Start learning a new language today with Babbel! Get 50% off for six months for a limited time only! bit.ly/BabbelbyBrainfood

They don't teach Stalin. Since he's dead he wouldn't learn a thing.

Everything depends on the teacher. One might praise him while another will do everything to worsen his image. I had 5 different history teachers and each one had a different opinion on him.

My history teacher once said: "If they ever raise a monument of Stalin in Yakutsk city and one night this monument suddenly explodes, you know who will be responsible, it's me"

Curious how The American Revolution is taught in British Schools.

Imagine learning history in Poland then THEY occupied us, and then THEY occupied us.......

Next: How is Mao taught in China? .... Wait, the party he founded is still in power, so we already know how he is taught.

Desalination: Making water less salty. DeStalination: Making Russia less salty. Makes sense.

I'm from Russia and I can say that this video is pretty accurate in its analysis, kudos for your work! I can also add that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, during the 90s the school textbook' regulations were much more loose and there was a lot of textbooks that either criticized Stalin directly or didn't draw any strict line at all, they consisted of pure historical facts and sum-up questions like "What do you think about it?" Unfortunately, the Neo-Stalinism is on the rise now and as years go by, Stalin is more and more, due to unofficial support of the Kremlin, considered one of the most prominent leaders in Russian history, so it's no wonder that his crimes are pretty much omitted in modern textbooks. If you shop around Russian book shops, you will find stacks that are crammed with books about "The Great Leader" and "Debunking of Perestroika myths", hundreds of them! That is just the way it is.

Easy, they say they'll cover it later

He must be very dim if he's still trying to graduate from school.

04:20 - And that line in "Rasputin vs. Stalin" ("I even crush motherfuckers when I'm lying in state") makes so much more sense.

Thank you for the video. Stalin is spreading in the modern textbooks that way mostly due to the existing government demand for the "strong national leader" narrative. As a relatively recent graduate of one of Russian state universities I can testify, that my history professor when he just met us in the begining of the semester, has taken then latest government recommended textbook on the subject of history of Russia in the 20th century and has offered an A in a semester and a right for a free admission of his lectures to anyone, who would be willing to write a critical essay on any of the chapters in a that book, provided that such chapter has at least 5 substantial mistakes or groundless conclusions. By the end of the month I got an A, my friend got an A, almost everybody in my group got a A. No chapter had left uncovered. There is a growing disparity between the existing human ability to think critically and the demand for critical thinking by some of those that work forces. And in Russia nowdays it sometimes feels too real.

This is pretty much how our school taught us how Mao was to China, I guess my primary school put both Mao and Stalin"s portrait together in the classroom for a reason

Please do a video about Japan schools and WWII.

Duolingo is better than Babbel, if you dont think so, the Owl will come.

Suggestion: How does South Africa teach Apartheid? * I am a South African. *

Student to Russian teacher: "Why did the Russian people follow Joseph Stalin?" Russian teacher: begins Stalin for time*

Why am I even watching this? I was born and raised in Moscow and actually took a state exam in history. Guess the lockdowns are really getting to me lmao. Although, on a more serious note, the video does a good job of painting the picture regarding teaching Stalin in our schools. While his horrible crimes are common knowledge, schools really just skip the whole purges and gulags things entirely. Depends on the teacher, but federal guidelines don’t include it

The way Stalin is taught varies greatly throughout Russia. As many parts were impacted differently and have different cultures...its a a big country..

too easy, in soviet russia , stalin teaches you...

Look how they teach history regarding Winston Churchill in Britain. More of a 'super cut' than a biography.

Stalin was so harsh on Ukraine that in fact some of the Ukrainians switched sides in WWII after their German occupation.

In Soviet Russia, you don’t teach Stalin, Stalin teaches you.

“How do the Italians teach Mussolini?”

2:55 GULag in Russian stands for Main Office of Camps, it was the structure that managed the prison camps, not the camps themselves.

this actually makes me think: what if, just hypothatically, around 1941 Hitler would have made a peace agreement with the UK and US, and had used his forces to defeat the Sowjets, and instead of the Pact there would have been a similar organisation opposed to the West in the Cold war, but under a German Reich that was lead by Hitler for decades to come, and in the 90s it would have ended similar to the cold war, with the German Reich crumbled, but never defeated militarily. In this scenario, imagine the attrocities commited by the nazis would be seen today as "hard, but necessary sacrifices", and Hitler as a very devoted man who might have had some negative personality traits, but ultimately undertook a great effort in uniting ze German people in times of crisis. As a German, the sheer thought makes me want to vomit. And this is basically what is happening with Stalin.

