"This is bollocks."
No it isn't - Stalin's excesses were aimed at his political opponents, not the Russian people as a whole
The Moscow Trials were aimed at The Old Bolsheviks, not the people.

"The power of the party, in turn, now was concentrated in the persons of Stalin and his handpicked Politburo. Symbolic of the lack of influence of the party rank and file, party congresses met less and less frequently. State power, far from "withering away" after the revolution as Karl Marx had predicted, instead grew in strength. Stalin's personal dictatorship found reflection in the adulation that surrounded him; the reverence accorded Stalin in Soviet society gradually eclipsed that given to Lenin."

I was in Russia in the 1960s and even then, the attitude towards Stalin was ambivalent - "a flawed genius".
Stalin fostered 'the cult of the individual' in the name of Bolshevism and was pretty successful in doing so - he usurped political power by removing his political opponents - "The Terror" was aimed at them, not the people as a whole.
When we visited Lenin's Tomb, it was explained to us that the mass of the visitors that queued were largely made up of Russians who treated the visit as a pilgrimage.
In the mid sixties, W.W.2 was referred to as "The Great Patriotic War" and Stalin was still regarded in the same terms as was Churchill back home.
The idea that any dictator could enslave an entire nation is a nonsense - no leader could terrorise an entire people - Hitler won the support of masses of the German people, Stalin did the same in Russia.
The difference was that Hitler sold Germany the idea of a racially pure 'Reich' while Stalin traded on the dream of communism.
Whatever the faults of the Soviet Union, the lot of the people was far improved than it had been under Tsarism, and Russia moved from a semi-feudal State to an industrial economy, a contender on the world stage - peoples lives improved immensely.
The collapse came when the economy failed and when the Soviet leadership finally abandoned the dream of Communism - not from popular pressure.
The same was true elsewhere in the communist bloc   
A friend and I thumbed our way into Prague on the day that the Russians opened the up border after the 1968 invasion
We had been picked up hitching, by a couple of students in Germany who were returning home to see that their families were ok.
When we got to Prague, we were found empty rooms in a student hostel and were taken around to meet some of the people who were part of the anti-Soviet opposition - not one person we met wanted to change the political system in Czechoslovakia, but they objected to Russian interference in Czech affairs
The support was for 'The Velvet Revolution' - a break from the old one-party system in order to achieve communism, not for a return to capitalism.
WE spent several nights with our student friends (and a young North Vietnamese soldier on leave), at the local park where the Russians were billeted, arguing with them - the gist of the argument was that the Russian leadership had betrayed the revolution.
If you went to Germany following the war, you would be told that the German people never supported what Hitler was doing because they didn't know what was going on.
The same is very much the case in the former Soviet Union since the fall of Communism – "we were all suppressed"
CULT OF PERSONALITY
Jim Carroll