Sure, Stalin did some fucked up stuff. But the issue is treating this as the individual moral failings of a specific leader, and not taking into account the conditions of the time. If Lenin didn’t have medical problems and had lived, if Trotsky had taken over instead of Stalin, how differently would they have done things really? I remember some stuff about Trotsky admitting he’d have done a lot of the same stuff Stalin did (although I can’t give you a citation, so it might have been bullshit).
Reading up on that, the deportation seems to have happened during WW2, due to concerns about potential insurgency and collaboration with the Germans. That doesn’t excuse it, and it seems like this resistance never materialised (not that it would necessarily excuse it if it had), but the Soviets were fighting against a foe that openly sought their extermination, paranoia about internal rebellions is to be expected.
Going back to the pod, they do a bit of shitting on socialist realism, and praising how cool early Soviet art was and how homosexuality was decriminalized, until Stalin came along and ruined everything. That’s a classic example of this kind of blame - it’s big bad socially-conservative Stalin who personally fucked things up, there weren’t any other forces at play in the Soviet Union at all.
idk you can hold the position that neither are great, and one is more badder than the other.
for example enacting/overseeing a genocide is not very pog
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Chechens_and_Ingush
Sure, Stalin did some fucked up stuff. But the issue is treating this as the individual moral failings of a specific leader, and not taking into account the conditions of the time. If Lenin didn’t have medical problems and had lived, if Trotsky had taken over instead of Stalin, how differently would they have done things really? I remember some stuff about Trotsky admitting he’d have done a lot of the same stuff Stalin did (although I can’t give you a citation, so it might have been bullshit).
Reading up on that, the deportation seems to have happened during WW2, due to concerns about potential insurgency and collaboration with the Germans. That doesn’t excuse it, and it seems like this resistance never materialised (not that it would necessarily excuse it if it had), but the Soviets were fighting against a foe that openly sought their extermination, paranoia about internal rebellions is to be expected.
Going back to the pod, they do a bit of shitting on socialist realism, and praising how cool early Soviet art was and how homosexuality was decriminalized, until Stalin came along and ruined everything. That’s a classic example of this kind of blame - it’s big bad socially-conservative Stalin who personally fucked things up, there weren’t any other forces at play in the Soviet Union at all.