The American Century 21st that is

[Michael Tee]

from the tab "Discussion" at the top of the article you linked to - - although I don't think that any of the links in the original article will work in this text version - - everything that follows the end of this line is verbatim unedited text of a single Copy-and-Paste:

Astonishing Death Toll

The number of people who perished in the purges is subject to hot disputes with death toll estimates ranging from 1 to '''100 million''' people, depending on who counts and what is counted as a purge.

This has got to be a joke. You couldn't convince a 10 year old that a median of 50 million would be executed out of a population of 160 million. Such is unfeasible. Demographic data does not remotely correspond to such allegations. Countless sources have correctly specified the death toll from executions to total 681,692 including the Russian Viktor Zemskov, J.Arch Getty, Robert Thurston and Stephen Wheatcroft. Archival data must be given priority over hearsay, rumours, and crude arithmetic.

Some sources place the number at about 20 million, which includes approximately 5 million kulaks and other peasants killed between 1929 and 1933; 5 million who died during the Ukrainian Holodomor, 5 million executed between 1933 and 1953 (including military personnel executions during the Great Patriotic War), and 5 million dead in gulag camps.

This has been debunked by archival material. It's been revealed that 150,000 kulaks died during 1930-1931; 3 million died during the rural famine of 1932-1933; 786,000 executions from 1930-1953; a 1 million deaths in the GULAG. The total figure is not quite 5 million. Again, we must give priority to archival sources over second-hand estimates. Sources include "Years of Hunger" by Stephen Wheatcroft and RW Davies and "Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence" by J.Arch Getty.

Then don't talk about it. Fix the article with your data, adding sources with every claim. Remember: be bold. -Kasreyn 22:02, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
"The main evidence for the gendercidal impact of the "Great Terror" lies in the Soviet census of 1959. In a fascinating addendum to the original edition of his work on the Purge period, The Great Terror, Robert Conquest uses the census figures to argue that the Soviet population "was some 20 million lower than Western observers had expected after making allowance for war losses." "But the main point," he notes, "arises from a consideration of the figures for males and females in the different age groups." He then unveils a striking table indicating that whereas age cohorts up to 25-29 displayed the usual 51-to-49 percent split of women to men, from 30-34 the gap widened to 55 to 45 percent. Thereafter, the disparity became massive, reflecting the generations of males caught up in the purges and the Great Patriotic War. From 35-39, women outnumbered men by 61 to 39 percent; from 40-54, the figure was 62 to 38 percent; in the 55-59 age group, 67 to 33 percent; from 60-69, 65 to 35 percent; and 70 or older, 68 to 32 percent. [...] [...] The estimates are "only approximations," Conquest notes, and "anything like complete accuracy on the casualty figures is probably unattainable." But "it now seems that further examination of the data will not go far from the estimates we now have except, perhaps, to show them to be understated"; and "in any case, the sheer magnitudes of the Stalin holocaust are now beyond doubt." He cites Joseph Berger's remark that the atrocities of Stalin's rule "left the Soviet Union in the condition of 'a country devastated by nuclear warfare.'" (All figures and quotes from Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, pp. 485-88.)" from Genocide Watch --Dwarf Kirlston 18:47, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

is there a Wikiproject Genocide?--Dwarf Kirlston 18:47, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
> "The main evidence for the gendercidal impact of the "Great Terror" lies in the Soviet census of 1959. In a fascinating addendum to the original edition of his work on the Purge period, The Great Terror, Robert Conquest uses the census figures to argue that the Soviet population "was some 20 million lower than Western observers had expected after making allowance for war losses."

This is pretty weak. For one thing, the opening of archives has revealed that the costs of war were worse than had been assumed previously. Once you begin making this type of alteration, everything else can be thrown out of kilter and it makes no sense to claim to know what the population of 1959 should have been then. This is why Conquest's tracts are pretty meaningless. The archives of the Gulag and the general demographical data have become available. This information can be found in Haynes & Husan, A CENTURY OF STATE MURDER? It does not support claims of "20 million." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.69.137.7 (talk) 04:08, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

There are plenty of other reasons why this might have happened. It is a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument to say that the lower population was a result of genocide. To assume that it's related to genocide is drawing a pretty long bow. David Glantz has proposed, with some justification, that the real figure for Soviet war dead was closer to 40 million rather than the figure of 20 million which is usually quoted.Flanker235 (talk) 11:47, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

[BSB]

Actually Michael, if you look at the gendercide site ( http://www.gendercide.org/case_stalin.html ) you'll see that the purges started in 1935. I don't think that was in preparation for the war, do you my honorable friend?

