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?
Well, as I noted, "just as bad" is a pretty slippery concept to define when you are dealing with human enedvours.
Is it to be measured by numbers killed, by willingness to kill, by who they kill?
As I also said, after the death of Stalin in 1953, the Soviet Union did "mellow out".
The pattern for both the Nazis and the Stalin-era Soviets is that they would come into a territory, exterminate whichever population they deemed necessary to exterminate and then rule whatever population was left over.
In post-war Eastern Europe, the Soviet extermination campaign involved both German POW's and German civilians and even anti-Communist Eastern Europeans who had fought the Nazis.
After World War II, the Soviets kept German POW's for years in their slave labor camps. About 1.5 million German POW's died in the Gulag and hundreds of thousands of German civilians, including women, who were also shipped out of East Germany to the Soviet slave camps were never heared of again.
The Eastern Europeans marked for slaughter did not only include the anti-Communists left behind the Russian lines but even those who had escaped to the West. Stalin demanded the return of these people and the Allies complied in "Operation Keelhaul":
By the time that Stalin died in 1953, the Soviet extermination work in Eastern Europe had been almost completed and, if you were a member of a population class that had not been targeted for extermination, you settled down to the sad but relatively peaceful existence of life in a totalitarian state just as say, a non-Jewish civilian in Nazi-occupied Denmark or Norway had done.
How you fared under Nazism or Stalinism in Eastern Europe depended on your ethnic, religious and social class.
If you were a Jew or a Gypsy you were surely to be exterminated by the Nazis.
If you were a Polish Army officer or an Eastern European that had shown themselves to be anti-Communist, you would be exterminated by the Soviets.
In either case, the numbers on both sides totalled into the millions.
The ideal solution would have been a Nazi victory over the Red Army followed by a Western Allied defeat of the exhausted Nazis leading to a real liberation of both Western and Eastern Europe in the 1940's. The Manhattan Project would have ultimately assured such an outcome if the Red Army had been destroyed.
That, in turn, would have avoided a Red China, a Korean War, a Vietnam War, a Cold War and the looming danger that our grandchildren will face from Red China in the rest of the 21st Century.
Such a scenario, but in reverse, is what Stalin looked forward to when he signed the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact. Stalin envisioned Nazi Germany destroying the West thereby leaving only a weakened Nazi Germany standing between the Soviet Union and the Soviet domination of all of Europe.
It is an indication of the idealism of America that it never carried out such a realpolitik strategy against the Soviets but, rather, treated the Soviets as a true ally rather than as the future enemy that the Soviets proved themselves to be.
Ethnic Cleansing and Soviet Crimes Against Humanity
As I said, before, one major difference between Nazi and Soviet mass murders is that the Nazi actions were revealed to the World by Allied photographers in 1945 while the Soviet mass murders occurred far beyond the cameras.