I love how Spain teaches Stalin. Franco:"Literally Hitler" Stalin:"leader ofrece the USSR

The Soviet Union, I thought you guys broke up? Yeeees, that's what we wanted you to think!

Stalin: Murders 3 million of his own people. Enslaves his own people along the same lines. Makes his political opponents disappear. Also was a war time leader. Russia: It was all worth it! That kinda scares me. Sure, the US isn't perfect either, but at least we acknowledge that our bouts in slavery, concentration camps and whatnot were bad. Saying, "But it was all worth it" gives a bad precedent for the people to be willing to go through it again if a leader called on it to happen. "I'm going to a slave labor camp, but it's for the good of the country." "I can murder my political opponents for the good of the country." "I can kill people who disagree with me for the good of the country." Every dead person is one person less who can vote, who can make something beautiful with their hands, who can have an opinion or have a world changing idea or innovation. Each person dead is less chance for a better world. Even if they disagree with you, they have a right to live their disagreeable life. Viewing people as mere numbers in your favorability polls is a disaster. Stalin was a disaster. Don't be afraid to call it out.

Sounds familiar somehow.

I can imagine most countries education systems gloss over the bad parts of their history and have lots of justifications. As a Brit, I feel we definitely do that.

OUR history

In short: we don't even get to Stalin, history course stops at the end ww2 because the school year ends

"I've broken Stalins house" is all I can think about watching this.

I'm Russian myself, let me tell ya the truth: School says: he's a HERO! Parents say: he was a GHOUL! (the correct answer)

It sounds a lot more similar to how different things are taught in the US than I thought it'd be.

I went to school #550 in Petersburg (a public Jewish school) and he’s not taught in a very positive way. We were even told how he thought he was about to be arrested when the Nazis attacked the USSR. We even had a discussion about whether his death was natural or was a poison administered by perhaps Beria. Granted, Petersburg was blockaded during the war and it was awful. My school also had Israeli funding and teachers were paid more but my experience with how Stalin was taught, is not what you said though it was also not the truth either. His victims are down played. The atrocities taught but also downplayed. Still, he is portrayed as a relative monster.

My cousin adopted her daughter from Russia and when she was a baby my cousin sponsored a foreign exchange student from Ukraine. One weekend they were at my house and my cousin was outside with my parents I was watching TV and Tania (student) was looking after Gracie, changing her diaper or something I wasn't paying attention. Gracie was fussing and all of a sudden I heard an exasperated sigh "Russia and Ukraine have always had problems". I couldn't breathe I was laughing so hard. She finished what she was doing and came sat down just said that girl.

Weird that you took a minute and a half to tell us in an add that the app you're selling is add free.

As an American, I would love to see one of these regarding our education. Perhaps the American-Indian Wars, or something slightly closer to contemporary times like the dropping of the atomic bombs. Either way, I very much enjoy and support this channel, and Simon is a gloriously pleasant narrator.

Actually the topic of how to teach about Stalin in school is quite controversial, so much so they're still Stallin' to this day.

Oddly I'm far more interested in how Nikita Khrushchev is covered. Any time I have read anything mentioning Khrushchev from an east-of-the-iron-curtain perspective he seems the far more polarizing Soviet leader.

I was talking to my wife the other day about the different disciplines in school and how history, while it does give you a sort of frame of reference for your place in the grand scheme, is more about indoctrination than the transmittal of balanced and accurate information. Told her about how the Nazis are taught about in Germany and pointed out how different we in the Southern U.S. would view the Civil War if we were taught that it was about the wealthy elite in the south forcing the South into a reckless and backwards war to protect their interest rather than this states' rights and lost cause stuff. Not that I know the former to be true, might be, just that as a form of indoctrination it would be effective and would fundamentally change the Southern view.

I studied in the USSR as an American. I don’t need Babel, lol. One of my friends asked a professor who had just finished lecturing on Russian literature from the Stalin era without mentioning the persecutions. He asked about the millions who died. The professor, who was young, answered that it may have been a few hundred. He seemed to be very sincere about it. He apparently did not know himself what had happened 😮

Yes, this certainly would explain the stuff some Russians tend to say in online discussions. A general attitude of "my county can do no wrong". A few take it to the extreme with "Russia never lost a War" and perform some fascinating mental gymnastics when presented with examples to the contrary.

