Tali Perch, writing in Guernica Magazina, chronicles the horrors of Stalin’s repression, banditry, and genocide. She readily conflates him with Hitler. Notably, Stalin’s goons break into poor shtetl homes looking for gold and cash. It was an interesting read about generational trauma. Even so, I have a hard time believing some of the claims put forward. Does someone more knowledgeable than me want to clarify its contents?
Stalin only did three things wrong:
However, Stalin’s success in obliterating Nazis overshadow all of his mistakes and thus his legacy must be upheld.
One more, stopping at Berlin.
another one: he died
From what I read, Stalin’s thinking at the time was that removing fascist elements and traitors from racial groups in the Soviet Union was already stirring up more blowback and dissent than expected. Amplified by the spread of capitalist lies and media, he and the other Soviet leaders at the time were between a rock and a hard place. They figured either go “all-in” with the repression of capitalist elements, which is a process that would take a longer amount of time than the USSR had before Nazi invasion, or move populations further east away from the Nazis, set up new regions and then filter out the scumbags.
I saw a tweet many months ago that used data from racial and ethnic groups in the USSR that was compared to political affiliation, and the data showed that the extent of the purges and repression against interlopeprs (Yezhov’s excesses notwithstanding) was supposedly at or around the maximum that many populations would tolerate, and Stalin didn’t want to risk further subterfuge or breakup of the USSR.
Believing Lysenko, who claimed that he could end the famine in Ukraine by “educating” plants to grow faster and insisted that DNA was a Nazi hoax
Trusting Yezhov, who started the Great Purge after conning Stalin into believing that the Soviet government was thoroughly infiltrated and killed many Stalin allies and innocents
He tried to assassinate Tito just because of some stupid ass personal feud and permanently ended any possibility of alliance between the Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia
A lot of these problems – belief in pseudoscience, a paranoia about "infiltration, being a bit too open towards race essentialism, etc. – were endemic to governments of the time. Stalin’s was far and away the least bad here.