The 60th anniversary of the death of one of history’s most
murderous tyrants has passed with relatively little notice. Yet the
shadow of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who died on March 5, 1953,
still hangs over post-communist Russia—and has yet to face proper
judgment in the West. This is one bloody ghost still waiting for
its final exorcism.

During the years of his absolute rule over the Soviet Union from
1928 to 1953, Stalin was responsible for the deaths of at least 20
million people. They included victims of state-engineered famines,
particularly in Ukraine, intended to starve the peasantry into
submission to collective farming; people from all walks of life
shot on trumped-up charges of subversive activities; and others
sent to the Siberian labor camps known as the gulag, never to
return. Untold millions who survived lost years of their lives to
the gulag. (Among the latter were my own paternal grandparents, who
were arrested in 1947 and released after Stalin’s death;
ironically, unlike most of their fellow prisoners, they were
actually guilty as charged—of “betraying the motherland” by trying
to escape the Soviet Union and go to Palestine.)

If there was ever a true devil in the flesh, Stalin was one of
the prime candidates for the title. A tyrant with a deeply sadistic
streak, he reportedly howled with laughter when told about the
final moments of a former associate who had been promised clemency
in exchange for a false confession and vainly begged his
executioners to “please call Comrade Stalin” and clear up the
misunderstanding. He jailed the wives of several men in his inner
circle, presumably just for the pleasure of seeing his underlings
squirm and showing them who’s boss.

Yet four years ago, this monster came close to being chosen as
history’s greatest Russian in a nationwide Internet and telephone
vote. Though the voting was not representative, actual polls also
yield discouraging results. In a survey conducted last month by the
Levada Center, a respected independent polling firm, almost one in
10 Russians said that Stalin’s role in Russia’s history was
“entirely positive” while another 40 percent saw it as “mostly
positive.” Fewer than a third believed it was entirely or mostly
negative, while the rest were not sure.

To some extent, this sympathy for the devil is a grass-roots
phenomenon, fueled by anger at Russia’s humiliation and fantasies
of national greatness. But the Stalin revival has also been
deliberately cultivated by the neo-authoritarian Russian state
under Vladimir Putin, despite official lip service to the
acknowledgment of Stalin’s crimes. A standard history textbook
approved by the government a few years ago described the dictator
as “an effective manager” seeking to build up Russia as an
industrial and military power. In recent years, official
celebrations of Russia’s victory over Germany in World War II have
featured tributes to Stalin as the generalissimo who won the war;
for last year’s Victory Day, Stalin’s portraits appeared on the
side of buses in some 40 Russian cities. Ironically, most
historians agree that Stalin could not have done worse damage to
the Soviet Union’s war readiness if he had tried to sabotage it on
purpose; his winning strategy consisted of using millions of
Russian conscripts as cannon fodder.

This month, one of Russia’s leading television channels, NTV,
marked the anniversary of the tyrant’s death with a documentary
titled “Stalin Is With Us.” With pro-Stalin historian Yuri Zhukov
as chief consultant, the film depicted the Great Leader as less a
communist than a Russian patriot who devoted his life to making his
country strong; the Great Terror was not only portrayed as an
acceptable cost of empire-building but was blamed on the perfidious
West and the excessive zeal of Stalin’s henchmen as well as local
officials. Meanwhile, the municipal government of Volgograd has
decided that the city’s name will officially revert to Stalingrad
on six war-related dates every year.

Pro-freedom Russians overwhelmingly agree that no progress
toward a free and decent society is possible without true
de-Stalinization. But what of the dictator’s memory in the free
world?

True, one would be hard-pressed to find Stalin admirers in the
West. Yet the persistent double standard when it comes to communist
and Nazi crimes remains. Communist old-timers, including blatant
Stalin apologists such as the recently deceased British Marxist
historian Eric Hobsbawm, are treated with a respect no one would
ever dream of according ex-Nazis or Hitler whitewashers.
Revisionist historians who minimize Hitler’s crimes, such as David
Irving, are ostracized. Historians who paint a kinder, gentler
Stalinism—such as Robert W. Thurston of Ohio’s Miami University,
author of the 1996 revisionist tract “Life and Terror in Stalin’s
Russia”—pay no such price. In 1992, The Chronicle of Higher
Education gave Thurston a platform to attack a Library of Congress
exhibition on Soviet archives for focusing on the Soviet regime’s
brutality and ignoring its achievements.

To some extent, this double standard is rooted in the unique
horror of the Nazi quest to exterminate entire races. But there
also remains, on the left, a lingering belief that Soviet communism
was at least motivated by noble goals of social justice.

Vestiges of this delusion can be found in left-wing sympathy for
Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, who, by startling coincidence,
died exactly 60 years after Stalin. Chavez was not a mass murderer,
but he was an authoritarian ruler who rigged elections, gutted
judicial independence, muzzled the press, and arrested political
opponents—while spouting Soviet-style rhetoric about creating “the
new man and woman” and building “the socialist society.” After his
death, The Nation, the premier magazine of the American left,
published a long, fawning obituary by Greg Grandin, which declared
that Chavez’s real fault was that “he wasn’t authoritarian enough.”
Grandin acknowledged that this argument was “perverse”; one can
think of a few other terms.

Perhaps it’s not just Russians who need to shake the dust of
Stalinism from their boots before they can move forward.

This article
originally appeared on RealClearPolitics.