Stalin was never racist.

1. Ideology and official anti‑racism: programmatic commitments and propaganda

The Bolshevik project began with an explicit anti‑racist, internationalist rhetoric that sought to cast the USSR as a refuge from Western racial hierarchies and to promote proletarian solidarity across color lines, a message loudly amplified in Soviet press and cultural diplomacy which celebrated racial equality and contrasted Soviet harmony with American racism ^{[4] [5]}.

2. Practice diverged: deportations, purges, and the “ethnification” of Stalinism

Under Stalin the state carried out large‑scale deportations and repressions of entire nationalities—actions judged by scholars as ethnic cleansing or national‑cultural genocide—which targeted groups such as Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Koreans, Poles and others and involved sending millions to Siberia and Central Asia, a campaign contemporaneous with NKVD operations organized by Beria and justified by charges of collective treason ^{[6] [3] [2]}.

3. Racialized logics without the modern concept of race: essentializing nationalities

Recent scholarship emphasizes that Stalinist policy often treated populations as carrying immutable, inherited traits—endowing whole nationalities with negative characteristics and treating them as security risks—thereby importing a form of racialized thinking into nationality policy even if Soviet elites eschewed Western scientific racism vocabulary ^{[2] [7]}.

4. Russification and assimilation as hierarchy in practice

Policies that demanded or coerced assimilation—what historians describe as Russification and Sovietization—functioned in practice as a cultural hierarchy that privileged Russian norms and marginalized non‑Russian peoples, turning early Bolshevik korenizatsiia experiments into later campaigns of denationalization under Stalin ^{[8] [1]}.

5. Antisemitism and late‑Stalinist discriminations: covert and overt dimensions

Multiple sources document that Jews and other minorities faced targeted discrimination that shifted over time from overt physical assaults and purges to more covert or institutionalized exclusions; scholars note antisemitic elements in late‑Stalinist policies and argue that post‑Stalin leadership continued some discriminatory practices in subtler forms ^{[6] [2]}.

6. The African and global front: Soviet anti‑racism as selective and instrumental

The USSR’s vocal antiracist posture on the international stage and its attraction for Black intellectuals and visitors coexisted with a domestic record of anti‑Black incidents and representational biases; Soviet propaganda about being the “fatherland of black, yellow, and white races” covered over visible violences and structural exclusions experienced by people of color inside the USSR ^{[4] [9]}.

7. Historiographical tensions and why the absolute claim fails

Historians and commentators are divided: some emphasize Soviet antiracist commitments and comparative achievements relative to capitalist societies, while a robust body of scholarship documents systemic ethnic oppression and racialized policy under Stalin, leading to a consensus that Stalinism produced racist outcomes even where ideology formally denied race as a scientific category ^{[1] [2] [10]}.

8. Conclusion — answering the claim directly

To say “Stalin was never racist” ignores a large and well‑documented record in which Stalinist decisions and state practices enacted ethnic expulsions, Russification, and policies that treated whole peoples as suspect or inferior; while Stalinist ideology publicly condemned racism, the regime’s actions produced racialized hierarchies and mass suffering that scholars equate with ethnic chauvinism or racial politics ^{[3] [8] [2]}.