The purges were not simply Stalin lashing out. The purges were done by the broader Soviet government, in response to a real threat. The majority of cases simply resulted in an expulsion from government, it wasn’t a naked goal to execute a certain quota of people. There was a real crisis on hand, and the Soviets responded with legal action, those found guilty of treason or other crimes punishable by death (such as murder, severe sexual assault, antisemitism, etc) were sentenced accordingly.

I have no idea what you mean by “ivory tower.” The global south has a far more nuanced perception of Stalin than the west does. My stance on Stalin is a common stance among Marxist-Leninists, that he was more good than bad, especially when measured honestly and accurately against contemporary monsters like Churchill.

And no, it isn’t easy for Neoliberals to “destroy” us communists. When the Red Scare club of Stalin’s black legend is wielded against us, we can do one of the following:

1. Agree with the Red Scare version of Stalin, throwing existing socialist history and victories under the bus to “save face,” which backfires and makes socialism entirely unconvincing, and relies on lying to the working classes just to agree with people that already hate us

2. Accurately appraise Stalin and put him in the correct historical context. Honestly tell people of his successes and mistakes, without flinching. This is the practice that does result in advancement and spreading of communist ideas.

When picking between lying by regurgitaging Red Scare mythos and taking a principled, historically accurate stance, it’s clear that the latter is the only acceptable option. We cannot grow the movement through lies, we need to meet the people honestly, which involves honest engagement with past failures and successes. This does not mean conceding the point to bourgeois historiography.

Essentially, it isn’t the communists giving an honest and accurate account that hurts the movement, it’s the people trying to distance themselves from socialist history and alienating themselves from historical struggle. Experience shows this, which is why Marxism-Leninism is resurging while anti-AES branches of Marxism are faltering.

Here’s the excellent Marketing Socialism by Nia Frome:

When I was a kid I also believed ‘communists should ditch that label, for PR reasons.’ Now I think we make more headway owning it than dishonestly disavowing it. Not least because someone will almost always bring up Stalin no matter what we call ourselves.

Stalin is a powerful trope. His name stands for the perverse emergence of injustice from the overzealous pursuit of justice. It’s dramatic irony, a morality tale about how power corrupts. That mythic trope stands as a barricade for socialism no matter what kind of spin you put on socialism.

The ritual denunciation of Stalin on “the left”:

1. presents a utopia of socialism without antagonism, flatters first-worlders and academics,
2. spares people the unpleasantness of interrogating how their ideas about the past were formed, and
3. makes a virtue of losing and waiting.

First-worlders get to feel better about themselves if they believe that all the socialist revolutions that took place in the third world “weren’t really socialist.” The same goes for denigrating national liberation of ex-colonies as bourgeois, Bonapartist, etc. Intellectuals get to feel more important if they believe really existing socialism “failed” because of faulty ideas. This lends itself to an interpretation of history where ideas are the motive force, and fidelity to the text is paramount. It’s not surprising that they would also trash “developmentalism” as “merely” bringing food security, electricity, literacy, education, industry, healthcare, job security, etc.

What are the crimes normally attributed to Stalin? The show trials, the purges, the gulag, forced collectivization… in other words: state violence. The socialisms that define themselves in opposition to Stalin therefore downplay state violence as much as they can. This yields a socialism that’s just trying to sell itself to people like any other commodity. Disavowing negativity/terror means ignoring that the USSR made the world a better place partly by scaring porkie.

The question of who’s doing violence to whom, and to what end, is the fundamental problem of politics. It’s capitalism’s answer to this question that makes us hate it so much. “Nobody does violence to anybody” sounds good, but it’s not actually a political position. Political positions require charting out a plausible course from where we are now into the glorious future ahead, and that path goes through socialist states. Statehood is (a monopoly on legitimate) violence. Thus, the demonization of Stalin is the demonization of socialist statehood itself.

In other words, pretending our new thing is sui generis and doesn’t have anything to do with “Stalinism” doesn’t actually mean we’ll face different problems, or have better solutions. Stalin faced problems that were generic to socialism. Socialism isn’t just an infinitely malleable brand in need of better marketing, it’s a class project with definite and durable contours. We don’t actually transcend these problems just by calling ourselves something else, just like we don’t transcend capitalism by calling ourselves post-capitalist.

Anticommunism is most efficiently compressed and transmitted as demonization of Stalin, and it stands in the way of Americans joining any possible global left wing project, since it prejudices them against left authority everywhere (but especially overseas). International solidarity requires that we abandon great power chauvinism. Hatred of Stalin reinforces great power chauvinism, therefore defending Stalin weakens it.

If we decline to draw from the entire history of socialism-in-power in favor of utopian socialism or pragmatic liberalism, the range of results we can obtain will be limited to those achieved by utopian socialism (evanescent communes) and pragmatic liberalism (hellworld).

Read the Losurdo text I linked.