Same trigger warning as above
[Stalin] Impregnated a 13 year old. Twice.
Okay, so this is obviously a very distasteful subject, but I don’t like how it’s twisted to smear political figures, so I have to reply.
First, judge Stalin on how he ruled, not how he lived. You’re not drinking beer with him, you’re considering what he did right or wrong while in power. [To be fair, you did say that’s what you’re doing, but you’re also calling him “a monster” - which is just in line with the usual anti-Soviet propaganda ~“Bloody psychopaths murdering babies!”] Stalin in exile in Siberia was a nobody - he wasn’t abusing power, he was living the way other regular people lived, or else he’d have been seized by the authorities or ostracized which would have been a death sentence.
Second, your link says she gave birth at 15 and then again at either 15 or 16 (depending on what her exact date of birth was), after starting to “live with” Stalin at 14. Still wrong, but not 13.
Third, the proof is questionable. The (by then) woman is said to have recognized Stalin from a picture that was shown to her years later after she thought he had died. She could have made a mistake. A DNA test conducted by some unknown party in our era of every possible slander against Stalin is hardly ironclad evidence.
Fourth, the social context matters. I don’t like the implicit anti-anthropological, Western-centric assumption that anything outside modern sexual norms makes the historic figure a sexual abuser. How were they to know the norms would change? They lived the way they lived.
Here’s an article on age at first marriage in the Russian Empire, citing Soviet research, contrasting it with what was by then the norm in the West. It says:
people wedded immediately after reaching the socially accepted age of majority, which in the second half of the 19th century was between 13-16 for a young woman, 17-18 for a young man …
… In 1774 the church established the marriageable age at 13 for women and 15 for men. In accordance with an imperial decree of 1830, the minimal age for wedding was raised to 16 for the bride and 18 for the groom. However, the peasants and lower urban classes often turned to religious authorities for permission to give a daughter away in marriage at a younger age.
So even in a city you could get a priest’s permission to marry at 13, and in a remote village the old tradition would have prevailed.
We know now that young (and especially old-to-young) sexual contact is damaging, so anyone doing that now is rightly considered a sexual abuser. But labeling entire past societies sexual abusers is wrong. Neither the perpetrators nor the victims thought of themselves as such.
More on the same topic
Done. Didn’t think anyone would read my word wall before they saw your comment saying “Child Sexual Assault”, but I was just being lazy about learning how to hide it. My bad.
Pleasure to speak to you too. I don’t believe that considering a thing in context is same as defending the thing.
This is exactly my problem with the anachronistic and Western-centric attacks. This is science denialism - anthropology teaches us that humans have many norms that appear absolutely barbaric from the outside, but are thought normal from the inside. “Oh my god, how could you even think that anyone could ever do this at any point and not be forever damned to the deepest layer of hell.” Millions of people did this forever - regular everyday people. Calling them monsters is elitist and myopic. You know better, living in the Information Age, so you can look down your nose at them all.
This is like attacking the Gracchi brothers for having slaves. Yes, slavery is always wrong. But damning long-dead people for whom it wasn’t wrong is pointless grandstanding. They were better than their peers in some ways, but not in all ways.
That’s the Daily Mail, but okay. Don’t claim one thing and then cite a source that says something different - that doesn’t lend your argument credibility.
Then cite them, please, instead of the Daily Mail, although even “peer reviewed” sources routinely slander Stalin. My point about the veracity of the claim is non-essential. But it’s useful to note that there’s a huge incentive for people (then and now) to lie about the subject.
So my source citing Soviet research, which is my main point, means nothing to you?
…Doesn’t that read like bullshit? A convicted revolutionary in exile can chase an armed cop out of town after being stabbed in the neck? Stalin wasn’t Rambo. The only way it’s true is if the whole town thought Stalin was doing nothing wrong and the cop was the one going against the norm which would be my point - the traditional norms prevailed in practice.
That’s not what postmodernism is. And you have to subscribe to a very specific modernist belief system if you think that everyone who married before 16 was “a monster”. They were wrong to do so, but they were normal human beings.
If YOU were born in the same place at the same time, YOU would be doing the same thing. You wouldn’t have the magic foresight or visions of what some faraway place did to tell you otherwise.
To me, it is wrong to equate people who believed they were doing the regular and moral thing to people today who absolutely know they are doing harm. They’re not the same - and it’s a disservice to modern victims to make that equation.
And that goes beyond Stalin. This is the whole attack on the prophet Mohammed. “Islam is a pedo-worshiping religion” - that’s the stuff of ignorance and xenophobia. “They considered right what we consider wrong - therefore THEY were all like the people we consider the worst of the worst.” This line of thinking is blind hatred.