another day, another terror

After reading Nate's post about whether the Russian terror was justified or not, I decided I have to agree in that it was not justified. However, and correct me if I'm wrong as I am very tired at this moment, I got the sense that Nate was almost saying that it wasn't necessarily justifiable but it is understandable how Stalin thought so. Now, I know I am bias in the situation. Stalin killed a good portion of my grandmother's Russian family and treated the Latvians (I am mostly of Latvian descent), as my Dad would say, "like dogs", causing my grandparents to flee there home in Latvia during World War II. Aside from my personal feelings about the situation in Russia, I think it was really rather idiotic and is always idiotic when a ruler decides to kill millions of his own people no matter what ideology or the outcome. I believe that a government's soul purpose is to protect and govern the people of their states. What good is a state without its people? What good is a government that cannot be trusted? So what if Stalin brought the nation up to speed with industrialization? What good is that if millions of people who once lived in the country are no longer around to experience this boost of Russian status? I can vaguely understand, for ideological purposes, why Stalin would kill people who were very against him and very vocal or subversive in their ways, but he killed a lot more people than just those who were against him. Also, if you continuously believe that people are against you, they eventually will be. Even more so, a proper reaction to discontent amongst your people should be to listen to why so many people are against you in the first place and change yourself and your government instead of simply killing them. Industrialization did not necessarily need a communist regime to increase. As far as I can tell, there can be no connection made between Stalin's ideologies and the increase in industrialization. Thus, the two do not need to go hand in hand. Industrialization and the improvement of Russia as a whole could have occurred without the terror, which makes it completely and utterly not understandable and unjustifiable to me.