I doubt the people in Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, Bessarabia, and Bukovina thought of Stalin as a hero.
Stalin was no good. He was a monster, an inhumane monster.
But I will give him great credit for one thing. When the German army reached the outskirts of Moscow in the fall of 1941, Stalin was strongly advised to retreat eastward. Get out of Moscow. Stalin refused. He remained in the Kremlin, and so served as a role model - for general and private alike.
Contrast that with George W. Bush’s and Dick Chaney’s behavior on 9/11. Both went into hiding for the day. Perhaps that was the wise thing to do. But it wasn’t very inspiring.
The guy who allied with Hitler? And only switched sides because he was betrayed?
No, no he was not a hero.
He was the lesser of many evils.
Read “The Gulag Archipeligo” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Stalin was worse than Hitler.
Stalin and Beria were monsters. But the communist cultures of the west treat these guys and the Oppenheimer’s of the world as heroes.
Beware liberals asking rhetorical questions.
Stalin was as evil a man that ever lived. But the question should be, could the USSR or Russia have survived without him?
Lefties always point out that the meat-grinder than was the German’s Eastern Front was the deciding factor in defeating the Nazi’s in WWII, and hence Stalin’s leadership of the Russkies was the crucial feature; they almost always conveniently forget Stalin’s role in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, without which a war of that scale probably wouldn’t have happened.
The Russians did lose an enormous number of men in resisting HItler - and that’s their own damn fault for giving him the green light to pursue his aggression early on.
What a freaking absurd click-bait title!
Stalin led us to prosperity and peace,
Unerring as the course of the sun.
May you be granted a long life,
Stalin, friend and comrade, loyal and smart.
In golden letters, we are writing
The all-union Stalinist code!
These great and glodrious words
Will never be erased through the years:
"A man always has the right
To study, rest and work."
Vast country, my homeland,
Full of forests, fields and rivers!
I don't know of another country
Where a man would want to live.
He is to democrats.
The part left-leaning historians like to leave out is that Stalin depleted his stockpiles of war materiel in the penis-measuring contest with Herr Hitler over Stalingrad. The USSR would have had nothing left to fight with except sharpened sticks and snowballs if not for the heroic efforts of Churchill to establish a supply route through one of the most treacherous seas in the world to Arkhangelsk (in the dead of winter, right under the Tirpitz’s nose, and at great loss to the Allied shipping fleet) and the USA loaning not quite $10 BILLION (in 1941 dollars) to the USSR under Lend-Lease.
They had so much American equipment that the saying back then was the the Soviet army rode into combat in the back of Studebaker trucks.
More like the guy who started WWII with his Non-Agression Pact with Hitler.
“which he argues was ultimately more critical for British survival than ‘Our Finest Hour’ in the Battle of Britain itself”
The Luftwaffe fought The Battle of Britain with Soviet oil. I’d say Stalin was one of the culprits.