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70% good 30% bad. Absolutely must be analysed within the historical context of the time. Should not be seen as a cartoon character monster, a constructed image that has been built up as a means of opposition to socialism as he represents the first socialist experiment and its incredibly fast rise against capitalism.
Strongly recommend Domenico Losurdo's book - Stalin: History and Critique of A Black Legend
Ooh, didn't know he wrote one on Stalin. Reading "Liberalism: A Counter-History" right now, and he goes hard
I just read the front matter of the English translation and I definitely want to read more and other works of his.
He confronts mistakes and faults quite honestly, which is how it should be and the only way the myths can be swept away.
I think the most important thing is that Stalin pretty much saved the world from fascism and made enormous sacrifices to defeat Hitler, as you mentioned, yet NATO quickly formed after WW2 and changed the narrative surrounding him for the rest of history. The reason we emphasize the point so much is because of the prevalence of Double Genocide Theory, which, especially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has really served to demonize him and the USSR, while minimizing Nazis. Red scare propaganda has used Stalin as a Hitler analogue and it's important that we try to clear up the myths about him. I don't have a lot of other material on him outside of that, though, hopefully some other people can chip in.
This is a good reminder. I was aware of double genocide theory but connecting it to the foundation of NATO and how it shaped our view of the USSR is important as well.
Blackshirts and Reds makes that point a lot better than I did, I forgot to mention it in the comment.
I gotta read that book
It's incredibly easy to get through, especially if you've already read other pieces of theory or books on history. Parenti doesn't write in a fancy or particularly sophisticated way, it's extremely entry level.
"What's the deal with Stalin?"
"is he Stallin', or is he goin'"?
He's definitely goin'. I'd say that he sure is Russian to get there as soon as he can.
Thanks for the laugh comrade!
As always, 
has a lot of great, succinct views on Stalin in Blackshirts and Reds. There are a bunch of free PDF links if you google for them. These are not all rosy -- he has at least one whole chapter critiquing the USSR from a leftist perspective, and he acknowledges that under Stalin the USSR committed some crimes of state -- but overall the conclusion he reaches is justifiably positive on balance.
Another good (but longer) source on Stalin is Domenico Losurdo's Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend.
WHAT is the DEAL with STALIN
I'm one of the people who won't shut the fuck up about Stalin, so I'll let my list of posts on him speak for themselves.
Stalin good actually, but best not to bring it up with the Tatars or the Ingush. Also the song about Stalin in the Tractor Drivers maybe a little cringe. All literature published in the English language covering the prewar Soviet Union, especially academic literature, must contain a ritual denunciation of Stalin. If you want to engage directly with the bases for these denunciations, that is a little harder to research.
It's important to understand that Khrushchov's "secret" speech denouncing Stalin in 1956 was an enormous contributing factor to the Sino-Soviet split, which became more or less official that year. The image of Stalin represents anti-revisionism to the communists who use it today. Stalin's bust is a symbol for the rejection of the revisionist turn in the postwar Soviet Union. It is also stands for staunch opposition to Trotskyism and Maoism. You will find however that communists rarely deal in absolutes. Dialectic analysis of history allows for simultaneous acknowledgment of the bad and celebration of the good in any person or political project.
There are some really interesting interviews with Stalin, some examples:
With Emil Ludwig, my favorite
And of course with HG Wells
When assessing someone, it's good to let them speak for themselves, even if your attitude towards what they say is nonetheless one of complete skepticism. Of course, Stalin wrote a few books and some of them are very accessible, so that's another option.
god that HG Wells one is still so insanely relevant
it's the one that changed my mind about Stalin back when someone linked it back on 
brainworms got withered in real time, when someone you've been told was a brutish barbarian warlord goes on and on about theory like look at this shit:
There is no, nor should there be, irreconcilable contrast between the individual and the collective, between the interests of the individual person and the interests of the collective. There should be no such contrast, because collectivism, socialism, does not deny, but combines individual interests with the interests of the collective. Socialism cannot abstract itself from individual interests. Socialist society alone can most fully satisfy these personal interests. More than that; socialist society alone can firmly safeguard the interests of the individual. In this sense there is no irreconcilable contrast between "individualism" and socialism. But can we deny the contrast between classes, between the propertied class, the capitalist class, and the toiling class, the proletarian class?
On the one hand we have the propertied class which owns the banks, the factories, the mines, transport, the plantations in colonies. These people see nothing but their own interests, their striving after profits.
