> > 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.
You've apparently repeatedly stumbled across a very interesting and troubling phenomenon: tyrants are often well-liked by the very people they terrorized. Unfortunately, you take this to be proof-positive that the tyrants really couldn't have been all that bad.
-- Luke