Some information about the extent of repression in Eastern Bloc states

[Ismail]

Perhaps Stalin and Mao's terror cannot be misunderstood to be typical of communist party rule in general?. Of course, the answer to this question is clear: no.

I don't think the comparison is fair in regards to Stalin. In the 1930's the USSR had to overcome various remnants of feudalism and capitalism whilst building its industry and preparing for war. The Great Purge itself had anti-bureaucratic aspects and was mainly directed against right-wingers within and outside the party. The way it went about was not efficient and tons of innocents winded up dead, but you can't divorce it from the situation existing at the time.

To give a comparison, you'd probably consider Enver Hoxha a horrible evil totalitarian madman or whatever, and he was certainly the most pro-Stalin leader ever, but there was nothing like the Great Purge done under him. There was the Cultural and Ideological Revolution that was partially inspired by the GPCR, but it winded up being very different from the GPCR and obviously Albania wasn't driven into chaos like most of China was. Albania didn't have the various problems the USSR in the 1930's had. The USSR in the 1930's stretched over a gigantic landmass with a huge and inefficient bureaucratic system which couldn't even keep reliable check on who was where and who was in the party or not. The 1930's USSR was afraid of these security problems being exploited to create spies and terrorists, whereas Albania was more concerned about foreign invasion owing to its secure borders and party organization.

After the 1950's, after the rise of revisionism, there was no more talk of class struggle or even much about capitalist encirclement, just how the USSR was awesome, how communism was the immediate goal, how the CPSU was totally without error and had gloriously uncovered the "Stalinist distortions of Leninist norms" and what not, how world peace is great and how the USA wants nuclear war, etc.

Kinda different from Stalin saying in 1931, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us." Or as he is reported to have privately said to Vyshinsky a month before he died in 1953, "We are afraid of no one, and if the imperialist gentlemen feel like going to war there is no more favorable moment for us than the present."

Now, I still believe in Dubcek's vision of socialism with a human face (and no, it is not capitalism, it worked until Soviet tanks came in August 1968,

In what way did it "work" and in what way was it "socialism"?

and no, he was not present in the post-1989 goverment, well, for a short time because of popular vote until he died in a car accident under "mysterious circumstances" [possible car trapping by corrupt pigs like Meciar]),

He became a bourgeois politician who was praised by Gorbachev. In 1992 Radio Free Europe noted that, "In an interview with the daily Rudepravo in November 1991 he said that he was 'inspired by social democratic examples' and predicted that social democracy would have a great future in Czechoslovakia... Dubcek declared that Sweden provided a good example of his vision of society."

[Toppler]

I don't think that anyone in the left-communist side thinks that mass executions are a defining point of "Stalinism", though.

Yes. However the post-Stalin countries also lacked the coercive Gulag based economy of the Stalinist period and so on...

[Ismail]

Yes. However the post-Stalin countries also lacked the coercive Gulag based economy of the Stalinist period and so on...

You seem to follow ComradeOm quite a bit. There was no "Gulag based economy." The Gulag system was, overall, a drain on the economic system and was being phased out by the time Stalin died as noted in The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag. Robert W. Thurston in Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia also noted that the image of the USSR having an economy based on prison labor is incorrect.