BSB

[Michael Tee]

Hey, Ami, thanks for quoting Solzhenitsyn, one of the biggest anti-semites that Russia ever produced, as a perfect example of the kind of anti-Soviet scum that I've been talking about all along.

The "Discussion" page of Wikipedia articles is for people who have a problem with the accuracy of the article itself.  Some of them are very scholarly and present their sources, others are just crackpots or cranks.  The section that I reproduced seemed to have a good variety, including some who made a good case that the death toll of Stalin's alleged "crimes" was highly exaggerated.

The "Discussion" page is part of a multi-stage editing process.  From there, persons with apparently valid changes to make can be sent on to make formal revisions to the article as posted.  Whether they take the time and trouble to go through the more onerous process of actually effecting the proposed revision is, of course, strictly up to them.

[BSB]

Michael, you know you need more than that discussion page. Find something like the gendercide site I put up.


BSB

[BSB]

I've got to go out and meet the day. I can't say I've got enough to hang Stalin anymore than about ten times. How do you think your defense is doing?


BSB

[Michael Tee]

<<Actually Michael, if you look at the gendercide site ( http://www.gendercide.org/case_stalin.html ) you'll see that the purges started in 1935. I don't think that was in preparation for the war, do you my honorable friend? >>

Uh, yeah, actually I do, my honourable friend.  1935, as you undoubtedly will recall, was the year that Adolf Hitler announced that Germany, in flagrant contravention of the Treaty of Versailles, was going to fully re-arm, which came as no surprise to Stalin, thanks to his excellent intelligence operations in European capitals.  But you knew that.

[BSB]

another site for you:
http://countrystudies.us/russia/10.htm

For such a serious student of Russian history you aren't doing so well. In fact you're doing downright poorly. No where in everything I've read has anyone made the point that the purges were part of the preparation for WWII. In fact they don't even hint at it. And you know why? It's bullshit. They had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Which brings me to another point, you're just making shit up on the fly. You're shovelling crap. You don't know nothin'.  I'm afarid as many shots as I give you here the target still pops up, BLOWHARD. And that's being polite, son.


BSB

[BSB]

Michael Tee: "They were the enemy of the people."


Joesph Goebbels: "Each Jew is a sworn enemy of the German people."

[Plane]

The government of the USSR didn't make looking up the facts convienient.

Whenever someone gets busy destroying evidence , should one assume that the evidence was good for the evidence destroyer?

Should the assumption be made that the destroyed evidence would have exonerated the party that destroyed the evidence?

If it were me I would preserve evidence that was proving my inocence , I would even preserve evidence that would prevent exaggeration of my crime.

If it were me I wouldn't expect everyone to assume that the minimum possible damage had been done just because I had destroyed as much evidence as I could reach.

[BSB]

>>The government of the USSR didn't make looking up the facts convenient.<<



http://articles.sfgate.com/1997-12-14/books/17764450_1_stalin-s-russia-vanishes-soviet-photographs

BSB

[Plane]

  I had a hard time finding the photo your comment brought to mind, it is of Dubcek standing in a group along with the doctored version with Dubcek exicised.

I havn't found that one wgere I could copy it , though if you want a look at it follow the first link and turn a few pages.

Many other examples ....
You really need to know the provenance of a photo to consider it evidence. 

http://www.ohio.edu/visualliteracy/JVL_ISSUE_ARCHIVES/JVL11(1)/JVL11(1)_pp.10-37.pdf
http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Mitchell/MitchellHow.html

Effacements and Elisions
The converse way to fake the photographic evidence is to efface something. The result is an image that tells the truth up to a point, but not the whole truth. For example, one of the most notorious photographs of the twentieth century exists in two versions (figure 9.7). The first, taken on May 5, 1920, shows a dramatically posed Lenin addressing a meeting with the conspicuous figure of Trotsky at his side. In the second, Trotsky is absent--deleted from the image as he was in general from Stalinist history. [17] Those who want to rewrite political narratives know such strategies well--hence also the removal of Alexander Dubcek from a 1968 photograph of Czech leaders outside Saint Vitus Church in Prague, and the removal of the Gang of Four from a photograph of Chinese leaders at Mao's funeral in Tiananmen Square in 1976. [18] (Similar effects can be achieved by selectively excising portions of audio tapes, as in the notorious Nixon Watergate tapes.) The photograph's metonymic power-- its capacity to stand for a larger world outside the frame and to suggest a larger narrative that embraces the moment of exposure--is being exploited here. Modifying what the photograph explicitly shows has the more important effect of changing what it implicitly constructs.

