This first line essentially just says “Stalin believed in progress.”?? accidentally based??

There’s always this weird need to alienate communism from reality; somehow they need to be esoteric and convoluted, so whenever we describe anything related to socialism they always make it sound like its incredibly removed from any reasonable understanding of the world, as though it can only be understood by so-called “Sovietologists”. In reality, the ideas and processes that drive socialist states are anything but idealistic or abstract, but rooted in practicality and were understood by the people writ large.

It is somewhat surprising that this article actually does shockingly little psychoanalysis of Stalin; usually, libs love to claim that Stalin was paranoid, evil, and deranged.