I recently re-read vol 1. of the Gulag Archipelago and it’s striking how similar MAGA-ism and Stalinism is. I’ve known a fair number of Republicunt and MAGA types who cheer on all the tough-guy orange stuff being applied to other people. They don’t read books and certainly not history books, and don’t understand that Stalin didn’t just terrorize the Other, he intentionally wrought terror on the entire society, from top to bottom. Nobody was safe. The Terror might have started with the peasantry (not sure) but it certainly didn’t end there. The “intelligentsia” was one target, but so was the military (which Stalin purged) and veterans and scientists and engineers and religious bodies. If you looked like you had the slightest bit of potential power or potential influence in society (or were just too damn educated), and if you seemed to be even slightly uncommitted to the Great Leader, then he or his lackeys would see to it that your door was kicked down in the middle of the night and you dragged off for torture until you “confessed”. Then a “tribunal” (not judges) would sentence you and it was off to the gulag and to a life of slavery in the Arctic cold, for decades or until you died. Or just a bullet to the head.

Separately, there was the mass-starvation (for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor) inflicted on certain Soviets - a byproduct of Stalin’s ideologically-driven re-engineering of the economy. I’ve read some opinions that starvation was the intent - a genocide against a potentially non-loyal segment of the citizenry.

This is where we’re heading.