Me to other Communists: Stalin was a complex character who did make mistakes, went too hard on some stuff and not hard enough on others, but overall was a force for good, and I can never fault him for leading the USSR in defeating the Nazis.

Me to libs: You will not talk badly about uncle Joe Steel, ender of the holocaust, killer of fascists, beacon of hope to the global south.

I would like more people to become socialist, but I feel not condemning Stalin doesn’t help the cause.

Constantly repudiating historical socialists for being the wrong type of socialist hurts the cause far more, and is exactly what the feds want you to do.

For starters, “Gulag” just means “prison.” Of course prisons existed in the USSR, and some had rather brutal conditions. Others, however, did not, and treated prisoners better to much better than your average American prison. Nobody is saying the Gulags never existed, perhaps they mean your specific interpretation of the conditions of gulags and the extent to which they were used. Edit 1

As for Stalin himself, it’s fair to say he committed a fair degree of errors in judgement, had reactionary social views such as his view of homosexuality, was frequently paranoid, and so forth. At the same time, it is equally fair to understand that Stalin has been the subject of countless lies, exaggerations, myths, and other degrees of Cold War propaganda we learn as fact despite evidence to the contrary, especially following the opening of the Soviet Archives. Moreover, it is necessary to acknowledge the vital role he played in governing the worlds first Socialist State, and building the foundations of this rapid improvement on the utter squalor of the Tsarist regime.

Should Stalin be idolized? I don’t think so, as I believe that can get in the way of accurate analysis. Should Stalin be villianized and made a scapegoat to brush the Red Scare under the rug? I don’t believe so, either. The USSR came with countless benefits, from a doubling of life expectancy to free healthcare to near 100% literacy rates (better than the modern US), and more. These benefits were formed under Stalin, and as such we must do our absolute best to separate fact from fiction. If we accept and push purely the accepted bourgeois narrative regarding the real experience of AES states, then we cannot learn from them properly and sort out what worked and what did not.

Basically, Stalin was neither a perfect saint devoid of mistakes nor a unique monster that should be especially condemned. He was the leader of the USSR, but did not have absolute control, and in addition was in many ways less monstrous than contemporary leaders such as Hitler and Churchill. Correct contextualization is important. I highly recommend the short, 8 minute article “Tankies” by Roderic Day, hosted over on Red Sails. For more in-depth reading, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo is a good historical critique of Stalin that focuses on taking a critical stance towards Stalin and contextualizes him.

Edit 1: seeing your other two comments, I am now entirely certain that this is the case.

This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources.

Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off defector testimony.

Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponized information and disinformation and “fake news” to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements.

He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash.

The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, “a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism”.

• Andrew Brown. (2003). Scourge and poet

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author’s personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, Nazi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth.

Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A history (published 2003) draws directly from The Gulag Archipelago and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world.

However, in contrast to these depictions, we have this interesting report produced by the CIA regarding the nature of the gulags, or “Forced Labor Camps” as they describe them. Let’s take a second to note that this year, California voted to uphold their forced labor practices in the state, and that the US still maintains constitutionally protected forced labor as a form of punishment.

A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:

1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas
2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon “economic accountability” such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.
3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.
4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners’ food supplies.
5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.
6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.
7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the “ordinary criminals” of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.

• Saed Teymuri. (2018). The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA

In terms of scale, Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union’s forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that.

Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise.

In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. …

Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the Nazis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” …

Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states…

• Michael Parenti. (1997). Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, “over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision.” That’s 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States’ Prison Industrial Complex today is larger than the USSR’s Gulag system at its peak.

Regarding the “death rate”, In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality:

It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive…

Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hitler were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more.

• Timothy Snyder. (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

(Side note: Timothy Snyder is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations)

This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not death camps.

Nor was it slave labor, exactly. In the camps, although labor was forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (minus expenses).

We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson…

The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled).

• L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG

We can comb over the details all you want, but I don’t think you care about the details. You are looking to reinforce your own personal bias, not correct it. You are not taking an objective and materialist view of history regarding the Stalin era of the USSR. Not even, at a minimum, drawing comparisons between the prisons in the Soviet Union and the current for-profit systems that exist today in America.

All this effort in this post will go on to be wasted, I feel. I do it, though because your post will attract others with similar questions, and hopefully those more willing to deprogram themselves will read it and do more investigating.

