These are both good points. The Stalin Cult portrayed him as a kind of infallible god who was nevertheless still a Man of the People -- kind of a folksy Zeus.
However his image in the popular mind dropped fast after the Secret Speech (and even faster during Gorby). By the time the Brezhnev era rolled around, he was generally perceived as a bloody dictator, and his posthumous approval ratings were at the nadir in 1989 (whereas now they are probably at their highest since his death). Ironically the partial rehabilitation of the Vozhd in the popular mind accompanies a depreciation of Lenin, since a lot of archival material has been coming out that makes Lenin appear other than the Kindly Grandfather he was portrayed as in Soviet school textbooks. Whereas Stalin will always be associated with winning the War.
--- andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Well, in the Soviet days -- pre-Gorbachev, I mean --
> "democrat" didn't mean "kleptocrat," the way it does
> now, or even, "pro-capitalist neoliberal," way it
> did
> under Gorby. It meant behaving in a personally
> relatively egalitarian manner, not getting all
> high-hat, being the sort of person you would want to
> share a shot of vodka with -- or, this being the
> USSR,
> a bottle of vodka
>
> Of course Stalin was a cruel tyrant who, among hsi
> other defects, kept anyone even remotely near him
> in
> a state of terrified subservience, and often helped
> them to other sorts of shots, nine grams in the back
> of the head. But he was _perceived_ as "democratic"
> in
> the old Soviet sense, sort of the way that W is
> perceived as regular guy, man of the people, decent
> (and formerly) straight-talking fella. (And not as a
> privileged Yalie/Hahvahd grad from a
> multimillionaire
> family.)
>
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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