Yeah, but brutal doesn’t mean good. Brutal is usually bad, because it means you can’t get any real loyalty. Too soft isn’t good either, but I feel like Soviet counterintelligence was mostly just randomly killing people you decided they were “bad” and punishing people to get information, both of which are often counterproductive.

The Sovs were actually quite intricate in setting up blackmail, threats, hostage situations, leveraging useful idiots, making it an offense NOT to inform, etc etc etc. And the way they made Soviet society work, there wasn’t the freedom of movement or association that espionage benefits from in non-totalitarian countries.

I was talking about the 2002 coup which I think is credibly believed to be US-backed. All Chavez’s crazy authoritarian stuff came after that, as far as I’m aware. I thought until years and years after that, he was just doing normal Latin American politics with communism, with a marked level of success and popularity.

Chavez basically immediately went all-in in 1999 on hollowing out Venezuela’s institutions and replacing all positions of power with his cronies.

I think Stalin was by far the worst and most brutal of all the Bolsheviks. If it had been Trotsky and Lenin, I think things would have been way different. Seeing touches of Castro or Chavez in Trotsky, and touches of Saddam Hussein in Stalin, is part of what leads me to the type of thinking that makes me think maybe the US was pulling for Stalin.

I think you give too much credit to Trotsky and Lenin. They were both very big on the Bolshevik single-party state being run via terror.