Aksu wrote:Stalin was an admirable totalitarian. Classes were very real under his leadership, the secretive and exclusive bureaucratic class
The bureaucracy under Comrade Stalin was neither exclusive nor particularly secretive. They held political office openly, and in fact Comrade Stalin often subjected the bureaucracy to some serious blood-letting in order to make room for fresh bureaucrats of proven Communist loyalties and proletarian backgrounds.
Aksu wrote:and of course the divide between educated and non-educated proletariat. A very elitist society.
A divide that the Soviet system did its very damnedest best to kill dead from the very beginnings of the USSR: Educating the working masses was probably THE primary goal of Soviet domestic policy. Plenty high-ranking communists did in fact rise from the ranks of the urban proletariat and the collective farmers.
Aksu wrote:Clearly not in the same way Stalin was. His authoritarianism was akin to Mussolini's if not more violent in its enforcement.
Reactionary, authoritarian liberals have murdered countless millions of leftists worldwide for political reasons, and most authoritarian dictatorships have in fact been liberal-capitalist.
The Soviets had their own hegemonic foreign policy rivalling the West's cultural hegemony and imperialism.
All political factions engage in a ruthless struggle for hegemony.
He clearly was a militarist.
Not really. He kept the military on a far shorter leash than any other Soviet leader since.
During WWII Soviet socialist patriotism and Russian nationalism merged portraying the war not just as a struggle between socialists versus capitalists but more as a struggle for national survival. He was a master manipulator in this realm
Considering that the Germans DID want to enslave and/or exterminate the Slavic peoples, it WAS also a struggle for national survival.