You can’t polish a turd. .................................... Ahhhh, but you can rewrite history. Fighting a war is a military thing, forcing people to work to death in the frozen Archipelago mines under the guise of patriotism is BS. Randomly picking up people off the streets for false crimes isn’t part of the war. The Nazis invaded the USSR, it was a Patriotic War for the Russians, the appointment of the General Officers and the muscle behind them was Stalin. In that sense he was a great war leader. By putting millions of so called criminals of the state to death, he was a mass murderer like Hitler, who some consider the greatest politician Germany ever had. Lots of turds get polished, wait a hundred years, #44 will probably be the leader of the golden age of America.
Stalin ignored warnings of the Nazi invasion. After the British warned him, anyone telling the psychopath the truth was at risk of getting shot as a British agent. Stalin believed the Nazis, when they claimed to be moving forces east to protect them from British bombers. (At this stage of the war, British night bombers were lucky to inconvenience the proper city in an attack.) Stalin then increaed and sped up oil deliveries to the Nazis. Stalin responded to the invasion with a nervous breakdown. He should have been sacked after hiding in his dacha for a week. However, every communist leader with any ability to do so had been assisinated or convicted of treason. Stalin's war orders were horrible, leading to armies being surrounded. Fortunately, Hitler was no more competent.