From FrontPage magazine.com:

By Dr. Paul Kengor
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 29, 2007

Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to have a habit of making outrageous statements. In the latest, he compared Soviet atrocities under Stalin to American actions during wartime. “Yes, we had terrible pages [in our history],” Putin acknowledged, noting Stalin’s 1934-38 Red Terror, when one of every eight Soviet citizens perished. “Let us not forget that. But in other countries, it has been said, it was more terrible.”

What could be more terrible than some 20 million of your innocent citizens starved or shot to death in four years? Putin had an answer, pointing to America’s use of Agent Orange in Vietnam and nuclear weapons against Japan. The latter is an interesting choice by a Russian like Putin, given that it was advocated by the grateful Soviet soldiers who (along with their U.S. allies) were spared a brutal invasion of the Japanese mainland that would have killed millions.

To be sure, America has its share of sins, a fact that even the most patriotic, flag-waving, anti-communist would have to concede. Yet, Putin is wrong to suggest the United States in any way outdid Joseph Stalin.

The fact is that Putin’s homeland set a standard for being “terrible,” beginning in 1917, when another Vladimir—Vladimir Lenin—transmogrified Russia into the Bolshevik monster that came to be known as the Soviet Union. Putin is very familiar with the monster, since he worked for one of its ugliest offspring—the KGB.

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