Responding to Sam's post, which asked why Hitler has, for the most part, been considered worse than Stalin, I would say that it's not just because the U.S. had allied with the Soviets. Even after World War II and into the Cold War, the American propaganda films focused more on bashing Communism and the Reds in general than on the figure of Stalin, perhaps because Stalin was already dead by 1953. On the other hand, Hitler's image and persona were quite prevalant in American war propaganda, to the point that he was featured in children's cartoons.
Another reason most people's perceptions about the two dictators are often skewed would be the Holocaust - to be more precise, the Holocaust survivors. Enough people managed to survive the Nazi concentration camps and tell their stories that readings about the Holocaust are often required in elementary and middle schools, and there are a number of museums around the world making sure that we "never forget." Compare this to the coverage of Stalin's victims - there are no accounts of life in the gulags I'm aware of besides Solzhenitsyn's works because almost no one escaped - there was no liberation of Stalin's camps. The fact is that Stalin's atrocities aren't as present in the collective memory as Hitler's. It's 6 millions vs. ?
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And also, we have a lot of access to Nazi archives. We have none with regards to this period of Soviet history. Thus, the definitive history of the age of Stalin has yet to be written. The Holocaust is well documented, Stalin's atrocities are not.
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