I am not keeping score here. My point was not to make a competition about who was worse. I personally think it was completely wrong for the US to give so much aid to Stalin. It let him steamroll Eastern Europe.
My point was to show how the West is not to be trusted from a Russian perspective. Even if we think Stalin should have been overthrown, you cannot expect Russians to think it was cool that we wanted to invade them. To point here is to be able to see what is going on from a Russian perspective. Not to have "empathy" for them but to understand the rational for their actions.
It is not all that different from when somebody analyzis as serial killer to spot the next victim. Understanding the serial killer is not about having empathy with him/her but about being able to predict their actions.
I still think it is hypocrisy with some of our attitude. We were find with the Czar enslaving his hole population. As bad as the USSR was, it was still a huge improvement over the tyrrany of the Czar. The USSR gave regular people decent apartments, jobs, education and health care.
Ultimately capitalism and imperialism which the West used to push has to take a lot of blame for the rise of revolutionary communism. People don't embrace communism if they have good living conditions and rights. Communist revolts spread all over the world in many Western colonies. The US invaded Vietnam to supposedly fight the horrors of communism, while completely ignoring the horrors of French colonialism and oppression of Vietnamese people.
There is a tendency to cherry pick history. Communist revolutions did not happen in a vaccum. It happens for much the same reason as people revolted in France during the French revolution. Oppression, inequality and an elite living the good life while common people suffered.
The best anti-dote to communist revolts is to give people democracy and spread the wealth.
Keep in mind that people we celebrate as heroes and liberators like Churchill was no such thing. His primary reason to enter WW2 was to preserve the British empire. And empire that oppressed hundreds of millions of people. It starved to death more people than Stalin. It offered no more freedom to its subjects than the Soviets. In fact it offered much less.
Modern China has done more for common Chinese people than imperial China which was a horrendously oppressive and violent regime. I am not sure if you have read how they punished people there by mudering every family member and friend of anyone who wrong the emperor.
