A particularly telling Milne moment came in 2006, when the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly voted to condemn "the massive human rights violations committed by totalitarian communist regimes". In the article he wrote in response, Milne admitted the USSR executed 799,455 people, then moved on.
"For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality," he insisted.
Now, you can quibble with the facts. Focussing only on the USSR's executions ignores the millions it starved to death in Ukraine, or in the mass deportations from the Caucasus and Crimea, the way it used rape as a weapon, or that fact it invaded without provocation half a dozen countries. You can also question those "huge advances" considering the fact that life expectancy in the USSR peaked in 1962, then declined steadily as chronic alcoholism took hold.

It has become almost received wisdom to bracket Stalin and Hitler as twin monsters of the past century - Mao and Pol Pot are sometimes thrown in as an afterthought - and commonplace to equate communism and fascism as the two greatest evils of an unprecedentedly sanguinary era. In some versions, communism is even held to be the more vile and bloodier wickedness. The impact of this cold war victors' version of the past has been to relativise the unique crimes of Nazism, bury those of colonialism and feed the idea that any attempt at radical social change will always lead to suffering, killing and failure.

Russia gathers all kinds of criminal gangs [in Russia]. They're given the nickname "opposition". They arm them heavily, pay them big money. Countless funds are spent on this. It's unthinkable to a normal person's imagination. Tanks, armored personnel carriers, planes, Grads, Smerches, Uragans. Their training happens outside the republic, on Russian territory, at special bases. Russian military specialists, Russian special services. Plus a few criminals of Chechen ethnicity – and they call this whole mixture "opposition". Opposition in the Russian way. In fact, Russism. Typical Russism. Worse than fascism, Nazism, racism, all individual-hating ideologies. Raised to the rank of Russian state policy. Russism is worse than fascism.
Throughout the history of Russia, it chooses the most helpless victim. To a complete physical destruction, and realistic intimidation of the world – saying: "here is how strong, powerful we are, what we can do, how insidious, evil, predatory."
Nagorno-Karabakh – isolated and completely destroyed. It's the training.
They went further: Abkhazia - isolated from the Caucasus, from Georgia. Destroyed all potential.
War with Georgia. Armenia with Azerbaijan – in fact [the conflict involves] Russian special services, Russian troops, Russian weapons, Russian equipment.
South Ossetia - isolated, destroyed. North Ossetia, Ingushetia – isolated.
And the physical destruction of entire nations. Violence, death, blood. Destruction of nation's potential.
The Russian leadership, throughout its history, when it got difficult, fled to sign agreements that it has never respected and will never respect, and does not think [of respecting]. As soon as it gets stronger, it starts again. It isolates the weakest and tortures them.
That's what Russia is – empire of evil. As it was, is, and remains. Its rapacity... greed, ruthlessness, lack of spirituality, immorality it has demonstrated in Chechnya. 250 000 armed forces. 5600 units of armored vehicles on the territory. An unheard number in history against [a handful of] mountain people. Against a territory for which you need a microscope to look for it on a map. They reassured the world community, they made a statement from the Russian President that there will be no forceful solution. There will be only a peaceful solution [they said]. And when on the New Year's Eve... on the New Year's Eve, they mixed sand, earth, sky, human blood and flesh. Mixed and made a bloody mess. And they are not going to move from this policy, they are not going to move from it. That's what Russia is.
If the world, I declare responsibly, if the whole world does not stop this plague, or do not – at least – make it follow rule of law (there will never be democracy, and never was) If – at least in legal terms – they do not comply with the norms of international law, the world will be subject to severe shock.

My life experience prepared me to identify evil at an early age. Not my life as the chess player. Not even as the youngest world champion in history. No. My relevant experience is where I was born and raised, in what Ronald Reagan accurately called the “evil empire,” the USSR. As a young star in the chess-crazed Soviet Union in the ’70s and ’80s, I had many privileges my compatriots did not. I could travel to the West outside of the Iron Curtain, where it was obvious to me very quickly that they were the free world and we were not, despite what communist propaganda told us.

Until socialism is confronted with its lived, communist reality, the gravest atrocities of all recorded human life, we live in its age.

Let us be aware that while they [the Soviet leadership] preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.

