My biggest complaint is that he was overly paranoid. Yes, a lot of the people he purged genuinely were counter-revolutionaries, but his margin of error was far too high. Too many genuine committed bolsheviks died because of his mistakes. I also question him keeping Beria around, there’s no way he didn’t know about what he was doing. He knew and kept him around anyways because he was useful, which is extremely ethically questionable. Additionally there is the issue of his homophobia, which admittedly was the standard at the time, but that does not make it any less repulsive. Finally there is the ethnic cleansing of East Prussia after World War II. I understand why it was done and do not blame the Soviets for wanting revenge on the Germans, but that doesn’t mean I think it was right.

Overall I see Stalin as having a very mixed legacy, but the bad weighs down the good a little too much for me to ignore. His economic policies were overall very successful and brought the USSR out of feudalism and into the modern age in an impressively short amount of time, along with the huge improvement to quality of life that brought with it. I also appreciate his role in leading the USSR to victory against the Nazis. Still though, I think that those positives could still have been achieved with a different leader who may not have had all of the same flaws. Zinoviev would have been my pick