You’re not going to build a socialist movement if you build it off the back of Cold War era red scare propaganda. You came to us with a simple question, and to fully understand the answer, you need to read more and deprogram yourself.

highly recommend reading Losurdo’s Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend. it’s a very good historiography of stalin which dispels a lot of the western-propagated myths about his rule and the guy himself. near the end there’s a very enlightening section about why “condemning” communist leaders and figures as somehow aberrations of communism is a dangerous road to go down. Stalin was not an aberration of communism, he was trying his best to further the cause and by all accounts he did quite a good job. we can critique without performing such a binary disavowal, ultimately that is liberalism

The gulag system was infinitely more humane than America’s prison system. They weren’t death camps, it’s difficult to understand what the stigma around them is other than the fact that they have a spooky Russian name. Prisoners were paid a full wage, and were permitted to leave the prisons for short times.

Good: industrialized a poor country under extremely difficult conditions, maintained the integrity of the socialist project, defeated the Nazis, supported China and the DPRK

Bad: forced relocation of ethnic minorities, imposed sedentism on nomadic and semi-nomadic groups, betrayed and isolated Yugoslavia

stalin was a good guy who was doing his best

He was mostly alright, but his significance really comes from popularizing and formulating what is now known as Marxism-Leninism.

As a result of mounting internal and external pressure, as well as the power-struggle following Lenin’s death, Stalin had to make countless concessions to deal with problems that could not be avoided.

Because of his role leading a country that was led into, and greatly harmed by war (tens of millions of deaths as a result), it can be very challenging to get an appropriate critique and analysis of his role. You are not going to find any example of peaceful revolution, nor will you find any examples of countries in a state of war that can grant complete freedom and liberty.

I defend him to the extent that he led a struggle against European fascism, and I defend him against accusations that Marxism and fascism are the same. Going so far to condemn Stalin generally has a tendency to grant a certain level of forgivenes and apologia for fascists and their collaborators, as well as a wide assortment of reactionaries and nationalists.

When it comes to people who would be identified as “Stalinists”, usually what is meant is something more similar to what we would call National Bolsheviks (NazBols). If not that, then in reference to the tendency of certain Marxist-Leninist groups to justify social conservatism, petty nationalism, and premature centralization.

One thing I’d like to touch on: the experience of the Bolsheviks told us that we need unity of Marxists, where we exclude the distorters of Marx. If you want to be a Marxist, you need Marx - no way around that. Stalin had to read Marx’s major works, Lenin did so and more, and so did Trotsky, Luxembourg, even Kautsky and Bernstein.

Any major revolutionary figure is going to be smeared and distorted for someone else’s gain. People still hate Robespierre, for instance, and people still try to rewrite the narrative of people from Nat Turner to Huey P. Newton - Stalin was no different. You don’t have to defend him at all, nor do you have to condemn him (or any other historical figure), but you should at least understand the real Stalin and understand that the USSR was born out of the ashes of the Russian Empire - generally for worse as we came closer and closer to its dissolution. If you don’t care to catch the full story, you are going to be clueness when it comes to any revolutionary movement across the Americas, especially the US. You can try to overcorrect or overly emphasize how much you don’t like Stalin, if you’d like, but remember that Stalin’s opposition and the leftists who opposed the initial October Revolution were well on their way to make mistakes in the complete opposition direction - equally as harmful and destructive. That doesn’t make you superior, it makes you blind. Stalin’s errors were far from the only possibility.

It could’ve went way worse, or it could’ve been far better off - which would you prefer?

Wrong. Read books

70% good 30% bad

He had a really big spoon.

From what I understand, people who were sent to Gulag mostly were Nazis, bourgeoisie (basically people like the UnitedHealthcare CEO) and counter-revolutionaries.

I’m not saying it was the best way to seize resources from the rich and prevent counter-revolution. Some of the things he did were good, and some were bad.

he was s power hungry megalomaniac that felt no shame in killing anyone who crossed him

He is an ambiguous person. He certainly did a lot of good things, but there were mistakes and even from our point of view, quite cruel decisions. It is difficult to assess why he made certain decisions. There is a lot of unconfirmed information and ambiguous accusations around him, although, of course, there are bad decisions, maybe we don’t know all the information, or maybe he was wrong. It was a difficult time back then. According to some reports, at the end of his life, even Lenin treated him ambiguously and was afraid of the concentration of power in one hand and even wrote a letter to the congress, but some doubt this, so it may not be true. To truly understand this, you need to be a historian and read a lot of original documents by yourself. But I don’t think that we should consider him only a complete villain, as he is often exposed.

From my limited understanding Stalin tried to change things too fast. A comparison that would piss everyone off is like Elon Musk going all-in on robotics in an underdeveloped country.

In the long term Stalins policies paid off, but a lot of people starved because as it turns out putting all your points in technology means you don’t have farms.

Gulagging bourgeoisie also isn’t bad per se. But Stalin definitely sacraficed innocent people in the crossfire.