I could answer by mentioning lack of democratic process and about self-proliferating structures of power that held him, as well as atrocities of GULAG (and the point wasn’t the sentence duration, but conditions in the camps), but that misses my core point.

The point is - endless praising of Stalin as some sort of superhero is basically a prerequisite for personality cult - something that Lenin has openly warned us from (and ironically got an even bigger cult himself).

Stalin is a leader, and in many ways, an excellent one. But turning him into a flawless genius of socialism and barking at any attempt to mention any flaws in his policies doesn’t promote a healthy discussion and turns otherwise reasonable left movement into a self-contained cult.

I suggest we all agree Stalin was no superhero and no villain, he just did what he did. He allowed for the insane levels of industrialization and has shown himself as a strong leader during the WWII, but he also held authoritarian grip on power, held political and other prisoners in inhumane conditions, and was the one to make LGBT illegal in the USSR.

Stop glorifying or demonizing him, that’s all I’m saying. The rest is true.

Fairly good!

For all its downsides, federation allows for the creation of very cozy communities. I love the feature that you can switch between browsing federated and local subs.

There could be more content of course, but it’s not a matter of Lemmy and I, too, feel like I want to invest more in local community than on Reddit.

Keep it up!

I believe tankies are hardline communists wishing to instate a brutal authoritarian communist/socialist regime (think Stalin)

Hey there! Never heard of Lemmy before all that Reddit situation, which is a sad occasion because I like it here! I’m a left-winger since mid-teen ages, first got bought by the Venus project (see, it’s not useless!), and then figured out it’s basically communism served for red scare victims and went into Marxism from there (and never looked back). Despite being a fairly orthodox Marxist, I’m also a young and somewhat soyboy left-winger, wishing to make the world a better place for everyone (for that reason I’m also a young and aspiring scientist). Hope to find meaningful conversations, useful theory and deep analysis of world’s events here.

P.S. I also come from an actual Leningrad (Saint Petersburg, that is), which I guess makes me the ultimate Lemmygrad user :D