Trotsky was a communist revolutionary and intellectual. He once wrote "In politics, obtaining power and maintaining power justifies anything" in his book "Leur morale et la nôtre"*

In this book, Trotsky justifies the use of lies, infiltration of other political parties, smearing, even hostage taking. He says absolute ruthlesness is necessary to overthrow a hostile system and wield power. He concludes "We are acting for the greater good. We can't be restrained by normal morality".

Joseph Stalin took Trotsky's advice literally. So he murdered Trotsky because he saw him as rival. Stalin also started killing people because he believed they could be sympathetic to capitalism or opponents to his power.

Even the secret police themselves were not safe

Everybody was absolutely terrified during this period. At least 500 000 people were murdered. Over 1 million people were deported to Gulags, secret prisons in Siberia, where they worked 12 hours a day.

Joseph Stalin decided to crush Ukraine for resisting communism and supporting independance. In 1933, he seized all Ukraine's food production [with his giant spoon] including all the bread, the wheat, the cows, the chicken. In the next months, over 5 million Ukrainians were starved to death. The situation was so bad that thousands of people turned to cannibalism. When the Nazis invaded Ukraine, some Ukrainians thought they were saviors

Hitler was a monster, but we really don't talk enough about how bad Stalin was.

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[–] Damarcusart@hexbear.net 44 points 18 hours ago

Over 1 million people were deported to Gulags, secret prisons in Siberia, where they worked 12 hours a day.

This one is very funny, because most of the work prisoners in gulags did was to farm and build housing for themselves, to literally make their prison experience more tolerable. It's not like modern US prisons where they are used as slave labour. Also, 12 hours a day would've seemed like an amazing improvement for factory workers in the west at the time.

I love how every time they get close to an actual "fact" about how bad the Soviet Union was, it often wasn't that bad, or was bad, but nowhere near as bad as literally any capitalist country on earth at the time. Probably why they just lie nonstop most of the time, because any actual factoid they remove from context, once put into the context of what was going on at the time, makes both the USSR and Stalin seem actually pretty reasonable or at least understandable.

I think the most hilarious thing about all of this is trying to blame Trotsky for creating Stalin, like that is a double whammy of pissing off both MLs and Trots, at once, that is hard to do, well done.