Is he our guy?

Just want to use this opportunity to plug, "Stalin: Paradoxes of Power." It is pretty good, though when Lenin takes over and begins to form the Soviet bureaucracy, the biography likewise takes a turn into the Byzantine. Still worth the read.

>getting baited by the /pol/ larper

He slaughtered millions of Leftists, so he's MY guy, but he was also the worst thing to happen to his country since the Mongol invasion.

Every Leftist who died screaming for his mommy with his fingernails breaking off on the frozen ground of the gulag was a sacrament to God. A great historical justice. Every commissar who beat and raped and tortured and murdered good little leftists did so as a great offering to the immortal spirit of justice.

M8 I live in Russia, I know what it is and how truly shitty USSR was.

congratulations

i dunno, ivan chonkin?

russia has always and will always be shitty, not even socialism can fix you lot

how old are you mate
not memeing or trying to be snide, just genuinely curious

Read The naked year by Boris Pilnyak. Or Mahogany if you want some short stories.

>sent letters to his favorite writers about misspellings in their books

based

Yeah, soviet historians claim he also read 500 pages a day (no joke) including reading Ancient Greek texts in the original

Paste that in the google translate that will give you an idea about his literature interests
ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кpyг_чтeния_Cтaлинa

Well, I am in my twenties, obviously was not around when USSR was.
One of my great grandfathers underwent dekulakization, the other was in Gulag, their children went through the war.
Anyway, pretty much everyone had it rough except for the blind and people from the party. No sane person has any illusion about Soviet Union today.
I know all this Gulag and political repressions thing sounds like a scary campfire story, but It was real.
The best part is, because most people in the government today were in the party, government still supports memes about USSR ("we were the most reading nation", "Soviet education was the best in the world", etc) and they refuse to declassify NKVD/KGB repressions archives, so a lot of people still do not know what happened to their relatives.

1850-1900 was bretty gud

I know it's real. I'm reading Lenin's Tomb at the moment. I was just curious if I'd find someone who lived through it all so I could ask them about personal shit.

>/pol/posting ironically

Exactly how far back do you think women have had the right to choose their own partners?

Well, most of the people who went through Gulags or WW2 are dead, you would not expect 90 y.o. shitposting here.
However political repressions existed all the way until the end of the union, though milder.
Post-soviet prisons were nice heirs of Gulags, here's a documentary of childrens prisons: youtu.be/Xzk9z6hG93A
or a coil song, which is russian convict prayer with excerpts of the mentioned documentary.
youtu.be/CA4nsWE7S1U

We were part of the Soviet Union and I have grandpa who I ask questions and shiet about how it was but let's just say it's hard getting something tangible that I can write down from him.
My grandma has dementia and doesn't even know who she is so that's a no-go and the rest of grandparents are dead.
I'm not looking to reach far back to the gulags but the 70s-early 90s are my jam.

I have my great grandmother, but she did not go to GULAG or WW2, when the WW2 started she was 13 so she had to drop school and go to work in kolkhoz to have some food. She recently told me about her memory that she remembers that one lunchtime in school when everybody had a piece of white bread and some sugar and there was a giant Stalin portrait on the wall which said "Thanks to comrade Stalin for our happy childhood", also told me how everybody in the kolkhoz were happy when Stalin died. It is funny, because one of her daughter is a Stalin admirer.

You should write down what she says. She's not going to be around forever.