Assess the statement; Stalin was a 'necessary evil'.

The main preoccupation of the new soviet sate was survival. It was faced with civil war, invasion, attempts to achieve independence by some of the nationalities (the new regime only controlled one seventh of Russian territory) and by economic and social collapse. Hence democracy, freedom of rights, seemed to threaten survival while an effective centralized organisation was deemed essential to ensure survival. Faced with many regime threatening problems, Stalin believed that economic difficulties should be …

…had achieved great things but had also experienced terrible crimes and sufferings. Although Trotsky accused Stalin of ushering in the Thermidorian era of the new revolution with his new bureaucracy it can be argued more convincingly that Stalin carried the party forward the only way possible at the time, though in the process he inadvertently may have destroyed the possibility that Russia could ever become socialist in the egalitarian and humane sense of the word.