That’s not apologia, I’m describing pushing back against a well-known conspiracy theory among Holocaust scholars. Here’s a 2017 Jewish Currents article on the topic.

Within the mythology of East European nationalists, particularly but not exclusively in the Baltics and western Ukraine — where there was massive local participation in the actual killing of Jews, usually by shooting at local pits rather than by deportation to faraway camps — the Bogus moral equivalence of the Holocaust has been from the time of the actual massacres the myth that the Jews were all Communists and got what they deserved because Communism was every bit as genocidal as Nazism. Hence what the Jews call the Holocaust is a kind of opposite and equal reaction to the first genocide, the crimes of Communism.

When you say that Stalin was as bad as Hitler, you are participating in this. You can criticize Stalin’s crimes and failures without equating him to Hitler.