Editing Stalinism (section)

=== Other interpretations ===
[[File:GULag 2 Museum Moscow Russia.jpg|thumb|right|[[Gulag]] Museum in Moscow, founded in 2001 by historian [[Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko]]]]
Some historians and writers, such as [[Dietrich Schwanitz]],<ref>Schwanitz, Dietrich. ''Bildung. Alles, was man wissen muss'': "At the same time, Stalin was a kind of monstrous reincarnation of Peter the Great. Under his tyranny, Russia transformed into a country of [[industrial slave]]s, and the gigantic empire was gifted with a network of working camps, the ''[[Gulag Archipelago]]''."</ref> draw parallels between Stalinism and the economic policy of [[Tsar]] [[Peter I of Russia|Peter the Great]]; Schwanitz in particular views Stalin as "a monstrous reincarnation" of him. Both men wanted Russia to leave the western European states far behind in terms of development. Some reviewers have considered Stalinism a form of "[[red fascism]]".<ref>{{cite book |last= Fried |first= Richard M.|title= Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=1991|isbn=978-0-19-504361-7|page=50}}</ref> [[Fascist]] regimes ideologically opposed the Soviet Union, but some regarded Stalinism favorably for evolving [[Bolshevism]] into a form of fascism. [[Benito Mussolini]] saw Stalinism as having transformed Soviet Bolshevism into a [[Pan-Slavism|Slavic]] fascism.<ref>MacGregor Knox. Mussolini Unleashed, 1939–1941: Politics and Strategy in Italy's Last War. pp. 63–64.</ref>

British historian [[Michael Ellman]] writes that mass deaths from famines are not a "uniquely Stalinist evil", noting that famines and droughts have been a [[Droughts and famines in Russia and the Soviet Union|common occurrence]] in [[History of Russia|Russian history]], including the [[Russian famine of 1921–22]], which occurred before Stalin came to power. He also notes that famines were widespread worldwide in the 19th and 20th centuries in countries such as India, Ireland, Russia and China. Ellman compares the Stalinist regime's behavior vis-à-vis the [[Holodomor]] to that of the [[Government of the United Kingdom|British government]] (toward [[Great Famine (Ireland)|Ireland]] and [[Bengal famine of 1943|India]]) and the [[Group of Eight|G8]] in contemporary times, arguing that the G8 "are guilty of mass manslaughter or mass deaths from criminal negligence because of their not taking obvious measures to reduce mass deaths" and that Stalin's "behaviour was no worse than that of many rulers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries".<ref>Ellman, Michael (November 2002). [http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/ELM-Repression_Statistics.pdf "Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments"]. ''Europe-Asia Studies''. Taylor & Francis. '''54''' (7): 1152–1172. {{doi|10.1080/0966813022000017177}}. {{JSTOR|826310}}.</ref>

[[File:День памяти российских немцев, 28 августа 2011. Возложение цветов.jpg|thumb|right|Memorial to the victims of political repression in the USSR, in [[St. Petersburg]], made of a boulder from the [[Solovetsky Islands]]]]

[[David L. Hoffmann]] questions whether Stalinist practices of state violence derive from socialist ideology. Placing Stalinism in an international context, he argues that many forms of state interventionism the Stalinist government used, including social cataloguing, surveillance and concentration camps, predate the Soviet regime and originated outside of Russia. He further argues that technologies of social intervention developed in conjunction with the work of 19th-century European reformers and greatly expanded during World War I, when state actors in all the combatant countries dramatically increased efforts to mobilize and control their populations. According to Hoffman, the Soviet state was born at this moment of total war and institutionalized state intervention practices as permanent features.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Hoffmann |first1=David |title=Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939 |date=2011 |publisher=Cornell University Press |location=Ithaca, New York |isbn=978-0-8014-4629-0 |pages=6–10}}</ref>

In ''The Mortal Danger: Misconceptions about Soviet Russia and the Threat to America'', anti-communist and Soviet dissident [[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]] argues that the use of the term ''Stalinism'' hides the inevitable effects of communism as a whole on human liberty. He writes that the concept of Stalinism was developed after 1956 by Western intellectuals to keep the communist ideal alive. But "Stalinism" was used as early as 1937, when Trotsky wrote his pamphlet ''Stalinism and Bolshevism''.<ref>[http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/08/stalinism.htm "Leon Trotsky: Stalinism and Bolshevism (1937)"]. Marxists.org, 28 August 1937. Retrieved 12 July 2013.</ref>

In two ''[[The Guardian|Guardian]]'' articles in 2002 and 2006, British journalist [[Seumas Milne]] wrote that the impact of the [[Post–Cold War era|post–Cold War]] narrative that Stalin and Hitler were twin evils, equating communism's evils with those of [[Nazism]], "has been to relativize the unique crimes of Nazism, bury those of colonialism and feed the idea that any attempt at radical social change will always lead to suffering, killing and failure."<ref>Milne, Seumas (12 September 2002). [http://m.guardian.co.uk/education/2002/sep/12/highereducation.historyandhistoryofart "The battle for history"]. ''The Guardian''. Retrieved 7 October 2020.</ref><ref>Milne, Seumas (16 February 2006). [https://www.theguardian.com/Columnists/Column/0,,1710891,00.html "Communism may be dead, but clearly not dead enough"]. ''The Guardian''. Retrieved 18 April 2020.</ref>

According to historian [[Eric D. Weitz]], 60% of German exiles in the Soviet Union had been liquidated during the Stalinist terror and a higher proportion of the KPD Politburo membership had died in the Soviet Union than in Nazi Germany. Weitz also noted that hundreds of German citizens, most of them Communists, were handed over to the Gestapo by Stalin's administration.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Weitz |first1=Eric D. |title=Creating German Communism, 1890–1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State |date=13 April 2021 |publisher=Princeton University Press |isbn=978-0-691-22812-9 |page=280 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=JOgSEAAAQBAJ&dq=stalin+handed+over+german+communists+gestapo&pg=PA280 |language=en}}</ref>