It is remarkable that you find the best portrait of Stalin in a book written by the person who started all those fabrications on Stalin, which was the foundation of his political success.

If you find any posts defending Stalin in this thread, then you should take a few lessons in English. Half the posts in this thread accuse Stalin in all kinds of nonsense (refer to your post for an example), and another half merely requests any evidence to support these accusation. None has been provided so far. Would you be willing to correct this unhappy discrepancy?

Now, your claim "many of these historians are working toward a pre-conceived thesis". It equally (to put it mildly) applies to the kind of prose that you seem to adore. Except that you do not find any facts in that prose.