That is bizarre, the accounts of people in the gulags bursting into tears when they heard he died. It’s right up there with people who saw all the abuse is happening, and thought “if only Stalin knew”. They would write letters the Stalin explaining what they were seeing, and he would have them arrested also. I think a lot of that must be because the USSR was a very backwards agrarian country at the time. Beaten down by centuries of czarist rule, and they just had no sophistication to allow them to understand. Half the USSR still lived in buildings with grass roofs at that time. Many of their people lived like it was 200 years
I think you nailed it right there.
While the Soviets were building huge dams and railroads, touting their industrial expertise in the twenties and thirties, a huge segment of their population were what we would characterize as country rubes living like it was the year 1740 with handmade farming implements and donkey carts...if not human drawn carts.