Quote Originally Posted by chaika
by some of the ones still left alive. Most probably cried because they were afraid the KGB would come after them if they didn't.
No, the facts about the atrocities were made known only after his death. Really, my great-grandfather was arrested in 1940 and nobody has seen or heard of him ever since. But still my grandma told me that she too cried when Stalin had died.
When they say about the cult of personality they mean exactly that - the cult. He was godlike in eyes of his subject, something holy and flawless. Khrushev invested a lot of efforts afterwards in destroying that cult in the minds of people but there are still people who justify Stalins' deeds even now.

Maybe you could measure evil by the number of human beings killed by each of them?
So do you say that killing a thousand men is better than killing a million? It's a rotten logic. We have to measure evil sometimes in our lives but we're doing that only to justify our actions. And we shouldn't really if we're doing something bad.