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By exterminating them you Nazi piece of shit. They didn’t care if they starved, got sick and died, had adequate housing, died from exposure, were infested with parasites, had adequate clothing, had enough water, or so on.

That’s why they massacred them right off of the trains and left the rest to work to death.

Eat shit you Nazi. Take your Holocaust denial and get lost.

Firstly, the BBC is a UK state-controlled media outlet that routinely spreads imperialist propaganda (and even lies about left-wing movements within the country, as shown by their defamation of Corbyn); it has absolutely no credibility. With that said, the the only citation I could find that wasn't the BBC itself (and I checked recursively at a depth of 3 before stopping) was this, which is an article by an organization called "Golos" alleging forced voting; I've never heard of it before, so I can't say whether they're trustworthy. Aside from that citation, it seems to be nothing but anecdotal "evidence", the credibility of which is proportional to that of the media outlet.

I can't speak to the video as I've never seen it.

Here's a summary of the coup in Ukraine. As for post-coup Ukraine, you could start by looking at a few of the sources here (I recommend that entire document for learning more about Marxism and imperialism, even if it's a bit messy). We've had several people asking about the conflict, the most recent being this one; you can use the search function on Lemmygrad, just check "Local" and search by posts using a keyword like "Donbas". Alternatively, you could make another post asking specifically about this (I'm not particularly good at saving my sources, but crowdsourcing would give better results)

I think it’ll be almost impossible to get right numbers because of the secrecy the USSR had

We have perfectly fine accuracy regarding the numbers for most things in the USSR. In the 90s, the USSR archives were open to researchers from across the world and many propagandized narratives about the USSR were promptly shown to be false, at least in serious academic circles.

I believe we can find better communist leaders that didn’t kill at least 700,000 of his political opponents to maintain power

Firstly, Stalin didn't do any of this on his own and neither did any other communist leader. Secondly, around 700 000 people were executed in the entire ~30 years Stalin was the leader, not just during the purges. Thirdly, he didn't "just do this to maintain power". Our job is not "to find better communist leaders" from the past. It's to accurately analyze concrete historical situations, the material reality in its social and historical context and learn from that analysis as much as we can - both the good and the bad. However, ceding any ground to baseless anticommunist propaganda does not benefit us at all. No one is going around saying Stalin was flawless but any nuanced discussion is impossible in mainstream spaces.

Jackson School of International Studies

This doesn't mean much at all. It's a liberal institution connected to a university in the US. It cites the CIA world fact book as a good source and even mentions The Gulag Archipelago in a positive, uncritical light. Not to mention all your other sources which include wikipedia and the history channel website which cites Business Insider articles and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty all of which serve as explicitly anticommunist propaganda.

I think we have different people in history that set a much better example, like Fidel Castro for one.

You cannot just pick and choose who you like and don't like from history. You have to study all of it fairly. The situation in Cuba from the 50s onward is not the same as in the USSR around WW2. We aren't looking for good examples to blindly follow form the past. We are looking to learn, based on their specific examples, how to in general better analyze and approach our situation today. We cannot just replicate any past socialist strategy, we have to formulate our own that is specific to our current circumstances.

I would recommend you read Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti or Stalin: History and Critique of A Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo to better understand the history and historiography concerned with past and current socialist states, and Stalin in particular.

The soviet archives were opened after the dissolution of the USSR, the idea that these things are unknowable is wrong. Anti soviet historians with a shred of decency revised their analysis following those events and retracted many of their extreme claims. Conquest called the Holodomor a genocide prior to the opening of the archives and later admitted he was wrong.

I get what u are trying to say but its kinda hard to acknowledged your point when u say shit like the ""infamous" order 227" clearly there is a lot more western propaganda to unpack on your side, because there was nothing wrong with telling generals to stop retreating when conditions werent just right especially when u consider that at that point in time the nazi hoards controlled more territory than the USSR, no it was not an order to kill deserters there werent many to begin with since people knew what giving up to the nazis meant it was an order for generals to stop spreading fear and fucking around and while it included a provision for death as a punishment it was only ever used a handful of times and again against high ranking officers not common soldiers.

There were actual bad things done by the USSR's government while Stalin was in power some of them he could have been personally responsible for, like the exile of the Crimean tartars or the fact that relief efforts for the famine in Ukraine were carried out in secrete (and therefore were less effective) seemingly to save face. There is no need to invent reasons for critique. Rest assured we are all well aware of his flaws after all we had to read plenty of his history to debunk the made up flaws u fell for, we dont blindly like him, his flaws and mistakes (the real ones) just dont outweigh the good he did if u disagree thats fine its a line and its gotta be drawn somewhere, as long u know the facts its not wrong to draw that line such that his more bad than good. Either way im not gonna go tell a lib about how amazing Stalin was (tho i will certainly correct any misinformation) nor is anyone here trying to replicate the bad parts of the USSR during his time in power, we just think he did more good than bad and theres a lot of hate for him out there so someones gotta love him.

"Not a step back" was a policy introduced because generals believed that the size of the USSR territory meant that they could afford to tactically retreat more often, which resulted in civilian deaths and a large amount of soviet resources being taken by the Nazis.

They needed to make a stand somewhere, and Stalingrad might've been the turning point of the entire war.

Gulags were a continuation of the Tsarist Katorgas. The katorga camps weren’t some vacation.

They were starved of resources, employed forced labor for the empire, and inmates could be sentenced there for anything from common crimes to revolutionary beliefs (even common liberalism).

From the turbulent times post-revolution to post-WW2, the Gulags were a tool of their era to keep the country afloat while handling counter revolutionaries, actual Nazis, and common criminals.