To be a communist had often come to mean being a supporter of the Soviet Union after its founding in 1922, and to support the Soviet Union came to mean supporting Joseph Stalin when he seized control of the nation, and so by degrees people who had begun with noble ideals of freedom and equality and revolution came around to supporting one of the most brutal dictatorships the world has ever seen (in part because it was seen as a bulwark against another, Hitler’s Germany, and while at the time they were routinely portrayed as opposites, afterward their resemblances would become more widely
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