Here’s a creative solution to the D-Day Memorial’s Stalin bust conundrum. From an e-mail:
When I visited the DDay memorial last summer, I wished they did have something to acknowledge the USSR’s role in WWII. It did have an impact on the Normandy invasion, because the Wehrmacht in June 1944 was a lot weaker than it was on June 22, 1941; and most of the combat that had weakened it was on the Eastern front.
I would propose instead of a bust of Stalin, a bust of two Red Army soldiers. One poor Ivan Ivanovich (or whatever the Soviet equivalent of GI Joe was) who died fighting the Germans, and his mate, Ivan Denisovich, the Red Army veteran who went off to the Gulag as the war ended because he had been captured by the Germans at one point. (Ivan Denisovich in Solzhenitsyn’s novel was in the Gulag for having surrendered to the Germans).