Yeah, but brutal doesn’t mean good. Brutal is usually bad, because it means you can’t get any real loyalty. Too soft isn’t good either, but I feel like Soviet counterintelligence was mostly just randomly killing people you decided they were “bad” and punishing people to get information, both of which are often counterproductive.

The Sovs were actually quite intricate in setting up blackmail, threats, hostage situations, leveraging useful idiots, making it an offense NOT to inform, etc etc etc. And the way they made Soviet society work, there wasn't the freedom of movement or association that espionage benefits from in non-totalitarian countries.

I was talking about the 2002 coup which I think is credibly believed to be US-backed. All Chavez’s crazy authoritarian stuff came after that, as far as I’m aware. I thought until years and years after that, he was just doing normal Latin American politics with communism, with a marked level of success and popularity.

Chavez basically immediately went all-in in 1999 on hollowing out Venezuela's institutions and replacing all positions of power with his cronies.

I think Stalin was by far the worst and most brutal of all the Bolsheviks. If it had been Trotsky and Lenin, I think things would have been way different. Seeing touches of Castro or Chavez in Trotsky, and touches of Saddam Hussein in Stalin, is part of what leads me to the type of thinking that makes me think maybe the US was pulling for Stalin.

I think you give too much credit to Trotsky and Lenin. They were both very big on the Bolshevik single-party state being run via terror.

Stalin came out on top and he was exactly who the US would have wanted to have come out on top.

The US just likes strong leaders, because it's a lot easier to work with one individual than an entire party or democratic system.

The United States was far more concerned with the stability of europe than the politics of european heads of state in the aftermath of World War 1 which saw the collapse of multiple european empires. The Russian Civil war started during World War 1 and ended in 1922 when the USSR was finally formed.

The United States, (or rather US corporations uniquely unravaged by World War 1), were at the time investing heavily in German rearmament to dodge Versailles. The Soviet Union and the German Republic were nominally allies in the 1920s, so in a sense you could say the United States saw the benefit of Stalin stabilizing the USSR.

But I wouldn't go so far as to say America has much of a stake in Stalin, or was even rooting for him until approximately 1941.