“Russia today is a capitalist country” I have several questions

I can't afford to pay my library fines let alone sign up for a new language learning app but kudos, glad ya got a sponsor hahaha.

As a Georgian, I remember hearing that Stalin took a nearly ruined Russia, and then left it as an industrial powerhouse. But that was the only "positive" thing that was said about him...

If you were not liked by the local “government”( usually made of the local slick ones and shady people who didn’t care much about dignity etc)... you were getting sent to Siberia without trial or executed the same day- every thing you owned was confiscated, and your family left on the street. It still gives me chills as some of my family members survived after being almost killed by having the head smashed with rocks by a drunk city mayor and left on the street for dead... he was never charged with anything... Crazy times.

do "how is the indigenous genocide taught in the us" next pls

For some reason, I was under the impression that Stalin's purges of the 1930's are regarded as leaving Russia ill prepared to repulse the Nazi invasion, due to the loss of military intellect and experience in the "rivals" he eliminated. Do people not think this?

stalin has my second favorite historical mustache

I’m just going to predict this is along the lines of Japan’s teaching of, “One day, Japan visited other countries, and suddenly, for no reason, the USA dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki” Edit: called it

First I have a lot of respect for Simon for his well informed and unbiased videos but this video did get me thinking. In the same context an interesting video would be how Churchil (a man who saved millions of British lives but was also an alcoholic racist responsible for the famine in Bengal) is taught in the UK, India and Bangladesh.

"...gradually consolidate his position." That's a quite humorous way to put it.

I'm from Russia and I can say that there is an "official" point of view on Stalin, which is promoted by modern Russian government, that praises Stalin as a war leader, however in reality how Stalinism is being learned in schools and universities heavily depends on the teacher. I hope soon this official misconception will come to an end and government won't try to hide numbers of Stalin's victims thinking that this would change image of this terrifying dictator

How do the Russians teach about the Romanov family?

One mistake that political and historical analysts often make is thinking that their enemy should be our enemy.

Maybe a unpopular opinion, but I think this is the ideal way to teach your own dark history. Children should be taught about things their ancestors did, but not be instilled with a sense of shame and/or guilt for it. I remember in school being taught about how terrible certain things in US history were and how we were responsible (i.e. the people living now), and getting pissed off since my thought process was "Why the hell am I responsible for shit some guy did 200 years ago?" I think developing a guilt complex for children for something they didn't do is not just unhealthy, but also morally wrong.

9:30 I remember learning about the Nanjing Massacre in great detail while in middle school.

I went through the Russian educational system, admittedly, quite long ago, but at least at that time there was a lot of attention paid to his atrocities, the GULAG, etc. Not sure about the present day, though. A lot of attention was drawn to the fact that he opposed to the preparation to the imminent German invasion even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the invasion would probably happen any day now. He was not presented to us as "harsh, but fair", but as a genuinely terrible thing that happened to the country. It was in the nineties, though, when the general attitude towards the communist past was very negative.

Stalin, ''Yeah I caused 100+ people to die despite being dead, you know, it's my thing.''

I would like to know more about the opinions of Common Russians regarding Leonid Brezhnev.

"I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy." -Joseph Stalin

Every time I hear the name Stalin, I can't stop thinking about Agent Orange. All traits of behavior just ticked all the boxes.

Excellent overview of how to think about history from different perspectives.

Stalin never was a premier. He was the general secretary.

It's important to remember that perspective is everything. The judgement you pass on something is very much dependent upon how you see it relative to the context of other events and situations of history and what personal connections you may or may not have had to the subject. In the same way an African, Chinese, Italian, Spanish or Irish American will have a very different personal story than an English, Scottish, German or Dutch American, so too will a Ukrainian, Kazakh, Moldovan or Latvian have a different outlook on Soviet history than a Russian would. There's also the element of "he might've been a tyrant, but he was OUR tyrant" at play and Russians are no more anxious to be moralized at for their history than anyone else... certainly not Americans, British, Germans or French; all of which have plenty to answer for themselves without pointing fingers at others.

My gran-grandmother (which i never met) got deported by russians to a gulak, where she worked and starved to death. Her crime was being a german, but at the time my familiy was living for generations in Romania, only my grandmother fleed from the east to west Germany by selling everything they had to bribe police and such.

Dude, that's a massive introduction. I was waiting for the title to start

Say what you will about the man, I always liked his mustache. Edit: I’m curious how Italy teaches WW2 since their country was basically split in half to begin with.

in Estonia Stalin and Soviet Union in general was all we learned for years. the occupation was harsh on us

Sort of like how Winston Chirchills atrocities are ignored in British schools

@1:12 skip the commercial

Episode suggestion: Hungarian Tokaji wine and the relationship with the Czars of Russia...truly fascinating!

