It slowly dawns on one writer that Stalin may have been worse than Hitler.

Writing a review of "Bloodlands" for Slate, author Ron rosenbaum observes:

How much should the cannibalism count? How should we factor it into the growing historical-moral-political argument over how to compare Hitler's and Stalin's genocides, and the death tolls of communism and fascism in general. I know I had not considered it. I had really not been aware of the extent of the cannibalism that took place during the Stalinist-enforced famine in the Ukraine in 1933 until I read Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder's shocking, unflinching depiction of it in Bloodlands, his groundbreaking new book about Hitler's and Stalin's near-simultaneous genocides.

And:

But I suppose that, without looking deeply into it, I had considered Stalin's state-created famine a kind of "soft genocide" compared with the industrialized mass murder of Hitler's death camps or even with the millions of victims of Stalin's own purges of the late '30s and the gulags they gave birth to.

Snyder's book, while controversial in some respects, forces us to face the facts about the famine, and the cannibalism helps place the Ukraine famine in the forefront of debate, not as some mere agricultural misfortune, but as one of the 20th century's deliberate mass murders.

And:

Students of comparative evil often point out that Stalin caused a higher death toll than Hitler, even without taking the famine deaths into account; those losses were not treated the same way as his other crimes or as Hitler's killing and gassing in death camps. Shooting or gassing is more direct and immediate than starving a whole nation.


But Snyder's account of the Ukraine famine persuasively makes the case that Stalin in effect turned the entire Ukraine into a death camp and, rather than gassing its people, decreed death by famine.

Should this be considered a lesser crime because it's less "hands-on"? Here's where the accounts of cannibalism caused me to rethink this question—and to examine the related question of whether one can distinguish degrees of evil in genocides by their methodology.

And:

find it hard to understand anyone who wants to argue that the murder of 20 million is "preferable" to anything, but our culture still hasn't assimilated the genocidal equivalence between Stalin and Hitler, because, as Applebaum points out, we used the former to defeat the latter.*

Consider the fact that downtown New York is home to a genuinely likable literary bar ironically named "KGB." The KGB, of course, was merely the renamed version of Stalin's NKVD, itself the renamed version of the OGPU, the secret police spearhead of his genocidal policies. And under its own name the KGB was responsible for the continued murder and torture of dissidents and Jews until the Soviet Union fell in 1991 (although of course an ex-KGB man named Putin is basically running the place now).

You could argue that naming a bar "KGB" is just a kind of Cold War kitsch (though millions of victims might take issue with taking it so lightly). But the fact that you can even make the kitsch argument is a kind of proof of the differential way Soviet and Nazi genocides and their institutions are still treated. Would people seek to hold literary readings at a downtown bar ironically named "Gestapo"?

The full evil of Stalin still hasn't sunk in. I know it to be true intellectually, but our culture has not assimilated the magnitude of his crimes. Which is perhaps why the cannibalism jolted me out of any illusion that meaningful distinctions could be made between Stalin and Hitler

That this is an epiphany for Rosenbaum suggests the wool of euphemism that people from his social structure have been wrapped.  Rosenbaum is the author of
"Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil ."  One would think that someone interested in "evil" would have had more than an intellctual understanding that the evils of Communism were at least as bad as those of Nazi Germany.