big question.

first, one of the reasons there are so many more apologetics for Stalin than say, Hitler - as the two are so often compared - is because Stalin never 'lost' like Hitler did. Hitler fought and strove to create a 'something' and that 'something' was defeated and completely left in ruin. his movement was largely discredited when his mortal enemies - the communists and capitalists - stood atop the burning rubble of his capitol.

the same did not happen for Stalin. For many old Russians (and former Soviets) even today, Stalin is remembered fondly. To them, 'things WERE better under Stalin. people DID respect their elders, and really I mean come on - was he THAT bad? no. at least we were a super-power, now look at us! and besides, socialism could work under the right leader and without damn saboteurs'.

That's making somewhat light of it, but you get the point. Stalin brought about sweeping revelations and revolutions and was only discredited many years later. That's difficult for some people to grasp.

Revisionist historians are still grappling with Stalin. J Arch Getty wrote 'The Origins of the Great Purge' and argued that it was somewhat organic in its construction. Stalin may have engineered the purge, but what resulted was largely out of his control and his lieutenants were responsible for most of the killings. or worse, much was done at a local level. Sheila Fitzpatrick has been, for me, the most influential revisionist as she sought throughout her career to identify how ordinary people lived and how the system in place changed or affected them. she also seeks to view the times as somehow cultural, meaning that people operated independently of Stalin's grip. He was a brutal dictator yes, but he didn't do all the evil that's ascribed to him. He set standards, and his cronies or those who took advantage of the environment then ran with it.

Simon Sebag Montefiore wrote 'In the Court of the Red Tsar' in which he analyzes the lives and drama of Stalin's inner circle throughout his reign. In it you get a really good - outstanding even - sense of the machinations of power in a dictatorship. the ways in which beria, malenkov, krushchev, yezhov, yagoda, even generals like timoshenko and zhukov - sought to outdo each other in their fanaticism. in this, he's following a similar strand as the other revisionists in that his cronies were responsible for much of the killings and death. however, he does insist that the myth of 'If only Stalin knew' is just that, a myth. He does provide, in the last chapter, a bringing-to-the-present of the whole saga, with interviews from surviving family members and the views from different people's homelands. what they thought of the soviet era leaders and how that has affected the history.

much of revisionist stalinist history attempts to bypass the traditional tendency to lump everything that happened at the feet of the great dictator, all while asking the pertinent question in their back of their minds, 'was he really responsible for everything? did he have complete, utter control over the entire system?' Sometimes the answer seems to be a resounding yes. other times the conclusions are that no, he is not to blame for all the evil that occured from 1927 to 1954.

In that link you submitted, and in the original, those claiming 'it's impossible to kill a quarter of your population without further revolution' simply don't understand history very well. it is possible, and has happened multiple times. Pol Pot's Cambodia regime accomplished this in a relatively short time period and few people care enough to debate it.

Real historians of the stalinist era also, in my opinion, don't debate the numbers unless there are new revelations, often about backwater or outlying provinces. because there simply isn't a point. what's the different between 20 and 22 million, or 22 million vs 38 million dead? The tragedy in lost human lives is so staggering that by that time it just becomes a strange macabre competition of memory distortion. There are also historians who argue that only those shot ought to be counted in his tolls, while others claim that those who died as a direct result, ie famines due to his policies, should be counted as his victims. Norman Davies puts the figure at 100 million in his book 'Europe: A History', and that is disuputed among many, but his parameters make sense. anyone killed directly or indirectly should be counted. So those who died in camps, those who died by execution, by famine, but also those in poland who were killed by polish communists, those in czechoslovakia, hungary, romania, albania, all the 'stans of central asia, and those who died as a tertiary result, ie the little turf wars that sprang up in Georgia, Ossetia, Tajikistan or on the steppe as a result of his policies. It's hard to come up with numbers for anything historical, but with death it's even harder. Revisionists, in general, seem to avoid this in favor of searching for nuance and perspective.