The result is that beyond the works of Grover Furr and Domenico Losurdo’s “Making of a Black Legend," there are virtually no widespread English literature that portrays Stalin in a positive light. When even the USSR adopted the position of denouncing Stalin following Khrushchev, there was no opportunity for works that positively portray Stalin to be published. If you were an anticommunist, you were against Stalin. If you supported the USSR, you accepted their narrative about Stalina and thus you were also against Stalin. Only a few principled Marxist-Leninists denounced anticommunism and stood by Stalin’s side, but they were deeply marginalized with no institutional publishers to support their writings and this ideological isolation led many of them to become ultra-leftists. It also means that any history of the Stalin period, including all coverage of Soviet feats in WWII, is inescapably covered with tedious tirades against “Stalinism” in every second paragraph. As Keeran and Kenny write:
Among many friends of the Soviet Union an un-examined assumption grew that, after Stalin, the USSR was perfecting socialism. Khrushchev was better than Stalin. Gorbachev was better than Brezhnev. With the rare exceptions of Isaac Deutscher and Ken Cameron, few attempted to deal with the Stalin, Khrushchev, or Brezhnev periods in a critical but balanced way. Particularly in the case of Stalin, Soviet supporters gave up the effort of an overall assessment, perhaps because of its inherent difficulty, perhaps because such an effort could have no possible payoff, or perhaps because of an assumption that Soviet progress would make Stalin a historical anomaly of diminishing importance. The enemies of the Soviet Union readily filled this vacuum with shelves of books portraying Stalin as a monster or a madman. These caricatures in turn influenced the views of Communists whose only knowledge of the Stalin period was second hand.
Compare this to Deng’s formulation of 70%/30% for Mao, which he borrowed from Mao’s own profound 70%/30% formulation for Stalin. The trick was not to claim that Stalin was faultless and without blame: he made mistakes and as shown above, many in the Comintern thought those mistakes were fairly sizeable. Claiming Stalin was 100% right would have been laughably dogmatic and would have sounded insincere to those who thought they knew better. 70% right and 30% wrong was the perfect balance: Stalin saved the USSR from Hitler’s genocidal lebenstraum and his leadership led to the indisputable (until today) role of the USSR as the primary contributor to the defeat of Hitler-fascism and the liberation of Europe and his faults, no matter how large they seemed to anticommunist freaks, were dwarfed by this shadow. 30% is not too high as to compete with his achievements but not too low as to dismiss his faults either. This is the principled line that should have been adopted with Stalin and was adopted for Mao. As such, Chinese people can cognitively accept the idea of Mao’s faults without having their entire worldview shaken like what happened with Soviet people and global leftists following the 20th Congress, who the USSR itself stripped them of their weapons to defend against anticommunist propaganda.
This is how, despite all the same copycat anticommunist propaganda barrage against Mao and all the Ivy League and Oxbridge University Presses printing out endless slop attacking Mao about his “great famine” and the “tragedy” of China’s liberation, they’ve ended up screaming into the void because the CPC maintained the achievements of Mao, allowing for a coherent historical narrative that has the strength to reject Western propaganda assault. This is why the modern Western academic line of attack on China is to promote “historical nihilism,” which is basically begging Chinese people to be “nihilistic” and forget the entire coherent historical narrative they are taught and accept the West’s anticommunist revisionist propaganda instead. With the USSR, there can be surgical strikes on Stalin himself. With China, the only option to to slam impotently against the wall of China’s own history to try and get at Mao.
Mao’s portrait still hangs proudly in Tiananmen and up to this day, Western Marxist-Leninist authors still often publish positive historical accounts of Mao and many leftist movements that distance themselves from modern China itself like the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist, Communist Party of the Philipines and Communist Party of India (Maoist) still nonetheless proudly call themselves Maoist parties. Through them, the term “Maoist" is a (chauvinistic) source of pride, distinguishing themselves and their “correct ideological stance” from normal Marxist-Leninists. The term "Stalinist,” however, through the disintegration of a counter-narrative, has been entirely appropriated by anticommunists as a slur.
You really witness the inhumanity of Western imperialism, that was then replayed in every first contact with the West since the 1500s, being first expressed through the period of early Spanish settler-colonialism. And you see the inability of those they encountered in grasping the refusal of Western chauvinism to ever see them as human equals.
You see it in Montezuma welcoming the armed Spanish conquistadors to the Aztec capital; you then see it with Lin Zexu’s letter to Britain’s inbred Victoria (which she never read) appealing to her “better virtues” to stop the opium trade right on the eve of the First Opium War; you see its modern reincarnation with Gorbachev betraying the entirety of Europe’s actually existing socialism with his delusion of a “Common European Home” and his weepy need for approval and “friendship” from Reagan, H.W. Bush, Thatcher and Kohl, an especially reactionary generation of mediocre Western leadership that had been utter domestic policy failures, which he then elevated into the history books through the credit they took for the capitalist restoration of Eastern Europe and the USSR.
Because English language academic “scholarship” on the extermination of the Aztec state are obsessed with getting the “conquistador” perspective and revisionist apologia, same as every other Western historical atrocity, to treat historical figures like Cortes “with more nuance,” the best history on the subject likely remains Miguel León-Portilla’s 1962 “Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico,” a compilation of Aztec primary source documents.
In the Aztec account, first contact between the Aztecs and the Spanish in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan begins like this:
After the Spanish place Montezuma under house arrest in his own palace, a festival leads to a massacre:
Another account of the Fiesta of Toxatl Massacre:
After this moment, the Aztecs unite and retaliate, driving the Spanish out of the city. In a pathetic historiographical display of playing the victim card, the Spanish-dominated historical record calls this eviction “la Noche Triste” or “the Night of Sorrows.” They later return to put the city under siege and this leads to the fall of Tenochtitlan:
After the Spanish colonial regime is established, one indigenous leader rebuilds on the land left to his people: