It's interesting because I have heard that in Germany, Hitler is highly despised.  Why not so with the Soviet leader among Russians?  To my knowledge, total deaths under Stalin exceeded those under Hitler.  But it's not only in Russia where we find this lack of outrage, but everywhere; when is the last time we saw a movie which probed Stalin's abuses?  Meanwhile, Hitler movies are a dime a dozen.

Well, when Stalin passed away and Khrushchev assumed power, a process of de-Stalinization took place, and Khrushchev did make his famous secret speech to the Central Committee denouncing Stalin. Perhaps the reason is that outside of Russia, people may know of Stalin, but beyond that, unless you have studied Russian history, which I did in senior high school Modern History, you would not know details of the extent of his atrocities. Also, the Russians were allies in WWII, whereas Hitler was actively attempting to expand the German empire through invasion and other perfidious means. Things like the Holocaust also worsened his notoriety. It is true that Russians became the enemy after WWII in what came to be known as the Cold War, but Stalin died in 1953, almost 4 decades before the Cold War came to an end. I too worry about this trend of Russians putting Stalin up on a pedestal instead of reviling what he did. One just has to consider his purges and the Ukrainian famine that Stalin instigated to see the evil in this man.