don’t forget “being fully aware of what fucking Beria was up to with all those women” in your list of legitimate criticisms. He rang his daughter to tell her to leave immediately and urgently when he found out she was alone with Beria.
Nah Beria was a rotten, sociopathic asshole but that's exactly who you want for the creation of a terrifying secret police. Judging by the last head of NKVD (Yezhov), Stalin probably planned to purge Beria eventually too after he was no longer useful.
lmao imagine reading about all of stalin’s stuff and being like “uhhh his biggest problem wasn’t homophobia, it was actually functioning as a competent head of state”
It makes sense in context: every legitimate problem with Stalin was something accepted as normal by Western countries until long after his death, so the vast majority of all propaganda attacking him focuses on things the far-right establishment thinks are distasteful rather than the real problems that they have in common with him. Like his homophobia was the dominant hegemonic stance on sexuality in the US for 50 years after Stalin died and still remains the position of the further right faction of the ruling capitalist party, so of course all the old Cold Warriors aren't going to attack him on that.
It's really only those liberals who see themselves as simultaneously successors to and apart from the history of liberalism in the US that will really go hard on it the second they sense a leftist because they're either ignorant of the history of liberal homophobia in the US or hypocritical enough to ignore it while also trying to smear the entire left with a man who's been dead for 70 years whose biggest problem was that in some respects he was just as vile as his liberal contemporaries. And those same liberals will continue to do so regardless of how much one denounces Stalin, because their objective is to attack the left in bad faith, not engage in legitimate criticism in a productive way, similar to how Gorbachev's bloc in the politburo would furiously denounce not only their enemies but any of their supporters who weren't enthusiastic enough as a "stalinists" regardless of how little sense that made.
Although I'll say that's still not as galling as when people go off about Cuba's history of homophobia as if Cuba didn't legalize homosexuality 30 years before the US did and begin formal government programs aimed at educating away homophobia and chauvinism at the same time that the US was deliberately exacerbating the AIDS epidemic. Even today, the Cuban government is still taking a proactive educational stance there, while the best the US government ever offers is trailing public opinion.
I don't know how the scope compares to what they're doing today (there's a government ministry dedicated to LGBT rights headed by Fidel Castro's niece who's articulated that the position of the Cuban government is that homophobia, transphobia, and all forms of chauvinism are something that has to be educated away at the family and community levels), but starting in the 80s they were importing sex-ed textbooks from the GDR and consulting with GDR academics on LGBT rights and there was at least some degree of support available even in the early 80s (I remember reading that the current president of Cuba was involved in those programs in the early 80s to some extent, but that didn't provide any more details than that mention).
So at a bare minimum, the "formal government programs" were LGBT-positive sex ed classes in school and at-least tacitly approved social organizations that provided community and support to LGBT Cubans.
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don’t forget “being fully aware of what fucking Beria was up to with all those women” in your list of legitimate criticisms. He rang his daughter to tell her to leave immediately and urgently when he found out she was alone with Beria.
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yeah those bodies of women found under his rose garden were all propaganda.
Nah Beria was a rotten, sociopathic asshole but that's exactly who you want for the creation of a terrifying secret police. Judging by the last head of NKVD (Yezhov), Stalin probably planned to purge Beria eventually too after he was no longer useful.
The world if liberal democracies had formed an antifascist alliance with Stalin in 1933
*picture of future utopia *
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It makes sense in context: every legitimate problem with Stalin was something accepted as normal by Western countries until long after his death, so the vast majority of all propaganda attacking him focuses on things the far-right establishment thinks are distasteful rather than the real problems that they have in common with him. Like his homophobia was the dominant hegemonic stance on sexuality in the US for 50 years after Stalin died and still remains the position of the further right faction of the ruling capitalist party, so of course all the old Cold Warriors aren't going to attack him on that.
It's really only those liberals who see themselves as simultaneously successors to and apart from the history of liberalism in the US that will really go hard on it the second they sense a leftist because they're either ignorant of the history of liberal homophobia in the US or hypocritical enough to ignore it while also trying to smear the entire left with a man who's been dead for 70 years whose biggest problem was that in some respects he was just as vile as his liberal contemporaries. And those same liberals will continue to do so regardless of how much one denounces Stalin, because their objective is to attack the left in bad faith, not engage in legitimate criticism in a productive way, similar to how Gorbachev's bloc in the politburo would furiously denounce not only their enemies but any of their supporters who weren't enthusiastic enough as a "stalinists" regardless of how little sense that made.
Although I'll say that's still not as galling as when people go off about Cuba's history of homophobia as if Cuba didn't legalize homosexuality 30 years before the US did and begin formal government programs aimed at educating away homophobia and chauvinism at the same time that the US was deliberately exacerbating the AIDS epidemic. Even today, the Cuban government is still taking a proactive educational stance there, while the best the US government ever offers is trailing public opinion.
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I don't know how the scope compares to what they're doing today (there's a government ministry dedicated to LGBT rights headed by Fidel Castro's niece who's articulated that the position of the Cuban government is that homophobia, transphobia, and all forms of chauvinism are something that has to be educated away at the family and community levels), but starting in the 80s they were importing sex-ed textbooks from the GDR and consulting with GDR academics on LGBT rights and there was at least some degree of support available even in the early 80s (I remember reading that the current president of Cuba was involved in those programs in the early 80s to some extent, but that didn't provide any more details than that mention).
So at a bare minimum, the "formal government programs" were LGBT-positive sex ed classes in school and at-least tacitly approved social organizations that provided community and support to LGBT Cubans.
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