many”

While under Joseph Stalin, the Great Terror was a time in which had caused constant fear of authority through means that were harmful. It contained the cruelest of tortures, interrogations, and the fearful abuse of human dignity. Joseph Stalin was a cruel leader who had applied vast powers of the Soviet government to control the real, and even imagined opposition to his rule (Doc. C), establishing himself as a dictator. The amount of Soviet people believed to have been killed by Stalin’s government between 1937 and 1938 are around 681,692 people. It is said that around 1,000 people were executed each day (Doc. C).

In the past 150 years, tens of millions of men, women and children have lost their lives to ethnic cleansing or genocide. Although the definition is often scrutinized, according to Merriam Webster, "Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political or cultural group". The most notable event associated with the term is the Holocaust. Stated by Judah Gribets, Edward Greenstein and Regina Stein, "nearly six million Jews fell victim to genocide during the years of the Holocaust". Of This number, one million were children who were unable to take care of themselves. People's hopes and dreams for the future were stripped from them, and many families were ripped apart. Many of these people were tortured or raped

Genocide is the deliberate and organized annihilation of a racial, ethnic, religious, or national group of people. The term “genocide” was not used until after 1944, when it was created by a Polish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin, who combined “geno”, meaning race or tribe, with “cide”, which means killing. The Holodomor refers to the famine of the Ukranian people from 1932 to 1933 under the rule of a Josef Stalin. Under his leadership, the Soviet Union persecuted the Ukrainian people by denying them their basic needs. An estimated 7,000,000 people died in this genocide, which is also known as Holodomor, meaning “death by hunger.”

One of the most brutal mistakes made by Stalin was the creation of a GULAG. It is difficult to give a precise characterization of its purpose. The aim of this work is to answer the question, “Can we generalize why certain people were able to survive the Gulag more than others?” To survive the Gulag, many prisoners had to fight with others for food, shelter, and simple medical care. Certain prisoners went into religious and intellectual meditations to preserve at least the appearance of intelligence. The survival required willpower, strength of mind, skills, mercilessness, and a lot of luck.

The USSR showed great educational progress as it is shown in the statistics , the literacy was twenty-five percent in 1915 and it grew to ninety-nine in 1980. Another example of Russia’s social condition is the massive instability and genocides during 1937 and 1938. In Document C it states “According to declassified Soviet archives, during 1937 and 1938, the NKVD detained 1,548,366 victims , of whom 681,692 were shot -an average of 1,000 executions a day ( in comparison, the Tsarists executed 3,932 persons for political crimes 1825 to 1910-an average of less than 1 execution per week).” (Document C) it shows how the NKVD, the police force that carried out Stalin’s orders to keep his people from rebelling and having freedom of speech

When the Holocaust is mentioned, the first thing people think of is usually the concentration camps or Hitler. Most people forget about the other tragic events that occurred outside of the camps. More importantly, they usually identify they blame the wrong people who had committed these crimes. The Einsatzgruppen had operated in the territories and areas owned by the Germans. These Killing Squads were told to murder people and had done so willingly. They had found the most brutal ways to torture and murder the Jews of Eastern Europe and Asia.

The Holocaust genocide lasted for approximately 4,482 days. There were nearly twelve years of planning and organizing the extermination of Jews in Europe. For most of those years, nearly all surrounding countries did not partake in assisting the survival of these Jews. Why? Why was there such insufficient help from countries around the world while the Holocaust had been occurring? Had other countries stepped in sooner to provide safety and rescue for the Jews, how different would history be?

The slaughtering of 1.5 million innocent people at the hands of a cruel failing empire. Families and friends torn apart for no reason and all while being silenced from the rest of the world. The Armenian Genocide was swept under the rug by the successor to the Ottoman empire, the Turkish Republic. The cruelty in slaughtering millions of people, to using them for slave labor, and numerous death camps for women and children the Armenian Genocide was a tragic time in the history of Armenians and they are being denied recognition for their ancestors tragic loss of life. The crimes against humanity caused by the Ottomans and the Turks in the killing of millions of people is further inflated by the deliberate withholding