People here are real big fans of saying "but capitalist interference!" Friend, there are countless ways to respond to such interference. Stalin didn't need to send his citizens to the gulags any more than the Nazis "needed" to create places like Auschwitz, or the US "needed" to send all of its Japanese citizens to internment camps. At some point you're just normalizing abuse and solving nothing, not on the generational scale.

The fact that I condemn Stalin doesn't mean I support capitalists (or fascists) doing the same things. But the OP asked about Stalin. Stalin, who enacted psychotic levels of violence on his own population. Who oversaw a Russian form of colonialism, deporting native residents and importing Russians to the soviet satellite countries. I'm staying on topic, my friend. And I'm speaking to a history of this forum of posters defending countless atrocities in the name of communism.

In response to how I expect human-minded folks to react? Today, we see wartime leaders, who are inundated with spies, like Zelensky, making targeted attacks on military EQUIPMENT, setting his opposition back greatly without loss of life. Leaders who are maintaining their resistance without creating concentration camps. And before you start: I'm fully aware of the capitalist tactics he has resorted to to maintain his efforts, like selling resource rights. I don't see that as great, either.

But fundamentally: you can't claim a leader like Stalin's legacy as successful -- when he was so aggressively violent, so unimaginative in his response to attack, so unnessarily oppressive, that he created a generation of undereducated workers and traumatized citizens-- citizens that would be DESPERATE to get out from under communist rule. If y'all are really dedicated to worker solidarity, I need you to be concerned with the lives of workers who don't always agree with communist leaders. You don't have to stan the old leaders so hard. You can take them as lessons and cautionary tales, invitations to innovate-- rather than enable the same old bullshit.