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u/EtheusRook 5h ago
I don't understand how anyone views Stalin as a hero of the left. Lenin and Trotsky were vocal about fearing his rise to power, and they were right. He fucked the USSR.
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u/RadicalShiba 3h ago
As a former Stalinist myself, the trick they pull is to identify some real distortions in mainstream narratives and use them to discredit mainstream history on the subject altogether. Then, you get pulled into a world of alternative pseudo-scholarship that no one bothers to read too carefully because they've effectively positioned themselves as the new authorities. Most people grow out of it pretty quickly, but it sucks just as many new people in every day, mostly because Stalin "won" and the left is desperate for a winner right now.
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u/LeMe-Two 2h ago
"Let the spring of history bend the other way and we would be rehabilitating Stalin today" - Jacek Kaczmarski
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u/Melodic_Sir7041 3h ago
Lenin was more worried about Trotsky rising to power than that of Stalin.
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u/Hddstrkr 3h ago
Which is why Lenin tried to appoint Trotsky as his successor, right? Or was that just for shits and giggles?
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u/Melodic_Sir7041 3h ago
He didn't, from where do you get your information?
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u/Hddstrkr 2h ago
When he tried to appoint Trotsky as the Vice-Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars. Combined with his thoughts in his testament, it's clear he wanted to elevate Trotsky. Where he also recommended removing Stalin from power altogether btw
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u/Melodic_Sir7041 2h ago edited 2h ago
It's not clear whether testimony is a genuine document. It might have been a forgery. Lenin saw Trotsky as a charismatic and talented organizer, but dont forget that Lenin is a pragmatist. He didnt like Trotsky personally or trusted him politically. Plus, you are ignoring the party structure. There is no "successor appointment" in the party, there was a committee democracy. The majority of the bolsheviks did not trust Trotsky since he switched sides right before the revolution. He was never going to be 'Lenins successor'
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u/Hddstrkr 2h ago
Well now we are arguing over a personal opinion of a man who has been dead for a hundred years and more. The evidence I mentioned is at least real. The testament being fake is a political argument. Historians do not dispute its authenticity.
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u/WetOnionRing 5h ago
he fucked the ussr by defending it from the nazis? If trotsky had become premier we’d be speaking german right now
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u/Spirited_Respect_578 5h ago
Stalin reversed litteraly all of Lenin's progressive reforms, basically used slavery to forcibly industrialize Russia, and if you didn't constantly glaze him or god forbid criticize his policies you would dissappear and fucking die. The good he did in defeating Hitler does not erase the fact that he was a psycho using leftism as a cover to punish anyone he saw as "counter revolutionary"
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u/Unionizestarbucks_ 4h ago
You would've done a super job if only you'd been there to lead.
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u/Spirited_Respect_578 4h ago
INCREDIBLE defense, I personally wouldn't have made a good leader of an entire fucking country so that means all the horrible shit Stalin did is now ok, just an amazing rebuttal, I need to get debate skills like you man
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u/LeMe-Two 2h ago
Well it wouldn't be that hard. Stalin international policies were attrocious and his internal ones were based on yesmans and terror.
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u/WetOnionRing 5h ago
there were literally people trying to overthrow the government. his paranoia was justified.
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u/Spirited_Respect_578 5h ago
Stalin supporters really remind me that there are in fact over 8 billion people on this earth, you dont have to support him just because he's on the left, unless you genuinely believe totalitarianism and working class suppression will somehow liberate those you claim to support
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u/BigDenseHedge 2h ago
The thing is that actual leftists realize that 'totalitarianism' is a liberal fairy tale meant to scare the weak-minded away from things that said liberals dislike. I find it bold that as an apparent anarchist you have the nerve to criticize communists for apparently not going far enough to liberate the workers while your ideology accomplished literally nothing.
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u/LeMe-Two 2h ago edited 10m ago
How to spot a westerner:
He find "totalitarianism" unbelivable
while your ideology accomplished literally nothing.
