Nazi Germany vs. Soviet Union?

[HabemusFrancis]

Often I have noticed, in theology of evil discussion in Catholic circles the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are presented as equal evils, and that one empire is as evil as the other.

I have thought about it a bit, and have come to the conclusion that it isn’t really a fair comparison, and despite Lenin and Stalin’s body count, Nazi Germany was many times more evil than the Atheist Soviet Union at its worst?

Why? Let me explain.

First of all, the Soviet Union was far from an atheistic country. Why would the government spend so much time on atheist propaganda if religion were such a problem? I believe religion just sort of went underground, and it was too ingrained in the Russian/Slavic psyche to have it eradicated completely. And unlike Nazism, Soviet Communism (despite its hideous crimes) had hints of Christianity to it.

It yearned for a society where all men and women were given equal dignity and opportunity, preached the fellowship of all races and creeds (provided they did not get too vocal about their creeds), and (on paper) abhorred the notion of racial supremacy and military conquest.

As cruel as he was to his own people, Stalin’s foreign policy goals were fairly modest. He may have wished to spread communism, but he also dearly wanted a series of fortress countries to protect his land from a future German invasion. After stalin, the Soviet Union had bad leaders, but leaders who were bad in the normal way, not off the chain evil, as their predecessor was.

Nazi Germany on the other and seems, compared to the misguided behemoth of the USSR, truly like a demon from Hell. The state was founded upon conquest, cruelty and racial supremacy. True, Hitler did not kill as many people as Stalin, but that mostly was because he did not have the opportunity to do so. Apart from the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe, Hitler apparently planned to starve millions of Russians and Poles to death, in order to make room for Germanic conquest of Europe.

Unlike the average German soldier on the Eastern front, I understand the average Soviet/Russian soldier wasn’t motivated to fight necessarily to advance Communism. Mostly just out of pride/defesniveness of their homeland, and a desire to defeat stop the Germans from enslaving/murdering their people.

Don’t get me wrong. I think communism is badand can only lead to class envy, stagnation, despair, and ultimately failure. I just don’t believe Marx’s theory was as intrinsically evil as Hitlers, which espoused the supremacy of one race and advocated murde and discrimination right from the beginning.

The Soviets did commit war crimes in Germany and Eastern Europe, but they never advocated the murder/descrution of an entire race of people. As badly as the people of East Germany suffered for 40 odd years or so, it was probably gentle in comparison with what the Nazis had in store for the Russians/Ukranians etc.

Any thoughts?

 

[Rhubarb]

I think some of what you say is right. Perhaps I’ve read too much Trotsky, but I think there’s a pretty clear distinction between Marx and Engles’ communism and socialism, to the Stalinist and Maoist versions we saw in practice. My mother says that communism would be the best form of government, if not for the greed and ambition of humans. I’m sure people would disagree but I think that statement sums up what I see as the difference between true communism and Stalinism. Then there’s weird off-shots like North Korean communism which is essentially warped Maoism. (see Juche)

Nazism any way you slice it is based on evil - take from outsiders and give to our own. Kill those that get in the way. We’re supermen, they’re human vermin.

However, your post isn’t “True communism vs. Nazisim”, It’s Nazi Germany vs. the USSR. I think the practical effect of what Stalin did was more or less equal to Nazi Germany. Stalin killed more people, but, Stalin had more time to do it, and more people to kil. The USSR, despite being technically ideologically opposite from Nazism, engaged in the same things - state-glorifying, suppression of individual rights, suppression of dissent, building of a one-party system, gross negligence of human rights, etc.

 

[Monte_RCMS]

Add Mao and Pol Pot.

Check out author Paul Kengor.

And M. Stanton Evans.

 

[Monte_RCMS]

**These are totalitarian states.
**

They do not tolerate competitive ideas.

They do not tolerate debate.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_Noon

Vast networks of secret police.

Huge networks of informers.

Files were kept on everyone.

Read “The Black Book of Communism”.

You want to object, then it’s off to the death camp.

