same goes for the soviet union

/s.... Right?

No, it's a serious post. I also think Stalin was a better leader than Khrushchev, especially considering the fact that Khrushchev enabled the rise of bourgeois elements that later gained power in a counterrevolution in the 1990s. It was still socialist up until the end, but Stalin was better overall.

Serious Poe's Law. Didn't think someone would be up in here simping for a mass murderer

Lemmy was made by communists, it shouldn't be surprising that communists are here. Stalin was a much better leader than those that followed in the USSR. "Mass murderer" is also sensationalist, he wasn't a monstrous butcher either.

Not interested in debating the Holodomor today.

Also Stalin was more totalitarian than communist. Not interested in debating that either. Have a good one.

You don't have to respond, but I'm not going to leave anti-communism hanging.

The fact that there was a famine in the 1930s in the Soviet Union is undeniable. The idea that it was deliberately steered or orchestrated by Stalin doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Once discovered that a famine was occuring, the soviets did what they could to prevent and alleviate it once it had started. The idea of an intentional famine is simply fringe among contemporary historians, same with claims of white genocide in South Africa. For example, serious bourgeois academic sources tend to say it was a failure of planning, rather than intentional and genocide. For instance, Mark Tauger wrote:

[data] indicate that the famine was real, the result of a failure of economic policy, of the 'revolution from above,' rather than of a 'successful' nationality policy against Ukrainians or other ethnic groups.

Tauger believes it was a failure of economic policy, not an intentional attack on ethnic Ukrainians. The 1930s famine was a combination of drought, flooding, and mismanagement. Further, the Kulaks, wealthy bourgeois farmers, magnified matters by killing their own crops in the midst of a famine rather than letting the Red Army collectivize them. The Politburo was also kept in the dark about how bad the famine was getting:

From: Archive of the President of the Russian Federation. Fond 3, Record Series 40, File 80, Page 58.

Excerpt from the protocol number of the meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party (Bolsheviks) “Regarding Measures to Prevent Failure to Sow in Ukraine, March 16th, 1932.

The Political Bureau believes that shortage of seed grain in Ukraine is many times worse than what was described in comrade Kosior’s telegram; therefore, the Political Bureau recommends the Central Committee of the Communist party of Ukraine to take all measures within its reach to prevent the threat of failing to sow [field crops] in Ukraine.

Signed: Secretary of the Central Committee – J. STALIN

Letter to Joseph Stalin from Stanislaw Kosior, 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine regarding the course and the perspectives of the sowing campaign in Ukraine, April 26th, 1932.

There are also isolated cases of starvation, and even whole villages [starving]; however, this is only the result of bungling on the local level, deviations [from the party line], especially in regard of kolkhozes. All rumours about “famine” in Ukraine must be unconditionally rejected. The crucial help that was provided for Ukraine will give us the opportunity to eradicate all such outbreaks [of starvation].

Letter from Joseph Stalin to Stanislaw Kosior, 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, April 26th, 1932.

Comrade Kosior!

You must read attached summaries. Judging by this information, it looks like the Soviet authority has ceased to exist in some areas of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Can this be true? Is the situation in villages in Ukraine this bad? Where are the operatives of the OGPU [Joint Main Political Directorate], what are they doing?

Could you verify this information and inform the Central Committee of
the All-Union Communist party about taken measures.

Sincerely, J. Stalin

As for the idea that Stalin was a "totalitarian," that isn't an ideology. Stalin was a commited Marxist-Leninist that oversaw the world's first socialist state in its most tumultuous period. The Soviet Union was democratically run, and Stalin himself was in the position he was because of his enormous popularity. From Anna Louise Strong's This Soviet World, written in 1936:

The operation of Soviet democracy is thus so intimate, continuous and organic that the observer fresh from capitalist politics hardly recognizes it as government. Where is the debate? Who determines general policies? Can the people throw out the upper officials? Can they throw out Stalin? The Communist Party? The Soviet voter, when asked these last questions, replies in a puzzled way: “Why should we want to?” The questioner thinks he has been evaded. But all elections presuppose an existing economic system, which voting is powerless to change. Voters in America cannot change Rockefeller’s method of operating oil companies for private profit. Similarly no Soviet election raises the issue of returning public properties to private hands: this was settled by the Revolution, and forms the foundation beneath the whole government.

Barring that question, there is nothing whatever that Soviet voters cannot change. They actually do change thousands of officials at every election, and as their acquaintance with the wider problems of the country grows, the forms of democracy are being widened to include direct control of the highest officials. Stalin’s chief post is not in the government, but as general secretary of the Communist Party, which would certainly remove him if his policy and actions should ever discredit him with the people; at present he is by far the most popular man in the country. To throw out the Communist Party bodily would be to throw out all the leading and organizing elements in all factories, farms, schools and enterprises; it could clearly be done only by upheaval leading to chaos. But the citizens are constantly at work changing the very membership of the Party, any member of which may be “cleaned out” on protest of his non-Party associates that he is too dictatorial, too rough towards workers, or merely not a fit leader.[27]

The succession issues created by the deaths of Lenin and Stalin are silly. The party was dynastic without a clear plan for succession. Being fair however, Khrushchev was the only First Secretary with the rest being General Secretary.

Pity the dynasty chose successors from the political class. Hijacking the state seems to perpetuate the boundary between boss and worker. For the boss, succession to power; for the worker, wage labor.

"Holodomor" - oh, so youre a nazi trying to do double genocide in order to belittle the Holocaust? Fucked up.

Speaking on the holodomor it might also be worth putting focus on the fact Ukraine wasn't even the hardest hit region, it's only due to western propaganda it gets treated as some unique Ukrainian tragedy.

If you have good sources on that, I'd like to see them!

nope