Confinement relocation and extermination of inconvenient ethic and ideological groups
To be fair to Stalin, under him there was never any campaign of all-out extermination on a purely ethnic basis. There were mass expulsions, relocations, and other projects targeted at various ethnic groups that intentionally and cold-bloodedly inflicted death rates well into double-digit percentages, but the goal was breaking resistance, looting, exploitation of slave labor, preemptive liquidation of potential rebels, etc., never a genocide in the true sense of the term. (Even if the stories about Stalin’s planned anti-Semitic purge are true, it would never have been anything close to a real genocidal campaign.)
The Nazis’ absolute determination to exterminate an entire ethnic group as defined by ancestry down to the very last person at all costs, spending vast resources just to ensure not a single one of its members gets away, is to the best of my knowledge really unique historically.
Otherwise, except for this particular fact, about whose relevance I’d say reasonable people may disagree, one would really have to stretch one’s case to argue that the Bolsheviks were significantly more benign than the Nazis. In fact, the very concept of “Stalinism” and the tendency to heap all blame on Stalin is a propagandistic sleight of hand; his fellow political gangsters like Lenin and Trotsky weren’t much different except in what they were able to get away with.
One source of pro-communist bias here is the common belief that communists, bad as they were, persecuted only dissenters and rebels, and left alone those who conformed obediently—in contrast to the horror of being on the Nazis’ extermination list, where nothing at all would help you, not even the most abject submission. This is however completely wrong: if you found yourself among the intended casualties of a Bolshevik plan, it was no different, except that in fairness these were never plans for all-out extermination on ethnic basis.
If one considers Nazis to be a kind of Fascism (which I don’t think it is, I think its distinct ideologically) then mellow Fascist regimes actually come out looking better than mellow Communist regimes.
In the present predominant opinion, the Nazis occupy the absolute first place on the scale of evil, with reasonable justification. However, they are followed on this scale by a bunch of right-wing regimes of all sorts, which are in turn followed by the worst communist regimes, and only distantly. (Even though, as you note, many regimes in the second category were outright idyllic compared to the standard communist fare.)
There is certainly enormous bias there, both because of the traditionally leftist inclination among the Western intelligentsia and because of the cognitive dissonance that would otherwise be caused by celebrating WW2 as a righteous crusade while at the same time admitting that it involved an alliance with a despotism no less awful than the ones it was fought to defeat. (This cognitive dissonance occasionally rears its head in amusing ways even as it is.)
Konkvistador:
To be fair to Stalin, under him there was never any campaign of all-out extermination on a purely ethnic basis. There were mass expulsions, relocations, and other projects targeted at various ethnic groups that intentionally and cold-bloodedly inflicted death rates well into double-digit percentages, but the goal was breaking resistance, looting, exploitation of slave labor, preemptive liquidation of potential rebels, etc., never a genocide in the true sense of the term. (Even if the stories about Stalin’s planned anti-Semitic purge are true, it would never have been anything close to a real genocidal campaign.)
The Nazis’ absolute determination to exterminate an entire ethnic group as defined by ancestry down to the very last person at all costs, spending vast resources just to ensure not a single one of its members gets away, is to the best of my knowledge really unique historically.
Otherwise, except for this particular fact, about whose relevance I’d say reasonable people may disagree, one would really have to stretch one’s case to argue that the Bolsheviks were significantly more benign than the Nazis. In fact, the very concept of “Stalinism” and the tendency to heap all blame on Stalin is a propagandistic sleight of hand; his fellow political gangsters like Lenin and Trotsky weren’t much different except in what they were able to get away with.
One source of pro-communist bias here is the common belief that communists, bad as they were, persecuted only dissenters and rebels, and left alone those who conformed obediently—in contrast to the horror of being on the Nazis’ extermination list, where nothing at all would help you, not even the most abject submission. This is however completely wrong: if you found yourself among the intended casualties of a Bolshevik plan, it was no different, except that in fairness these were never plans for all-out extermination on ethnic basis.
In the present predominant opinion, the Nazis occupy the absolute first place on the scale of evil, with reasonable justification. However, they are followed on this scale by a bunch of right-wing regimes of all sorts, which are in turn followed by the worst communist regimes, and only distantly. (Even though, as you note, many regimes in the second category were outright idyllic compared to the standard communist fare.)
There is certainly enormous bias there, both because of the traditionally leftist inclination among the Western intelligentsia and because of the cognitive dissonance that would otherwise be caused by celebrating WW2 as a righteous crusade while at the same time admitting that it involved an alliance with a despotism no less awful than the ones it was fought to defeat. (This cognitive dissonance occasionally rears its head in amusing ways even as it is.)