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I agree that the Katyn massacre was an evil act. But it was not an attempt to exterminate a whole people as if they were vermin as the Nazis attempted to do with the Jews. Or to enslave a whole people as they planned on doing to the Russians and Ukrainians. It was an evil act, but it was an act of war as it was limited to uniformed Polish officers, was it not?

On the contrary, it was an attempt to wipe out the entire Polish Army officer corps class. The Soviet-Polish War was over. The Soviet Union simply wanted this particular class of people exterminated from their newly conquered territory.

Did it include whole families? Was the end goal to kill all Poles?

Another example of the Soviets exterminating an entire class of people, including entire families, was the extermination of the kulaks.

According to data from Soviet archives, which were published in 1990, 1,803,392 people were sent to labor colonies and camps in 1930 and 1931. Books say that 1,317,022 reached the destination. The remaining 486,370 must have died or escaped. Deportations on a smaller scale continued after 1931. The reported number of kulaks and their relatives who had died in labor colonies from 1932 to 1940 was 389,521. It is difficult to determine how many people died because of the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class". The data from the Soviet archives do not tell us exactly how many people escaped and survived and what number of deaths would have been if there had been no deportation. These data do not include people who were executed or died in prisons and gulags rather than died in labor colonies. Many historians consider the great famine a result of the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" and therefore they estimate the death toll at about 7 million.

The Nazis end goal was to kill all Jews as the final solution to the "Jewish problem". The scales still tip toward the Nazis on my "evilometer". Don't get me wrong. I am not condoning anything the communists did. I'm just saying the Nazis were worse.

To me, arguing if Hitler or Stalin or Mao was worse is like arguing if Scott Peterson or O.J. Simpson was the worse husband.

By absolute numbers, Mao killed the most (40 million) followed by Stalin (8 - 20 million) and then followed by Hitler.

Absolte numbers, however, merely mean that Mao and Stalin had larger populations to kill and therefore racked up higher numbers.

The Nazis marked people for death based on ethnicity. The Communists, like the French Revolution, marked people for death based on social class.

Mao, Stalin and Hitler were all monsters and, given unlimited time, population and technology, each one could have racked up his death toll into the billions without losing a night's sleep over it.

The Soviet system undougtedly did "mellow out" after the death of Stalin.

How a Nazi system would have developed if it had survived into the late 20th Century is, fortunately, a historical question that was never answered..

All well and good. You are preaching to the choir. The communists were bad guys, no one disagrees with that. The question under debate is not about pre-war Russia, but about if the post-war communists in occupied Eastern Europe were "just as bad" as the war-time Nazis they replaced. I disagree with that premise. I don't think they were. Do you?

Mao, Stalin and Hitler were all monsters and, given unlimited time, population and technology, each one could have racked up his death toll into the billions without losing a night's sleep over it.

Well said. No disagreement there.