you know how people, especially on twitter, try and share their absolute dogshit takes without a care for humility, just unbribled stubbornness
everybody seem so full of themselves and I just can't bring myself to trust anyone unless they show a hint of doubt over their own thoughts, and that's flat out absent from most social media
idk, I don't think I did a good jb describing what I feel, it's hard to accurately put into words
but like, do you have stuff you usually keep to yourself, because like you know the thought isn't well rounded or something and you don't want to say something incorrect. or like interrogations about stuff you can't really answer by yourself
Despite my memeing, I honestly am unsure of why we should uphold the legacy of Stalin. Like his theoretical contributions aren't groundbreaking, his statescraft wasn't amazing, the economic gains he contributed probably would have come from any Leninist in his position, even the war effort wasn't him single-handedly taking on the Nazis. I dunno but he just seems banal at best and honestly kinda shitty at worst. Def have an open mind about him but....well meh honestly.
What you’re basically correctly doing is removing the “great man of history” aspect out of the narrative, never a bad idea.
One helpful exercise is -- instead of asking if some person/country/policy is good in a vacuum -- asking if it was good compared to what came before it, if it was good compared to what else was happening in the world at the time, and if it was good compared to other realistic options. The basic premise is you can't go from a terrible society to a utopia overnight, so we really should be judging people/countries/policies on how much they move the ball forward compared to how much they realistically could have moved the ball forward.
For Stalin, this would mean comparing the USSR under him to Imperial Russia and all the problems created by WWI, something like ~17 capitalist countries invading, and the Russian Civil War (in short, none of this was a good time); comparing the USSR under him to contemporary peer countries (other major powers in of the period, with some allowance for the fact that they were more industrialized and didn't go through post-WWI invasions and civil wars); and comparing his actions to what else he realistically could have done.
I don't think he comes out looking too bad after that sort of analysis, especially if one looks at the positives and not just the negatives.