OrdinaryLove

When you add up the famines, executions, camps, and deportations, Stalin’s policies killed over 20 million people. He caused the Holodomor in Ukraine. Took the grain, sealed the borders, and let millions starve. The same collectivization drive killed over a million Kazakhs in the famine there. Whole regions wiped out while the state grabbed the food. Then the Great Purge. Hundreds of thousands executed, many shot in the head for quotas or false accusations. His own military officers got taken out right before the war with Hitler. Millions more went into the Gulag. 18 million passed through the camps. 1.5 million died from starvation, cold, disease, and overwork. Slave labor in the worst conditions. He also deported entire ethnic groups. Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, and others got packed into trains and dumped in remote areas. Hundreds of thousands died from the conditions and neglect. All this death came from deliberate policies of control, collectivization, and terror. The Western Allies knew about the killings and still chose to cooperate with him to win the war. They supplied him, held summits with him, and looked the other way. And that remains one of the West’s gravest moral failures.