Stalin’s attempt to resign
He had a massive cult of personality and the whole thing was a charade. Who in their right mind would support the dictator saying they’ll resign?? First time he tried to resign I think it was an actual political gamble, he wasn’t a dictator at that point yet.
Not to mention he also shuffled the members of that “collective leadership” often and nobody was safe even at the very top. Such collective leadership.
Random CIA document, a “comment” from someone with no context and apparently right at the time and huge “this information is UNVALUED” vs all the later studies that could rely on vastly more information on the subject of Stalin indeed having been an absolute dictator during the height of his power to the very end
Yeah checks out.
Someone put it well in Reddit’s AskHistorians:
On the topic of this kind of CIA document in general, see this discussion. We don’t know who wrote this. We don’t know why they wrote it. We don’t know on the basis of what they wrote it. We don’t know exactly what was meant by it. There’s a big ol’ paragraph at the beginning that probably explains what the basis of this “information report” is, it’s blacked out, no doubt to protect “sources and methods.” So this could be a wise report from someone who know what they are talking about… or it could be a report of something overheard at the cocktail party of a middle-ranking Warsaw Pact bureaucrat.
The problem with these kind of intelligence sources is that to a layman they might look authoritative or like they had access to special data and so on. But in reality we know that the CIA was wrong about as much as it was right in those days, and that individual analysts and sources could be hit and miss. Just because they stamp “SECRET” on it doesn’t make it authoritative in any degree.
Also dropped out the New part from the text