Bret Devereaux

(There were few things in my undergrad funnier than getting to watch three members of the communist student group take the 'Russian Revolution' course and try to argue with Audrey Altstadt, who taught it. They chose poorly, but it was fun to watch them look foolish.)

In any event, I don't allow holocaust denial in my comments, I don't see why I'd allow holodomor denial. Anyway, the USSR was bad, folks! Stalin too, also quite bad! Communist regimes in general - totalitarian, violent and bad!

To be fair, the idea that Stalin's USSR was a qualitatively lesser evil than Hitler's Germany shouldn't really be controversial as such, and "double genocide theory" has a pretty clear historical lineage from anti-Semitism and Holocaust denialism on the Eastern European far right

There comes a point where 'what was the worst mass-murdering hell-regime' is not a useful question. Was Allied decision to side w/ USSR against Nazis correct? Yes, absolutely. But, given the scale of the inhumanity of the USSR, I hesitate to put it in a 'lesser evil' category.

If nothing else, does the fact that the USSR defeated Nazi Germany (thus saving the tens of millions of additional lives that the the Nazis would've ethnically cleansed under "Generalplan Ost" if they'd won the war) count as a point in its favor?

Stalin getting crazy and paranoid toward his death (well, more so than before) is one thing, but are we talking about a hypothetical Stalin-led 1950s USSR carrying out a deliberately planned mass murder of tens of millions of people? If not, the comparison seems apples to oranges

1950s Stalin seems roughly as paranoid as 1930s Stalin and the toll for the Great Purge is often placed around a million. Which in turn fits with the c. 10m deaths from forced collectivization that was often ethnically targeted, 1932-3.