[MadIvan]

20 million Soviet citizens have cause to wish that Stalin was never born. Never forget.

Regards, Ivan

[MadIvan]

Bump!

[BrooklynGOP]

My great-grandfather one of those.

[chilepepper]

Life for Russians 'was better in time of terror'

As in,

more exciting because you didn't know if you would survive to the end of the week before they shipped you off to the NKVD headquarters...

[WarrenC]

I believe the number is more like 50 million according to the historian, Robert Conquest. Not to quibble.

[Dr. Frank fan]

Many ... rail against what they see as the theft of the country's natural wealth by a privileged few.

This seems to be a fairly widespread sentiment among many Russians. I think they also have a point - the natural wealth of the country was stolen, by the Bolsheviks, when they (ahem) "socialized" everything. It was called the "Russian Revolution".

The problem, presumably, is that many Russians still do not realize that their wealth wasn't stolen in the late '80s during "perestroika" or the '90s when the ruble was devaluated. It was stolen over 80 years ago by the communists. Then it was shared with them (well, with the ones who weren't imprisoned or killed..) sparingly over the next 70 years, till 1989.

They have diagnosed the crime correctly but don't seem to understand when it actually occurred.

[Bobby777]

why anyone would wish for a 'Stalin' to come back is beyond me ... with 20 million Russian dead, one has to figure that affected at least 100 millions lives with tragedy and probably a lot more ...

Stalin didn't die soon enough ... he was a criminal to his own people ... if he had dropped dead just after WWII he might have been remembered differently ... good riddance ...

FReegards ...

[lizbet]

Interesting! The death of Stalin came just before he gave the order to kill the Jews in the Soviet Union. He had indeed become paranoid and thought that the Jews were plotting his death. If God had not caused him to have that stroke (which left him unable to speak), then many Jews would have died.

[singsong]

Does this name Dzhugashvili mean anything in Georgian?

[Cacique]

supposedly he didn't die of natural causes as some people claim. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/857164/posts