If someone calls themselves a “Marxist-Leninist”, just ask what they think of Stalin’s genocides (plural). Then stand back.

What they’ll say is that the modern historical consensus is that Stalin did not commit genocides, that the Holodomor is widely regarded as a climate-caused famine, exacerbated by failures of governance, but without any evidence of deliberately causing mass death to a specific culture or ethnicity, as evidenced by the number of Russians, Georgians, and other ethnic groups also affected by the famine.

They’ll then pull up sources like The Years of Hunger by Davies/Wheatcroft, and Tauger’s subsequent critique of the numbers cited in Davies/Wheatcroft demonstrating that the harvest was actually substantially smaller than even what Davies/Wheatcroft used in their analysis.

So what they’ll say is that they can’t endorse the genocidal tyranny of Stalin because that is a constructed narrative and framing it that way is designed not to illuminate but to obfuscate. For example, Churchill openly made the decision to starve millions in Bengal in order to feed the British, particularly the occupying British forces, and they actively knew about the famine and deliberately refused to send any type of aid. So anyone who isn’t a staunch anti-Churchillist is now endorsing the genocidal tyranny of Churchill. Then there’s the genocidal tyranny of Europeans in the Americas and Africa. If you’re not a decolonialist, you’re now endorsing the genocidal tyranny of essentially all European power and many many of their citizens who became settlers.

Stalin’s tyranny isn’t justified by Marxism-Leninism. Stalin was a horrible person who did horrible things. He was also a great person who did great things. He was extremely paranoid that there was a counter-revolutionary movement that was trying to take power from him. When he died, Kruschev took power and proved that Stalin was correct to be paranoid. Stalin failed to address the very real problem. He was wrong about how he went about doing things. Even Lenin knew that Stalin shouldn’t be the next leader after him, but there was nobody more effective. All of the tragedies are tragic. But they aren’t indictments of Marxism, MLism, the Soviet project as a whole, or any aspect of the theories. Stalin was just bad at his job. Good enough to defeat the strongest European military ever fielded, mind you, but not good enough to secure the future of the revolutionary project.