Thought it would be a good idea to create a web page each
day for any messages I would like to write for the day.
If you would like to read Alton's MOD Supplement Page B for
today, click here
...the dictator who won the strugle for power after Lenin's death--Josef Stalin--was a paranoid psychopath to boot. Stalin made Lenin's terror look mild and reasonable. Peasants were shot, died of famine, and were exiled to Siberian prison labor camps by the millions during the 1930s. Factory workers were shot or exiled to Siberian labor camps for failing to meet production targets assigned from above. Intellectuals were shot or exiled to Siberian labor camps for being insufficiently pro-Stalin, or for being in favor of the policies that Stalin had advocated _last_ year and being too slow to switch. Communist activists, bureaucrats, and secret policemen fared no better. More than five million government officials and party members were killed or exiled in the Great Purge of the 1930s as well. All of Stalin's one-time peers as Lenin's lieutenants were gone by the late 1930s--save for Leon Trotsky, in exile in Mexico, who survived until one of Stalin's thugs put an icepick through his head in 1940. Of the 1800 delegates to the Communist Party Congress of 1934, less than half were alive by 1939. We really do not know how many people died at the hands of the Communist regime in Russia. We know more about how many cows and sheep died in the 1930s than about how many of Stalin's opponents, imagined enemies, and bystanders were killed. R.J. Rummel estimates 62 million dead.