Stalins story is not as black and white as I originally thought. For whatever other crimes he was guilty of (and there were really too many to name them all), Stalin was a true believer in Communism. When he saw that Jews like Trotsky were trying to use Communism as a platform to benefit Jews, this made Stalin very suspicious and angry. He quietly went to work on removing the Jews from their position of power within the Soviet Union. He had Trotsky banished and later executed, and initiated the purges that killed off alot of Jews (like Yagoda).

I was also surprised to learn that after the fall of Berlin, Stalin reigned in the Jewish elements who were trying to get revenge on the German people. He downplayed the Holocaust because it made the Jews seem like the main victims, instead of the Soviet people who suffered so many deaths in the war. While Stalin did lend his support for the creation of Israel, that was with the expectation that they would become an ally of the Soviets. When they instead became an ally of the United States, he did an about-face and supported the Arabs.

Communism was an ideology that sounded good on paper but worked very badly in practise. Any countrys that adopted it suffered from severe economic mismanagement that left much of the population living on the edge of poverty. Soviet Russia in the postwar era was prosperous only in comparison to the rest of the eastern Communist bloc: Its GDP per capita didn't hold a candle to any western Capitalist state.