Now we’re talking…

And to be clear so I don't get dogpiled and dox'd for this later. I don't think that excuses the blood that was shed. I do not think a state has a right to terrorize it's populace into submission, regardless of the ideological motivations for doing so.

No human being has the right to determine if another human being should live or die. That's not power. That's not authority. That's cowardice. Sadly we have ideologies and religions that think otherwise.

In principle I agree with you but the "pressure" you mentioned means my view on this is sort of like Bjarne Stroustrup's take on programming languages: there are political systems that people complain about suppressing dissent & interference in their nascent stages, and ones that nobody lives under.

Just like Stroustrup's formulation, this can become a cover for unnecessary and mistaken excesses, but I don't necessarily think that's inevitable.

I wonder what he would keep and what he would throw away from the current state of his legacy

I'd like to see that argument. Russia pre-WWII and Mao's China don't seem to me to have much capitalist pressure against them, yet Stalin and Mao killed millions. Stalin's purges were internal, against people who were on his bad side. Now, you could say that maybe Western spies agitated, but there's no way that Western agitation would account for millions of people. Furthermore, in 1930, the Communist system was widely seen as successful, since initial food production in the USSR was strongly up. Mao's deaths were incompetence (famine: killing sparrows, resulting in sparrows not eating insects the next year; famine: misallocation of resources, causing starvation in Sichuan when enough food existed elsewhere; Cultural Revolution: Mao's reaction to losing his grip on power). I think China was so poor that it realistically did not interact with the rest of the world, but in WWII, the US actually helped the Communists.

Every other Communist state that I am aware of also killed millions in internal purges: Cambodia and N. Korea, notably. I'm actually not sure what happened with Vietnam and Cuba. I'm not sure if contemporary Venezuela counts as Communist, but I am under the impression that there was killing or at least persecution of internal political enemies. I don't see how US sanctions have anything to do with how one treats political enemies.

I guess Eastern Europe might be an exception, but I think that is because Communist states were imposed with external force, not revolution from within, and the population mostly capitulated. However, I believe that political opposition was still likely to be deadly.

Since Communist states seem to be highly correlated with killing internal enemies, it seems like a feature of the system, not a response to external pressure, particularly since the largest two did not have serious external pressure at the time.