Before I become very angry, please tell me you are not trying to hold up the extermination of your relatives as superior, more meaningful, or more heinous than the near-extermination of my grandfather and the successful extermination of ALL his relatives -- except his wife and his children!!!
Furthemore, the Soviets view(ed) themselves as vastly superior in the arts to all other nations. They had a term for all foreigners: Nekultura. Not cultured.
What I have read of their literature, seen of their ballet and heard of their music is impressive, but I am most impressed with the Russian common man, who is vastly more well-read than any average German.
And as far as record-keeping of the purges and the extermination of Kulak in particular and Ukranians in general, no record-keeping is needed for starvation. However, Stalin was quite careful to outline the propaganda necessity of 'eliminating' Kulaks, of which my grandfather was one. His farm was visited by the Russian security forces but he escaped with his family by mere hours, thanks to the fact that the local police chief was his friend and warned him.
Huh? Not for a minute. Mass murder is mass murder is mass murder. It is evil and totally repugnant no matter who does it and who the victim is.
Regardless of how the Soviets saw themselves, the rest of the world did not see that way. The Germans were revered by many in the U.S., if not for their advances in optics and physics in general then for Beethoven and Bach and Wagner. Yes, I can name great Russian composers, but the point is how the world looked at Germany even after Hitler came to power. Time never made Stalin their "Man of the Year".
Stalin's purges were every bit as evil as what Hitler did. If Hitler has the blood of 45 million on his hands compared to Stalin's 40 million it doesn't mean that they were not both as evil as evil can be and when the murder is on that sort of mass scale it boggles the imagination regardless of where it happens. No, I don't think that many in your family perished at the hands of only the second greatest mass murderer in history instead of the greatest is at all qualitatively different.
What makes the Holocaust different is the methodology, not the end result. The lives lost in the Holocaust are no less or more tragic than the lives lost in Stalinist purges. The lessons learned from the Holocaust, though, are somewhat different.
FWIW, part of my family came from what is now Russia and Belarus. There is a Yiddish saying about a baby that goes something like this (in translation): Who cares if it looks like the Cossack so long as it lives. I suspect both our families endured pogroms and persecution and I suspect our heritage isn't all that different.