[They used innocuous terms, like … liquidation. ]

Sometimes they had these tree grinders in the basements of the prison and in ya go.

That’s what they did to people.

Guillotines.

Shooting was difficult, because the guns would heat up and the executioners would burn their hands.

Detailed questioning on motives of EVERYONE.

Any questions on loyalty … and to the camps. The Gulags.

 

[Monte_RCMS]

The Holodomor was a man-made Soviet famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that killed an officially estimated 7 million to 10 million people. Wikipedia
Period: 1932 – 1933
Location: Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
Total deaths: 2.4 million to 12 million

 

[Monte_RCMS]

**The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression **

by Jean-Louis Panné (Author), Andrzej Paczkowski (Author), Karel Bartosek (Author), Jean-Louis Margolin (Author), Nicolas Werth (Author), Stéphane Courtois (Author), Mark Kramer (Editor, Translator), & 1 more
4.4 out of 5 stars 155 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0674076082
ISBN-10: 0674076087

Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of Communism over seventy years.

“Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruit,” Ignazio Silone wrote, and this is the standard the authors apply to the Communist experience―in the China of “the Great Helmsman,” Kim Il Sung’s Korea, Vietnam under “Uncle Ho” and Cuba under Castro, Ethiopia under Mengistu, Angola under Neto, and Afghanistan under Najibullah. The authors, all distinguished scholars based in Europe, document Communist crimes against humanity, but also crimes against national and universal culture, from Stalin’s destruction of hundreds of churches in Moscow to Ceausescu’s leveling of the historic heart of Bucharest to the widescale devastation visited on Chinese culture by Mao’s Red Guards.

As the death toll mounts―as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on―the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting, this book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century.

 

[Monte_RCMS]

What was the tolerance in these countries to the Catholic Church?

 

[Monte_RCMS]

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism ( – January 10, 2011
by Kevin D Williamson (Author)

Stalin’s gulag, impoverished North Korea, collapsing Cuba…it’s hard to name a dogma that has failed as spectacularly as socialism. And yet leaders around the world continue to subject millions of people to this dysfunctional, violence-prone ideology.

In The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to Socialism, Kevin Williamson reveals the fatal flaw of socialism—that efficient, complex economies simply can’t be centrally planned. But even in America, that hasn’t stopped politicians and bureaucrats from planning, to various extents, the most vital sectors of our economy: public education, energy, and the most arrogant central–planning effort of them all, Obama’s healthcare plan.

In this provocative book, Williamson unfolds the grim history of socialism, showing how the ideology has spawned crushing poverty, devastating famines, and horrific wars. Lumbering from one crisis to the next, leaving a trail of economic devastation and environmental catastrophe, socialism has wreaked more havoc, caused more deaths, and impoverished more people than any other ideology in history—especially when you include the victims of fascism, which Williamson notes is simply a variant of socialism.

Williamson further demonstrates:

Why, contrary to popular belief, socialism in theory is no better than socialism in practice

Why socialism can’t exist without capitalism

How the energy powerhouse of Venezuela, under socialism, has become an economic basket case subject to rationing and blackouts

How socialism, not British colonialism, plunged the bountiful economy of India into stagnation and dysfunction—and how capitalism is rescuing it

Why socialism is inextricably linked to communism

If you thought socialism went into the dustbin of history with the collapse of the Soviet Union, think again. Socialism is alive and kicking, and it’s already spread further than you know.

 

[Monte_RCMS]

pewsitter.com/page_1.html

 

[StudentMI]

How about instead of comparing body counts we just say both were horrible states?

 

[Tim_D]

I think the practical effect of what Stalin did was more or less equal to Nazi Germany. Stalin killed more people, but, Stalin had more time to do it, and more people to kil. The USSR, despite being technically ideologically opposite from Nazism, engaged in the same things - state-glorifying, suppression of individual rights, suppression of dissent, building of a one-party system, gross negligence of human rights, etc.

