The Gulags, Salt Mines and Siberian work camps were not his - they were an established Russian form of punishment and suppressing offten - fine when the Tsar was running them apparently but condemned under Soviet control
There is no record of how many were sent there because that opposed Stalin or how many were criminals or opponents of the state wishing to bring back the old system... or whatever
Stalin may have used them to dispose of opponents, but to say those opponents surpassed the numbers of the Holocaust was nonsense.
The greatest number of fatalities under Stalin were though incompetence and the mishandling of national crises - certainly not deliberate suppression of opposition.
Stalin regarded the left as much as an enemy as he did the right - he destroyed Socialism, he in no way represented it.
The numbers game is nonsense anyway - the Ukraine famine was no different than the Irish one - both were mismanaged - but even that is a complex issue.
The "democratic nations"
There is evidence that the Irish famine was deliberately mismanaged to solve "The Irish Problem" - the same cannot be said about the Soviet one - no proof exists that it was anything other than a bungled job under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
I have no doubt that the usual suspect with claim this to be a defence of Stalin - it is not
I detest Stalin for his destruction of teh Socialist dream, but the 14 countries who provided support for those who would re-establish the old order (coincidentally!! the same people who regarded "New Germany as a bulwark against Communism") must share part of the blame for what happened etween the Wars in the Soviet Union
The whole period is incredibly complex and cennot be dealt with by out of context cut-'n-pastes and soundbites)   
Read Deuscher (in context of all his books) or Trotsy (history of teh revolution and biography of Stalin, or Vinagradov's biographies of the manin leader and his "Empire")
A lorra, lorra reading, I'm afraid
Jim Carroll