The image attached portrays the defence of Stalin as a waste of time at best, this is frankly charitable compared to most self proclaimed leftists who think the rehabilitation of Stalin is actively harmful towards our movement.
There are reasons as to why the rehabilitation of Stalin is indeed an important issue and not just some trivial thing that we must halt in order to gain a larger following.
The rehabilitation of Stalin's image is less about the rehabilitation of Stalin as a historical individual and more about defending and upholding Marxism.
Condemning or even refusing to uphold Stalin to at least some extent is equivalent to fighting our enemies on their terms. Why would we let our enemies decide who we should love and hate? There's no reason to allow the historical narrative that our enemies have constructed to be our historical narrative, that's just ideological surrender, may as well become a liberal at that point.
The total slander and demonization of Stalin's image is what leads most people into deviationist tendencies, tendencies which are totally harmless towards the bourgeoisie. It's only logical, if people believe Marxism-Leninism led to practically 1984 in real life, then why would they follow it?
Rather than keeping quiet about the USSR under Stalin, it is our duty to defend this period against the reactionary slander laid upon it. It was the first time in human history that mankind entered the socialist mode of production, and that's something to be cherished.
In truth, I really do hate speaking on this topic. I really don't like handwaving human lives like this. The only reason I do this is because it makes people think communism is a force of evil worse than fascism; a sentiment that keeps the bourgeoisie in power, because the alternative is apparently so monstrous that the plunder and impoverishment of the global south, the eternal wars of the world, the destruction of the ecosystem, and the continuation of wage slavery are so so much better.
The vast majority of gulag deaths happened in World War 2 when the supply chains broke down, causing many people to starve.
Indeed those people who died in the great purge weren't all "too dangerous to be left alive", the great purge went completely out of hand, there's no consolation I can give on this topic; some people put the blame entirely on Yezhov, because the VAST majority of deaths happened during Yezhov's leadership of the NKVD, but again putting blame on individuals like this is not Marxist, it was the fault of the party and the system as a whole at the end of the day.
On deportations, I can't speak on that or if those numbers are accurate. But think about what "deported during the 1940s" actually means, it means deporting people during World War 2, during the German invasion.
Also, you kind of skipped the next sentence of the Wikipedia article
Why can't I just say Stalin was a fascist or a traitor like most 'respectable' communists in the modern day? Because it just feeds in to a different liberal criticism of communism, which is that it always leads to dictatorship; I don't accept that premise and you shouldn't either. The Marxist conception is dictatorship of a class not individual dictatorship, even his biggest hater Trotsky didn't take Stalin as an individual dictator, but as the reflection of a degenerated worker's state (though I also don't accept this either as this is derived from Trotsky's distrust of the Peasant class). Stalin was a true communist. I suggest you read some of Stalin's writings, I've read quite a bit of them and there's not that much I disagree with, I don't think you'd disagree much either as a communist.
I'm obliged to say thought that Stalin is not nearly as important to Marxist theory as Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Mao as he hardly made new additions. But the possibility of Socialism in One Country as formulated by Stalin is to be upholded. In truth, I'm completely fine with people being critical of Stalin as long as they uphold his line (I'm also not posing Stalin's USSR as sunshine and rainbows as you can tell), but usually people who hate Stalin follow deviationist ideologies like Titoism, Trotskyism, etcetera, etcetera and that's the core of the original post.
Well, I do think we need new ideas for Communist Theory. It's not just the lies and propaganda about the USSR, it's also simply that they collapsed and failed. So what I'm missing is something like "neo-communism" that incorporates new information and communication technology into communism to be more efficient, realtime and democratic. Or advances in psychology to create tests for who may hold leadership. Game theory about how people min-max to achieve power to end up with leaders who are good at gaining and holding onto power, but not at ruling, and countermeasures. Even generative AI could be insanely useful for a communist economy.
But whenever you look into spaces like this, you're encouraged to read the theory of the "ye olden days". But in order to refute a hypothesis, you only need to show one counter example of where that hypothesis breaks down. And the USSR did fail. So the theory NEEDS to be fixed, patched, improved. But the few communist spaces I've looked into all seem very "conservative" with their ideology. Not that I have much to say on how to do that, besides ideas.
I think something like "how Stalin damaged the USSR and how to prevent it from happening again" would be far more useful to proliferate belief in communism.
Marxism-Leninism is an evolving science. Theory written in the past holds up, but certainly isn't all there is, much has been written today and in the last century that goes beyond Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. The CPC for example is learning from the successes and errors of the Soviet Union, including the failure of Stalin to properly line up a successor or prevent a Khrushchev-style figure from instilling a social nihilism.
Contrary to your belief, we should not be learning how to "avoid a Stalin." We should instead be learning how to avoid a Khrushchev, a Gorbachev. Stalin built up the USSR during its most tumultuous period, it wasn't him but his successors that ultimately tanked the project. That doesn't mean Stalin was perfect, but he was good.
The context we are living in rn is kinda the same 100 years ago, nearly everything that is said in the political scene today was first articulated in Europe, What actually changed since was counter revolutionary**** tactics used by the bourgeoisie as it is way more experienced in anti communism, because the class dynamics didn't change, proletariat are proletariat and bourgeois are bourgeois
It is way more complexed than that, there's a lot of parameters into it, mainly it was the opening up of khrushchev that let the revolution rot, also it should be noted that the ussr was illegally dismantled,
Imo the ussr existed in a context yes a lot deaths happened (even though none can be proven to be intentional acts of tyranny) but in the same periods capitalism was creating way worse conditions and way worse deaths, black people in the usa were killed because they simply existed, european colonies were intentionally starving and killing indigenous populations, imperial wars and invasions and genocides are to this day committed by imperialist states,
Your conception of "power" fall right inside the liberal pov and fails to understand how the ussr actually works, and what class dictatorship is. If we call a socialist experiment "dictatorship of the proletariat" then anything else than that should be a dictatorship of another class, which is the bourgeoisie, so "power" falls in the hand of a class, not an individual,
Sorry if it sounds mean but your comments lack some maturity about the subjects, you still hold onto the that liberal logic the imperialists argue with, just read