....However,
to compare this with the murder of many millions of Europeans by the Nazi regime, and especially with the state-planned genocide of the Jews (Holocaust) in the context of Nazi crimes generally no doubt as to make the acceptance of the comparison easier -
is a distortion of history.
.... The two regimes were both totalitarian, and yet quite different. The greater threat to all of humanity was Nazi Germany, and it was the Soviet Army that liberated Eastern Europe, was the central force that defeated Nazi Germany, and thus saved Europe and the world from the Nazi nightmare.
It also implies that the war was initiated by both regimes equally, and that they therefore bear equal responsibility for the death of some 35 million people in Europe alone (if one adds the war in Asia, the total is, according to a number of historians, about 55 million). This is a total perversion of history. In the summer of 1939, Stalin would have sold not only his own mother, but all Russian mothers and grandmothers, for an assurance that Germany would not attack the USSR
World War II was started by Nazi Germany, not the Soviet Union, and the responsibility of the 35 million dead in Europe, 29 million of them non-Jews, is that of Nazi Germany, not Stalin. To commemorate victims equally is a distortion.
There is more to it even than that. Communism was a deviation from the ideals of the French Revolution which Marx had admired. Marxism was, from the outset, a contradictory ideology, because it aspired to equality and justice, even to democracy, on the one hand, and from the outset it also included clearly anti-democratic elements, even genocidal ones (articles by Marx and Engels in 1848/9, again in 1863, and the correspondence between them, talked about the elimination of the Czechs, Slovenes, and others, as so-called non-historic nations). The democratic trend came into its own with the development of Marxist social-democratic parties in Central and Western Europe, while the anti-democratic and dictatorial elements became the ideology of the groups out of which communism developed.
The USSR, even under Stalin, had these contradictory elements in its basic make-up. The ideal was still the realization of libertarian principles, and the abolition of the State, as Lenin wrote; this can be seen, for instance, in the 1936 Stalin Constitution, a prime example of a wonderfully democratic program. The reality was the exact opposite: oppression, terror, corruption, murder, torture.
But very large numbers of Soviet citizens actually believed in the quasi-liberal propaganda, and I think it was, ultimately, the internal contradictions that became the basis for the collapse of the regime. The economic inefficiency, the corruption, and the terror were, in the final analysis, the result of the fact that there was no consistent basis for the communist regime. With the Nazis it was completely different. There, there was a terrible consistency between a racist, terrorist, antisemitic ideology and the way the society was being built. There were no contradictions: world control by war and conquest, and genocidal programs, were the hallmark of the regime. Without military defeat, the Hitler regime would not have disappeared; it would never have collapsed on its own. The Soviet regime did. It is therefore not that difficult to see how the Soviets in the end were able to collaborate with the West in the defeat of Nazi Germany.
One certainly should remember the victims of the Soviet regime, and there is every justification for designating special memorials and events to do so. But to put the two regimes on the same level and commemorating the different crimes on the same occasion is totally unacceptable.