A Monument to Mass Murder

Stalin is enjoying a revival in Russia, doubtless encouraged by President Putin, who has become more dictatorial himself lately.

Here in the West, Stalin's crimes have never been explored by a left still enamored with communism, just as the left refuses to acknowledge Saddam Hussein's torture chamber of a country and its mass graves.

Here is Cathy Young:

On to Russia, where from the early 1930s and until his death in 1953 Stalin slaughtered his own people on a Holocaust-like scale. It is estimated that at least 20 million died. The extermination was not as systematically deliberate as the Nazis', but the victims, in the end, were just as dead....

In recent years, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been advocating a more positive view of the country's Soviet past. Cities have erected monuments to Stalin.

The British paper The Independent said a Stalin museum is scheduled to open in March in Volgograd, formerly known as Stalingrad.

Polls show that 30 to 40 percent of Russians now regard Stalin's role in history as mostly ''positive," crediting him with turning the Soviet Union into a superpower and defeating Hitler.

Compared with this amnesia about state crimes against humanity, the German experience is certainly a good model -- whatever one thinks of Germany's Holocaust denial laws. Sadly, amnesia about the crimes of communism is common in the West as well.