If Hitler Was Evil, What Was Stalin?     

by Ian Frazier, Smithsonian

   Historians estimate that before the end of the Soviet Union, the Bolshevik revolution resulted in the deaths of perhaps 60 million (not including war) civilians. 

Hitler remains evil man No. 1. 

How does Stalin escape similar condemnation? - JD 

   What could be said about such horrors? The United States had never known what to make of its cruel, sly, opaque World War II ally turned Cold War enemy. Stalin appeared on the cover of Time magazine 12 times. 

   (President Roosevelt considered him a trusted partner, favored above Churchill. We listened to the car radio with Dad in 1953. The newsman repeated that Stalin was dying, adding, "The only question is, why doesn't he hurry?"- JD) 

   Lenin (who sought worldwide socialism) died of strokes in 1924. Russia would involve itself aggressively in the affairs of countries all over the world. That sense of global mission, soon corrupted to strategic meddling and plain trouble making, is why America (but not former President Obama -JD) still worries about Russia today.

   (It's why we went to Vietnam, unpopular as that decision may be today. - JD)

   Russia's 1967 half-centennial was a huge deal. Celebrations in Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg) rated front-page coverage in the U.S. 

   

   Other communist nations sent representatives - with the exception of Albania and China, which did not approve of Brezhnev's policies of peaceful coexistence.  

   Cuba sent only low-level officials because Castro wanted to overthrow some Latin American governments and Brezhnev wouldn't let him. Ho Chi Minh, worried about offending either China or Russia, stayed away, but he did contribute a special gift, a piece of a shot-down American jet. 

   In 1991, hard-line Communist Party leaders opposed reforms, but Boris Yeltsin stood strong, and it was over. Life in Russia remained miserable. Tired and weak after governing, and a heart attack in 1996, Yeltsin resigned in favor of Vladimir Putin, his then mild-seeming protege, in 1999.