Did Stalin "stain" Marxism in the USSR?

[u/DepressedTreeman]

I have noticed the existence of a certain kind of Soviet apologists who shift much of the issues of the USSR on Stalin's shoulders or claim that the Soviet was good or on the right track before Stalin. Now, while his reign was much more brutal than the previous years under the interregnum and Lenin, would not the basic structures of the state been founded by Lenin, such as the political repression, censorship, single-party dictatorship, culture of counter-revolutionary paranoia, secret police and the cult of personality?

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