69
votes
Did the Soviet Union murder over 20M people under its control after the war?
As it usually is the issue with those questions: what counts as someone being killed by the Soviet Union changes the answer. And that is supposing we have reliable numbers of the cause of deaths in ...
- 3,269
33
votes
Accepted
Did 57% of people in France believe that the USSR contributed the most to the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945?
Yes, it is true
This document (PDF, in french) is a summary of the recent and previous polling by IFOP, written by IFOP and hosted on their website. Page 5 has the question, and a table with answers ...
- 967
31
votes
Accepted
Was very little or no new medication developed in the USSR?
Concerning the claim in the question headline: it might be difficult to properly define "very little", compare that to Western medicine. Then start an argument about what counts statistically as…
...
- 44.1k
27
votes
Did a Soviet nail factory produce useless nails to improve metrics?
I can't find examples of nails, but there's a concrete example of chemical equipment where a factory avoided switching to producing superior models because they were lighter... and their output was ...
- 9,512
18
votes
Was the KGB using leftists to "destabilize" nations?
These kinds of claims did not originate with Yuri Bezmenov, and he is not claiming some kind of scoop. For example, the phrase "useful idiot" was not popularized by anyone in Russia but by anti-...
- 47.3k
16
votes
Did a Soviet nail factory produce useless nails to improve metrics?
The book Social Problems in a Free Society: Myths, Absurdities, and Realities
by Myles J. Kelleher (alt link) documents many of the idiosyncrasies of Soviet planned economy. It mentions the nail ...
- 277
15
votes
Accepted
Did secret police in the Eastern Bloc use X-ray machines to give people cancer?
This claim comes (according to multiple Wikipedia pages) from Crampton, R. J. (1997), Eastern Europe in the twentieth century and after, Routledge
This is a relatively scholarly book, however this ...
- 78.9k
15
votes
Was this Communist Party Directive from 1943 genuine?
It seems quite incompatible with recorded history.
One expert verdict of "this is made-up" is already found in the question. Proving a negative is not easy. But there is plenty of ...
- 44.1k
15
votes
Did 40% of the NKVD (Soviet police) leadership have Jewish nationality?
This is an at one time accurate and still highly misleading number. The total numbers and ratios of Jews in that organisation varied enormously. While true for at 'the highest point', this point is ...
- 44.1k
14
votes
Did Dr. Nikolay Chudinov revive Permian bacteria found in a potassium salt crystal in Perm, 1972?
Looks true.
Although there seems to be some remaining controversy over definitions between alive, re-animate, survive, dead etc. For example: Where the bacteria 'alive' while no longer metabolising ...
- 44.1k
10
votes
Accepted
Does Liberation Theology have its roots from the KGB and the Soviet Union?
Professor Matthew Shadle writes:
Pacepa’s story also really has no explanation of how the actual
theology came to be. For starters, although Gustavo Gutiérrez’s
seminal work A Theology of ...
- 47.3k
9
votes
Did the US break several treaties with the USSR/Russia after 1918?
As explained in Train Wreck: The U.S. Violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (Georgetown Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 12-128):
The United States is violating a multilateral ...
- 109k
9
votes
Did Lenin say "destroy the family, you destroy the country", and if so in what context?
The one thing somewhat like the quote that he wrote, in 1914, was:
A new form of family, new conditions in the status of women and in the upbringing of the younger generation are prepared by the ...
- 109k
8
votes
Was this Communist Party Directive from 1943 genuine?
Well, there is some evidence here, although I'm not sure how to interpret it. Still, I haven't found the directive either.
The National Republic, Volumes 30-31 published a relevant article, but ...
- 34.1k
8
votes
Accepted
Did Stalin say in 1940 that "the action of the Red Army is also a matter of world revolution"?
In the English translation published in 2003 by Yale University Press, the following quote can be found, dated January 21st, 1940 (page 124, formatting from source):
—Stalin: World revolution as a ...
