>>213842013
Stalin was genuinely the most popular man in the world at the time, people literally broke down crying in streets in Italy, France, Britain etc when he died, the Catholic church literally said
>When we saw that Hitler and Mussolini persecuted people for their race, and at the same time saw how the Russians, composed of 160 different ethnicities, sought to fuse them
together, overcoming the differences between Asia and Europe, this attempt, this effort towards the unification of human society, let us say: this is Christian, this is eminently universalist and the embodyment of Catholicism.
Stalin was to the average person, "Uncle Joe". The man who defeated Nazi Germany.
It wasn't until Destalinization and Khrushchev basically smeared Stalin with every piece of Anti-Communist cold war propaganda he could did Stalin's image fall apart in the west. Even the opening of the Soviet archives actually debunks much of the anti-Stalin narratives (holodomor, scale of the purges were vastly exaggerated, the lie he broke down at the start of barbarossa etc), they still continue in public consciousness because frankly, we need to justify Eastern European Ultra-Nationalism because it's useful against modern Russia.
>>213841739
This is one of the most annoying things about the rewriting of WW2 narratives to present the USSR as the bad guys. Like seriously, Finland, the Balts, Poland etc were all Nazi cocksucking fascist shitholes who were genociding minorities and annexing land all over the place. Another thing that people forgot is the USSR and US were basically the most liberal progressive forces in the world at the time, and American and Soviet elites both despised the "Old World" superiority complex, classism, colonialism and aristocratic snobbery.