I wrote: The only people in Russia who hate Stalin, which a few exceptions, are relatives of people he killed (sometimes, even they like Stalin) and a few liberals who are despised by the population at large and exist only in Moscow.
--- Just as a personal anecdote to illustrate this, as I mentioned a while ago here, the grandfather of a friend recently died. I was an officer in the Red Army in WWII. After he got back from Germany, he was sent to the GULAG for two years like a lot of the returning soldiers were. Guess what? He liked Stalin.
"I killed many fascists for Stalin" he said. He was sometimes mentally spotty due to advanved age (he remembered seeing Lenin, for God's sake), but still remembered every one.
When Solzhenitsyn published Ivan Denisovich, former camp inmates rushed to partially defend the camp. That is how popular Stalin was.
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