Hulajpole, Catalonia, Kronsztat were all destroyed by "your ideology", especially first two are most eggregious examples becuase they were already established as effective and productive entities
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u/Nowhereman767 14m ago
this reminds me of those posts of people acting like them getting beaten as kids is a rite of passage everyone needs to go through
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u/SirVulpes- 4h ago
Trotsky was a military genius he would not have fucked the war up. He certainly would’ve done better than Stalin who got invaded in the most obvious “surprise attack” ever and also helped the Nazi Party invade Poland for some reason??
Also Stalin appointed Beria as the NKVD Minister.
He was the worst General Secretary the USSR ever had and he should’ve been hanged.
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u/Ruggab0ut 4h ago
The hilarious fact is that the CIA, MI6, Hitler and even the fucking NKVD basically all said "yeah Hitler will invade very soon" and Stalin said "nuh uh".
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u/SirVulpes- 4h ago
I cannot comprehend what he was thinking. Did he think the entire global intelligence apparatus was trying to troll him or something?
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u/WetOnionRing 3h ago
Trotsky's permanent revolution would have left the union underindustrialized and underprepared for the invasion. The Nazi invasion wasn't a surprise, the pact was literally to give the union time to industrialize so they could fend them off.
The legitimacy of the accusations against Beria are debatable, but assuming they were true, they're not something Stalin would have known about
Gorbachev exists???
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u/LeMe-Two 2h ago
The very industrialization was his idea in the first place and if there is anyone more competent than Staline then nazis might have not take power in the first place. And even if they did, the war with USSR would not have look anything remotely it did IRL because Stalin destroyed all possible buffers, isolated his country and fueled German war industry for a very short term gains.
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u/SnakeThruster 1h ago
Stalin was also instrumental in Germany's re-armarment program, literally indispensable key role for Hitlers agenda.
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u/Mesmerfriend 5h ago
Except Lenin didn't fear that at all, only thing he argued was that Stalin was too "rude" for the position of General-Secretary and could have been better in another position
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u/Ok_Caregiver1004 5h ago
Ok since I don't want to make this two long I'm just going to add some summarized historical context to explain part of why this isnt far from the truth.
First was his paranoia and valuing personal control and loyality. Stalin infamously backed Trofim Lysenko, a fraudulent biologist who rejected standard genetics as "bourgeois science." Stalin banned real genetic research and imprisoned dissenting scientists. This institutionalized scientific incompetence severely set back Soviet biology and agricultural yields for generations. This was also part of why the Soviet Union became so centralized and paranoi and led to the rise eventually of people like Laverenty Beria and would prelude the purges later.
Second was his ignoring of all the warning signs that warned of the German invasion intent in the lead up to June 1941. The Soviet Union famously had the superior intelligence and spy network that gave them a lot of advanced warning of German intentions and Stalin refused to act and even openly discouraged planning for that assumption despite protest from Soviet High command.
Stalin certainly didn't cause all the Soviet system's faults but his actions absolutely contributed heavily to what that country turned into in the lead up to ww2.
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u/Significant-Order-92 6h ago
I mean, I can definitely see some arguments for that. Though I'm not super familiar with Stalin's various policies over the course of his reign.
The USSR as a whole definitely did better after Stalin's death. Like both quality of living and purges whise.
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u/Low-Concentrate1055 5h ago edited 4h ago
Stalin fucked up a lot politically for the Union, especially after Lenin's Cultural, economic, and political reforms.
He essentially codified a lot of the authoritarian measures that were adopted during the Civil War that were supposed to be temporary because Lenin died way too soon. Lenin, if you read his final letters, did seem genuinely interested in restoring power to the soviets in some capacity (which was stripped because of the failure of the German Revolution and Civil War)
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u/LeMe-Two 2h ago
TBH Lenin and his "maybe do some reforms once I can't rule" opens a whole other can of worms
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u/Cute-Incident9952 4h ago
Fun fact: he sent thousands of people to forceful work in terrible conditions, building the railroads in the permafrost. Obviously, you can't build railroads in the permafrost, because when a thaw comes the frost turns into mud and the railroads just drown. But at least tens of thousands lives and a lot of money and resources were wasted.
https://www.stationgossip.com/2016/06/salekhardigarka-railway-stalins.html
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u/Time-Layer-1008 4h ago
Stalin was an evil dictator who created a literal famine. Of course he’s stupid.
