We remember Stalin because he had the most time to achieve his ends, but it was Lenin who laid the foundations of everything Stalin did. He had the same casual indifference to human suffering and he acted on it. He ordered mass executions of "class enemies" - intellectuals, the clergy, the nobility and anyone who was even moderately wealthy. The first mass arrests of political enemies (and mass executions in basements of the secret service) were ordered directly by Lenin. He had the poet Nikolai Gumilev shot for being a Social Revolutionary. But what else would one expect from someone who seized power by illegal coup in order to invalidate the results of the election that was to take place a few weeks later, in which the Bolsheviks were set to come in a distant second to the Social Revolutionaries? He cared only for power and keeping it, and all means were acceptable to him.

He authorized the use of chemical weapons against villages in the Tambov region when they refused to give up grain to the Bolsheviks (as it would mean starvation), long before Hitler or Saddam used chemical weapons against innocents. He systemically starved regions, also using hunger as a direct weapon. He condoned the use of torture, rape and execution against his enemies, he murdered prisoners, he instituted forced labor for political enemies, set up the first concentration camps of the modern fashion and he looted the entire nation in order to pay for world revolution. He murdered the Tsar and betrayed his own nation to the Germans. On all counts - foreign policy, domestic policy, justice, economics - he was a monster. I don't mind leaving him as a dessicated mummy in his mausoleum to the extent that turning his corpse into a freak show is the closest thing to allowing us to piss on his body that we will get, but I think Russia would be better off throwing what's left of him into the river.

Trotsky may, if anything, have been worse than both Lenin and Stalin. Certainly, his record as chief of the Red Army shows his willingness to use violence, but his fanatic adherence to the notion of world revolution led him to suggest, in his writings, that the family unit be destroyed and replaced with workers' collectives in which people lived in barracks in privation working for nothing until the world revolution succeeded (which, essentially, was calling for the entire nation to be turned into a Gulag). It's clear why his fellow Bolsheviks sidelined him, and why when Stalin's agents got an icepick into his brain he was generally isolated, without friends and seen as irrelevant anyway. I think the real reason Stalin killed him was that he didn't want anyone to think they could ever "get away". It is clear Stalin didn't see him as a real threat (though he used Trotsky's name liberally when sentencing others to death).