You joke, but for most of the cold war period the standard view held by American "historians" like Robert Conquest (promoted by the US government, of course) was that Stalin and most other Soviet leaders were "fake" commies who said the right things publicly but privately were just in it for the power and money. It was called the "totalitarian school". Then the Soviet archives opened up and surprise surpise turns out folks like Stalin and yes, even the Corn Man, were all principled Marxists who, despite their faults, were genuinely trying to build communism in the USSR.
Its amazing how much of "Soviet Studies" was just pure projection. Its clear our capitalist "leaders" don't believe a single word that comes out of their mouth unless it about sucking the dick of private capital and that they all have the intellectual capacity of an ant (sorry ants, I know that's unfair, at least you know how to build something), so of course the soviet leaders (and other AES leaders) couldn't possibly have meant what they said or read and wrote deeply on philosophy, politics and economics.
This mfs last name was “Conquest” and he thought he had a right to accuse people of being “totalitarian“???
The American elite probably couldn't conceptualize someone who had sincere goals that ran contrary to what the elite assumed "everyone" did. The world they lived in was so completely removed from anything like a communalist ideology they believed that anyone talking about Communism must be acting in bad faith.
the standard view held by American “historians” like Robert Conquest (promoted by the US government, of course) was that Stalin and most other Soviet leaders were “fake” commies
You can't just drop knowledge like this and not give me some reading links to follow up on. Is there like a historiography of the historiography of the Soviet Union?
Even more absurd are those dumbasses who think Joseph Stalin and Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili were the same person. smh
