I am vaguely familiar with what you bring up, eisenhertz, and I know that Stalin ran a very harsh regime in the 1930s, and was brutal against those he thought were his enemies, or enemies of the state.

And you are right that I judge the USSR from the era that I am familiar with.
I visited the USSR a few times in the 1980s, in my childhood, I watched kiddies programs from there growing up, and artsy Soviet films in my teens.
Balanced by the odd US film with Soviet villians, or bestseller with some gruesome story about people who were wronged by the USSR. I always figured the truth was somewhere in between. But after 1990 - the US version has been accepted by many as the truth. I.e. everybody there was a tragic victim.

Like everyone else in the 1990s I watched the news when all the dirt on the USSR was dug up; bones of people along the roads in East Siberia; retarded and handicapped children tied to their beds in in state asylums, poverty bringing out the worst in people etc. I certainly grasped pretty fast that there was a very dark and ugly side to the USSR, and that what I had seen on holidays and TV was far from the whole picture. Very disillusioning.

HOWEVER I don't think most other people in recent times had horrific experiences either. My own relatives lived in Tallinn and later Leningrad. They had plenty of opportunity to leave the country ("defect") had they wanted to, but they had made it clear that they were not interested. While I don't think they felt that they lived in an ideal country, they thought at the time, that it was good enough, and they had a comfortable life. None of this victimisation I read about later, that happened to some Baltic people happened to anyone in that family.

Plus, plenty of people here have told about their happy childhoods growing up in the USSR, and I think that is the majority. I have no reason to distrust them - I'm sure they would say so, if their experience of life in the USSR was really bad. There are also people here, who left back in those days - they haven't really brought up any major grievance either. I guess the grass just seemed greener in North America, or Israel or wherever they went to.

But seriously, I don't see the point in dwelling obsessively on the past. For example some Brits can't hear the word Germany or Germans without starting to obsess about various aspects of the War. It's tiresome, rude and pointless. Everybody in Germany knows it all too well, so what's the point? I feel the same way about the harsh aspects of Stalin's regime, about the US having discriminated against blacks, and slavery, the many faults of the British empire.

Finally --- it's the older relatives of the Russians, who had to put up with Stalin, right? So let THEM judge him, if they want. Stalin did nothing to me or anyone in my family. I have no reason to dwell on him any more than historical faults of any other country.