We can't touch Comrade Stalin here; the children of executioners and slaves with Stockholm syndrome will trample you. But remember...

...Four in the morning. A knock on your door. You open it — three men stand on your doorstep. Caps with cornflower-blue bands. They've come for you. They twist your arms,

drag you outside, shove you into a van marked "BREAD," promising to explain everything, and after a few hours, having crushed your testicles under the heel of a boot and extracted some confession from you while you were unconscious, they take you to a damp prison yard and shoot you in the stomach. Then — you're still alive — they finish you off. They tell your parents you've been sentenced to ten years without the right to correspond. And for ten years, they believe they'll see you again.

Or this.

...You've got nothing to eat. Nothing to eat because requisition squads come and take everything, and whoever argues with them is led behind the barn and shot in the head with a Mosin rifle. All the grain you thought you'd sow has been taken. And now there's nothing to eat. And again, the requisition squads come. To take away the last bit you managed to miraculously save. Without which you'll perish. Of your seven children, two died of hunger in your arms, and one, the youngest, your wife smothered with a pillow herself because she had no milk, and he wouldn't stop screaming from hunger. Neighbors, they say, secretly fed the suffering little one to their surviving children. They asked where the meat came from, and the mother burst into tears. And you wonder: could you do the same? And you take up the sawed-off shotgun left from the First World War, and your neighbor grabs a pitchfork, and you drive out the parasites. But a few months later, they send the brilliant Marshal Tukhachevsky with his cavalry against you peasants. But to avoid wasting cavalry on you, Tukhachevsky decides to poison you with toxic gases. And your neighbors swell, blacken, suffocate. And you die. And all your children, who miraculously survived the famine, die too.

And remember this?

...You're a hero. You must be a hero! Because you held that damn church for a day. Because you definitely killed four, and the fifth crawled away, twitching, dragging a bright red wide trail behind him, back into his trench. But you're not a hero: there was nowhere for you to go from that church; if you tried to retreat, you'd meet the NKVD. You have a rifle, they have submachine guns. They'd cut you down with a burst and leave you to vomit blood. You have your duty, and they have theirs. Bastards... Vasya, who stood by your side for the last two years, from the next street, got a bullet in the cheek, all his teeth shattered, the bleeding wouldn't stop. And then the Germans brought out a mortar, covered you, and you were concussed. When you came to, they spared you. Took you prisoner. But Comrade Stalin said: we have no prisoners of war. And you — to a concentration camp. They formed a company, half of which starved to death, all the officers were executed immediately, both those who told the truth and those who tried to lie. Communists were beaten to death with rifle butts. But you survived. And escaped. Crossed the front line, back to your own! Wanted to keep fighting! Against those bastards... But the NKVD got you — just like that. They knocked out your teeth. Wanted to know if the Germans had recruited you. And — just in case — sent you for fifteen years to the Komi ASSR. To a camp. You came out — without teeth, without a liver, without a stomach. Without a soul. And then for however long you had left — ten years, maybe — you'd dream of proving you weren't guilty. And they never thought you were guilty. They just did it, just in case.

Stalin didn't win the Great Patriotic War. The people did. And he treated the people — his own people — like nails, like cement, like rebar, like dirt.

May he be cursed.