a prefect microcosm of how Stalin’s regime operated with the violently anti-communist Nazi’s

You’re saying this to a Spaniard. From 1936 to 1939, during the Spanish civil war (which the fascists ended up winning thanks to the inaction of western powers and the military intervention of fascist Italy and Germany), the Soviet Union was openly against fascism in Spain. They delivered weapons, troops, planes and tanks in the antifascist struggle on the opposite end of the continent, and were the only country to do so. Three pictures you’ve pulled out of CIA-sponsored anticommunist sources don’t change the material and historical reality that the Soviet Union was staunchly antifascist, both in rethoric and in action. This is 3 years before Molotov-Ribbentrop. Why did the Soviet Union support antifascist Spain on the opposite side of the continent?

that doesn’t change the fact that the USSR acted to project and protect its own influence.

Well… Obviously? If my country was communist and antifascist, and was threatened by a fascist country, I would think it morally correct to extend the influence and projection of my country. Do you disagree with this?

Stalin’s USSR was a hard turn from Lenin’s korenisatsiya

Almost as if the experiences from the Civil War and the historical and material conditions of 1939 were different from those of 1917… Granting independence to Poland and seeing it immediately invade Ukraine and Belarus must have been a kick in the balls to Marxists believing in idealistic approaches to the question of nationalities, and that’s just one example of many. If you again don’t see how unity was important (and actually achieved) in a country which managed to maintain social cohesion and a functioning economy during the loss of 27 million people in the struggle against Nazism, I tend to think I’m arguing against an idealist who doesn’t analyse the material and historical constraints of policy.

My whole point with this is: what makes you think yourself more intelligent, well-versed and moral than the Marxist revolutionaries who achieved the first successful collectivisation of the economy of a country, the lasting elimination of the bourgeoisie, and ultimately the defeat of Nazism in Europe which saved millions if not tens of millions of lives from extermination? And also importantly, why are you so intent in conflating Socialism with some sort of Russian Imperialism as if the Bolsheviks weren’t the greatest possible break with Russian Imperialism that could be achieved in Russia?