On another famous occasion, the wife of a British newspaper proprietor was offended by a photograph of a prize bull and caused its testicles to be erased prior to publication. The owner of the bull, furious at this misrepresentation of his animal's capacities, sued. (Presumably, if the photograph had been labeled with the name of some other bull, he would not have found reason to complain.) For not dissimilar reasons (and perhaps to similar indignation), Rolling Stone magazine electronically deleted a shoulder holster and pistol from the portrait of a macho television actor for its March 28, 1985, cover. The holster could just as easily been removed before the moment of exposure to produce an image with exactly the same content, so the difference between directorial and electronic manipulation seems theoretically insignificant in this case. (Of course it is significant to the bull.)

Aesthetically inconvenient elements have frequently been excised from architectural photographs. Some of the most influential plates in Le Corbusier's 1923 modernist tract Vers une architecture, for example, portrayed the dramatically pure, unadorned, geometric forms of North American grain

[Amianthus]

  I had a hard time finding the photo your comment brought to mind, it is of Dubcek standing in a group along with the doctored version with Dubcek exicised.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Soviet_Union

[Michael Tee]

<<another site for you:
<<http://countrystudies.us/russia/10.htm>>

Thank you.  Too bad you didn't bother to mention the source of the article:  Federal Research Division, Library of Congress.  For sure an important source of impartial and unbiased information on Soviet Russia.  NOT.

The article really isn't much use in supporting your phony Cold War bullshit, though.  Virtually no facts at all to help you.  But that's just my opinion.  If you want to make a serious argument based on what you found in "countrystudies," you can't just dump the whole article down without comment.  You should quote the points you think it makes in your favour, so that I can demolish them (easily in this case) one by one.  I'm certainly not going to demolish an entire article line-by-line before you base a single argument on any of it.

<<For such a serious student of Russian history you aren't doing so well. In fact you're doing downright poorly.>>

Really, Professor?   And exactly why would you think that?

<<No where in everything I've read has anyone made the point that the purges were part of the preparation for WWII. In fact they don't even hint at it. >>

And would you mind if I asked you what "everything you've read" actually constitutes?  Is it ALL financed and published by the US Government like the article you just linked to?  Or does your reading list go even broader than that and include stuff by fugitive Nazi war criminals and their Eastern European collaborators?  Inquiring minds need to know.

<<And you know why? It's bullshit. They had absolutely nothing to do with it. >>

Oh thank you for enlightening me from your vast store of knowledge of these events.  I always thought there was something fishy about claims that Stalin would want to prepare for war against a man like Hitler, such a fine fellow, even though he was always raving and ranting about Jews and what a curse they were on mankind, and about the USSR and how it was run by a bunch of "Jewish Bolsheviks" - - of course Stalin never gave war with Germany a thought.  He was much more concerned about real threats, like invasions from Mexico and Peru.

<<Which brings me to another point, you're just making shit up on the fly. You're shovelling crap. You don't know nothin'. >>

I see.  Those are very complex arguments, BSB, subtle and many-faceted, as befits a man of your towering intelligence and immensely detailed knowledge of Soviet Russia and its history.  My pitiful brain is barely capable of grasping such refined logic and so it may take some time before I am able to answer the points you have just raised at a level befitting their exalted nature.

<< I'm afarid as many shots as I give you here . . . >>

Shots?  YOU'VE been giving ME shots?  BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

<< . . . the target still pops up>>

LOL.  Yeah, I'm still here, dipshit.  Still waiting for one sentence that makes sense, one source that helps your case.  Luckily I have infinite patience.

<< And that's being polite, son. >>

Oh, I'm well aware of your legendary politeness, DAD.  You can take it and blow it out your ass, DAD.

[Michael Tee]

<<The government of the USSR didn't make looking up the facts convienient.

<<Whenever someone gets busy destroying evidence , should one assume that the evidence was good for the evidence destroyer?>>

What do you make of the fact that over 90% of the photos and videos taken at Abu Ghraib showing prisoner abuse still have not been released by the U.S. Government?

Just askin', because you seem to make a lot of assumptions when it is foreign governments that conceal the evidence.

[BSB]

Not one word of substance blowhard, all bullshit. You just twist and turn in the wind. You started out with nothing and you've finished with nothing. Not one supported sentence that backs up anything you've said. You're a fraud Michael.



Michael Tee: "They were the enemy of the people."

Joesph Goebbels: "Each Jew is a sworn enemy of the German people."


BSB