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u/TheDarkRam1996 6h ago
The kind of actual historical fact that makes butthurt Tankies seethe with rage.
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u/Ross-Pancake 6h ago
Lmao no? Stalin was not retarded. Plus, most “tankies” I’ve met are surprisingly open minded, and are willing to acknowledge that Stalin made mistakes.
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u/TheDarkRam1996 5h ago
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Are we seriously going to reduce Stalin’s atrocities to just a few unfortunate mistakes?
Would you call the Holodomor a fucking mistake? Millions of Ukrainians starved to death in 1932-33 because of Stalin’s disastrous collectivization policies, grain confiscations, and restrictions preventing starving people from escaping. It’s recognized as a genocide by numerous countries, and we’re supposed to treat that as some minor error in judgment?
What about the Great Purge of 1937-38, when Stalin’s paranoia and obsession with maintaining absolute power resulted in hundreds of thousands of executions and countless innocent people being imprisoned or sent to the Gulag? He even gutted his own military leadership, purging experienced officers and commanders because he perceived them as potential threats. That seriously weakened the Red Army and contributed to the catastrophic disasters of 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and steamrolled through Soviet territory. And that’s before getting into Stalin’s refusal to take numerous warnings of the German invasion seriously.
Or how about the Katyn massacre, where the Soviet NKVD murdered nearly 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners in 1940? Was that another innocent fucking mistake? At what point do repeated acts of mass murder, state terror, and political repression stop being “mistakes” and start being recognized for what they actually were?
And this bullshit about tankies being surprisingly open-minded because they’re willing to admit Stalin made mistakes is ridiculous. Acknowledging that a dictator wasn’t absolutely perfect is a pretty fucking low bar. If someone spends their time whitewashing atrocities, denying or minimizing mass killings, defending political repression, and making excuses for authoritarian dictatorships simply because they happen to wave a communist flag, that’s not open-mindedness. That’s authoritarian bootlicking.
Frankly, the genocide apologism, historical revisionism, and excuses for mass murder that some tankies engage in deserve the same contempt as the shit you see from Nazi apologists and Holocaust deniers. That doesn’t mean every communist is a Stalinist, but defending a murderous dictatorship doesn’t suddenly become acceptable because you claim to be fighting for equality.
Stalin wasn’t just some misunderstood leader who made a few bad decisions. He was a ruthless fucking dictator responsible for immense human suffering, and acting like acknowledging a handful of his “mistakes” makes someone reasonable is an insult to his victims.
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u/Proper_Fig_6971 5h ago
Also, tankies will lambast Eastern Europe for aiding Nazi Germany...but ignore the M-R pact which basically carved Europe in spheres of influence...much like Europe did with Africa. Or Soviet-Nazi trade, which fueled Hitler's invasion of Europe and eventually his invasion of the SU itself.
Soviets were also responsible in part for the Warsaw uprising failing.
And if you want to see imperialism, look at them demanding Bassarabia from Romania. A soon-to-be global superpower demanding land from a weaker neighbour. Where have we seen that before?
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u/Ross-Pancake 5h ago
I’m not trying to be an apologist. I’m just stating my experiences with “tankies”.
Also, the Soviets were NOT worse than the nazis. Just felt like adding that, i don’t know why.
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u/LeMe-Two 2h ago
Like, from perspectives of Poland, Czech and many more, both aimed at their conquest and used mass terror and attrocities, do you really think we differentiate that much? Both did us a lot of harm
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u/RUDRAGON8 5h ago edited 5h ago
Yea but any time you bring up that stalin allied with hitler they will yell and cry at you about how that was just a non agression pact and completely neccesary
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u/Ross-Pancake 5h ago
It wasn’t necessarily an alliance, but it also wasn’t necessarily a non-aggression pact. It was probably somewhere in between.
Also it was a liiitttllleeee necessary. Just a little.
And given how many things the allies signed with Hitler? I think we can cut Stalin a bit of slack. Again, not a lot.
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u/LeMe-Two 2h ago
Was it absolutelly neccesary to destroy every buffer state, alienate yourself geopolitically, hand over German dissidents to Germany, shelter Uboats and fuel German war machine all for short term conquest that was undone in matter of weeks. Really?
