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A stroll west from the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., is a tutorial in American history — its monuments and memorials tell of its heroes, its victories and even its defeats, from Washington, through the Second World War, to Martin Luther King; from Korea and Vietnam to Lincoln.

On a street corner five blocks or so north of the National Mall, there is a modest three metre high statue of the Goddess of Democracy that commemorates the Victims of Communism.

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When George W. Bush unveiled the memorial in 2007, on the 20th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this [Berlin] wall” speech, he talked about the Ukrainian victims of Stalin’s Great Famine, the Chinese who died during the Great Leap Forward, Cambodians who suffered under Pol Pot and East Germans shot trying to escape to the West.

The memorial upset the Chinese and the Russians, who pointed out that bad things have happened in Western democracies too but there are no monuments to the victims of capitalism. Vladimir Putin said that Russia has never used a nuclear weapon on civilians.