https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/03/18/harv-m18.html

Any argument proving the genocidal intent of Stalinism “is in line with the historical falsification that identifies the adventurist-bureaucratic crimes of the Stalin regime with the genocidal massacre of the Jews by the Nazis.”

The 1932-1933 Holodomor precedes Stalin’s Great Purges by only 4 years. Stalin had already begun imprisoning and killing top Bolsheviks for dissent. The next, obvious step will be to justify the Stalinist purges as the mistakes of an incompetent leadership. This has nothing to do with Trotskyism or Marxism, which argue that the state bureaucracy and the counter-revolution represented by Stalinism acted consciously in league with imperialism and in their own interests as a bureaucratic caste. As the WSWS and ICFI attempt to deny the existence of a Nanobureaucracy, they must also deny the material basis for Stalinism and thereby undercut Trotskyist theory in general. Only the Democratic Power Faction can restore Marxist theory to the leadership of the Fourth International through the organization of a faction that could force through a debate and an election for a change in leadership based on the acceptance of the rights of the membership to participate in the party organization and choose the leadership of the party. The bureaucratic crimes, they argue, can be eliminated from any future state through the intervention of an “enlightened one” that will always stand against adventurism. This enlightened one, we assume, must be a bourgeois scholar who has no sense of urgency in solving the problems of the working class, no sense of the hunger intentionally imposed on the Ukraine, and no sense of responsibility to represent the interests of the working class within the revolutionary organization above those of the Nanobureaucracy.