COMMENTARY: Statues Commemorating Joseph Stalin Are a Disgrace to Humanity

A monument to commemorate Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin will be erected in the Ukrainian city of Zaporozhie ahead of the May 9, 2010 Victory Day celebrations, according to the head of the city's Communist Party. Oleksandr Zubchevskyi, who made the announcement last week, also said that a second statue of Stalin would be erected in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.

Stalin (1879-1953) was baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church and studied at a seminary, but was expelled for revolutionary activity in 1899. In 1924 Stalin took control of the Soviet Union -- a dictatorship he held until his death in 1953.

Considered to be paranoid by many historians, Stalin ordered the deaths of millions of innocent people across the Soviet Union on false charges of espionage, sabotage, and anti-Soviet propaganda.

It was, in fact, the armed forces of the United States and England -- not the Soviet Union -- that brought about the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. In an effort to avoid an attack by Nazi Germany, Stalin signed the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939 during World War II. Nonetheless, Hitler's Germany invaded Russia in 1941 -- probably because Hitler was confident that Russian forces had been weakened and lacked motivation for victory, since Stalin ordered millions of Russian troops killed before the beginning of World War II.

Stalin continued his deceitfulness not only with Germany, but also with his allies -- the United States and England -- at the end of World War II, and for many years thereafter. Stalin met with U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Yalta Conference in 1945 to establish the terms for ending the war.

Stalin violated the Yalta Treaty by retaining Russian troops in many countries -- Ukraine, Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and Romania among others -- for many years after World War II, making them, in effect, satellites or puppet nations controlled by the Soviet Union. Under Stalin's dictatorship, protests for freedom in these satellite nations were met with Russian tanks. The Soviet satellite nations finally attained their freedom in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

With this kind of a legacy of Stalin, statues designed to commemorate his "greatness" as leader of the Soviet Union, can only be considered a disgrace to humanity.