Memes

The USSR was never imperialist, that's really a poor analysis based on the economy of the USSR. It didn't run an extractionary economy based on export of capital, nor was it under the control of financial capital.

Secondly, Stalin was better friends with Lenin than Trotsky. This isn't historical revisionism, Trotsky retained his Menshevik roots throughout his life in his style of theory and practice, while Stalin was a Bolshevik from the beginning and worked with Lenin directly for a longer time. The idea that Lenin disliked Stalin mostly comes from a letter demanding Stalin's resignation over the treatment of Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, for which Stalin tried to resign but was rejected.

Third, the USSR wasn't a monarchy. Even if Lenin personally liked Trotksy more, Stalin was voted in. Are you suggesting that the Soviet Union should have been a monarchy? Moreover, Trotsky's plan of assaulting the peasantry and hoping Europe would have a revolution and save the USSR from the backlash would have been suicide. Trotsky's Permanent Revolution depended on the peasantry being incapable of long-term alliance, but we know from history that that was obviously false and socialism was solidifed in the USSR.

Stalin was no saint, not everything he did was good, but at the same time not everything he did was bad, either. The CPC maintains that he was "70% good, 30% bad," upholding him as legitimate but recognizing missteps. Most communist orgs hold a similar line. Overall, he was comparatively much better than contemporaries like Churchill, despite being remembered as far worse by liberal historians.