Robo
If you cast your mind back (or read it up) you will find that back then, the world was in total confusion, about both Stalin and Hitler
I used to have a photograph of me as a child sitting at a table at a street party in Liverpool, with a banner draped behind me reading "Good old Uncle Joe" - in those days Stalin was a hero to all, not just the Communist Party -
Russia sacrificed more than any other nation in the fight against Hitler in W.W.2 - 20,000,000 died.
On the other hand, world leaders, British and America included, were more than happy to watch the rise of fascism without intervention - they regarded "New Germany as a bulwark against Bolshevism", the result being a holocast which claimed around 12 million systematically murdered people, Jews, Gypsies, Russians, Poles, Trades Unionists, people regarded as a mental and physical liablity ...... anybody who didn't fit into the "new Germany" we were all happy to support
When my father returned from being a prisoner of war in Spain, where he had gone when he saw what was happening to Jews and others in the "New Germany" our leaders were happy to throw their weight behind, he was rewarded with an MI5 record as a "premature anti-fascist", blacklisted from work and excommunicated from his church - he couldn't get a job and was forced to become a navvy - British support for "New Germany" was still resonating with me and my family right into my early teens.
Stalin's crimes were not fully known until Khrushchev began to outline them in 1956 - many millions of people throughout the world regarded them as a product of political infighting propaganda.
It's all too often forgotten by people who use Stalin as an argument not to change society for the better that the left was as much his victim as anybody else who got in his way   
Songs like 'The Ballad of Stalin' were written in the period when everybody seeking a decent future for the world looked on the man as 'the leader of the world's first workers' state' and regarded many of the excesses taking place as 'breaking eggs to make an omelette for a better society' - a necessary sacrifice.
I was in the Soviet Union in the mid 1960s, where they still talked proudly about the magnificent sacrifice made by the Soviet People and described WW2 as "The Great Patriotic War" - this was in ordinary conversation - not government propaganda
I do wish people would put these songs into context before they use them as a continuation of The Cold War
Jim Carroll