Stalin's purge? Don't feel guilty, Putin says

Stalin's purge? Don't feel guilty, Putin says
By DOUGLAS BIRCH
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MOSCOW -- President Vladimir Putin said Thursday no one should try to make Russia feel guilty about the Great Purge of 1937, saying it may have been one of the most notorious episodes of the Stalin era but "in other countries even worse things happened."

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Book_of_Communism

• "The introduction, by editor Stéphane Courtois, maintains that "...Communist regimes...turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government". Using unofficial estimates he cites a death toll which totals 94 million. The breakdown of the number of deaths given by Courtois is as follows: 20 million in the Soviet Union,"

• also "65 million in the People's Republic of China, 1 million in Vietnam, 2 million in North Korea, 2 million in Cambodia, 1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe, 150,000 in Latin America, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan"

Yep, Vladimir these things happen all the time.