Historical Value

[Kuruharan]

Still Shape our world?

Yes.

last time I looked the Soviet Union had gone flooey

Per se, yes it has. However...(and this is really the more important part of what I have to say here)...

Stalinism was dead even before that

The Russia that exists now still rests on much of the foundation that Stalin built on the bones of the millions of his victims.

And currently Russia is in such bad economic shape that I would not be surprised to see them go back to something resembling the NEP that they had back in the early days of the Soviet Union. Putin is an ex-KGB man you know.

And Stalin is still popular with many of the descendants of the people that he brutalized all those years ago. He was even popular while he was alive. Which goes to show two things. One, people can be pretty strange, and two that man did a heck of a job building a personality cult around himself.

This may also show that people like being brutalized, which was a point made by Dostoevsky, but we'll cover this again later if need be.

Hitler and his thousand year Reich have been dead and buried for nearly sixty years.

And live on as people's favorite whipping boys. Anytime anybody wants to denounce anything they tie it (usually pretty implausibly) to Fascism or Nazism.

And then there is how the state of Israel came about partially as a result of the Holocaust, which is another one of their deplorable actions that still resonates to this day.

Mao's China has not only turned capitalist but done its best to undo the damage he inflicted

There is a considerable amount of chrome that the Chinese government has built up around themselves to make the rest of the world believe that they have turned over a new leaf (my complements to their propaganda ministry, although gullibility probably has something to do with it). That is not to say that there are not changes happening in China, there are. However, their government can be (and is) still absolutely vicious toward any form of dissent or resistance. They still at this moment have one of the highest piles of human rights violations in the world, and that pile continues to grow.

That these Bad men had tremendous and damaging impact on Human history is undeniable but it is the forces that were called up to oppose them that have lasted. It is the reaction *against* their evil that shaped the twentieth century.

I think that what you are mainly referring to is World War II.

I hate to mention it but Stalin (who was, by body count, worse than Hitler) had more to do with defeating Hitler than anybody else who fought against Nazi Germany. (Sorry US and UK). It was the Soviets who turned around the war at Stalingrad. It was the Soviets who consistently faced something between 80%-90% of the German army most of the time. It was the Soviets under Stalin who "liberated" (ha-ha) the most territory from German occupation (including much of their own). And it was the Soviets, or more specifically Stalin, who reaped the lion's share of the spoils of the war. Although on the other hand they were so thoroughly ravaged by the Germans (and by Stalin, and by a few decades of unrelenting turmoil and suffering before the war) that in the end things still looked a little rough for them.

(And before anyone gets all huffy about my little WW II schpiel, I'm not trying to say that the US and UK were not important, they were. The war probably could not have been won by the Allies if any one of the three main powers had been missing.)

And then following that came the Cold War.

I suppose that could be looked at as starting off as a "reaction" against Stalin. But on the other hand it could be equally looked upon as Stalin trying to gain as much capital off of "his" victory as he possibly could.

Then came Khrushchev, who was sort of a de-Stalinizer (to a point), who also almost started a nuclear war.

Then came Brezhnev, who was sort of a re-Stalinizer, and on and on we go. (But notice how everything was still bouncing off of Stalin.)

But suffice it to say that these men still resonate to this day, like it or not. The world is the way that it is today because of the things that those men did.

*He now looks frantically around to find some way to tie this back to Tolkien...*