Stalin in Retrospect

In the 48 years since Hitler broke up the Hitler-Stalin pact, the world has mostly forgotten how much those two ideological gangsters had in common. But now, as glasnost permits open discussion of the Thirties purges for the first time, Stalin takes his rightful place ahead of Hitler on the list of twentieth-century mass murderers.

After the Soviet government erected a pink marble memorial slab in his village in May 1988, 74-year-old Petro Kukovenko resolved to tell the truth he had kept secret for nearly half a century. The government’s memorial, in the suburban village of Bykovnya, near Kiev, extolled the “eternal memory” of “6,329 Soviet soldiers, partisans, members of the underground, and peaceful citizens killed by the Fascist occupying forces from 1941 to 1943” and buried in mass graves nearby.

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Eugene H. Methvin

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In the 48 years since Hitler broke up the Hitler-Stalin pact, the world has mostly forgotten how much those two ideological gangsters had in common. But now, as glasnost permits open discussion of the Thirties purges for the first time, Stalin takes his rightful place ahead of Hitler on the list of twentieth-century mass murderers.

After the Soviet government erected a pink marble memorial slab in his village in May 1988, 74-year-old Petro Kukovenko resolved to tell the truth he had kept secret for nearly half a century. The government’s memorial, in the suburban village of Bykovnya, near Kiev, extolled the “eternal memory” of “6,329 Soviet soldiers, partisans, members of the underground, and peaceful citizens killed by the Fascist occupying forces from 1941 to 1943” and buried in mass graves nearby.