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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.