Stalin's regime wasn't that much hated.
But it was, very much so. A few lines from a novel by Vassily Grossman called Forever Flowing. He lived in a small village in the Ukraine during the forced farm collectivization of the late 20's and the great famine of 1933 when Stalin demanded even more grain shipments from the Ukraine leaving the local peasants to starve (nearly 20 million died):

"Then I came to understand the main thing for the Soviet power is the Plan. Fulfill the Plan...Fathers and mothers tried to save their children, to save a little bread, and they were told: You hate our socialist country, you want to ruin the Plan, you are parasites, kulaks, fiends, reptiles...But these are words, and that was life, suffering, hunger. When they took the grain, they told kolkhoz members they would be fed out of the reserve fund. They lied. They would not give grain to the hungry."

Stalin and his cronies were very much hated by the Ukrainians, and the Germans would have found a lot of support had they not treated the populace as bad or worse.

I believe their strategy was the best possible one considering the circumstances.
Do you feel that the American public would have stood for the long casualty lists of Tarawa, the Solomons, Peleliu, etc. without the cry of "Remember Pearl Harbor" ringing in their ears?

What does Plan Orange have to do with it?
If Japan attacks the Philippines only, or as in some what if's bandied about, bypass it without attacking and go straight to the DEI, the USN is relatively powerless (except for the subs based in Manila) to do much of anything about it for a very long time. What does the US do in either of those cases? Execute Plan Orange? Not likely.....