Well said. Its strange that the OP is trying to give a pass to an ideology that was based upon lies and murder. The bolsheviks murdered every Romanov they could get their hands on. “We’re not interested in justice; we’re here to settle accounts” is the well known statement from an early bolshevik commander whose name escapes me at the moment. Add to that the numbers of people arrested, sent into exile, murdered and who simply disappeared and the whole thing becomes even that much more horrible. Pity the poor souls who managed to live through all of that.

 

[Vonsalza]

I would be very hesitant to view the social views/practices of a particular culture in time under a contemporary lens. Many feel that is a solid example of anachronism.

Both cultures were racially charged (what with pan-Slavism on the part of the Ruskies).

And everyone under the sun that had the cash to do it were participating in eugenics. The Brits and Americans had Cloud Nine and Masterman projects going on when the horrors of the Nazi attempt of the topic came out. We were happy to denounce those awful Germans while destroying the documentation of our own programs (which, admittedly, hadn’t been as far developed).

A great example of anachronistic error was a movie that came out a decade-or-so ago where an all-black Texas basketball team defeated the mighty Kentucky Wildcats and their horrendously racist coach in some important game.
Was Adolph Rupp of Kentucky a racist? Yes, very much so. But was virtually every other college basketball coach in the American 1950s and 1960s? Yes, yes, yes. Moreover, Mr. Rupp was at the helm when Kentucky fielded their own all-black starting team.

But naturally, his relative normalcy in racial attitudes among fellow coaches in addition his willingness to play black players didn’t fit the desired narrative very well, even if they were facts.

 

[TK421]

The Soviet Union gained a place in Fatima’s message because it had the ability to propagate & integrate its errors around the entire world: in Europe, Asia, Africa, and both Americas. There was a point in the 1960s where half of the world’s population was living in state’s that were officially atheist. There were university scholars & professors around the world, in England & central Europe, who were trendy in calling themselves communists.

Nazi Germany was a spasm of evil and rage that rose, fought on all fronts, and violently fell. It had very little charismatic appeal once the smoke had cleared, except for a small minority of skinheads. Communism challenged the established order and organized religion and deemed itself to replace it, and in many, many places, for many decades, that’s what it did. Paul VI had to fight very hard in his own country of Italy to prevent a communist government from being elected, which nearly happened.

 

[Latias]

Often I have noticed, in theology of evil discussion in Catholic circles the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are presented as equal evils, and that one empire is as evil as the other.

I have thought about it a bit, and have come to the conclusion that it isn’t really a fair comparison, and despite Lenin and Stalin’s body count, Nazi Germany was many times more evil than the Atheist Soviet Union at its worst?

Yes, right-wingers want to make the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany equivalent evils.

It isn’t fair because it is driven entirely by ideology and propaganda.

Nazi Germany on the other and seems, compared to the misguided behemoth of the USSR, truly like a demon from Hell. The state was founded upon conquest, cruelty and racial supremacy. True, Hitler did not kill as many people as Stalin, but that mostly was because he did not have the opportunity to do so. Apart from the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe, Hitler apparently planned to starve millions of Russians and Poles to death, in order to make room for Germanic conquest of Europe.

Any thoughts?

I ask anyone: where is the evidence that Stalin killed more people than Hitler? Where is the evidence for the tens of millions of deaths? The answer is that there is no evidence.

I have done some research. The figures come from the newly opened archives.

There was no Holodomor. It never even happened. The Holodomor is the deliberate famine, and there was no deliberate famine.

Deaths from 1921-1953 in the USSR*

Executions 900,000
Gulag deaths 1.2 million
Anti-Kulak campaign 390,000
Total 2.5 million

References

Getty, J. Arch; Rittersporn, Gabor T. and Zemskov, Viktor N. October 1993. [Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence. ](http://web.archive.org/web/20080611064213/http:/www.etext.org/Politics/Staljin/Staljin/articles/AHR/AHR.html)American Historical Review.

robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/how-many-died-under-stalin/

Look, if anti-Communists want to go on and on about Stalin killing 2 1/2 million people, please knock yourselves out. But they’ll never do that because it’s not sensational enough. You say the phrase “20 million killed in Communism” and everyone sits up and takes notice. You say Stalin killed 2 million and most will yawn and ask, “That’s all?” and turn back to the TV show.

robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2017/07/02/the-lie-of-the-20-or-40-or-60-or-80-or-110-million-how-many-people-did-stalin-kill/#comments

If you are upset at the lower figure, then I ask for evidence for the higher figures. Evidence is the word.

