Earlier quoted context omitted.
Often times there's a lot of controversy about if a leader is really in charge, or if they are merely a figurehead for some group of masterminds behind the scenes. The thing I like about studying Russia under Stalin is that Stalin was the one actually in charge. More than any other leader of the 19th or 20th century, he held the whole thing together almost singlehandedly. He had to because he got rid of people so reg…
The degree to witch the Personality of the Leader is reflect in the country can be quite absurd. In any Gulag you would find amazing musicians, dancers and so on. But not singer, Stalin liked them to much. The cultural landscape of a country altered by the simple preference of one men. We don't have everything, people like Ygoda seem to have gone threw the document and removed things that would negatively reflect on…
This is not true. It took super little searching to find Vadim Kozin and Lidia Ruslanova. And it is not like I would be an expert. The reason I searched was that this anecdote makes zero sense in the context of how Russia under Stalin or Stalin himself operated. Liking something too much would not prevent either from crushing that something hard.