A “Huge, Grim, Whimsical, Morbid, Human Monster”

-Khrushchev’s “secret report” aimed to liquidate the character of Stalin in every respect.

-Khrushchev accuses Stalin of only understanding the situation from films, of mercilessly repressing entire nations, killing his best friend Kirov, and weakening the Soviets before World War II due to blind trust in Hitler.

-Khrushchev alleges Stalin was an incompetent battle leader, insisting on this point and Stalin’s apathy and despair.

-Students and workers across the country initially resisted the Twentieth Party Congress’ events, showing respect to Stalin.

-Trotsky made many similar claims, even stating that Stalin’s work Marxism and the National Question was secretly written by Lenin instead.

-These portraits of Stalin do not actually align with reality, and are in fact quite ridiculous.

The Great Patriotic War and Khrushchev’s Inventions

-Contrary to how Khrushchev depicted the Soviet preparation for the Great Patriotic War, Nazi intelligence expressed astonishment at how quickly the Soviets were able to manufacture massive amounts of tanks and armaments.

-Stalin was reported to have been obsessed with quantitative increase in arms and qualitative improvements in them 2 years prior to the war.

-Stalin, contrary to Khrushchev’s report, spent 11 hours straight in meetings and organized resistance immediately upon the Nazi assault as soon as it began.

-Stalin supposedly pondered over every minute detail, from Pravda headlines to the size and shape of bayonets.

-Stalin had always opposed Hitler and the Nazis.

-Goebbels admitted that Stalin’s speeches had been widely admired in England and the United States.

A Series of Disinformation Campaigns and Operation Barbarossa

-Khrushchev alleges Stalin ignored grave warnings of Barbarossa, but this fails to account for the massive amount of disinformation being spread at the time.

-Goebbels excitedly wrote of the Nazi plans to feint and misdirect.

-Nazis put people on the west on high alert, said that Crete was a model for conquesting England (which it then censored, giving the impression of a leak), all while preparing for attacking the Soviets.

-Goebbels wrote that people believed buildup near Russia to be either a bluff or a blackmail attempt.

-France also participated in disinformation, claiming Stalin gave a speech talking about how he wanted to sovietize Europe.

-Britain, while warning of Barbarossa, also warned the Germans of a Soviet attack, wishing to kickstart it as quickly as possible.

-Rudolf Hess flew to Britain on the eve of war.

-Stalin justifiably feared a British/German pact, and this was increased by British pressure.

-Stalin could not risk a preemptive attack and give Britain the opportunity to side with Germany.

-In all of this, preparations were accelerating, with divisions deployed to the west, aircraft hidden and soldiers told to expect an attack from the Germans.

-The British predicted the Soviets would fall within weeks, the Statesians gave the Soviets a few months.

-Geography explains Barbarossa’s initial success, the ratio of force to wide open land favored the attacker, and areas where railways converged in cities provided numerous avenues to attack.

The Quick Unraveling of the Blitzkrieg

-Coming into Barbarossa, Hitler and Goebells were extremely confident and thought of the soviet army as but a joke. This turned out to be laughably wrong, and their confidence destroyed merely 10 days in.

-Anti-Aircraft ended up being so effective it reduced the number of raids possible by the Nazis against the soviets.

-Within weeks, Hitler swapped to furious anger at how difficult the advance was, and how dramatically they had underestimated the Soviets, to the point of pivoting from fearing the west as their strongest opponent to the Soviets.

-German generals admitted astonishment at the amount of resources the Soviets had built up.

-Japan decided against going to war against the Soviets to help the Nazis based on the effective Soviet advances at Smolensk.

-The incredible bravery and defense by the Soviets caused a total reversal in perception by western onlookers to that of admiration even among conservatives.

-Contrary to what Khrushchev had said, it turned out that Stalin’s caution and insistence on maintaining large reserves was key to the counteroffensive, as the Nazis were depending on the Soviets amassing all of their forces on the front to be swiftly routed in a race to Moscow and other core cities, surrounding and destroying the Red Army.

-Poland and France had deployed their troops too far forward and were surrounded and crushed, due to national pride. Their theory of battle left them inflexible.

-2 days after the attack, the Soviets moved 1500 industries to the core to protect them from attack and keep them productive, and this process had begun even before the invasion.

-The soviets had developed industry intentionally in areas far from Europe.

-Adolf Hitler was so surprised by the Soviets that he wrote “How can such a primitive people manage such technical achievements in such a short time!” As well as “The fact that Stalin has raised the Russian standard of living is unquestionable. People don’t go hungry [at the moment when Operation Barbarossa was launched]. In general, it’s necessary to recognize that they have built factories of similar importance to Hermann Goering Reichswerke where two years ago nothing but unknown villages existed. We come across railway lines that aren’t even marked on our maps.”

-Stalin had a developed and universal mindset, choosing to celebrate the October Revolution in a besieged Moscow for resolve and renewed vigor.

-Western analysts wrote that the success of the German invasion initially was unsurprising due to its size and preparedness, what was truly astonishing was the incredible counter by the Red Army.

-Goebbels admits that the Nazi spies had no idea about the soviet capabilities while having full intelligence on the French.

The Lack of “Common Sense” and the “Mass Deportation of Entire Populations”

-Stalin wrote two key theoretical texts, Marxism and the National Question and Marxism and Problems of Linguistics.

-Internment of ethnicities was done by the Statesians well after the war and any reasonable credible suspicion could possibly be accounted for.

-Britain had split India and Pakistan in the largest forced migration in history, and the Nakba was forcing Palestinians to flee.

-16 million Germans were forcibly relocated, 2 and a half million did not survive, by the Allies, with full enthusiastic support by the US and Britain.

-Germans worried what would happen if the Soviets did not protect them from the Czechs.

-The communists disagreed with deportations and instead felt that the Germans in charge should be tried and punished, and the German workers and peasants reeducated.

-In Czechoslovakia it was the communists who put an end to the repressions of ethnic minorities.

-While FDR blamed the German people, Stalin said the true allies of the Soviets were the German workers, oppressed by the Hitlerites.

-The US at the time was segregationist and deporting entire populations of Mexican Americans and Black Americans.

-Of 139 cases observed, 137 Germans had their testicles destroyed by kicks from the American War Crimes Investigation team. The Soviets were more humane.

-Stalin had far more of an understanding of the national question than the west and other contemporaries in practice, against Khrushchev’s desire to rob him of his theoretical significance.

The Cult of Personality in Russia from Kerensky to Stalin

-Khrushchev alleged Stalin had a cult of personality, but this isn’t due to Stalin’s vanity or narcissism in reality but a broader phenomenon.

-Wilson was effectively a dictator in the US.

-In times of acute crisis, personalization of power is often combined with veneration of the leader who holds power. This applied to Stalin due to the immense siege the Soviets found themselves in at nearly all times.

-FDR won four elections, effectively in his own cult of personality, and became nearly worshipped even as he detained Japanese Americans.

-Kerensky tried to model himself after Napoleon.

-Meanwhile, when it was suggested to Stalin that Marxism-Leninism be made Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, he downplayed his own significance in comparison to Marx and Lenin.

-Stalin rejected the award for Hero of the Soviet Union after helping win the Great Patriotic War.

-Stalin had Zhukov cancel any military welcome to Berlin for Stalin, and took the train, rather than walk through the ruins of Berlin with Churchill and Truman.

-Stalin allegedly liked people who had their own views and were not afraid to stand up for them.

-Khrushchev failed to eliminate the cult of personality, he turned it into a negative cult of personality around Stalin, turning it into an enormous national pessimism.