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The Nazis committed many mass shootings, predating the concentration camps in many cases.

Snyder’s Bloodlands is the definitive work on the subject. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands

Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands is excellent on the Holodomyr. He cites various sources estimating the victim count at 3M to 10M, and suggests 6M himself IIRC. He also details Stalin's orders in 32 and 33. The NKVD confiscated grain. When all the grain was gone, they confiscated seed grain, making it impossible to plant for the following year. And they confiscated the cattle too. Snyder constructs a strong argument to the effect that this was deliberate mass murder by Stalin.

And then Stalin launched the Great Terror in 37. Snyder estimates the death count as 750K.

In the West we have a propaganda hangover from WWII - the "Uncle Joe" view of Stalin. Many wonder at what was going on in Hitler's mind. For me Stalin is far more incomprehensible. Utterly cold, cynical and calculating. Must have been some kind of sociopath or psychopath.

This seems like a junk article. World War 2, especially the European theater, is one of the best studied historical times in existence. Especially since the Russian archives have come to light. It is really not believable to claim that we have gotten the story that wrong -- with such weak evidence.

I don't believe carping about the merits of specific machine guns is substantive, and I think what he said about tanks was incomplete and misleading, although I don't want to spend the time to demonstrate it.

The article really went off the rails in dismissing the significance of the Battle of the Atlantic. TFA claims that U boats only sunk 127 ships during 1940, but Wiki claims that 270 ships were sunk during June-October alone. And it is well known that Churchill himself said that winning the battle of the Atlantic was critical to Great Britain's survival.

In a later phase in early 1942, after America had entered the war but before it understood the threat, German subs sunk 609 ships at a loss of only 22 u-boats. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Happy_Time)

A recent examples of a book that has changed emphases and perceptions about WWII is Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, on the unique savagery of the Eastern European conflict.

>Stalin has always been under-rated in the United States. Truth was, he was a hero who helped to defeat the Nazis and Imperial Japan.

That anyone in the 21st century would ever attribute heroism to a man who murdered 20 million people (that's a low estimate btw) is beyond comprehensible.

Was Stalin the "lesser of two evils" in the fight with ole Adolf? Perhaps. But anyone who holds Stalin in anything but contempt is either utterly ignorant of a huge swath of 20th century history or has a profoundly twisted sense of morality.

I suggest you take a brief spin on Uncle Joe's wikipedia page or read Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin to get a feel for just what sort of hero Stalin was.

Timothy Snyder (historian, famous for the "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin" book) has nice speech about Russian-Ukrainian conflict, and he describes the philosophy Russian use in recent propaganda as "applied postmodernism".

It (this "applied postmodernism") starts with the assumption that truth doesn't exists, and goes to prove that all possible narratives are as good as any other, so don't criticize us, let us do what we want in our backyard (including ex-soviet countries).

You do the same in most of your comments.

I highly recommend his speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKFObB6_naw

Starts with short history of Ukraine but it's very short and most western viewers need it to understand anything anyway.

The fragment about applied postmodernism starts at 44:00 but it's worth listening through the whole thing - a lot of insights (and some that you probably will agree with, even if you won't share the conclusions).

Perhaps best, certainly most depressing (and 20 pages or so to go, but there's time left yet): Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder, http://www.powells.com/s?kw=bloodlands

Very good, long: China Marches West: The Quing Conquest of Central Eurasia by Peter C. Perdue, http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780674057432-0

Odd, interesting, relatively short: Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues by George Berkeley, http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780674057432-0

Techie: Effective Perl Programming by Joseph Hall, http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780321496942-0

I suggest you read Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

The artifical famine of 1932-1933 was not a natural famine. It was a calculated effort by Stalin to undermine the Ukrainian peasant farmers, a class he viewed as a threat, and force them into collectivization.
It was perpetrated by the Communist party through the steady increase in grain quotas. It is a matter that of historic fact that Ukrainians starved to death while trains shipped away mountains of grain that they themselves had grown.

Feel free to distrust "Western media", but there are primary sources that support this narrative. For instance, Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko's account, or the narrative of American (and up to that point Soviet sympathizer) William H. Chamberlin (although perhaps you might not trust his account since he's a Westerner).