Most people “know” that Joseph Stalin was “evil”. But very few know that - Under Stalin, and the Soviet Union set the world record for the quickest doubling of life expectancy from 32 to 68 in under 30 years, the quickest turnaround in history - Literacy rates in the Soviet Union rose from a dismal 30% to 98.5% - Women made up a third of Societ engineers and 79% of medical doctors - Women in the ruling party went from 5 to 21%, at a time when Black and Native women in the United States were not allowed to vote - Stalin took the Soviet Union to the second most industrialised nation globally in a decade, something that took Western capitalists centuries of colonial pillaging - Healthcare, education, and childcare remained universal and were improved upon, hence the drastic increase in life expectancy - Racist speech was criminalised! - The Soviet Union defeated Japanese imperialism in both Manchuria and Korea - Defeated Hitler and the Nazis - Took a desperately underdeveloped society to a competing world Power with real, tangible outcomes - Every national liberation movement that followed, Cuba, China, Vietnam, South Africa, all stood on Soviet shoulders The popular Western political theory of “totalitarianism” which frames Stalin and Hitler as “twin monsters” of the 20th century is an ideological tool meant to hide the dark side of Western liberalism, specifically its history of White supremacy, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, colonialism, and chattel slavery, which actually served as the closest ideological inspirations for Nazism. Western historians hypocritically isolate Stalin’s actions from the global context of the early 20th century, whereas in reality, the mechanisms of the Soviet state were the same things done by Western liberal democracies at the time. For instance, France casually killed 10 million Algerians and tested an atomic bomb on their soil. Westerners harp on about Stalin’s Gulags as if they were the same thing as Nazi extermination camps. In truth, the Gulag was a punitive penal system focused on forced labour and political re-education where redemption was officially possible, rather than a system designed for industrial racial extermination. Meanwhile, the British in South Africa, the Germans in Namibia and the US with the Japanese population in the US, all used concentration camps when they thought it was necessary. A lot of projection going around. In the end, Stalin was just a typical European leader. What sets him apart from the rest of the capitalist west, and why he is demonised is because he was attempting to build a socialist state while under total siege by civil war and foreign capitalist encirclement. Source: