this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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As for Beria, the context was in Khrushchev's "secret speech" and denunciations of Stalin and the Stalin administration. Much of this has been confirmed false, see Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo.
Regarding the allegations around Stalin, I'll direct you to my response to their comment. Essentially, these claims about Stalin's supposed pedophilia come from the very same Montefiore. Secondly, Stalin did not have anti-semitic policies (anti-semitism was punishable by death in the USSR). I don't know why five year plans are a bad thing to you, having goals for a state to focus on is common practice in socialist countries, China is beginning their 15th Five Year Plan.
As for the famine in the 1930s, Stalin wasn't punished because he did not intend to do so, and the soviets did what they could to prevent and alleviate it once it had started. The idea of an intentional famine is simply fringe among contemporary historians, same with claims of white genocide in South Africa. For example, serious bourgeois academic sources tend to say it was a failure of planning, rather than genocide. For instance, Mark Tauger wrote:
Tauger believes it was a failure of economic policy, not an intentional attack on ethnic Ukrainians. The 1930s famine was a combination of drought, flooding, and mismanagement. Further, the Kulaks, wealthy bourgeois farmers, magnified matters by killing their own crops in the midst of a famine rather than letting the Red Army collectivize them. The Politburo was also kept in the dark about how bad the famine was getting:
From: Archive of the President of the Russian Federation. Fond 3, Record Series 40, File 80, Page 58.
Excerpt from the protocol number of the meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party (Bolsheviks) “Regarding Measures to Prevent Failure to Sow in Ukraine, March 16th, 1932.
Letter to Joseph Stalin from Stanislaw Kosior, 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine regarding the course and the perspectives of the sowing campaign in Ukraine, April 26th, 1932.
Letter from Joseph Stalin to Stanislaw Kosior, 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, April 26th, 1932.
Muggeridge and Jones reported on the famine. Völkischer Beobachter reported on it as intentional, and then spread the story around further.
Returning to your claims:
Communists are entirely different from fascists, because they establish socialist democracy and pro-social policies, while fascists do not.
The soviet union wasn't run by a dictator. To the contrary, the USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.
When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski's Human Rights in the Soviet Union.
The soviet union did not "bleed dry" their member-states, or anyone else. As a socialist economy, it did not need to run on the same mechanisms of capital expansion the west does. Instead, all socialist countries saw dramatic growth over time, and rising key life metrics.