The purges weren’t just stalin going around shooting his opposition, they were a series of anti-corruption trials aimed at removing revisionists in power who were intent on seeing a return of capitalism. It was only in the worst cases, people who had deliberately committed espionage or sabotage, who were sentenced to death. Everyone else however, was largely either just barred from political life, or sent to jail, or not prosecuted at all as they hadn’t done anything yet.
The return of capitalism? Lmao. There was no danger of ‘returning’ to something they never left. Read literally anything written by Lenin on the NEP. Stalin was literally the revisionist and needed to get rid of all the people who were still loyal to the international revolution or refused to kiss his ass and toe his line. Most of the people given show trials and purged were heroes from the civil war, Lenin’s old friends and principled internationalist communists who didn’t buy Stalin’s BS theories- hundreds of them didn’t suddenly turn traitor. Stop getting all your info from Hexbear, Lemmygrad and other meme cesspits and go actually read Marx and Lenin.
I think the memo put in doubt the dictator part, not the brutal part of Stalin.
What’s so brutal about him exactly?
The purges weren’t just stalin going around shooting his opposition, they were a series of anti-corruption trials aimed at removing revisionists in power who were intent on seeing a return of capitalism. It was only in the worst cases, people who had deliberately committed espionage or sabotage, who were sentenced to death. Everyone else however, was largely either just barred from political life, or sent to jail, or not prosecuted at all as they hadn’t done anything yet.
The return of capitalism? Lmao. There was no danger of ‘returning’ to something they never left. Read literally anything written by Lenin on the NEP. Stalin was literally the revisionist and needed to get rid of all the people who were still loyal to the international revolution or refused to kiss his ass and toe his line. Most of the people given show trials and purged were heroes from the civil war, Lenin’s old friends and principled internationalist communists who didn’t buy Stalin’s BS theories- hundreds of them didn’t suddenly turn traitor. Stop getting all your info from Hexbear, Lemmygrad and other meme cesspits and go actually read Marx and Lenin.