Stalin was a violent revolutionary who absolutely did see violence as a tool for political change and he was right about that judging by how much change he achieved.

He was also the leader of the fight against Nazism, he stood against Nazism in Spain in the civil war and he attempted to form a coalition against Nazism during the Czechoslovakian crisis, then finally he led the final defeat of Nazi Germany.

And while leading a country from a wracking civil war, through world war 2, and straight into the hostility of the Cold War, he also transformed the USSR from a still basically semi-feudal agricultural society into the second most powerful industrial power and an almost entirely self contained economy, the greatest raising of the standard of living for such a large group thats only surpassed by China.

And while doing all this he supported countless anti-imperial struggles in the colonial British, French, and American empires with communist support for anti-colonial insurgencies being the major reason why those European colonial empires finally collapsed.

He was one of the greatest men of the 20th century, arguably one of the most significant men of all history. He’s far too complex a character to reduce to a thumbs up or a thumbs down that’s just inane. It’s not possible to cause as much change as Stalin caused without creating a lot of losers alongside all those winners, but at most you can criticize him for the ruthlessness of his pursuit of a greater world for all.

The negatives of his rule exist but they have been greatly exaggerated. Exaggerated and overemphasized. This is a kind of narrative emphasis, a choice of perspective chosen by pro-capitalist and pro-western or anti-communist historians to immediately frame Stalin for you.

For example, when we talk about Churchill the framing is on his resistance to Hitler. We don’t emphasize the many crimes against humanity this colonial imperialist committed. No, the framing we receive of Churchill is the dogged resistance of the English character. Not millions of starving Bengalis or the victims of colonial police massacres, we don’t get that framing.

For Stalin, he’s never framed as the man who lifted about 200 million people out of poverty while fighting off Hitler and politically sponsoring the invention space travel, all while supporting the end of 19th century European colonialism in Africa and Asia. We don’t get that framing.

Instead we get an effort to equate him with Hitler.

The claim is made that the holodomor was a genocide which is a lie that began with WW2 Nazi propaganda that’s been debunked repeatedly in academia but keeps being asserted as an unquestionable fact.

Or the invasion of the Baltics or Finland is decontextualized from these nations de facto alliance and collaboration with Nazi Germany, frequently also the ideological affinity of their political leaders with Nazi Germany, which was openly hostile to the existence of the USSR and indeed hostility to the existence of the Slavic peoples and other minorities. Stalin was a hard man getting ready for what he could see would be a titanic clash. Sorry for your borders that is regrettable but maybe you shouldn’t haven’t chosen to host German military units so close to Leningrad. What’s gonna happen?

Or the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. The dozen or so pacts the western allies made with Hitler are just ignored or framed as “that was just Chamberlain”. The pact Stalin made is framed as the betrayal that allowed WW2 to happen. In reality Stalin saw what Nazism was early in the 1930s and actively pushed for the treaty of Versailles to be enforced. It was the western powers that bank rolled the German reindustrialization and remilitarization. Stalin was sending tanks and fighter planes to Spain while Britain was writing loans for Hitler and preventing France from intervening for the republic. Only Stalin stood against fascism in Spain.

And again with Czechoslovakia. Stalin made an alliance with France specifically to protect Czechoslovakia against German aggression. When the Nazis claimed the Sudetenland it was Stalin that pushed to fight back. Britain pushed France not to act, meaning the German-Polish pact to subjugate Czechoslovakia was effective.

Or the occupation of Poland, leaving out the fact Poland had its own expansionistic and fascistic government, was taking pieces of its neighbors, and the part of Poland that was occupied by the USSR was the part of Ukrainian and Belorussian populated USSR that Poland had taken by force in the 1920s. That recent history is actually highly relevant to the conflict but it is simply erased from history.

You see it wasn’t just “peace in our times”. Lords Halifax and Chamberlain were trying to forge a German-Polish alliance against the USSR and were perfectly happy for Nazi militarism to go to war with the USSR. That was their plan to fight communism, a threat to their colonial empires. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was Stalin breaking this anti-Soviet alliance. The betrayal wasn’t the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the betrayal was the western support for the Nazis in Spain and the betrayal was the subjugation of Czechoslovakia.

Or they will emphasize the truly regrettable policies such as the forced population transfers eg the tartars but they’ll just leave out that these highly offensive policies were unfortunately commonplace throughout the world including the USA, Canada, and Australia with reservation systems or the population transfers of the British empire or of the post-WW1 and post-WW2 settlements. Most of the time there is a Stalinist policy that’s truly horrendous you’ll find that while we can and should criticize Stalin for that policy, it was unfortunately common for the era meaning it’s not a reason to criticize Stalin in particular in a way we wouldn’t also have criticized the other leaders of the era but historians seem to reserve these criticisms for Stalin while ignoring them for FDR.

The framing they wish to create is to frame you to think of Stalin in the same thought as Hitler. They want you to equate these two figures. So they pick and choose and cherry pick from history. The occupation of the Baltics is decontextualized from WW2 and their collaboration with the Nazi regime from their far right governments is just quietly ignored, and bam, territorial aggression. The holodomor is exaggerated as a genocide by relying on WW2 Nazi propaganda and an extremely notable reliance on unreliable anecdote instead of data and bam you’ve got his Holocaust. The death rate of the gulag being high during times of extreme famine or by including all MIA German soldiers in WW2 and in the 1950s being less than twice that of the US prison system and those are your death camps.

Stalin was one of the greatest men of the 20th century. It’s just silly to reduce him to the essentialist idea of “he was a good guy” or “he was a bad guy”. The fact is he was an extremely impactful person far too complex to reduce to a single judgement.

Having said all of that, he receives very little praise when actually he deserves a lot, and he receives endless and extreme condemnation when in reality he only deserves criticism and critique.

—@420stalin69