They do not submit to the will of the collective; they strive to subordinate every collective to their will. On the other hand we have the class of the poor, the exploited class, which owns neither factories nor works, nor banks, which is compelled to live by selling its labour power to the capitalists which lacks the opportunity to satisfy its most elementary requirements. How can such opposite interests and strivings be reconciled? As far as I know, Roosevelt has not succeeded in finding the path of conciliation between these interests. And it is impossible, as experience has shown. Incidentally, you know the situation in the United States better than I do as I have never been there and I watch American affairs mainly from literature. But I have some experience in fighting for socialism, and this experience tells me that if Roosevelt makes a real attempt to satisfy the interests of the proletarian class at the expense of the capitalist class, the latter will put another president in his place. The capitalists will say : Presidents come and presidents go, but we go on forever; if this or that president does not protect our interests, we shall find another. What can the president oppose to the will of the capitalist class?
Very interesting! Thanks comrade!
He was a complicated guy. Grew up with an abusive father and a mother who left his dad and basically raised Stalin by herself. He got into a lot of fights in school, got disabled when a carriage almost ran him over, studied to be a priest as seminary, which is when he stumbled across Marxist theory. I think he really believed in what he fought for, but was such a hothead in his youth that he was even mistaken for an agent provocateur of the Tsarist secret police.
But he put his life on the line to become a revolutionary and in the end climbed to the top of Lenin's cadre. The guy was a gangster, but in maybe the best way possible. He sacrificed a lot of people for a greater cause and ultimately saved the Soviet Union from destruction by significantly worse men.
At the same time, he wasnt a nice dude. If you look into his personal life there are a lot of nasty things. I mean the guy used Beria as a tool to ensure he wouldnt lose power. Had bad personal relationships with his friends and family.
But unlike the shittiest men you've probably known irl, he actually did a lot of good for the cause. We can hem and haw over who SHOULD have held power in the USSR and global communist movement, but at the end of the day he wasthe guy. Tbh his biggest fuck up was stopping at Berlin.
He was a complicated guy. Grew up with an abusive father and a mother who left his dad and basically raised Stalin by herself.
Isn't a lot of that sourced from historical fabricator Simon Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin? From my understanding of what's written by him and about him from reputable authors and historians, his father was not abusive nor entirely absent from his life up till his departure to seminary school. That's not saying he didn't get his ass whooped, as such was a historical and cultural norm of the period.
As I recall reading from both Kotkin, Barbusse, and G. Roberts, Stalin was more closer to a scholarly type than a rough and tumble gangster. I think to save myself time from writing another Stalin dissertation, I'll wrap up by saying even the modern communist understanding of who Stalin was is incredibly flawed as well.
I learn something every day. Nerds stay winning
The vibe I get is that people at a minimum don't hate Stalin, but also maybe at most appricate Stalin.
Correct. If you look at actual, modern, and active leftist movements around the world, they’ll proudly praise Lenin, Marx, maybe even Mao and other figures, but Stalin is usually absent.
Part of it is optics, I’m sure, but the other part is Stalin didn’t really write too much valuable theory nor tactics. Yes, he lead the USSR to victory in WWII, but it’s not relevant to every country and leftist movement whereas Lenin’s theories were and continue to be relevant. Stalin’s country’s survival meant it could help colonized people fight back and that’s why these movements and countries usually don’t hate him. But he is long gone now, and now that appreciation has shifted over to the Russian Federstion.
The closest you’ll get to modern praise is China saying that one major reason for the USSR’s fall is the slander of Stalin and the (largely) incoherent soviet ideology after his death. Also Russia and Belarus talking about the USSR defeating Nazis without mentioning who commanded the Red Army lol.
Stalin’s contributions to the world is not just defeating the Nazis, ok?
Stalin was an economic and financial genius, whose groundbreaking Five-Year Plans pulled the USSR from the NEP rut and propelled it into a highly industrialized society capable of rivaling the more advanced capitalist West. It is debatable whether the USSR would have been capable of defeating Nazi Germany’s invasion if it had continued to stick with the NEP model, but it is undeniable that Soviet industrialization took off exponentially from 1929 onwards, marking the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan.
The Five-Year Plans were subsequently adopted by China and a variant of it by the DPRK. Heck, even South Korea, a right-wing dictatorship, emulated the Soviet Five-Year Plan to pull itself ahead of the DPRK - before implementing the Five-Year Plans in the 1960s, South Korea’s GDP per capita struggled to exceed even one third of the DPRK’s (even after all that bombing during the Korean War). Copying Stalin’s Five-Year Plan enabled South Korea to rapidly industrialize and transform itself into an economic powerhouse rivaling Japan’s economic miracle (I am simplifying here as I am omitting the role of chaebol (a form of nepotistic capitalism) and the state-run banking sector, but the Five-Year Plan was a key breakthrough for the South Korean economy in the 1970s)
Next, let’s talk about sociology. Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question (1912-13) is hailed as one of the most important Marxist work on resolving the contradictions of the national question. Employing dialectical and historical materialism, Stalin boiled down the complex problems and formulated the theoretical foundations on the national question. The following sentence would turn out to be one of the most important contributions from Stalin to the field of Marxist sociology:
A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.
