Stalin
 

If someone were to ask Comrade Stalin if it is better to be loved or feared. Stalin would look you up and down and think if you have to ask such a question you are not only no threat to me but useless as well. So out to the Gulag you would go.

To Comrade Stalin if you were a foreign leader and acquiesced to one of his demands he would think you are weak. If you were a Russian and challenged Comrade Stalin you would be dead. The trick for the successful apparatchik in the USSR was to never be in a position where you had to challenge him. It was a deft game one had to play.

During WW2 there were only 2 or 3 military commanders who were able to challenge Stalin because of their technical expertise. Stalin had learned from his mistakes and realized that he needed that expertise for not only his own survival but the survival of the USSR. The most famous of whom was given a command in Siberia after the war as a gift of gratitude for his service during the war. It beat being purged from the system.

One might say that Stalin was the most successfull political operative of the 20TH century, or to put it another way the most successful shark in the tank.

"One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic."
~Iosef Stalin

Uncle Joe was a piece of work.

My favorite Stalin quote:

"Death solves all problems. No man, no problem."

I know an old Russian couple here in town who still have a large portrait of Stalin in their living room. They toast to him with ice vodka most every night.

Another favorite Stalin quote, "How many divisions does the Pope have?"

Both FDR and Reagan were more successful politicians in the 20th Century than Iosev the Terrible. So were Ike and Churchill, for that matter.

Then you don't understand the fish tank Stalin swam in...To rise to the top of the revolutionary ladder. to usurp power and to hold unto to it untill death took it from your fingers. The out maneuvering of FDR and Churchill over Eastern Europe etc. Remarkable in the least...

Stalin was a master politician, manipulator, and ruthless dictator. He also had many on his staff that were in the same league. Read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and both Soviet foreign diplomats, Litvinov then Molotov (yes the one named for the Molotov cocktail) were also masters of deception, diplomacy, language, character with total loyalty to the State.

They were on the front line often between Stalin, Hitler, FDR, Chamberlain, then Churchill. The conversations and correspondences between them all are pure classic masterpieces with every word carefully chosen and used in a manner to influence, win at all costs and ultimately change the face of History.

To your "Rise" list you might want to add Tolands "Adolf Hitler" Fests "Hitler", both tomes of Albert Speer, Mansteins memoirs, Guderians memoirs, Gallands memoirs, Paul Carrels "Hitler Moves East" and "Scorched Earth" The Lufftwaffe War Diaries" by Becker among others.

Stalin was a master mainpulator and dictator, but he was mere Bagatelle compared to Mao.

But he still was a second rate politician compared to Churchill FDR, Ike, and Reagan. For starters, Churchill, Truman and Ike let Stalin have eastern Europe because they weren't willing to shed blood for it and Stalin was, and they bet that over time they could defeat the SU without fighting. And the doctrine of containment was born.

Less than a lifetime later, Reagan and Bush, both of whom wore uniforms during WWII, came along and defeated the Soviet Empire without firing a shot. That Churchill and FDR were able to look forward 50 years and Reagan was able to fullfill their plan while Stalin's vision of the world was tossed onto the scrap heap of history without so much as a ripple on the pond of time demonstrates their mastery of politics vis a vis Stalin.

Now Mao, he kept power far more ruthlessly, longer, and with greater success than Stalin. And his vision for government still controls the largest single population in the world, albeit evolved to be a stronger but more flexible power center that the Party was under Mao.

Oh, and any reading list of WWII history is incomplete without Herr Speer's Inside the Third Reich.

PBS just finished a series on Stalin behind the scenes during WWII, that I thought was very good.

Necessarily not as in depth as the above reading, of course.

Your revisionist history lacks something...credulity