soysauce wrote:Stalin purged groups that he believed, or perhaps more accurately claimed were undermining his rule. The Purges of supposed counter-revolutionaries or so-called enemies of socialism were so extensive that no-one could reasonably argue that everyone caught up in the process was undermining Stalin's rule.
It becomes genocide when Stalin's purges target ethnic and religious groups, resulting in their mass arrest, deportation, killing or starvation. There's irrefutable evidence that this did occur in the Soviet Union.
And, even if it wasn't technically genocide, What's your point? Killing millions of people on charges of undermining the rule of a ruthless dictator is equally as reprehensable as genocide.
That's pretty much the argument the Turks take in regards to the Armenians.
Yes, they killed hundreds of thousands of Armenians, but it wasn't genocide, because something, something, something...
They seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that even if it wasn't technically genocide by the dictionary definition, they still systematically murdered over a million people. The morons just don't get it.
Also, soy, arguing with the Communists is often a lost cause. I honestly know a couple who are convinced that the purges, gulags, mass executions, pogroms, population shifts, enforced famines etc. of the glorious USSR are all one big western conspiracy. As far as I'm concerned, such an attitude is on par with holocaust denial. The deliberate choosing to ignore the murder of millions of people due to one's own political beliefs; hard not to describe that as being at best morally bankrupt and at worse completely sociopathic.