Well of Souls Forums

victor: considering that the prime attributes of any successful politician is lying and being crazy enough to believe his own lies, actual understanding of how national economics and international politics work is at best a secondary requirement....oh right, and allow yourself to be bribed by industry, never forget that one since without it you aint got the funds to pursue a political career.

i was not so much defending stalin as comparing all other politicians to him and saying 'meh same shit, power hungry shits all over the place'.

Arioch wrote:I think Mao Zedong beats Stalin in the mass-murder department. Estimates range from 45 to 78 million.

Oh yeah. I always forgeting about that guy. How chinese commies still enslave 1/6 of world population still puzzle me.

Because there, it is not proper to question your superior.

Victor_D wrote:And both are still loved by a significant part of the (surviving) population of their respective countries. We are a strange species.

You know what they say. "One mans death is another mans bread". So the survivors were probably just happy with all the free space they got.

Besides dictators have a remarkably ability to preserve order in a society so if you don't have any interest in politics and just want to work, eat, sleep and die in peace (which the majority of the soviet population wanted i think) these men were heroes.

Victor_D wrote:

Arioch wrote:I think Mao Zedong beats Stalin in the mass-murder department. Estimates range from 45 to 78 million.

And both are still loved by a significant part of the (surviving) population of their respective countries.

We are a strange species.

Vlad the Impaler's employment programs were reputedly highly effective!

If I remember right, the Vlad didn't like turkish people and staked only those, but his efforts on war were so effective that Ottomans were ready to make peace and leave anytime they heard his name.

bunnyboy wrote:If I remember right, the Vlad didn't like turkish people and staked only those, but his efforts on war were so effective that Ottomans were ready to make peace and leave anytime they heard his name.

Yes, and he didn´t liked the germans, too. Or at least the thugs from the german trade-guilds, because he was a remarkably righteous archon who strongly disliked corruption and lies.

That´s why he had such a bad reputation - trade guilders PR.

Vlad the impaler. The author of Dracula made a mistake and called him a count. But term "Wojewoda" in ancient slavic meant "army commander" or "warlord" (literally "one who leads warriors"). Sorry guys - my nerd sense kicked in.

Mali wrote:Sorry guys - my nerd sense kicked in.

You´re welcome!

Mali wrote:Vlad the impaler. The author of Dracula made a mistake and called him a count. But term "Wojewoda" in ancient slavic meant "army commander" or "warlord" (literally "one who leads warriors"). Sorry guys - my nerd sense kicked in.

In Czech, vojvoda as the archaic term changed into vévoda, which is now the Czech translation of English "duke". "Count" would still be wrong, but not that much.

In Czech, vojvoda as the archaic term changed into vévoda, which is now the Czech translation of English "duke".

So the German equivalent would be "Herzog". In ancient times the title of an elected or chosen military leader (herizogo = someone who "moves" in front of an army) for the time of war. Duke comes from the latin "dux" which means something like leader.

Vlad is called a "Fürst" in German. A title that doesn´t exist in English. You could translate it as "ruler" or so, literally it comes from "the first one" of a country. That fitts better than "Count" I think.

Yes, and he didn´t liked the germans, too. Or at least the thugs from the german trade-guilds, because he was a remarkably righteous archon who strongly disliked corruption and lies.
That´s why he had such a bad reputation - trade guilders PR.

Do you have any proof for that and what kind of "german trade-guilds" are you talking about?

Suederwind wrote:

Yes, and he didn´t liked the germans, too. Or at least the thugs from the german trade-guilds, because he was a remarkably righteous archon who strongly disliked corruption and lies.
That´s why he had such a bad reputation - trade guilders PR.

Do you have any proof for that and what kind of "german trade-guilds" are you talking about?

Fugger, Welser, Hanse.
It was outrageous to them that their ("honorable members") thugs were executed, even more outrageous that they were impaled right next to peasants.
So they funded exaggerated propaganda. Later it came in handy that printing was invented.
And literature? There´s plenty, e.g. "Draculea, Leben und Legende" or sth like "Dracula - Mythen und Wahrheiten".

Fugger, Welser, Hanse.

