Political Memes

so what's the nuance here? While striving for communistic utopia on paper, Stalin's regime is quite fascistic from my perspective.

I don't like to do that, but here's quote from wikipedia:

Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.

Stalin's regime does not correspond to the definition of fascism only in terms of how nationalistic it was, since the USSR was quite multinational, and had an objective to give prosperity to everyone regardless of one's nation, although a number of actions were performed in order to preserve cultural and linguistic uniformity. Supression of Ukrainian poetry (see "Executed Renaissance"), linguistic bans, deportation of Crimean Tatars - those are the examples that i know of, but there were more in other regions.

Fascism is a broad term, and sometimes it's used to refer to literally any authoritarian regime. While i don't quite agree, and think that we should call it fascism only if it's made in Emilia-Romagna region of Italy circa first half of XX century, otherwise it's just a sparkling totalitarism, most people find the modern definition quite handy, and being that pedantic equals to being buzzkill anyways. In other words, i think it's ok to call Stalin a fascist if you're not a history geek (in the latter case i kinda feel your pain tho).