The curator of a museum that one of my models use to be in personally met and talked with Stalin. Even despite the Curator being a communist, he found Stalin to be a psychotic and sick minded person.
Stalin had no value for human life, as he even admitted in his own words.
To him, human beings were nothing more then disposable resources and proved it in WW II.
Yes,he succeeded in defeating the German army, at the expense of over a million Russians IN A SINGLE BATTLE!
His industrial advancment also wasn't all it is sometimes cut out to be and with what little good it MAY have ever been, it still never justified the murder of millions upon millions of Russians.
The Soviet Unions Holocaust was just as bad as the German, and Stalin himself was no better then Hitler. The only reason the Soviet Union was our allie in WW II, was because he was passive with other countries ( to a reasonable extent ) and shared the same enemy as the allied forces.
How a Russian can like him is beyond me. The Russians were his first victims. He murdered millions of Russians, but didn't even scratch me, so the concern of Stalin belongs to the Russians, and the decision of weather or not they want to go through what he put them through all over again.
I prefer to not get in to a political debate about Stalin though. The man was a mass murderer and that is capitol crime against humanity. Their is nothing you can do to make up for that sort of behavior. That it's self is enough to say that he was a very bad leader, and the world is a better place without him and his empire. It doesn't NEED to go any further then that.