Du Bois: “Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature. He was simple, calm and courageous. He seldom lost his poise; pondered his problems slowly, made his decisions clearly and firmly; never yielded to ostentation nor coyly refrained from holding his rightful place with dignity. He was the son of a serf but stood calmly before the great without hesitation or nerves. But also—and this was the highest proof of his greatness—he knew the common man, felt his problems, followed his fate… His judgment of men was profound. He early saw through the flamboyance and exhibitionism of Trotsky, who fooled the world, and especially America. The whole ill-bred and insulting attitude of Liberals in the U.S. today began with our naive acceptance of Trotsky’s magnificent lying propaganda, which he carried around the world. Against it, Stalin stood like a rock and moved neither right nor left, as he continued to advance toward a real socialism instead of the sham Trotsky offered…He neither cringed nor strutted. He never presumed, he never surrendered. He gained the friendship of Roosevelt and the respect of Churchill. He asked neither adulation nor vengeance. He was reasonable and conciliatory. —National Guardian, March 16, 1953

Khrushchev’s secret speech

Khrushchev’s secret speech, (February 25, 1956), in Russian history, denunciation of the deceased Soviet leader Joseph Stalin made by Nikita S. Khrushchev to a closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The speech was the nucleus of a far-reaching de-Stalinization campaign intended to destroy the image of the late dictator as an infallible leader and to revert official policy to an idealized Leninist model.

In the speech, Khrushchev recalled Lenin’s Testament, a long-suppressed document in which Vladimir Lenin had warned that Stalin was likely to abuse his power, and then he cited numerous instances of such excesses. Outstanding among these was Stalin’s use of mass terror in the Great Purge of the mid-1930s, during which, according to Khrushchev, innocent communists had been falsely accused of espionage and sabotage and unjustly punished, often executed, after they had been tortured into making confessions.

Khrushchev criticized Stalin for having failed to make adequate defensive preparations before the German invasion of the Soviet Union (June 1941), for having weakened the Red Army by purging its leading officers, and for mismanaging the war after the invasion. He condemned Stalin for irrationally deporting entire nationality groups (e.g., the Karachay, Kalmyk, Chechen, Ingush, and Balkar peoples) from their homelands during the war and, after the war, for purging major political leaders in Leningrad (1948–50; see Leningrad Affair) and in Georgia (1952). He also censured Stalin for attempting to launch a new purge (Doctors’ Plot, 1953) shortly before his death and for his policy toward Yugoslavia, which had resulted in a severance of relations between that nation and the Soviet Union (1948). The “cult of personality” that Stalin had created to glorify his own rule and leadership was also condemned.

Khrushchev confined his indictment of Stalin to abuses of power against the Communist Party and glossed over Stalin’s campaigns of mass terror against the general population. He did not object to Stalin’s activities before 1934, which included his political struggles against Leon Trotsky, Nikolay Bukharin, and Grigory Zinovyev and the collectivization campaign that “liquidated” millions of peasants and had a disastrous effect on Soviet agriculture. Observers outside the Soviet Union have suggested that Khrushchev’s primary purpose in making the speech was to consolidate his own position of political leadership by associating himself with reform measures while discrediting his rivals in the Presidium (Politburo) by implicating them in Stalin’s crimes.

The secret speech, although subsequently read to groups of party activists and “closed” local party meetings, was never officially made public. (Not until 1989 was the speech printed in full in the Soviet Union.) Nonetheless, it caused shock and disillusionment throughout the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc, harming Stalin’sation known as the “Khrushchev thaw,” during which censorship policy was relaxed, sparking a literary renaissance of sorts. Thousands of political prisoners were released, and thousands more who had perished during Stalin’s reign were officially “rehabilitated.” The speech also contributed to the revolts that occurred later that year in Hungary and Poland, further weakening the Soviet Union’s control over the Soviet bloc and temporarily strengthening the position of Khrushchev’s opponents in the Presidium. — Britannica.com

Lenin’s Pure “Equality”. Three Weeks Before the October Revolution.

Here

~~

To what do naive Socialists tend? Read / hear history...