Importantly, the principles derived by Stalin in Marxism and the National Question would form the basis of China’s classification of its 56 ethnic groups (“nationalities”) in the 1950s, which is still in use to this day. The key breakthrough here is that the principles can be applied across varying developmental stages of capital formation, as these characteristics had already formed their latent potential in the pre-capitalist stage, and are realized and took their prominent forms throughout the different stages of capitalist development - this attracted the attention and became the guiding principles of the CPC’s pioneering work on formulating their own national/ethnic classification.
Lenin loved it so much that he proudly proclaimed the work as the “Bolshevism’s theoretical and programmatic declaration on the national question”. Even Trotsky - Stalin’s arch-nemesis - conceded that this was one of the most important works Stalin has ever produced, even throwing the jabs “hmm.. how come Stalin never wrote anything of this quality before and after that, was it really written by Stalin?” lol. Historians agree that while Lenin had contributed some ideas to the work, there is no reason to doubt that the work was essentially Stalin’s.
Stalin’s contributions to the world is not just defeating the Nazis, ok?
I didn’t say that.
All of what you said contributed to movements and countries, but it doesn’t change the fact that most of them don’t want to mention Stalin, which is what OP is asking about.
Somebody already mentioned Losurdo's book on Stalin--Ill add that a good companion piece is Losurdo's response to a Trostyist critic in "Primitve Thinking And Stalin As Scapegoat" https://redsails.org/stalin-come-capro-espiatorio/
The problem with Stalin is that his foreign policy was centrist. Stalin didn't have a liberal counterpart to balance the Spanish republican resistance around and didn't have the balls to turn it communist. His insistence on a United front had him minimize the potential of the Chinese communist yet boosted the reactionary Chang Kai Shek.
Stalin didn't have a liberal counterpart to balance the Spanish republican resistance around and didn't have the balls to turn it communist. His insistence on a United front had him minimize the potential of the Chinese communist yet boosted the reactionary Chang Kai Shek.
This can literally be summed up as he was more worried of fighting a war on two fronts, meaning a japanese invasion from occupied Manchuria. Do you think it makes more sense to unconditionally support a weakened CPC after their long march into a war with Republican China with the goddamn japanese wolves on everyone's doorstep? Do you think it makes sense to sink more resources into the losing Spanish Republican civil war after the western powers have completely turned their backs on it and the fascist states were ramping up their support?
No. You do as Stalin did, cut your losses in Spain, promote a cessation of hostilities and a united front with your eastern neighbors and secure a pact of non-aggression against the Japanese Imperialist dogs, all so you can focus your efforts on the coming nazi war machine.
This.
Reading Stalin's letters with Dimitrov has driven home how much they tried to create a united front in Spain and made sacrifices to better the situation there, only for it not to be enough. Stalin was in no way going to let China be lost to Japan, a way bigger threat to Mongolia and the USSR by the way. Mao and him go back and forth a LOT on splitting particularly with what ended up being the destruction of the 4th army.
Mao was correct not to trust the KMT in that case, but the Comintern was right to pressure them and the KMT to work together despite that. It was not something as clear cut as sending more rifles in HOI
I don't have much knowledge of the dude himself in that much detail but look at where the USSR was when he came to power and where it was when he died. And also that ww2 happened in there too. That's one of the most impressive 30ish years a country has ever had.
Whats the deal with Stalin?
He didn't like airplane food. He thought it was too dry. Other stuff happened because of that, which people have opinions about. There's a pretty good TV show about it called Seinfeld.
at least as cool as FDR if not cooler for working for the more correct politics. both did cringe re: ethnic minorities and homophobia was rampant in both governments/populations at the time, but they also did major positive things with lasting impact. i would obviously hope a modern socialist leader would be much better on lgbt and minority issues, but stalin was decent for the time period when compared to his peers, a less hateful person than someone like churchill for example. if you (or a normal person at least) would idolize someone like george washington or julius caesar or marcus aurelius or alexander the great or shaka zulu or king tutankhamun or ghandi or napoleon or oda nobunaga, or anyone else who has more or less successfully presided over a major world power, you should have no problem idolizing someone like stalin, who was at least democratically elected and tried to do things for the average person while resisting the industrialized ethnic annihilation of his people by the nazis, though in reality none of them should really be idolized in an unironic sense, its just misinformation that needs pushback and theres a lot of it for any socialist historical figure.
at least as cool as FDR
Jesus fucking christ USians are a lot
