Apparently so, at least by some Russian leaders. However, whatever Vladimir Putin’s faults are — and the author of this article paints him as a dangerous aggressor — there is no comparison of him to the genocidal murderer Stalin. As the author notes Stalin (iron man) never confronted the Nazis himself, avoiding coming too close to the combat zone to personally encourage his engaged troops. He, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, was so enamored in psychotic self-adulation that he changed his name to “iron man”. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in an interview once put the number of deaths due to Stalin’s purges at 110 million, says the author.
LA Times: Only six years ago, President Vladimir Putin visited the Polish port of Gdansk, birthplace of the Solidarity movement that threw off Soviet domination, and reassured his Eastern European neighbors that Russia had only friendly intentions.
Putin spoke harshly that day of the notorious World War II-era pact that former Soviet leader Josef Stalin had signed with Adolf Hitler — an agreement that cleared the way for the Nazi occupation of Poland and Soviet domination of the Baltics — calling it a “collusion to solve one’s problems at others’ expense.” Full article is here.
