For Stalin mass murder in his quest for power was logical, however his goals would have never been reached if his followers had also been logical. They didn't carry out Stalin's murderous orders in order to give him power. They believed that mass murder would create a Utopian society. Of course it didn't, as any logical person could have told them, but to this day millions of socialist morons believe that mass murder could pave the way towards Utopia. Are they logical? As I said before, God has nothing to do with their irrationality. They are just stupid.
“For Stalin mass murder in his quest for power was logical, however his goals would have never been reached if his followers had also been logical. They didn’t carry out Stalin’s murderous orders in order to give him power. They believed that mass murder would create a Utopian society”
I believe it is a mistake to believe that Stalin’s followers were ideologues. The people who had minds to go along with their guns, like Trotsky, weren’t the fountainheads of Stalinistic violence. Stalin relied on thugs, who fed the conveyor belt on a quota basis, in the interest of their little, tiny bit of priveledge.
As to this notion that Stalin’s Russia was a faile Utopia, I think “The Black Book of Communism” put it aptly when they described his regime as a criminal conspiracy. There are no doctrinaire Marxists in practice, but Stalin was not even an undoctrinaire Marxist. He was a Stalinist.
The reason his purges were “rational” (even though Stalin was a dangerous paranoiac) is that they were based on the age-old divide-and-conquer tactic. So long as anyone who could possibly oppose Stalin was in prison, Stalin was safe. And since Stalin’s goal was to aggrandize Stalin, he was completely successful.
Obviously, Stalin operated within the conventions of socialism (just as I operate within the conventions of democracy, without believing in it as anything more than a means to good government, not an end in itself). Let us assume, for a second, that he really, really believed in what he preached. His attempt to modernize Russia was not irrational. It was unfounded, given the laws of economic science, but not irrational.
For the cummunist millenium to arrive, according to doctrine, bad things must happen to some people. The proletariat must overcome the exploiters. That meant Lenin and Stalin had to destroy the kulaks, the clergy, the nobility, the industrial bosses, the bankers, and the small business owners as a class (even though they were more in competition with eachother than the peasants or the workers, but that sort of distinction never bothered a true Marxist). So, in theory at least, for there to be a Utopia, evil means MUST be used.
There is nothing irrational about that. Here in the good, old U.S., we have milder forms of the ends/means calculation. 600,000 men had to die for the slaves to be free. 50 million people had to die for Hitler to be stopped. Every culture in the history of the earth has known that often we have to use evil to bring about good.