As cruel as he was to his own people, Stalin’s foreign policy goals were fairly modest. He may have wished to spread communism, but he also dearly wanted a series of fortress countries to protect his land from a future German invasion. After stalin, the Soviet Union had bad leaders, but leaders who were bad in the normal way, not off the chain evil, as their predecessor was.

Yes, that is correct, there is no evidence at all of an aggressive Soviet foreign policy. They were largely foreign policy realists.

 

[GEddie]

**These are totalitarian states.
**

They do not tolerate competitive ideas.

They do not tolerate debate.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_Noon

Vast networks of secret police.

Huge networks of informers.

Files were kept on everyone.

Read “The Black Book of Communism”.

You want to object, then it’s off to the death camp.

[They used innocuous terms, like … liquidation. ]

Sometimes they had these tree grinders in the basements of the prison and in ya go.

That’s what they did to people.

Guillotines.

Shooting was difficult, because the guns would heat up and the executioners would burn their hands.

Detailed questioning on motives of EVERYONE.

Any questions on loyalty … and to the camps. The Gulags.

Nazism employed and perfected the guillotine (Fallbeil) and in fact took more heads than the French Revolution, which occupied about the same length of time; but the CCCP had no problem with mass shooting.

ICXC NIKA

 

[AnastasiaRomano]

I ask anyone: where is the evidence that Stalin killed more people than Hitler? Where is the evidence for the tens of millions of deaths? The answer is that there is no evidence.

robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/how-many-died-under-stalin/

robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2017/07/02/the-lie-of-the-20-or-40-or-60-or-80-or-110-million-how-many-people-did-stalin-kill/#comments

If you are upset at the lower figure, then I ask for evidence for the higher figures. Evidence is the word.

Yes, that is correct, there is no evidence at all of an aggressive Soviet foreign policy. They were largely foreign policy realists.

So all those mass graves in Ukraine – all the records of deaths during the famine years which were, for the most part, diligently kept by ZAGS – those didn’t happen? At all?

A large reason Ukraine has seen the famine as deliberate was the timing. Korenizatsiia was the policy of the 1920s – a “rooting” of communism in local cultures and the development of local Communist cadres, undoing the forced russification that had occurred in the tsarist Russian Empire, encouraging local language development and increasing people’s literacy in their native tongues. In Ukraine, the Ukrainian language flourished during this period, massive numbers of illiterate Ukrainians learned to read and write (in Ukrainian) and Ukrainian-speaking communist leaders and party members were numerous, even the majority in many areas. Then, swiftly, the tide changed in the early 1930s. Korenizatsiia was out, and russification was in. The Russian language again took prime place across the USSR. Some national languages that had Latin alphabets were given Cyrillic alphabets in their place. Local cadres all over the USSR but most notably in Ukraine were arrested and accused of being too “nationalistic.” So too Ukrainian communist writers, actors, artists. Most know about the purges across the USSR that began around 1937, but the purges in Ukraine began as early as 1930 – there was a show trial in spring 1930 that eventually led to the arrest of many in the Ukrainian intelligentsiia and party elite, as well as thousands of ordinary citizens. And then, in 1931-32, the massive famine that killed millions in Ukraine.

So, with that all going on in Ukraine and the whole USSR at the time, is it any wonder that Ukrainians consider the famine deliberate?

 

[Rhubarb]

Yes, right-wingers want to make the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany equivalent evils.

It isn’t fair because it is driven entirely by ideology and propaganda.

I ask anyone: where is the evidence that Stalin killed more people than Hitler? Where is the evidence for the tens of millions of deaths? The answer is that there is no evidence.

robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/how-many-died-under-stalin/

robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2017/07/02/the-lie-of-the-20-or-40-or-60-or-80-or-110-million-how-many-people-did-stalin-kill/#comments

If you are upset at the lower figure, then I ask for evidence for the higher figures. Evidence is the word.

