There is no getting around it: the Guardian is scum. Last month the Guardian offered up a piece by a sleazy perfesser pretty much accusing Churchill's belligerence, rather than Hitler, for World War II. Today, it offers up pseudo-historian Richard Gott defending Joe Stalin.

Such triumphalism has greeted the Soviet collapse in the western world, with its subsequent and interminable output of works of historical revisionism, that it is difficult to climb out from under the enveloping folds of invective that have sought to destroy the reputations of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin

Yet, what was notionally an entirely Russian experience soon became an unstoppable force that rolled over half the world, a phenomenon not seen since the expansion of Islam in the 7th century. Millions of people in the then thriving empires of Holland, France, Portugal and Britain, in the informal empire of the United States in Latin America and the Philippines, and in the vast warlord-dominated regions of China, were transformed almost overnight into agents of their own destiny. From listless and oppressed peasants, with little hope of change or improvement, they became soldiers in a new revolutionary struggle that brought the collapse of their overlords within a matter of decades - perhaps the most notable historic advance in the 20th century.

Of course, in the perverse accounts of those contemporary historians who continue the battles of the cold war, this international dimension is usually lacking. They concentrate their attention on the huge human cost of the Soviet project at home - the executions, the famines, the camps.

Can anyone tell me the difference between the Richard Gotts and Lord Haw Haw?