- 1,579
7
votes
Accepted
Did a Soviet nail factory produce useless nails to improve metrics?
There is a 1957 article which specifies which city.
The 1957 Newsweek says:
A nail factory at Kubishev (on the Volga River) is a model. Assigned a production quota, the manager proudly exceeded it - ...
- 109k
7
votes
Was the KGB using leftists to "destabilize" nations?
Oleg Gordievsky was a KGB colonel who spied for the British. In his autobiography "Next stop execution" he writes about his work with "agents of influence" and "confidential contacts of influence".
...
- 16.8k
7
votes
Does Liberation Theology have its roots from the KGB and the Soviet Union?
For this claim, there appears to be extremely little by way of actual evidence. In deed, it seems only the claims of Ion Mihai Pacepa in the linked essay, and an interview, are ever referenced as ...
- 1,074
7
votes
Accepted
Does this photo depict a human flesh market during the Russian famine?
I don't see any evidence presented in the other anwer that this was a "flesh market" photo. To the contrary, some other similar photos have clearly documented circumstances that these were ...
6
votes
Did Lenin say "destroy the family, you destroy the country", and if so in what context?
It is almost an exact quote from Lenin's time, but not by Lenin.
Instead, in 1918, Sir John Robertson, the Medical Officer
of Health for Birmingham, UK said:
To destroy the family is to destroy ...
- 109k
6
votes
Did the US / UK supply the Russians with machinery before or during the Cold War?
According to the Economic Review of the Soviet Union :
Among American firms represented were the following: ... Cincinnati Milling Machine Co. ...
Cincinnati Milling Machine Company was a maker ...
- 109k
5
votes
Did Dr. Nikolay Chudinov revive Permian bacteria found in a potassium salt crystal in Perm, 1972?
It turns out there is a film about this study — Узники пермского моря (1970) (Wikipedia) — in which experiments are shown and the methodology is explained. It is in Russian.
The film summarizes the ...
5
votes
Did a US soldier climb onto an unmanned T-54 during the Checkpoint Charlie standoff of Oct 1961?
The German Wikipedia article on the standoff provides this article as its primary source. It is a newspaper article written in 2011, so unfortunately it doesn't provide sources itself but it seems ...
- 1,924
5
votes
Did a US soldier climb onto an unmanned T-54 during the Checkpoint Charlie standoff of Oct 1961?
The Wikipedia page on the Berlin Crisis of 1961 mentions the incident where an American soldier climbed into a T54 to see if it were a Soviet tank. It references the book Berlin 1961 by Frederick ...
- 5,912
4
votes
Did the US / UK supply the Russians with machinery before or during the Cold War?
According to Empire of the Clouds by James Hamilton-Paterson, in 1945 Rolls-Royce sold Nene and Derwent engines to the USSR; permission was given by Sir Stafford Cripps, president of the Board of ...
- 141
4
votes
Accepted
Was a speech by Stalin released on vinyl where the entire B-side consisted of applause?
Apart from simple repetition, there is at least one non-fiction book that mentions this anecdote:
There existed at the time a gramophone record of one of Stalin’s longer speeches. It ran to eight ...
- 44.1k
3
votes
During the disintegration of the Soviet Union, was there a surge of child allergies in Tajikistan because people hoarded soap?
The June 1990 Atlantic article Inside the Collapsing Soviet Economy says:
Soviet TV and newspapers, liberated by glasnost, are filled with stories about these rising prices and their consequences. In ...
- 109k
3
votes
Is the March of the Immortal Regiment a cult of the German Third Reich?
It is utterly and completely untrue to say that the tradition of holding parades and marches to celebrate a victory comes from Nazi Germany. Victory parades were held in Ancient Roman times, and have ...
- 57.9k
3
votes
Was there ever a speech by USSR officials before 1950 where it was asked of Soviet women to uphold traditional female roles?
Here is the French original.
But in a translated version of the book, I discovered, following one chapter's footnotes:
Olga Michakova, secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth
...
- 389
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