I would recommend reading The Gulag Archipelago, to truly understand the depth of Stalin's evil.

As a German, try imagine some teachers manual would say this: We must make every school child aware of the grandeur of our struggle and our victories, we must show him the cost of these great successes in labor and blood, we must tell him how great the people of our epoch-- Hitler, Goebbels and their companions in arms-- organized the german people in the struggle for a new hapy life (in the east). lol.

12:07 I'm not even listening anymore, just mesmerized by the dead guy laying on the curb and peoples reactions. You can tell he's dead...how his body is resting.

My coworker is from Russia and I've asked him about Stalin before. He basically feels the way this video lays it out. Good leader who was good for Russia. Took a war torn country, set up infrastructure, everyone had food, Jobs. Etc. I asked him about the bad stuff, like mass death? He attributed it to American propaganda. Like I grew up here so his view was that my history was tainted with an anti-russian slant. Really smart guy actually, just thought it was interesting how he thought Stalin was good

Generally, Russian school program tries to avoid presenting any event and personalities in strictly positive or negative light, so "bothsidesism" is a big problem. It's not just about Stalin, it's a symptom of a trend when our government is trying to stop people from forming strong opinions on history and society.

Gorbachev would be an interesting biographic

In mother Russia, you don't teach Stalin, Stalin teaches you.

Added to the people actually shot, murdered or who died from deportation (froze or starved to death, died from exhaustion digging some useless canal or from lung disease from the fumes down in the coal mines), add the additional millions who survived the camps but whose lives were nevertheless made hell because of him - years and years of forced labour in -40 winters and +40 summers, alternating between frost bites in the cold and armies of horseflies eating you night and day in the marshy woodlands of Siberia in suffocating heat, atrocious working conditions "forever", no nine to five, no holiday obviously, underequipped, underclothed and underfed on thin soup and rotten cabbage leaves. That's speaking of the camps alone - the worst of the worse. But what about the crazy inhumane working conditions he imposed on the normal workers to fulfill his three and five year plans, overwork in the factories, which increases the chances for machinery accidents and mutilations (that's what factory work meant at the time - you run the machines too fast for your own safety cause you're running behind unfulfillable quotas, you lose concentration, or you fall asleep on the line, or you trip over - bang there goes your arm !) That was not communism, it was state capitalism, which is exactly what the system was. Factory work was inhumane everywhere, but paradoxically, at least in the west you had some protection through your union. In the USSR, the boss was the state and the union was the state ! Well you better shut up then, or you'll be executed or sent off to camp as a sabotteur. A great success ? Well they certainly claimed so, but the production rates were constantly invented, falsified, symbolic. Not everyone died, but everyone suffered. A few other joys : Stalin had a constant policy of relocating people hundreds of miles from their homes simply to break off any national or ethnic cohesion among the peoples he considered suspect (not even for individual actions nor concrete suspicions, but for being of a different ethnicity and "perhaps" having as a group a will for independance, autonomy or even simply sharing a culture and traditions that needed to be uprooted and liquified into the common mass : the amounts of tribal languages and cultures from the once very multiethnic and diverse Russia - and we're talking about today's territory, not including those that have since gained independence - that have gone extinct because of these policies is in itself an act of murder and ethnic destruction. The famine in the Ukraine was not simply "let happen", it was organised against the peasants thanks to confiscating grain (for export - the USSR was exporting grain to the west in exchange for money and machines while its own population in Ukraine had no skin on the bone and was dying in ditches) and road-blocks which kept the population from fleeing the starved-out areas : why ? Not even because the Ukrainian peasants wanted "independence", but because they were resisting collectivisation. This was punishment. The same violence, with targeted massacres of "richer" peasants was also organised throughout the Russian countrysides, for the same same reasons. Then, we count the murders, deportations and executions within the USSR alone, not counting that Stalin was directly responsible for carrying out the same systematic process in all the countries he occupied (Poland in 1939 - soon as he marched in, the deportations of civilians started, the Katyn massacre in 1940 ; the Baltic states in 1940 - immediately, overnight, look it up - tens of thousands deported to Siberia - petty figures ? Well if you consider that a country such as Estonia had 1 million people in 1940 and you deport 40 000 people, what is that ? And the same all over again in 1949 when new purges occurred - 1% of a population, 1 in 100, disappears, not over some years, but overnight, as a foretaste of what's to come - savoury stuff ! Then he did it in East Germany, in Poland, again after 45, instilled the same murderous regimes in Romania, Bulgaria, Tchecoslovakkia etc. Etc. Military success ? Yes, though certainly not through any device of Stalin. He did not see any of Barbarossa coming although the better part of his staff kept telling him not to trust Hitler, to organised defences on depth and not simply along the borders (which meant that once the Germans had encircled the soviet armies along the border they could dash for weeks and hundreds of miles without any serious resistance, and Moscow survived at least as much owing to a very wet automn terrain and the craziest winter in a hundred years as to last minute resistance organised by siberian troops which could be brought over once it was clear to Soviet intelligence that the Japanese would not open a second front). Stalin's only merit in this war was to gradually trust his staff to take over command and limit himself to an overview position, where Hitler gradually did the opposite and gave his staff less and less autonomy. The outrageous defeats and millions of prisoners in 1941 are however very largely his doing. A great leader ??? And go ahead, before you accuse me of being a capitalist or you tell me "what about American crimes, what about British crimes, what about crusades" (because that is what nowaday's Russian trolls do best, thinking that you can spare yourself owning up to anything simply because you're not the only one ever to have done something wrong - "tu quoque" fallacy all the way) - well I take no interest in defending capitalism or the western world in any way : I am an anarchist and I hate equally those who have instituted capitalist exploitation and (possibly even more) those who have taken advantage of an honest struggle to push themselves into power and submit the people completely, through murder and lies. It's because of people like Stalin that any workers' movement to come faces an uphill battle against either idiots or manipulators who believe that the USSR epithomises communism and that any non-capitalist society must lead to "Stalin". F*ck Stalin. Die in hell, and your lies. You didn't only murder your own people, you lead to the global victory of capitalism and to the destruction of the left, by using and perfecting capitalist methods of exploitation, while disguising it under fake marxist rhetoric.

