I've made liberals and conservatives agree with me that Stalin's industrialization policies were legitimately successful. It's not too hard to argue that, I don't think. They'll throw out "Yeah well he killed a lot of people" and you can talk about how that's a misconception and show that the average gulag sentence was only 5 years of labor (compared to the slave labor of U.S. prisoners for life sometimes). I'm not too sure about that statistic, I just remember reading it was 5 years. You should check up on it, though.