>>17907262
Again, read Court of the Red Tsar.
Stalin was very clever in some ways, but the vast, vast majority of his successes were dumb luck. He evaded arrest by dumb luck numerous times. He was sent into exile despite being a revolutionary bank robber because the Tsarist government lost it's balls. Any other country would've simply executed him.
He only survived early on in the party because of how incredibly dull he was, which made people feel he wasn't a threat (a tactic I've copied for myself btw). His positioning of allies into seats of power was brilliant, though, I will give him that.
In his personal life, he was a complete failure after Lenin's death. His wife hated him and committed suicide as a result. He got his own son killed in a prison camp by refusing to trade him for a German general. His daughter fucked Jews to get back at him for his controlling behavior, so he killed her lover's as a result. He 'had' to kill all his friends because they all fucking hated him and plotted to have him assassinated. He was so paranoid he'd walk through his dacha using levers and hidden doors. He got assassinated by Beria after expousing his plans to genocide the Jews in the Doctors Plot to Beria, who made a deal with NYC Bankers to work with him if he replaced Stalin as the new General Secretary. He only died because his guards were too scared to check on him out of fear of being killed.
His political agendas were a complete fucking disaster. His slave labor canal was worthless. The gulags used more resource than they produced. He caused the Holodomor through incompetence and malice. He decimated the Red Army and got whooped like a dog in the Winter War. He had a meltdown and became a shut in for weeks after Hitler invaded. He expected to be executed for it. He was inches away from losing Moscow, little known fact. He had sperg meltdowns in the Tehran and Potsdam conferences. The Soviets only won WW2 because Hitler German Autism'd too hard on Stalingrad.
