[hartpuff]

>You attempt to discredit my take on Stalin with rhetorical flourish, so generously implying that “you don’t think I’m a neo-nazi”, yet you provide no evidence that he wasn’t a butcher.

I didn't say he wasn't a "butcher", so why should I have to provide evidence to that effect?

As for my "rhetorical flourish", most of the people online I see making the ludicrous claim that Stalin killed 50+ million people turn out to be Hitlerites.

>Wikipedia has the number at 3-60 million, with 3 being the “officially” recorded number. [1] Perhaps you are right that Stalin was better than my interpretation, but you haven’t convinced me.

Apparently neither has Wikipedia and every historian who places the figure at less than 20 million, such as William Rubinstein and Yale University's Timothy Snyder.

As that Wikipedia article states, the 3-60 million wild guesses were before records became available after the demise of the Soviet Union. When researchers were able to study and analyse the records the ridiculously high estimates were revised drastically down.