Josef Stalin acted rationally in killing millions, claims Russian textbook

The manual says: "He acted entirely rationally - as the guardian of a system, as a consistent support of reshaping the country into an industrialised state."

It is produced by the country's leading school book publishers Prosveshenije, a state-supported company that used to have a monopoly on the supply of classroom texts in the Soviet era.

Editor Alexander Danilove said: "We are not defending Stalin. We are just exploring his personality, explaining his motives and showing what he really achieved."

Thoughts?

Interesting definition of rational. I guess it made some logical sense to do so to achieve a certain goal.

Well, Hitler never took Russia, so...

It could be a quote taken out of context, I'd need to read at least the paragraph to pass judgement.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2008/09/080904_stalin_wt_sl.shtml
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/2672717/Josef-Stalin-acted-rationally-in-killing-millions-claims-Russian-textbook.html
The second link is the story, forgot to add it to the first post.

There isn't much context there.

Meanwhile one can rationalize many things that may seem repugnant.. so it's not that surprising.

For the most part, I don't see how the killings were rational when the majority were due to his paranoia.

7 million died in a famine that the peasants caused by burning their crops and killing their own livestock because they didn't want to go along with collectivization. That gets attributed as his fault, and it shouldn't. 21 million soldiers died in WWII. That's probably attributed to him and shouldn't. 6 million more died of famine after the war when the Brits and Americans promised Russia aid that never came.

So, that's 34 million out of the 40 million killed that can be "excused." Even so, the 6 million others really have no] acceptable excuses. I understand his 5 year plans and the need for industrialization, but the gulags are a good enough deterrant - no need for the killing.

The past is the past. Whether or not he was rational or not is irrelevant. He is long dead and gone and can never be punished so what's the point? The killings happened, nothing can change that. People need to quit trying to justify, villify, claim compensation for, etc, etc, people long dead and events long past. Simply try to understand events as they happened to the best of evidence still available and leave things at that.

All I know is that if I was in his position I would have done the same thing.

horrible