Quote:
Originally Posted by afc wimbledon
I see little difference except inscale in any of the Tzars, they all sent hundreds of thousands to Siberia, under their inept rule millions lived in poverty and died when the crops failed.
I give you that Stalin was the best organised of them and therefore killed many more, but Russians were well used to leaders who didn't care if they lived or died.
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Let's not get carried away. The Tsars actually sent very few people to Siberia, and they sent the "politicals" there to live in villages, not to work in concentration camps. These deportees could and did escape whenever they felt like, the only limiting factors being weather and transportation.
The most brutal of the Tsars after Ivan the Terrible were Peter the Great and Nicholas I, but they are mere children compared to Stalin.
There is a big difference between internally exiling hundreds, maybe a few thousand, people at most, and intentionally murdering tens of millions. As mentioned above, the only leader that came close to Stalin's brutality was Lenin, but illness/death prevented us from seeing how many millions he would have exterminated...