> 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.
http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/python/Scripts/LifeOfBrian/brian-11.html
BEN: Now, take my case. They hung me up here five years ago. Every night, they take me down for twenty minutes, then they hang me up again, which I regard as very fair, in view of what I done, and, if nothing else, it's taught me to respect the Romans, and it's taught me... that you'll never get anywhere in this life, unless you're prepared to do a fair day's work for a fair day's pay!