George W Bush has a lot of blood on his hands - at least in the eyes of younger generations.

According to a new survey, one third of millennial, generation “X” and “Z” respondents believe that more people were killed while Bush was US president than under the dictatorship of former Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin.

Only 5 per cent of millennials were unfamiliar with the former US president - his decision to invade Iraq took place within recent memory - while 18 per cent were unfamiliar with Stalin.

The results were revealed in the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation’s first "annual report on US attitudes towards socialism".

"It is because of such widespread ignorance about communism that we formed the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which is dedicated to telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," Lee Edwards, co-founder of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, told the Daily Signal.

"Ronald Reagan said that ‘freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,'" he added.

"It is the solemn obligation of this generation to educate the rising generation about the manifold victims and crimes of the deadliest ism of the last 100 years—communism."

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Respondents also "grossly underestimated" the death toll of communism, with only a quarter of respondents correctly identifying that "over 100 million people" had been killed.

The survey was carried out among 2,300 people with a margin of error of 2.8 per cent.

Younger respondents were more unfamiliar with past communist leaders, including Mao Zedong, Che Guevara and Vladimir Lenin. While 57 per cent of Americans overall had a "very unfavorable" view of communism, just 37 per cent of millennials shared the same view.

The Foundation’s website explains it was established by an act of congress in 1993 to build a memorial in Washington DC to commemorate the more than 100 million victims of communism.