Memorial of a Vicious Leader

A new memorial monument of the D-Day, unveiled in a ceremony last week in Virginia, contains the head of Joseph Stalin. The justification for this statue can be the alliance between the United States, Great Britain and Russia during the Second World War, to victoriously overcome the Axis. Despite the suspicion created by the opposite ideological reasoning of the Soviet Union and the United-States this alliance seized until the end of the war. However, Stalin’s World War II history has not only been about his alliance against Nazis, it also caused the death of millions. Aside from the approximate ten million soldiers, roughly fourteen million civilians lost their lives. On the one hand, World War II was the deadliest conflict in the human history in which millions of Russians died among other citizens. On the other hand, many of the ordinary Russians lost their lives directly due to Stalin’s economical and social leadership.
Creating a chaos using the fear of a potential foreign attack, Stalin started his economical agenda using the ‘Five Year Plans’. To catalyze the industrialization and secure his own leadership, he accused many Russians of a broad term called “Kulak”. Initially Kulaks were defined as a class of rich peasants who owned lands. Further, the definition this term went beyond the initial boundaries and many ordinary citizens were suspended to concentration camps in Siberia and often never came back.
Outside the Soviet borders, after occupying Germany under the control of Stalin, Russian soldiers cruelly rapped many of the German citizens. Additionally, to create his buffer zone for securing his power, Stalin not only caused the separation of many nations, but also halted migrations from the East to the West after 1950. Stalin was the same leader that not only did not permit a fully democratic election in many of his satellite states, but also brutality enforced his power over other nations in cases such as the 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état.
These were only examples of the viciousness of Stalin. Currently many European diplomats in the U.S. are expressing how they are “shocked as a European citizen and as a European diplomat” (Foreign Policy magazine). This memorial is illustrating how the officials of Virginia singularly interpreted Stains leadership by only observing his alliance with the United States. In a global world, it is essential to understand and value the international society. It is crucial to respect millions who died under Stalin’s order. It is urgent for the Virginia officials to apologize and alter this memorial in respect to millions of humans.