Welll, well... Fugger and Welser were not trade guilds. They were family owned trading and banking companys. No wonder you do not like them.
I wonder why. The Fugger for example did a lot of good things, like building the Fuggerei for poor people.
Why should the Hanse (or hanseatic league), that was based in the Baltic and Northern Sea, be angry on some Balkan Count?
Maybe you should try to change your point of view on those things? It could offer you more insight.

"Dracula - Mythen und Wahrheiten" , "Draculea, Leben und Legende"

Ok, secundary sources. Any primary ones?
The first one, btw was written by Christine Klell, a graphic designer with no background as a historian as it seems. That doesnt necessarily mean much, but judging from my expiriences with hobby historians, I would say that I better leave that one out.
The second one is more interessting, written by historian Heiko Haumann and a beeing a part of "becksche reihe", it will most likely be the better and more reliable source. I will look into it and find out what he writtes about that topic.

I never thought that during my holiday hiatus, that I would return to a thread spawned from what I personally can only describe as a bad ranging to mildly amusing side comment...

Anyhow regardless from whatever bias you look at the tyrants of history their death tolls are perhaps the least biased of the gauges. Vlad snuffed off a range from 40,000 to 100,000. Stalin deliberatly starved millions of Ukrainians, and killed or imprisoned at least 10 million kulaks or "Wealthy peasants". Having corrugated iron on your roof, or even employing your son was enough to warrant a bullet in your forehead by an ideologically pure NKVD officer, as clearly their success was built on the repression of others. As always communists always had quotas, and they had execution quotas also. If there weren't enough kulaks to execute in the area, they would simply pull up some random peasants, accuse them of something like hording grain or being a white, and happily execute them. This was all early 30's. Stalin consistently makes Hitler look like a rank amateur, and that his execution of 5 million Jews, 2 million Romanies, & 1 million others look like a walk in the park. Reasonable evaluation of Stalin's death toll can go up to 17-20 million. Possibly much much higher.

"Blind chance rules a man's life in this country of ours," said one NKVD officer, who found himself suddenly placed under arrest. For ordinary citizens, "Fear by night, and a feverish effort by day to pretend enthusiasm for a system of lies, was the permanent condition." (Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, p. 434.) Solzhenitsyn adds: "Any adult inhabitant of this country, from a collective farmer up to a member of the Politburo, always knew that it would take only one careless word or gesture and he would fly off irrevocably into the abyss." (The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, p. 633.)

Smithy wrote:Reasonable evaluation of Stalin's death toll can go up to 17-20 million. Possibly much much higher.

I'd say that the Russians know the exact amount (or at least close enough for our purposes), but considering that the Soviets were supposedly meticulous documentors, it may well be that there's too much paperwork for them to find the relevant files.

Welll, well... Fugger and Welser were not trade guilds. They were family owned trading and banking companys. No wonder you do not like them.
I wonder why. The Fugger for example did a lot of good things, like building the Fuggerei for poor people.

Let's not forget the forest for the trees. The point is powerful german merchants were a source of instability and constantly incited the boyars to revolt against the Prince, so that their economic domination of Wallachia would continue unchallenged. I'm certain they have done many good and noble things elsewhere, but they still were up to no good in Romania. The United Fruit Company has done a lot of good too, but it would be a bit much to tell the Hondurans that they imagined the Banana Wars. Neither did Vlad imagine his past seven predecessors getting murdered in a span of ten years.

Why should the Hanse (or hanseatic league), that was based in the Baltic and Northern Sea, be angry on some Balkan Count?

The Hanseatic League's interests stretched far and wide as seen in the map below, including deep into Eastern Europe.

Absalom wrote:I'd say that the Russians know the exact amount (or at least close enough for our purposes), but considering that the Soviets were supposedly meticulous documentors, it may well be that there's too much paperwork for them to find the relevant files.

Assuming the files weren't burned a long time ago, or were altered, or were even accurate to begin with. Soviet apparatchiks never let old truths get in the way of new "truths". The Russians are probably as much in the dark as we are, especially with Putin and his gang of chekists back in charge. For that matter, they're probably barely more in the know than the rest of us about what the true numbers were.