>
> Christian Parenti says that people he'd talked to
> who hated Saddam
> Hussein a year ago - including some who were
> tortured by his regime -
> now praise him to the skies. When he reminded them
> of their earlier
> feelings, they denied them.
>
> Doug
I think there's an aspect of that in the renewed high posthumous approval rates for Stalin. In the Brezhnev era, he was mostly remembered as a bloody-handed dictator. Today, though, many people have reexamined their views in light of the 1990s economic collapse -- Stalin built the economy; Yeltsin wrecked it.
That said, the universal consensus in Russia was that Stalin was, in his own time, the object of a genuine cult of adoration. This appears a lot in the liberal (in the Russian sense of the term) commentary: "Alas! Our people are so backward! We adored Stalin! What is wrong with us?" It's not so much that he was _popular_ in the way that a politician is popular, unless it is correct to say that Yahweh was "popular" among the Jews of the Old Testament. He was almost a force of nature.
===== Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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