Joseph Stalin: Biography, Secret Agents, Roosevelt, Churchill, Funeral – Compilation 2008-2020

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Lenin’s Brain: https://amzn.to/346rP4E
The Chief Culprit: https://amzn.to/3AnTfii
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin: https://amzn.to/3FW9B2R
Iron Curtain: https://amzn.to/33DzR59
Stalin’s Secret Agents: https://amzn.to/3fOIwDY
Roosevelt and Stalin: https://amzn.to/3KF06sC
Stalin: Waiting for Hitler: https://amzn.to/3qRKn1c
The Kremlin Letters: https://amzn.to/3Iw4rwk

Shortly after his death, the Soviet Union went through a period of de-Stalinization. Malenkov denounced the Stalin personality cult, which was subsequently criticised in Pravda. In 1956, Khrushchev gave his “Secret Speech”, titled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences”, to a closed session of the Party’s 20th Congress. There, Khrushchev denounced Stalin for both his mass repression and his personality cult. He repeated these denunciations at the 22nd Party Congress in October 1962. In October 1961, Stalin’s body was removed from the mausoleum and buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, the location marked by a bust. Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd.

Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation process in Soviet society ended when he was replaced as leader by Leonid Brezhnev in 1964; the latter introduced a level of re-Stalinisation within the Soviet Union.[916] In 1969 and again in 1979, plans were proposed for a full rehabilitation of Stalin’s legacy but on both occasions were defeated by critics within the Soviet and international Marxist–Leninist movement.[917] Gorbachev saw the total denunciation of Stalin as necessary for the regeneration of Soviet society.[918] After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the first President of the new Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, continued Gorbachev’s denunciation of Stalin but added to it a denunciation of Lenin.[918] His successor Vladimir Putin did not seek to rehabilitate Stalin but emphasised the celebration of Soviet achievements under Stalin’s leadership rather than the Stalinist repressions.[919] In October 2017, Putin opened the Wall of Grief memorial in Moscow, noting that the “terrible past” would neither be “justified by anything” nor “erased from the national memory.”[920]

Amid the social and economic turmoil of the post-Soviet period, many Russians viewed Stalin as having overseen an era of order, predictability, and pride.[921] He remains a revered figure among many Russian nationalists, who feel nostalgic about the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War II,[922] and he is regularly invoked approvingly within both Russia’s far-left and far-right.[923]

Polling by the Levada Center suggest Stalin’s popularity has grown since 2015, with 46% of Russians expressing a favourable view of him in 2017 and 51% in 2019.[924] The Center, in 2019, reports that around 70% of Russians believe that Stalin played a positive role in their homeland.[925] A 2021 survey by the Center, showed that Joseph Stalin was named by 39% of Russians as the “most outstanding figure of all times and nations” and while nobody received an absolute majority, Stalin was very clearly in first place, followed by Vladimir Lenin with 30% and Alexander Pushkin with 23%.[926][927] At the same time, there was a growth in pro-Stalinist literature in Russia, much relying upon the misrepresentation or fabrication of source material.[928] In this literature, Stalin’s repressions are regarded either as a necessary measure to defeat “enemies of the people” or the result of lower-level officials acting without Stalin’s knowledge.[928]

The only part of the former Soviet Union where admiration for Stalin has remained consistently widespread is Georgia, although Georgian attitude has been very divided.[929] A number of Georgians resent criticism of Stalin, the most famous figure from their nation’s modern history.[922] A 2013 survey by Tbilisi State University found 45% of Georgians expressing “a positive attitude” to him.[930] A 2017 Pew Research survey had 57% of Georgians saying he played a positive role in history, compared to 18% of those expressing the same for Mikhail Gorbachev.[931]

Some positive sentiment can also be found elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. A 2012 survey commissioned by the Carnegie Endowment found 38% of Armenians concurring that their country “will always have need of a leader like Stalin.”[932] In early 2010, a new monument to Stalin was erected in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine.[933] In December 2010, unknown persons cut off its head and it was destroyed in an explosion in 2011.[934] In a 2016 Kyiv International Institute of Sociology poll, 38% of respondents had a negative attitude to Stalin, 26% a neutral one and 17% a positive, with 19% refusing to answer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin

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