MOSCOW, May 11 (RIA Novosti) - Although 60 years have passed since the end of the Great Patriotic War (WWII), people still dispute the price of victory.
In an interview published in today's Rossiiskaya Gazeta, a pro-governmental daily, political scientist Leonid Radzikhovsky says if Stalin had not been ruling Russia then, the country would not have lost nearly 30 million people, but neither would it have won the war.
The colossal contribution made by Stalin (meaning his party and system) to victory is obvious. The phrase, "The people won without Stalin," is emotionally colored but senseless. The people clearly fought, but they were organized and guided from above.
Four dead Soviet soldiers per one German (the Germans lost 3,200,000 on all fronts) or ten dead Soviet citizens per one German soldier - this was Stalin's war and victory. And this did not represent the "price" for Stalin's mistakes but the material form of the logic, the ideology and the very "anthropology" of Stalinism-Bolshevism, for which the death of one man was a tragedy, but the death of millions were statistics.
The Bolshevik-Stalinist state machine was created to fight wars, both internal and external. After Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, the Stalinist state continued to fight against its own people. About a million men and officers were shot by special departments and tribunals on the front. The state used absolutely identical methods to fight the enemy and its own people; it was a total war waged by a totalitarian state. Complaining that "Stalin did not spare soldiers" is senseless. When people are crushed into dust in hard labor camps, the losses of "dust" are not counted.
The Stalinist leadership did not think about the price of victory; by their logic, 30 million lives was not a high price. Could the country have won otherwise? No, not against Hitler. The Germans crushed Europe because Europe spared its soldiers. This is why if Stalin had not ruled the Soviet Union and the 30 million lives had not been lost in that war, the country would not have won it.
So, the Stalinist system saved the world from a worse fate.
