ach, I clicked the wrong button and upvoted by accident. Anyway; I think your latching on to one phrase for your own aims. "Belittle the holocaust"; well if th

ach, I clicked the wrong button and upvoted by accident. Anyway; I think your latching on to one phrase for your own aims. "Belittle the holocaust"; well if that isn't a sentence to garner a sympathetic audience I don't know what is.... I read the sentence not as an assertion that Russia suffers the same atrocities as those of the Stalinist era - but rather as a statement about how people in power still have not learned all of the lessons and still commit acts of crime and violence against others. The conditions described (if accurate) are certainly pretty severe and the level of corruption (again, if accurate) awful - only one section of Government seems to have replied seriously to any of the accusations. So, no, it is not Stalinism and not the Gulag; but the strong similarities are there. And the obvious connection must be drawn. I have travelled in Russia both personally and on business and some of the areas of government I have seen are extremely corrupt and brutal. The association to Stalinism would seem justified in my limited experience.