askchapo

My personal take on is is that for various complex reasons CPSU did not manage to establish a strong ideological core that would be able to withstand the cold war. Stalin was simply a useful too to pin all the bad things on while still maintaining the appearance of communism, until it could be overthrown altogether. Who wanted to overthrow it and who did it without thinking? Don't know exactly, probably never will.

A single person cannot and will never in the history on the entire world do anything other than what their own body is capable of, their image, name and stories left will always be infinitely more impactful than their own work, because those stories are shared by the work of others, for their own reasons. It's quite clear who benefits from Stalin being turned into a demonic figure, regardless of their intent their action speak for themselves. It is quintessentially anti-Marxist, anti-materialist to ever treat anything in a vacuum.

I'm going on a tangent but my biggest pet peeve kind of related to this is people throwing out the "I have no enemies..." line which is not profound at all. That kind of thinking is (one of many) reasons USSR got destroyed. There's absolutely enemies out there who exploit you so that they don't need to do shit themselves and you will never be able to convert them from the outside in, they have to be willing to convert themselves.