an actual question that may come off as inflammatory about Stalin.
Once again, this is an actual question; and I'm hoping to broaden my horizons and have a good conversation or two. I'm relatively new to commie subs, still trying to read political theory to figure out which one I like the most, so this might come off as uneducated. But why am I seeing so many positive posts about Stalin, followed by some comments that boil down to "Stalin was good, if you think he wasn't, that's just western propaganda" I'm thinking of the post that mentioned the 1921 Soviet Famine as a specific example.
I know that Stalin didn't create the famine, it was a byproduct of almost a decade of war, unrest, and a ton of other factors. But Stalin did do some bad shit. Things like sending 14 million people to gulags to work as slave labor, and killing millions more in his purges. I would argue that he used communism to become an authoritarian. Similar to how Putin is ruling now, stuffing ballot boxes, starting wars, and pushing propaganda. (I realize that we get pushed propaganda, too in the form of faux news, MSNBC, and most media outlets. I don't wish to have a discussion that boils down to "we do it too, you just don't see it")
The numbers of people executed or gulaged are widely exaggerated. For the Great Purge, he and Molotov set a maximum of 72,950 executions and 186,500 prison sentences. At the peak of the gulags, only 2.4% of the population was imprisoned (less than the percentage imprisoned in the US: 2.8%), and most were common criminals instead of political prisoners. When Khrushchev released many of them after Stalin's death, most committed new crimes and got sent back to prison.
Comrade, do you by any chance have sources for this? Always trying to look for them, but most if not all search engines are biased or straight up empirialistic.