Conclusion
"The cult of personality created by Stalin...enabled him to retain the loyalty of the Soviet people despite a dictatorship marked by famine, persecution, purges, and death."
-Ted Gottfried, author of The Stalinist Empire
While improving the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin committed numerous atrocities that devastated the country. He disguised such faults by developing a cult of personality around himself, which led to the formation of a convoluted legacy that is still, today, open to debate.
"No one is justifying the Great Terror, but the Terror is being brushed into a corner. It's said that the Terror was, of course, an unfortunate incident, but the most important thing was that Stalin created a great country. He inherited a country with the plough and bequeathed it the atomic bomb.” |
"He did effectively win World War II for the Allies in Europe, and he did preside over the industrialization of the USSR, but it is possible to imagine both things happening with far less loss of life." -Adam Hochschild, author of The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin |