Quote Originally Posted by HeroPie1862 View Post
I was going to make the arguement that the lines between left and right are blurred, and that his policies at the time were quite right, especially by todays standards, but someone already attempted to say I should read a book X
Back to Stalin though, I think like Kotkin mentions his attitudes towards those movements were shaped by his pragmatism and it essentially betrayed his stated ideology, I think the 1941 invasion showed that his foreign policy was largely influenced by strategic considerations rather than his actual ideology.

I've heard about The Mitrokhin Archive, for those that don't know Mitrokhin was a KGB archivist who initally offered these notes to the US - who said they were fake - and then offered them to MI6 instead.
Just like Putin, Stalin wanted to expand the Russian Empire. After the rapprochement which involved a deal to split Eastern Europe between Germany and Russia, when Germany invaded Poland, Russia made a grab for the East of the country, invading at the same time, something I hadn't known until recently.

It's interesting once you're aware of this that if you look at Russian War Memorials, they don't consider that their war, started until 1941 when they themselves were invaded.