>>17415580
>Kotkin is the only mainstream historian that has done any decent work on him, yet even Kotkin's work is largely ignored for old Cold War propaganda and Khruschevite bullshit ... This isn't to say Stalin is a great guy
Yeah sure but if you read Kotkin, Stalin comes across as an utterly ruthless, conspiratorially paranoid sociopath and that forced collectivization didn't actually work, it made agricultural production worse and starved around three million people to death, which did not bother Stalin at all, although Kotkin rejects the view that it was intentional genocide. But to a certain extent though, it looks to me like Stalin at the head of a state making war on the peasants as a class. And then Stalin basically murdered the entire generation of revolutionary Bolsheviks, civil war commanders, and military heroes, while creating a police state ruled by incompetent slugs who delivered bad information and ruled the population terror while also setting up the Red Army to get destroyed by the Wehrmacht in 1941. Seems bad.

>Turns out even the purges of the Red Army were largely justified and the correct position (even TIK of all people acknowledges this) and the Party purges were actually based largely on real subterfuge and espionage within the party itself.
I dunno but I'm thinking that I'm on the side of the people trying to overthrow Stalin for somebody else.

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Is Stalin the most lied about figure in history?