I'm no Soviet expert but I know a bit about Chinese history. Deng's approach to Mao was to dub him as "70% of his legacy is good, 30% of his legacy is bad". How subtle it is will be in the eye of the beholder but it gives Deng the flexibility to depart from Mao's policies under the guise of not repeating the "bad 30%".
In a way, without giving "percentages" on Stalin's good and bad aspects, this was done in the USSR as well. In the late 1950's, Stalin was treated in a more "balanced" way than he had been in the 1956 Secret Speech. Robert Conquest in *Power and Policy in the USSR* (pp. 354-255) sums up the evaluation of Stalin in the 1958 *Great Soviet Encyclopedia* :
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Another ideological event of key interest was the appearance of the Sta volume of the Large Soviet Encyclopaedia (Vol. 40) in 1958. There had been a delay of over eighteen months, during which all the subsequent alphabetical volumes had appeared. The trouble was plainly the Stalin biography. Its final form may be taken as representing the considered position bf the Khrushchev regime on the subject.
The article is one of only six pages, as against forty-four in the previous edition. Stalin's role in the revolution is toned down, though not to the extent of giving credit to the 'oppositionists'. He is praisrd for exposing Trotskyite and Rightist deviations and carrying out collectivisation and industralisation. The biography, unlike Khrushchev's Secret Speech, has little to say on the purges in the 'thirties, and what it says is far more moderate in tone. Stalin is said to have applied unnecessary mass repression against ideological opponents. This he did, it is stated, on the basis of the mistaken thesis he advanced in 1937 that the class struggle would become increasingly intense during the construction of Socialism. Besides neglecting the pre-1937 purges, the Encyclopaedia places most of the responsibility for the liquidation of the innocent on other shoulders:
'In this situation the accursed enemies of the people, Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria, who had wormed their way into J. V. Stalin's confidence, slandered and destroyed many honourable and devoted Party people.'
As far as his war policies are concerned, Stalin is credited with making 'a serious contribution to the defence of the country and the struggle against Fascism' and with taking all possible measures for strengthening the anti-fascist coalition. On the other hand, he is said to have attached excessive significance to the Nazi-Soviet Pact and, as a result, to have disbelieved reports of German military preparations and rejected proposals for strengthening Soviet forces on the frontier. This was partly responsible for the early defeat of the Soviet Army. Further, in his conduct of certain important military operations he disregarded the opinions of members of the Central Committee engaged on military duties on the spot, with disastrous consequences. This recalls the passage in Khrushchev's Secret Speech, where he attacked Stalin for refusing his advice on the Kharkhov operation. There is no mention in the biography of Stalin's part in the wartime mass deportations of several Caucasian nationalities.
Very little is said of Stalin's post-war activities. The publication of his works, *Marxism and Questions of Linguistics* and *Economic Problems of Socialism* is noted, the latter with the warning that certain of its propositions, including that on the inevitability of a decrease in capitalist production after the war, were fallacious. It is also stated that Stalin often made mistaken decisions on economic questions; rejected measures proposed by members of the Central Committee; and made serious mistakes in foreign policy — e.g. the break with Yugoslavia.
Considerable space is given to the personality cult theme. Seeking to prove that the personality cult is not endemic in the Soviet system, the biography attributes its emergence both to negative features in Stalin's character and to specific conditions which prevailed during the period of the construction of Socialism. As a result, although the lower Party organisations continued to function normally, Central Committee plenums and Party Congresses were not held for a number of years, and Stalin became impervious to all criticism.
In conclusion it is emphasised that while the personality cult inflicted considerable damage on Soviet life, it had no great influence on the development of the Soviet State. This provides the key to the whole biography. The final passages include,
'His name is inseparable from Marxism-Leninism and it would be a most flagrant distortion of historical truth to spread the mistakes made by Stalin in the last years of his life to all his Party and State activity extending over many years. The campaign undertaken by reactionary imperialist circles against the 'Stalinism' they themselves have contrived in fact constitutes a campaign against the revolutionary workers' movement. The attacks by revisionists against so-called 'Stalinism' are also essentially a form of struggle against the fundamental positions of Marxism-Leninism.'
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BTW, the article on Stalin in the 1976 (Brezhnev-era) edition of the *Great Soviet Encyclopedia* is even shorter than the 1958 edition (now Stalin is down to two pages...), and seems to me to be on the whole less negative, though not without criticisms (including a citation of Lenin's famous "Stalin is too rude")
https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Stalin,+Josef+Vissarionovich As Anne C. Vinograde noted in 1985 (in an article entitled "Will Stalin become a non‐person?')
https://books.google.com/books?id=C_7Xh2euykoC&pg=PA42 it is as though Stalin was simply becoming less and less important.