[george0812]

Stephen Kotkin (briefly referenced in the article) is a history professor at Princeton University and known as the leading Stalin scholar. He's written amazing books and has long interviews on the subject on youtube. One thing that stood out from his talks/books is that he proposes that Stalin was no a psychopathic killer (unlike many other biographers/scholars) but a person who genuinely and deeply believed in communism and was willing to sacrifice anything and everything for it. He also describes Stalin as a super hard-working and pretty smart person.

Disclaimer: Kotkin is absolutely NOT a fan of Stalin, just trying to be thorough and impartial.

[Duwensatzaj]

"Sacrifice" is a very dishonest way of referring to the mass murder Stalin routinely ordered.

You can look at the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 and argue about the real cause, and the Great Purge and crimes like the Katyn massacre had their own evil logic, but consider the Polish Operation of the NKVD -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVD. They randomly selected Soviet men with Polish-sounding names, arrested them, and executed 80% of them.

The only thing that separated Stalin from Hitler was that Stalin sent 20% of the men to the gulag and didn't murder their families.