The 9th short story of Short Trips: Defining Patterns is Closing the Account by Stephen Hatcher and it involves Stalin talking to The Doctor toward the end of his life.

Relevant passage

‘I’m pleased to hear you say that, Josef,’ the Doctor said. ‘I won’t lie to you – there’s no point in that. You’re right when you say that you are at the end of your life. If that were not the case, I couldn’t tell you any of this, but now it won’t make any difference.’

The old man sighed in relief. ‘How will I be remembered?’

The Doctor looked the old man in the eye. ‘For more than a century after your death, your name will be reviled. You will be hated as a tyrant and a butcher – judged indistinguishable from the evil that you defeated. Children will learn your name in school as an example of the worst sort of repression. Your failures will be magnified tenfold and your successes will be attributed to others. The reasons for the purges, the show trials and the executions will be ignored. The economic and social changes that you have forced through will be labelled as cruel and unnecessary. Your enemies will be judged posthumously as heroes and your friends will be derided as lackeys. Many of them will be imprisoned after your death. Many will die alone and forgotten.

‘Your crimes will be used by enemies of your country and your revolution as excuses to attack the successors who turn their backs on your legacy. Slowly, bit by bit, they will give ground, until everything as it is now is swept away. Your ideals and your dreams will either be laughed at as hopelessly impractical or regarded cynically as mere excuses for personal ambition and vanity. I’m sorry, Josef, I’m so sorry. History will call you a monster.’

‘Then it has all been for nothing, the struggles of the last thirty years, and the twenty before that. All the sacrifices, all the pain, all the death... we will have achieved nothing.’

‘For more than a hundred years, yes. But then a new generation will arise, hungry for change, desperate to put right the ills of society. They will look to their history for inspiration and they will mend what has been broken. Your story will be re-evaluated, Josef. What you have achieved here will be born again. There will be an acceptance that not everything you did was correct, but your revolution will live again and this time its success will be complete. Your influence on that future will be great.’

The president sighed in satisfaction, visibly reinvigorated by the Doctor’s words.

libgen link

http://library.lol/fiction/006342567fcef58d504044f5512fcc75