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other peoples were transported to empty frozen fields or waterless, lifeless steppes, and aban-
doned there to die. It is interesting to note that the Kalmyks, who already lived on the steppes,
were not relocated further into their depths but into the Siberian taiga. Stalin controlled the
fates of entire peoples, not only on the territory of the Soviet Union but also in nearby coun-
tries. Stalin relocated millions of Germans from Prussia, Silesia, and Sudet.
When the Nazi leaders went on trial in Nuremberg, Hitler’s concentration camps in
Buchenwald, Saksenhausen, Mulberg, Furstenwalde, Liebe-Roze, Bautzen, and others were
not shut down. ese concentration camps were simply taken out of the SS system and
incorporated into the system of the GULAG. us, for example, the Nazi concentration
camp at Buchenwald was transformed into “Special camp #2,” which remained operational
until 1950. Of the 28,000 people imprisoned there in those five years, seven thousand (25
percent) died. In comparison, from 1937 to 1945, 250,000 people went through the Nazi
Buchenwald. Of that number, 50,000 (20 percent) died. e Communist Buchenwald had
a higher death rate.
e Red Army came to Central Europe with the supposedly noble goal of liberating it
from the Nazis, but it left only after establishing puppet governments in most of those coun-
tries. Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, part
of Austria, and Albania were forced under Stalin’s control, as well as China, North Korea, and
Vietnam in Asia. On July 22, 1945, the Soviet delegation suggested that the Soviet Union,
the United States, and Great Britain separately or jointly oversee the former Italian colonies
in Africa and the Mediterranean. On July 23, Stalin demanded the right to create Soviet
4
military naval bases in the Black Sea region, in the straits of Bosporus and Dardanelles. He
5
also wanted parts of Turkey—the Kars and Ardagan regions—to belong to the Soviet Union.
6
Stalin tried to take control of West Berlin by strangling it through a blockade. Soviet agents
appeared in France, Italy, and Greece. e NATO military alliance was formed with the
clear goal of preventing Stalin’s troops from occupying Greece and Turkey. Stalin declared
northern Iran to be a part of Azerbaijan, and right until the end of his life never gave up
trying to take control of this province. Stalin set up the People’s Democratic Republic of
Southern Azerbaijan, and the Kurdish People’s Democratic Republic, respectively in north-
ern and western Iran.
In 1945, tens of millions of square kilometers of territory, occupied by millions of
people, lay at Stalin’s feet. But Stalin at that time did not have the resources to control all his
conquests. On June 22, 1941, Hitler dealt a lethal blow to the Soviet Union. e best part of
the male population of the Soviet Union perished in the war against Germany. After the war,
the USSR was supposed to have conducted a population census and calculated its war losses.
But Stalin did not conduct a census. It was only conducted fourteen years after the war, when
Stalin was dead. “ e decision not to count all the citizens until 1959 was founded on a desire
7
not to draw attention to the huge unjustified human losses during the war period.”
During the last year of the war, the Red Army had to recruit underage boys, without
saying how many years they would have to serve. ey were kept in the army for seven to
eight years. Otherwise, there would have been nobody left to serve in the gigantic army,
which controlled almost half the globe. ose seven to eight years lasted until Stalin’s death.
If he had lived longer, these soldiers would have been kept in the army for fifteen years, or
even more.