Josef Stalin could have stopped us from seeing the 500 year old palace of the Khans in Ukraine. The Russian leader planned to tear down this historic residence of Tatar rulers in the last year of World War II.

Although many Tatars served in the Red Army, others joined the Nazis and collaborated with them during the German occupation of Crimea. The brutal Soviet dictator used this as a pretext to eliminate the entire Tartar population, and deported every Tartar man, woman and child who lived in the state. Of the millions who were deported, only about 250,000 have returned.

Tragically, this was typical of Stalin. Ten million Ukrainians -ten million! - died in a famine he orchestrated in 1932, making Saddam Hussein a piker by killing 'only' thousands of his countrymen in Iraq.

The Kahn Palace is an hour's drive outside of Sevastopol, in a little town called Bakhchisaray, where the Tatar rulers, the khans, lived in splendor five centuries ago. Each khan added another monument or two to himself, proudly but unwittingly adding to its place in history. The palace will soon be named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

We'd left our cruise ship, boarded a bus,and rode an hour to see a bit of the way the monarchs of Crimea lived five hundred years ago.