I was also part of a post-Vietnam generation that had learned to question its own government and saw how - from the rise of McCarthyism to support for South Africa's apartheid regime - Cold War thinking had often led America to betray its ideals. This awareness didn't stop me from believing we should contain the spread of Marxist totalitarianism. But it made me wary of the notion that good resided only on our side and bad on theirs, or that a people who'd produced Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky were inherently different from us. Instead, the evils of the Soviet system struck me as a variation on a broader human tragedy: The way abstract theories and rigid orthodoxy can curdle into repression. How readily we justify moral compromise and relinquish our freedoms. How power can corrupt and fear can compound and language can be debased. None of that was unique to Soviets or Communisists, I thought; it was true for all of us. The brave struggle of dissidents behind the Iron Curtain felt of a piece with, rather than distinct from, the larger struggle for human dignity taking place elsewhere in the world - including America.

[T]he living memory of the USSR is now truly fading and the nature of the USSR—its peculiar awfulness, its criminality, its stupidity—is becoming harder and harder to explain.

A persuasive way of understanding the collapse of Communism in Europe and the Soviet Union is to think of nineteenth- or twentieth-century slum clearance. For in many respects the Soviet Empire was a slum of continental proportions. Beyond the grotesque architectural assertions of an alien ideology, public housing – almost all housing – consisted of anomic and primitive concrete barracks where the smells of cabbage, damp and low-grade tobacco combined. Rivers and lakes were polluted by chemicals, with the Pleisse river in East Germany alternately turning first red then yellow.

Witness the tragic condition of Russia. The methods of State centralization have paralysed individual initiative and effort; the tyranny of the dictatorship has cowed the people into slavish submission and all but extinguished the fires of liberty; organized terrorism has depraved and brutalized the masses and stifled every idealistic aspiration; institutionalized murder has cheapened human life, and all sense of the dignity of man and the value of life has been eliminated; coercion at every step has made effort bitter, labour a punishment, has turned the whole of existence into a scheme of mutual deceit, and has revived the lowest and most brutal instincts of man. A sorry heritage to begin a new life of freedom and brotherhood.

[Stalin's] purge caused me to examine the meaning of Communism.... I had always known of course that there were books critical of Communism.... I had never read them because I knew that the party did not want me to read them..... the first book I read... was called I Speak for the Silent [by] Professor Vladimir Tchernavin.... He was a little man in the Communist world, gentle, humane, good.... Suddenly for no reason at all he was arrested and carried away by the secret police.... Now for the first time, I believed that slave labor camps existed.... I said ‘this is evil, absolute evil. Of this evil I am a part.’ ... If Communism were evil, what was left but moral chaos? .... The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern mind – the luminous shroud which it has spun about the spirit of man, paralyzing in the name of rationalism the instinct of his soul for God, denying in the name of knowledge the reality of the soul.... (pp. 79-83)

The reason that communism is the greatest evil is simple: Communism is the greatest enemy of personal responsibility ever invented. Communism waters down and diminishes personal accomplishments. Once one sees this clearly, seemingly inexplicable communist-driven policies make sense. Every communist policy—from the minimum wage to single-payer health care to rent control—is designed to minimize and thwart personal responsibility. Conversely, individuals who take personal responsibility become leaders, inspiring others to take control of their own lives. Individuals who take personal responsibility for their actions are accountable for their behavior, which results in better relationships with others.

Judged by every standard which history has applied to Governments, the Soviet Government of Russia is one of the worst tyrannies that has ever existed in the world. (Cheers.) It accords no political rights. It rules by terror. It punishes political opinions. It suppresses free speech. It tolerates no newspapers but its own. It persecutes Christianity with a zeal and a cunning never equalled since the times of the Roman Emperors. It is engaged at this moment in trampling down the peoples of Georgia and executing their leaders by hundreds. It is for this process that Mr. MacDonald asks us to make ourselves responsible. We are to render these tyrannies possible by lending to their authors money to pay for the ammunition to murder the Georgians, to enable the Soviet sect to keep its stranglehold on the dumb Russian nation, and to poison the world, and so far as they can, the British Empire, with their filthy propaganda. (Cheers.) That is what we are asked to take upon ourselves. It is an outrage on the British name.

Putin's understanding of the world is maddeningly narrow, reduced to a gloomy tunnel vision, locked into a false narrative of betrayal. He once declared the fall of the Soviet Union 'the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century'.
What?
Worse than the First and Second World Wars? Worse than the Holocaust? The Soviet Union was, in reality, a dark totalitarian dictatorship under Stalin that slowly morphed into a gloomy senility.