It's equally as dangerous to equate fascist Spain with Stalin's or even Khrushchev's Russia

Hmmmmm. 28 million dead Russians, just 1940 - 1945, might have something to say about that. Maybe 5 million of them died in combat. The rest where those shipped far from the occupied territories to live under canvas, on meager rations. The effort was to shift whole factories far from the Germans, but it is questionable that they would have built better tanks (eg) and more of them, if they had been well nourished.

Stalin was not universally liked, just feared. Study Ukrainian history. Solzhenitsyn (decorated soldier) was sent to the gulags for voicing the plight of the workers.

My point was not to equate the dictators, or the regimes, if the post is read properly, it equated the game of political football. Older than time immemorial, Richard the 3rd got the treatment until 700 years later, the well-known painting of him is testament. And the Romans did it, routinely.