4:06 that word in Russian means Chief (chief sure is a leader though)

When you visit a country, you would find a party, when you visit soviet russia, the party will find YOU!

My father was editor of the University of Denver’s paper, the Denver Clarion. Shortly before Trotsky’s death, my father went down to Mexico to interview him. While the interview itself is interesting and shows Trotsky as someone who reasonably contradicts the then prevalent US view of the world, what was most impactful to me as a child was the realization that had the timing of the interview been different, my father might’ve been killed along with Trotsky, and then I would never have been. And yet this is the very scenario played out for the millions of men and women who died at Stalin’s behest during his lifetime, whose children were never to be....

What is your background music? It kinda sounds like the music in family guy when Stewie and Brian go back in time to WW2

He killed 10’s of millions of his own people. One of the biggest monsters in history.

Your boy roman, the friendly neighbourhood Russian could of answered this in 5 minutes

Do old photos require filters to make them look like old photos?

- vasilii ivanovich! what do you think about babel? - well, it depends on babel'

Stalin was such a dictator who was mad with power that he tried to resign 4 times in 1927. 28, 29, and 52

You forgot to mention that "GULAG Archipelago" is a part of school program since 2009.

I run a club on Xbox for a racing game which brings people from all over the world together in our love of motorsports. Occasionally though some discussion can get a little heated. One such instance was when the boys where discussing WWII. I don't recall exactly what was said as it was a rowdy discussion over 2 years ago but someone asked "How do you have such bad understanding of your history?" Well now we know...

As a russian myself, he was not so different from Hitler if not even worse than him. For good or bad he was on the right side on the war, at least after invading Poland.

Simon, i legit got a mail order bride ad on this video (not the first time on your channels) i have personalized ads turned off so there's something about this channel that google thinks mail order brides from the Philippines is an adequate thing to advertise 😂

Wasn't there a recent poll down about Russians' view on Stalin? I'm pretty sure a majority of them have a positive view on him

I went to school back in 1980-s in USSR. Stalin was barely referenced in history classes back then. No streets named after Stalin, no monuments, it was like he was condemned by communusts.

My grandmother and her peers grew up in USSR, I was born in 1996. Sometimes we compare our knowledge about history. She tells me, how instead of talking about the atrocities Stalin committed, she was forced to study some "meeting" papers. How awful it was and any question was met with dismissal. She honestly did not know what Stalin and his "comrades" did to our people until I told her. We live in one of the countries occupied by the soviets. Here we have a joke "Only nation which made us hate Germans are Russians". Due to our history, this rings a sad note.