Stalinism isn't Communism as a whole, to be sure; but it was Lenin's men who threw prisoners of war into blast furnaces (not on Wikipedia, but I think this was

Stalinism isn't Communism as a whole, to be sure; but it was Lenin's men who threw prisoners of war into blast furnaces (not on Wikipedia, but I think this was in _The Sword and the Shield_, from the Mitrokhin archive); Lenin who robbed the peasantry at the end of the NEP; and Mao who created the world's largest famine. You can't sacrifice Stalinism to save the rest of actually-existing Communism; Leninism, Maoism, Trotskyism (probably, although Trotsky didn't rule for long), Kim Il Sung thought, Enver Hoxha-ism, and all the rest were just as vile. (Castro was less bad, but that hardly means no political prisoners at all, or no torture at all.) Catch-up industrialization is easy; many societies have done it, dictatorships or not. Staying developed is harder; the USSR, like Argentina and North Korea, first developed and then regressed, which is not a particularly impressive feat. Meanwhile, China's development was stalled for 50 years because their implementation of Communism was more than usually destructive; it wasn't until Deng Xiaopang renounced Maoism and overthrew the Maoist die-hards that China finally began to industrialize. Nor are impressive feats acceptable when they're built on bones; or was the opium trade justified because of all the money it made for the UK and US? And the GULAG proper existed until 1961, with forced-labor camps for political prisoners (so, GULAG but on a smaller scale) existing until 1987; likewise, the VChK and its many renamings persisted for the whole history of the USSR, and I think the FSB is descended from them -- although they're evidently much less bad.