I feel like talking about Stalin is like walking on eggshells… You don’t want to go, “Stalin’s death toll is overexaggerated, in my opinion he didn’t kill enough people!!!” because that will make the average person instantly stop hearing you

What’s the best way to talk about Stalin in a sensitive way that doesn’t trigger a fight or flight response?

  • Carl [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    31·
    1 month ago

    Lately I’ve been going with some variant of this (not that it comes up often):

    Accusations against Stalin, when they’re not totally ahistorical black book of communism double genocide theory nonsense, always focus on specific things he did like using secret police. The problem is, secret police are not an inherently good or evil thing, they are simply one of the tools in the toolbox of a 20th century government. When you want secret police to sound friendly and professional instead of scary and repressive, you use euphemisms like “plainclothes officer” or “intelligence analyst”, but the methods are exactly the same.

    What separates states is not the methods by which they did things, but the goals and results of those methods. Stalin’s government by and large perpetuated violence against the previous ruling class in order to promote equality and progress. The kulaks were not an ethnic minority that were targeted out of irrational hatred the way that fascists were targeting Jews at the same time, they were capitalists who owned everything and hoarded wealth and who needed to be dispossessed of that wealth in order for the Soviet peasants to be freed from their generational poverty and economic repression.

    The goals of the Soviet government under Stalin were inarguably progressive: to rapidly industrialize a backward country, eliminate feudal remnants, and create a more equal society. The results were undeniable: the USSR defeated fascism and became a superpower, and the life of the average Soviet citizen massively improved under his tenure. Stalin’s primary mistakes were when he mistook contradictions among the people with those against the enemy, and deployed the tools of the state against those who were not class enemies.

    edit: refined it a bunch, removed the mamdani comparison, brought in a direct reference to Mao’s critique

    edit2: restored a bunch of my original language, cleaned up a bit that sounded like a whataboutism (it wasn’t but it soundedlike one), restored the original “states are what they do, not how they do it” framework