I personally absolutely do not think that Stalin is a "demon"!
Stalin's personality and his activities in history have been very much distorted. And first of all, Khrushchev was to blame for this, when he came to power after Stalin, he did an extremely stupid thing. He decided to "expose" the cult of Stalin's personality, while providing the historiography of the USSR and the world with extremely exaggerated and unreliable information. And this misinformation is still used by the whole world. And Russia itself is largely to blame for this until 2000, which itself escalated and supported the anti-Stalinist lie at home and in the West.
Yes, there were many ambiguous and controversial moments in the period of Stalin's leadership.
Yes, there were political repressions, no one denies that. BUT, the size of these repressions was extremely exaggerated. No millions of repressions were not even close, it was all a lie. For comparison, even at the apogee of repression from 1933-1938. As of 1939, the total number of the Gulag, was 1.66 million, where 70% were common criminals. At this point in the U.S., the prison population is over 2 million! For some reason, no one calls the U.S. a horrible authoritarian country.
A total of 642,980 people were sentenced to death in the USSR over the entire period (32 years). This is the officially established reliable data. Not what tens of millions! And it can be checked even from the point of view of elementary logic, and look the indicators of the USSR census, in different years, the population only increased. I will not lay out all these figures, you can look them up on the Internet.
Yes, it's a big number, too. But it was an extremely difficult and controversial period in the life of the Soviet state. These numbers also include Trotskyists, and other destroyers of the Russian Empire, who crushed the great country to please the West, the victims of the Civil War, and all the traitors who served Hitler during World War II. Of course, they included outright bandits, bandera fighters, deserters, and even terrorists.
This issue is very voluminous, and I'm just too lazy to write much here. There is a lot of misinformation and outright lies about Stalin.
I know this is a very sharply polarized issue, but I don't care, I personally have a very definite and unequivocal opinion about Stalin.
I respect Stalin, and I consider him one of the most significant figures in the history of the Soviet Union and Russia as a whole. Under Stalin's leadership, we won the greatest war in human history, and the Soviet Union became the world superpower.
У. Churchill: "Stalin took the country with a ploughshare and left it with nuclear weapons!"
That says it all!
That is my personal opinion!
I do not want to argue on this subject here, because I think it is such a voluminous topic that it deserves separate attention.
For this reason, to defame Stalin, in my eyes, no one can. It is better to simply close this discussion.