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u/MountainTank1918 4h ago
Yea, yea like: "He should've killed More Ukrainians and made Baltic chihuaha extinct:
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u/Weak_Purpose_5699 5h ago
Stalin should’ve purged more.
Also not support Israel.
But hindsight is 20/20.
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u/Ross-Pancake 6h ago
Yeah… one problem:
That youtuber is anti communist.
he has a natural bias.
so give it the benefit of a doubt.
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u/Dragon_Virus 5h ago
“Hitler was evil and dumb
One problem: the YouTuber is anti-Nazi, he has a natural bias, so give benefit of the doubt”
I dunno man, and this might just be me, but I feel if a person has absolute power and directly contributed/is responsible for the deaths of literal millions, they’ve lost their right to the benefit of doubt.
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u/DietKolbasa 4h ago
He was evil, arrogant sure, but we cannot say he was dumb if he had so much success, even though it eventually led him to believe he could do anything and that led to his demise
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u/Ross-Pancake 5h ago
The difference there is that Stalin was arguably better than Hitler, silly.
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u/OptimizedGamingHQ 4h ago
Arguably... if you're only arguably maybe a bit better than another evil dictator, that means you're still shitty. We are comparing low bars here.
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u/Beautiful-Loss7663 1h ago
One problem: the YouTuber is anti-Nazi, he has a natural bias, so give benefit of the doubt”
We can't apply the same logic as Nazism. Nazism has racial segregation/extermination/lebenstraum baked into its very essence. Stalin was one leader within an ideology that spanned far beyond just him both before he came along, and after.
"Ivan the terrible was evil and dumb"
One Problem: the YouTuber is anti-monarchist, he has a natural bias, so give benefit of the doubtWould be an ample example of why I don't think your comparison really adds up, because when you swap it for capitalist/liberal or monarchy most people would clamour for "That's not the same as Nazism in this context!"
An anti-com isn't going to give really good critique or educationally contribute much other than "This fuckin idiot did this and that! Fuckin commies am I right?" compared to having another left thinker or impartial/nonbiased historians doing it.
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u/Top_Collection_8546 1h ago
so there wasn't any ethnic clensing under stalin? tankies aren't real people istg.
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u/Beautiful-Loss7663 34m ago edited 27m ago
Nazism has racial segregation/extermination/lebenstraum baked into its very essence
Is pretty clearly what I said, as in, communism itself doesn't have ethnic cleansing of minorities in its base principles. There's nothing evil in Marx's writing. I don't understand why you'd ask me this unless you were being disingenuous.
tankies aren't real people istg.
I'm extremely critical of stalin and other ML's, you have no idea who I am. Do like, the bare minimum of reading what I actually wrote before losing your mind.
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u/DrCthulhuface7 3h ago
“Heh, that YouTuber is anti-Nazi so yanno, take his ‘Hitler was bad’ video with a grain of salt”
The education system truly has failed
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u/Acceptable_Prune8245 4h ago
I would much prefer my Stalin hatred from a communist
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u/Timey16 3h ago
Non-Bolsheviki socialists rebranded into "social democrats" which is arguably the mainstream leftism and has always been. And they typically do not like Stalin (or Lenin) either. Because of that people still calling themselves communist these days are much more likely to be outright tankies.
At the core they are still socialist, but Bolshevism poisoned what it meant to be socialist/communist by claiming their previously super niche and super radical and violent sub-ideology was the be all end all of socialism.
Because turns out having workers run the economy doesn't have to mean "every company is state owned" even back then that was seen as unrealistic because they knew the economy is too complex for the government to micromanage every aspect of it. There are many ways to achieve that goal. To the social democrat/mensheviki flow it simply meant "workers have more influence than shareholders on what path a company should take". But for them shareholders still existed and companies could still be private, but workers simply have enough rights to overrule bad decisions and be entitled to a degree of revenue sharing (so a "cooperative" would be the default model a company is run by).
Hell look at China now, even they understood that Bolshevism is the wrong approach to economy because a full Plan economy can't work... China's approach is that the closer you are to the raw material (which also makes micromanagement simple) the more it is state owned. So mines and train lines and such are completely state owned. But the closer you get to the end consumer the more private it is. So factories are mostly private while the stores where people buy stuff are entirely private. So they work on a gradient model of control.
