this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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Because he was the most successful politician of the era. The successors to Stalin in the USSR were not nearly as competent and needed to undermine the figure of Stalin to legitimatize their incompetence, instead of rising up to the challenge they chose to smear Stalin through the secret speech.
The west also needed to undermine Stalin because he was very popular worldwide because of his success during WW2 against Nazi Germany and the development of the USSR, so they did their part in the smearing by reducing Stalin to Hitler through encouraging scholars to write about it, the reducto ad hitlerum, a strategy that would be so effective that would be used on every single enemy of the west moving forward.
The book to read on this is Domenico Losurdo's "Stalin, history and critique of a black legend".
An excellent recommendation and essential reading imo. So much red scare propaganda is based on the Stalin bad narrative and this book dismantles that narrative with actual, material evidence. Something that Khrushchev and the anti-communist propagandists never offered.
It's a very special book, it also only uses contradictions among anti-communist sources to debunk the narratives. Sources like Arendt, Conquest, even Hitler and Goebbels.
I'm almost halfway through that book and I can't recommend it enough for anyone who wants to understand Stalin's actions during his life as well as his image after his death.
I came here just to recommend it.