Russia's opposition leader and most prominent Putin critic Alexei Navalny "lost consciousness" and died, Russian officials have said. Navalny was serving a prison sentence in a remote Arctic penal colony.
We really must separate out the people directly murdered for being a threat to the Soviet dictatorship, and the people who died as a result of Soviet incompetence and mismanagement.
They still died, but context matters.
Strongman style dictators are always petty and vindictive. But are also always corrupt and just bad at their job.
It’s often made worse by the fact that they will kill people for pointing out how bad they are at their job.
The Great Purge - i.e. just the purge under Stalin in the mid-1920’s - is estimated to have killed around (some estimate more than) a million people. No separation necessary, we aren’t talking about disastrous policies and wars.
This is to say nothing of the Russian civil war (tens of millions dead) or other leaders’ at the national and more local levels engaging in their own political purges.
We really must separate out the people directly murdered for being a threat to the Soviet dictatorship, and the people who died as a result of Soviet incompetence and mismanagement.
They still died, but context matters.
Strongman style dictators are always petty and vindictive. But are also always corrupt and just bad at their job.
It’s often made worse by the fact that they will kill people for pointing out how bad they are at their job.
The Great Purge - i.e. just the purge under Stalin in the mid-1920’s - is estimated to have killed around (some estimate more than) a million people. No separation necessary, we aren’t talking about disastrous policies and wars.
This is to say nothing of the Russian civil war (tens of millions dead) or other leaders’ at the national and more local levels engaging in their own political purges.
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