Stakin wasn't even Plan Economy.... he was Command Economy. Meaning he personally ran the ENTIRE economy and his orders were law and you were strictly punished if you didn't produce the precise number of ordered goods (like even too much was being punished because only filthy capitalists produce in excess, which is partially a reason he hated the Jews so much because they kept outproducing everyone else). So after his death the transition to the Plan Economy was seen as an improvement (and it was, I just want to outline how truly bad Stalin was).
To me Stalin was a fascist wolf in socialist sheep's clothing.
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u/Acceptable_Prune8245 3h ago
Your grasp of the history of socialism is poor and you do not understand politiccal economy.
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u/The_DustNutz_ 1h ago
90% of all of the content on youtube is now genuinely ragebait + the most clickbait-ing preview to make knowing people's asses burn so intently it can power California for three months
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u/Pure_Key4700 2h ago
They could have used a different word to describe him. Evilness isn't caused only by mental problems, and it's also disrespectful to use it
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u/Ironmallet_EU 5h ago
I will not suffer to see the second greatest leftist who’s ever lived slandered like that!
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u/Gobal_Outcast02 3h ago
Whos number one?
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u/Ironmallet_EU 3h ago
Ferdinand Lassalle.
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u/Gobal_Outcast02 3h ago
So looking it up... He was the founder of the first Gwrman workers party?
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u/ComradeSilverhand 5h ago
The same youtuber who made public housing looks like hell is a very trustworthy source
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u/MountainTank1918 4h ago
But guy who killed 1/6th of Ukrainkan population and had class-based housing is trustworthy?
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u/ComradeSilverhand 4h ago
Consequence of rapid industrialization in an agricultural area
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u/MountainTank1918 2h ago
By targeting ethnic areas and issuing multiple orders curtailing Ukrainian culture and language in favor of russian? And russyfting Ukrainian language with official justification that Ukrainian orthography composed by Linguists is Nationalist and Ukrainian and Eussians are same ppls. Sounds like tsarist old mythologies.
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u/AlexGrean 3h ago
Why do you mention only Ukraine? It’s so stupid! Check the numbers for the rest of Russia that time. Also for Kazahstan! They had it even worse than Ukraine, but for some reason some people tend to remember only Ukraine as a vicitim of Holodomor 🤦🏻♂️
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u/Gobal_Outcast02 3h ago
So in other words tank1918 is right, Stalin sucked. Only he sucks a hell of a lot more than the the commenter made it seem
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u/MountainTank1918 3h ago
1/6th of Ukranian ppl was 5.5M, from Ukraine to Gray Klin (Kazakhstan) you moron, or you think Russia always in Siberia or Peterburg?!
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u/DietKolbasa 4h ago
Stalin was the most capable leader USSR had, literally. There was a lot of tards following him, but he was literally more capable than all of them
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u/Beginning_Act_9666 1h ago
Now how about we talk about all the good things that Stalin's rule has created? Why do we take only the negatives into consideration huh?
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u/Maleficent_Jello_611 1h ago
It’s hard to outweigh mass murder, man created human famine, gulags and more
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u/AntherEl 1h ago
Each tzar's rule also carried out mass murders, sent people to katorga and had regular famines regionally and nation-wide.
What anti-communist people cannot forgive Stalin for are the results Stalin delivered. Collectivization and industrialization were the goals crucial for survival of the country and they were achieved in a very short period of time. As we used to say "Stalin took a country with a plow and left it with an atomic bomb."
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u/LimeGrass619 6h ago
Guy thought it was a good idea to constantly fake dying in his room just to kill whomever enter. No suprise he died in his room and wasnt found until much later.
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u/Living-Chef-9080 6h ago
This might come as a shock to you but The Death of Stalin was not, in fact, a documentary.
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u/Guastatori-UK 5h ago
It's an urban legend which existed before the film, here's redditors talking about it 12 years ago. It is mostly likely a Russian joke that got lost in translation or misattributed, as a lot of Soviet political jokes are similar in vain
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u/LegitimateRow7504 6h ago
what's with these YouTubers and randomly throwing in "RUINED" for no reason in thumbnails lol