The point, I believe, is that Stalin was never the caricature of a sole madman with no ability to be opposed throughout his tenure as head of state. The CIA report directly challenges that idea and instead suggests viewing Stalin as the “captain of a team,” one with large influence, sure, but one man in a web of collective leadership. The response to Kirov’s assassination, the event that directly led to the purges in the late 1930s, was not the decision of a single madman but instead a collective response to the perceived threat of Fifth Column-style elements, from what could be described as a “Bolshevik Civil War.”

After the death of Lenin, the Bolsheviks did not cleanly break for Stalin. However, this does not mean that they split into “good” and “bad,” but instead into those who coalesced around Stalin’s “centrist” Marxist-Leninist views, the Trotskyist “left-opposition” views, and the Bukharinist “right-opposition” views. This struggle was not merely one of open debate, but one that led directly to sabotage, armed resistance, and struggle. The broad majority of the Bolsheviks, and the population as a whole, supported Stalin and his position that industrialization was of prime importance. The opposition, therefore, was often an underground movement.

Bringing this to the assassination of Stalin’s close friend and ally Kirov, who was the only person other than the head of Stalin’s security detail he allowed into the sauna with him, the party found it necessary to investigate how and why a top Bolshevik was killed. This led directly to the Moscow Trials, which independent observers believed to be legitimate, but Trotsky and his followers alleged were rigged and used purely for political gain for Stalin.

No matter what truly happened, sham trial or no, there are two critical facts:

1. The broad population and the CPSU supported the purges, this was not an invention of Stalin.

2. The “Bolshevik Civil War” was a real power struggle that the CPSU could not simply ignore.

The caricature of Stalin as it exists in common western depiction is one of a twin devil with Hitler, an evil force of nature that all feared. This was largely something that happened after the death of Stalin, after Khrushchev’s not-so-secret “secret speech,” where Khrushchev advanced his own career by attacking Stalin (and, to be clear, the speech has had numerous inconsistencies and fabrications identified since the opening of the Soviet archives).

Stalin was by no means a saint, he made mistakes that we should not simply accept. However, the “black legend” of Stalin, as Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo calls it in his book on Stalin’s legend in particular, is one that serves a definite political aim: to delegitimize socialism, and depict anyone who supports the same systems that saw doubling of life expectancies in post-revolutionary Russia, that saw full employment and free healthcare and education, that saw a semi-feudal society reach space in only half a century, as essentially devils worshipping cultists of the twin-devil Stalin, as “Stalinists,” or “Tankies.”

The ghost of Stalin’s caricature is used to delegitimize Cuba, Vietnam, China, etc, and to delegitimize domestic support for these existing socialist countries. His popular image was transformed from someone who got on well with FDR and saw respect even in the western world, getting the honorary title of native American chief from indigenous tribes, to one of a twin evil with Hitler, for political aims at delegitimizing socialism. This isn’t to say, again, that he was perfect, merely that there is a difference between Stalin the man, and Stalin the legend.

What’s it like to be illiterate and yet so confident in your analysis?