Michael Malice

It broke the Ukrainians.

But I think his goal was to break their spirit and getting them fed was secondary, right?

And

given the fact that they stopped complaining, because they're dead, he got what he wanted.

He got a compliant population.

I think that was clearly the... So his... Like I said earlier, he broke with Lenin because he wanted socialism in one country, right?

That was his vision, right?

And he was also very aware that what became the Soviet Union was extremely diverse.

First of all, it's a gigantic country.

It's the big country on Earth.

It's not only gigantic, you had...

all these peoples, these nationalities within it that have had historical enmity and they're not gonna have loyalty to Moscow.

He's a Georgian himself.

This was always a big problem.

So that was what he wanted to do as well is to homogenize and have them be standardized.

And I don't see how you do that without either massive re-education, which is only gonna go so far or really just crushing people's spirits.

And the other big thing, a big element of Soviet culture and the Soviet mythology, I mean, he called, his name was, he changed his name to Stalin.

I can't even pronounce his Georgian name, Jugosvely or something like that.

It means man of steel.

So a large part of the, and this still remains in Russian culture to this day.