This one time my dad was talking about Karl Marx and said he was “born in Russia”, and I corrected him that he was born in Germany. And then he got argumentative and started spouting out other facts about “Karl Marx”, like that he overthrew the Czar and lead the Red Army…
Suddenly I realized… “Dad, you’re thinking of Vladimir Lenin, not Marx.”
My dad realized I was correct and replied: “Well of course you would know that.”
Yeah recriminalizing gay marriage was pretty bad, like he did a lot of good things and obviously helped save us from fascism. But the homophobic policies sucked and he was definitely a tier below Lenin as a leader.
That was part of a broad reform to criminalize pedophilia, and was really misguided, yeah. I think I read somewhere that statue was only used to imprison an otherwise normal gay person exactly once though, and it was after Stalin had died.
Does anyone know more about this?