4 million just in Ukraine. (All this is pre-WWII.) How many of 30M Soviets died because the whole officer corps was executed just shy of WWII? Or because all military assets were poised at the border, easily bypassed, not defending cities?
The first actual census in USSR came up 15M "short", but it is unknown how many were killed, vs. previously overcounted because of weird czarist policy inherited from Mongol rule: peasants who escaped were still counted against a town's tax obligations.
Making nukes whose spiritual descendants will be handed over to Putin's insane successors, as Russian Federation splinters, might do in the whole world.
Stalin — man of steel — was his nom de guerre, just as many people are (or at least that was long the convention) referred to by their usernames.
The term is used quasi-ironically on this very site, when people say they will “steelman” an argument. And there are many other people born with that name in various languages, such as Stahlman or, notably around here, Stallman.
I’m not to trying to defend one of the most brutal dictators in history, but since you’re the one who raised the onomastic issue…
იოსებ სტალინი seems to have had a good education, despite having had the kind of early family life which makes for either bitter revolutionaries or slow, steady, drinking. I wonder if his choice of nom de guerre had been a deliberate 20th century rejection of Plato's {gold, silver, iron, brass} men in the Republic?
(compare the meritocracy espoused here and in following sections with that described by Goldstein in 1984 ... and we can be certain EA Blair had read the Republic)