With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Michael Gerson: Virginia Museum's Bust of Stalin is an Atrocity by Any Name

[Michael Gerson is a columnist for the WaPo.]

In 1931, during the liquidation of millions of kulaks, Joseph Stalin granted an audience to George Bernard Shaw and Lady Nancy Astor. Astor bluntly asked: "When are you going to stop killing people?" To which Stalin replied: "When it is no longer necessary."...

Statues and busts of Stalin were once mass-produced in Russia as icons of a political cult. Few can now be found on public display outside the Stalin museum in his home town of Gori, Georgia, where some people remain perversely proud of a local boy made bad. But a newly cast memorial bust of Stalin stands at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Va., accompanying sculptures of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill. A plaque recounts Stalin's practice of "eliminating" his opponents. But Stalin would doubtless be pleased by the likeness and its setting....

The main difference between Hitler and Stalin is that one lost a war and ended with a bullet in his head. The other gets a bust at the National D-Day Memorial....
Read entire article at WaPo