P-Necromancer
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User ID: 3278
P-Necromancer
5d ago
Not sure I agree. The mass rapes and executions (mostly) stopped after the war, but the purges and repression only got worse until Stalin's death. And these aren't small numbers; Stalin took millions of people as political prisoners. In fact, it's argued (not uncontroversially) that he was gearing up for his own genocide of the Jews shortly before his death, the fabricated Doctors' Plot being the opening move. (He'd already launched one major pogrom, but this was supposed to be much bigger.) The Soviet Union wasn't stopped, but Stalin personally was, and his successors happened to be more moderate. Who can say if the same wouldn't have happened to the Nazis after Hitler's death?
(Actually, a very similar story played out in China: Mao remained every bit the brutal dictator until his death, orchestrating the Cultural Revolution in his 70s, and it was only after his death that Deng managed to salvage a workable system from his insanity. It's an interesting thought, given the insistence down thread that killing individual leaders never works (vis a vis Iran). Both died peacefully, I suppose, so perhaps not that close an analogy, and the revolutionary government has already survived one transfer of power without moderating.)
There's some ambiguity in the etymological inference: Is it '(bi-month)ly' (as in, 'occurs once in a period of time comprising two months') or 'bi-(monthly)' ('twice monthly'). 'Bi-(monthly)' seems more intuitive to me, but (at least in the US), it seems I'm in the minority. I certainly wouldn't have the temerity to 'correct' someone else's usage.
Though either way, I think there's enough confusion that you basically have to just guess from context clues what 'bi-[time period]ly' means. This is certainly the worst of both worlds.
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