a) Note the pointed ignoring of Pug on my part. :)
b) Well, yes, I wasn't there, and I'm sure Stalin-era opinion polls are something less than 0.1% trustworthy. :) But my experience is that people who are old enough to remember the Stalin era with some clarity tend to think very highly of him and dismiss talk of Stalin's crimes as democratic propaganda. And I don't see how you could embark on a social-engineering project of such maganitude without popular suport. He is quite popular today, despite 50 years of anti-Stalin government propaganda. He was certainly much more popular than Lenin was in his time.
People didn't tend to blame Stalin's brutalities on Stalin: The Vozhd' was infallible by definition. "If only Stalin knew!" We are talking about a still largely peasant country here; peasants are often big on God Kings. Come to think of it I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that Kim is broadly popular in North Korea.
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