Yes, that is correct, there is no evidence at all of an aggressive Soviet foreign policy. They were largely foreign policy realists.

Do you usually quote racist ideologs? Wait, no, I guess he’s an inconsistently described “race realist and white-positive, but anti-racist”, from his website.

 

[Latias]

Do you usually quote racist ideologs? Wait, no, I guess he’s an inconsistently described “race realist and white-positive, but anti-racist”, from his website.

I don’t see Robert Lindsay being racist, but he is against the cultural left. Yes, he is anti-racist.

Paradoxically, given that there is no communist government left in Europe outside Moldova, the attacks have if anything become more extreme as time has gone on. A clue as to why that might be can be found in the rambling report by Lindblad that led to the Council of Europe declaration. Blaming class struggle and public ownership, he explained that “different elements of communist ideology such as equality or social justice still seduce many” and “a sort of nostalgia for communism is still alive”. Perhaps the real problem for Lindblad and his rightwing allies in eastern Europe is that communism is not dead enough - and they will only be content when they have driven a stake through its heart and buried it at the crossroads at midnight.

The fashionable attempt to equate communism and Nazism is in reality a moral and historical nonsense.** Despite the cruelties of the Stalin terror, there was no Soviet Treblinka or Sobibor, no extermination camps built to murder millions**. Nor did the Soviet Union launch the most devastating war in history at a cost of more than 50 million lives - in fact it played the decisive role in the defeat of the German war machine. Lindblad and the Council of Europe adopt as fact the wildest estimates of those “killed by communist regimes” (mostly in famines) from the fiercely contested Black Book of Communism, which also underplays the number of deaths attributable to Hitler. The real records of repression now available from the Soviet archives are horrific enough (799,455 people were recorded as executed between 1921 and 1953 and the labour camp population reached 2.5 million at its peak) without engaging in an ideologically-fuelled inflation game.

But in any case, none of this explains why anyone might be nostalgic in former communist states, now enjoying the delights of capitalist restoration. The dominant account gives no sense of how communist regimes renewed themselves after 1956 or why western leaders feared they might overtake the capitalist world well into the 1960s**. For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment, captured even by critical films and books of the post-Stalin era such as Wajda’s Man of Marble and Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat. Its existence helped to drive up welfare standards in the west, boosted the anticolonial movement and provided a powerful counterweight to western global domination.**

theguardian.com/Columnists/Column/0,1710891,00.html

There is no evidence of a Soviet Treblinka or Belzec.

 

[MPat]

First of all, the Soviet Union was far from an atheistic country. Why would the government spend so much time on atheist propaganda if religion were such a problem? I believe religion just sort of went underground, and it was too ingrained in the Russian/Slavic psyche to have it eradicated completely.

So, communists are suddenly not so bad because some people managed to resist their persecution?

And unlike Nazism, Soviet Communism (despite its hideous crimes) had hints of Christianity to it.

It yearned for a society where all men and women were given equal dignity and opportunity, preached the fellowship of all races and creeds (provided they did not get too vocal about their creeds), and (on paper) abhorred the notion of racial supremacy and military conquest.

So, communists are suddenly not so bad, as they were better liars than Nazis?

As cruel as he was to his own people, Stalin’s foreign policy goals were fairly modest. He may have wished to spread communism, but he also dearly wanted a series of fortress countries to protect his land from a future German invasion.

Nonsense. He was willing to take anything he could. If he wanted “fortress countries”, he would have avoided destroying all the countries between USSR and Nazi Germany in 1939-40. Instead, he used an opportunity to expand even if it made surprise attack by Nazi Germany possible.

Not to mention that “World Revolution” (the official goal of USSR) makes Nazi wish to reach Ural (leaving Siberia to Japan) look modest in comparison…

After stalin, the Soviet Union had bad leaders, but leaders who were bad in the normal way, not off the chain evil, as their predecessor was.

And after Hitler Nazi Germany got Karl Dönitz. Whose evil was judged to merit just 10 years in prison in Nuremberg trials.

Nazi Germany on the other and seems, compared to the misguided behemoth of the USSR, truly like a demon from Hell. The state was founded upon conquest, cruelty and racial supremacy. True, Hitler did not kill as many people as Stalin, but that mostly was because he did not have the opportunity to do so. Apart from the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe, Hitler apparently planned to starve millions of Russians and Poles to death, in order to make room for Germanic conquest of Europe.

Holodomor was already mentioned.

Unlike the average German soldier on the Eastern front, I understand the average Soviet/Russian soldier wasn’t motivated to fight necessarily to advance Communism. Mostly just out of pride/defesniveness of their homeland, and a desire to defeat stop the Germans from enslaving/murdering their people.

Once again you use virtues of people under the regime as if they somehow reflect on the regime itself.

Not to mention that motivation of soldiers is more complex than the caricature you just painted. For example, political commissars did try to make soldiers fight for communism.

The Soviets did commit war crimes in Germany and Eastern Europe, but they never advocated the murder/descrution of an entire race of people.

I guess Crimean Tatars might disagree with that…

I think some of what you say is right. Perhaps I’ve read too much Trotsky, but I think there’s a pretty clear distinction between Marx and Engles’ communism and socialism, to the Stalinist and Maoist versions we saw in practice. My mother says that communism would be the best form of government, if not for the greed and ambition of humans. I’m sure people would disagree but I think that statement sums up what I see as the difference between true communism and Stalinism. Then there’s weird off-shots like North Korean communism which is essentially warped Maoism. (see Juche)

Yes, Stalin did not claim he has managed to build communism.

And even Stalinism was actually “Marxism with the human face”. Just look at “Communist manifesto” (en.wikisource.org/wiki/Manifesto_of_the_Communist_Party/2), for example, “Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with, is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized community of women.”. No, Stalin did not get to that.

 

[Latias]

I guess Crimean Tatars might disagree with that…

There was no genocide of the Tatars. Most were deported, and most of the deaths happened in the context of the famine of 1947, not during the process of deportation.

Nonsense. He was willing to take anything he could. If he wanted “fortress countries”, he would have avoided destroying all the countries between USSR and Nazi Germany in 1939-40. Instead, he used an opportunity to expand even if it made surprise attack by Nazi Germany possible.

Not to mention that “World Revolution” (the official goal of USSR) makes Nazi wish to reach Ural (leaving Siberia to Japan) look modest in comparison…

The Soviets wanted concessions from the Finland as a buffer for Leningrad. The Poles (along France and Great Britain) were obstinate about signing anti-German mutual defense pacts. The Poles were the cowards, since the entire leadership left the country, and they could not surrender to the Nazis, so a rump state could be negotiated between the Soviet Union and Germany-territory.

Do you have any evidence that Soviet’s regarded “world revolution” as a plausible goal (as opposed an ideologically stated goal)? Do you have evidence that the Soviet Union was responsible for more regime change operation than the United States in Cold War?

So we intervened in various ways for the opposition candidate, Vojislav Kostunica. And we gave funding to the opposition, and we gave them training and campaigning aide. And according to my estimate, that assistance was crucial in enabling the opposition to win.

SHAPIRO: How often are these interventions public versus covert?

LEVIN: Well, it’s - basically there’s about - one-third of them are public, and two-third of them are covert. In other words, they’re not known to the voters in the target before the election.

SHAPIRO: Your count does not include coups, attempts at regime change. It sounds like depending on the definitions, the tally could actually be much higher.

LEVIN: Well, you’re right. I don’t count and discount covert coup d’etats like the United States did in Iran in 1953 or in Guatemala in 1954. I only took when the United States is trying directly to influence an election for one of the sides. Other types of interventions - I don’t discuss. But if we would include those, then of course the number could be larger, yeah.

npr.org/2016/12/22/506625913/database-tracks-history-of-u-s-meddling-in-foreign-elections