Long accepted historical facts are misinformation. Wikipedia is imperialist propaganda. Stalin was a good guy. Don’t you dare mention that he had defectors who tried to warn him about Hitler’s invasion executed for their trouble. That’s an inconvenient historical fact, so it’s fake news.
Yeah I don’t mean that Stalin’s purges are what got them to space. The OP was using “the space age” as a stand in for modernization.
Now at risk of doing leg work on their behalf: I think tankies often get confused about what they’re arguing for, and usually/initially don’t even believe it was “worth killing millions,” but rather they believe that millions were bound to die anyway just because the economy was in such rough shape. It takes a situation like that for communist revolution to spring up.
Tankies then lose sight of why they’re even defending people like Stalin in the first place, and get caught up in the arguments presented by other people, so they forget to present this idea. This level of person-worship is also a mistake in and of itself, because if they didn’t cling to the idea of a king, maybe they’d be able to defend his actions with more clarity