Pride of Georgia

No, we're not talking Ty Cobb here.

Thanks to longtime Washington writer Cynthia Grenier for pointing out that Gori, Georgia, under bombardment this week by the Russian military, is the birthplace of Joseph Stalin. For those who don't remember Papa Joe, he was the brutal Communist dictator of the Soviet Union from approximately 1924 until his mysterious death in 1953. Sad to say, he was much beloved by many "fellow travelers" in the United States and other Western nations, many of whom were unrepentant in their support of him until their own deaths.

The New York Times even won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for coverage out of Moscow sugarcoating Stalin's excesses, although both the Pulitzer people and the newspaper have finally distanced themselves from that one in the last five years. Never too late, I say.

Stalin was responsible for the deaths of anywhere between 10 million and 30 million of his own people, depending on which historian you choose to believe. I prefer to go with

20 million which is the number Robert Conquest, to my mind the most distinguished Stalin biographer, has arrived at.

It's clear that in the post-Communist Putin era Stalin's illustrious place in history has been forgotten. How quickly they forget.