Joseph Stalin was a communist leader inspired by Leon Trotsky
Trotsky was a communist revolutionary and intellectual. He once wrote “In politics, obtaining power and maintaining power justifies anything” in his book “Leur morale et la nôtre”*
In this book, Trotsky justifies the use of lies, infiltration of other political parties, smearing, even hostage taking. He says absolute ruthlesness is necessary to overthrow a hostile system and wield power. He concludes "We are acting for the greater good. We can’t be restrained by normal morality".
Joseph Stalin took Trotsky’s advice literally. So he murdered Trotsky because he saw him as rival. Stalin also started killing people because he believed they could be sympathetic to capitalism or opponents to his power.
Matvei Bronstein: Theorical physicist. Pioneer of quantum gravity. Arrested, accused of fictional “terroristic” activity and shot in 1938
Lev Shubnikov: Experimental physicist. Accused on false charges. Executed
Adrian Piotrovsky: Russian dramaturge. Accused on false charges of treason. Executed.
Nikolai Bukharin: Leader of the Communist revolution. Member of the Politburo. Falsely accused of treason. Executed.
General Alexander Egorov: Marshal of the Soviet Union. Commander of the Red Army Southern Front. Member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Arrested, accused on false charges, executed.
General Mikhail Tukhachevsky: Supreme Marshal of the Soviet Union. Nicknamed the Red Napoleon. Arrested, accused on fake charges. Executed.
Grigory Zinoviev:: Communist intellectual. Chairman of the Communist International Movement. Member of the Soviet Politburo. Accused of treason and executed.
Even the secret police themselves were not safe:
Genrikh Yagoda : Right-hand of Joseph Stalin. Head of the NKD Secret Police. He spied on everyone and jailed thousands of innocents. Arrested and executed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrikh_Yagoda
Nikolai Yezhov : Appointed head of the NKD Secret Police after the killing of Yagoda. Arrested on fake charges. Also executed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov
Everybody was absolutely terrified during this period. At least 500 000 people were murdered. Over 1 million people were deported to Gulags, secret prisons in Siberia, where they worked 12 hours a day.
Joseph Stalin decided to crush Ukraine for resisting communism and supporting independance. In 1933, he seized all Ukraine’s food production including all the bread, the wheat, the cows, the chicken. In the next months, over 5 million Ukrainians were starved to death. The situation was so bad that thousands of people turned to cannibalism. When the Nazis invaded Ukraine, some Ukrainians thought they were saviors
https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/holodomor
https://www.history.com/articles/ukrainian-famine-stalin
Hitler was a monster, but we really don’t talk enough about how bad Stalin was.
But the councils have to have more authority to be the ones making the decisions instead of the people they represent.
Any form of delegation of responsibility is going to have some hierarchical aspect to it because you’re giving the delegate the authority to make decisions on your behalf.
I don’t think it’s possible to completely remove hierarchies from society, but I think the real issue is the general population glorifies those positions of power, and that attracts people who shouldn’t ever be in a position of power.
But if that delegate (and the council itself) has no more authority than the people they represent, anyone who feels their position isn’t being represented can raise the issue and represent themselves or their point of view. These types of systems are reliant on civic engagement far exceeding what most people in the western world would consider possible.
This is also part of why many anarchists make the distinction of just vs unjust hierarchy. Just hierarchy is when the respected elder or community organizer in a neighborhood represents the neighborhoods interest in the council, and has regular meetings with the people they represent to ensure all views are represented. Unjust hierarchy is when 51% of the 20% of the population that actually voted puts the person who invested the most money into their campaign in charge.
The point is to structure your society in a horizontal way such that no person or group of people has any degree of power greater than any other, and has no method of gaining greater power. As I’ve said elsewhere, there are miriad ways of accomplishing this, and each community tends to have solutions that work for them even if that solution wouldn’t work for another community.