Low estimates are nine million dead and the high estimates are that he killed thirty million of his citizens.
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Countdown to a brigade of triggered tankies:
3... 2... Oh wait, this is piefed
So piefed is like entirely anti communist?
I'm anti-bolshevik, not anti-communist.
If you think disdain for dictators who overthrow democratically elected socialist governments is anti-communist, that's a you problem, man.
Stirring up drama in leftist spaces online is not praxis
Leninism, stalinism and Maoism leads straight to fascism - historically speaking.
But communism is a destination - not a journey, damnit. Those ideologies merely suppose how you reach that destination, and as you can see they do not...
...because they lead to fascism.
A centralized committee?! A one party system?!?! No, mon signor. No bueno. That's centralization of power. It's power to the people, not some git in a suit spewing sweet nothings.
Did you mix up Lenin and Stalin? Weird to see shade thrown at Lenin, spose Marx and Engels were also mass murdering criminals?
Lenin couped a democratic socialist government, started a 4-year long civil war in the process, implemented mass imprisonment of political dissidents, suppressed workers' rights and freedoms, and attempted to wage wars of aggresion against neighboring states, including crushing the anarchists of Ukraine.
Lenin has a better reputation, and legitimately is not as bad as Stalin... but Lenin is still fucking horrible.
Admittedly a lot of my surface knowledge of the character comes from Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast and he paints a more nuanced picture of Lenin than just 'gross war criminal'. I think focusing on just his failures and crimes does a disservice to history tbh, I don't hate your meme I just think Stalin fits better.
How much of this was Lenin as opposed to Stalin? Usually the defense I see is that Stalin did all the bad stuff but Lenin and Marx had great ideas.
Marx had great ideas, and died long before the Russian Revolution occurred.
Lenin was fond of contradicting himself in the pursuit of power for the Bolshevik Party. He couped a democratic socialist government and kickstarted a civil war, and then implemented a deeply repressive authoritarian state with precious little in the way of "workers' rights" or "political freedoms".
Stalin was a paranoid lunatic who made the political prisoner system into a resource for mass slave labor with high mortality rates. Not to mention worsening every issue under the sun during his regime - from the right to quit one's job (very bourgeois, comrade, wanting to control your own labor!) to collectivization of farms to the bureaucratic mess that was Stalinist-era requisitions to public infrastructure. Oh, and he also performed multiple genocides and massacres, allied with the Nazis to invade Poland and the Baltic States, and supplied the Nazi regime with war materiel for the first two years of WW2.
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