Quote Originally Posted by Alexi
But all this gain came at, I think, an unacceptable price: the death of tens of millions of Russians.
Prove these tens of millions. According to the very NKVD archives the total number of sentenced during Stalin's "reign" was a less than 10 million. To quote a message earlier in this thread:

Quote Originally Posted by Scorpio
Do you even *know* about works of Vitaly Zemskov? He (as opposite to Conquest, and other western mythmakers) worked with archives and documentary evidence.
Here's a link to interview with him: http://www.contr-tv.ru/article/events/2 ... 6/repress2 (for anyone, who can read in russian). For anyone, who cannot, here's some numbers:

The total number of victims of political repression in USSR in period from 1921 to 1953 (e.g. so-called Stalin's era) is approximately 4 mln. This includes: 800 000 condemned to death, and 600 000 died in prison camps for various reasons.
So: there are 1,4 mln died due to a "Stalin's repressions", and 2,6 mln released and/or rehabilitated afterwards.
To give you a perspective on these figures, the USA currently have more than 2 million imprisoned. Yet every American knows that the "Gulag Archipelago" was in Russia, and the USA are really just the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountain,
The jails are made of tin.
You can slip right out again,
As soon as they put you in.
There ain't no short-handled shovels,
No axes, saws nor picks,
I'm bound to stay
Where you sleep all day,
Where they hung the jerk
That invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

Quote Originally Posted by Alexi
Stalin was mentally unbalanced, sadistic, and killed his own people; your basic mad dictator. Like any other mad dictator, it's difficult to compliment Stalin for anything that can be seen as good.
Do you realize that you need to prove these claims? And now tell me how exactly you can prove that. His mental unbalancedness and sadism could only have been noticed by his close associates (comrades Molotov, Zhukov et al) and they, in their memoirs, do not indicate anything of the kind. Same for "killed his own people".

The post by our battle tactics expert does not deserve a reply. Really, citing tabloids and geocites as a source of facts on Stalin.