There is a common back-and-forth where the outgroup points out toxic people on the your side doing bad things, and your first impulse is to defend them, but your second impulse is to point out that these bad people are not typical of the ingroup.
The outgroup then clarifies: These people are what’s wrong with ingroup, because these shitty people are a symptom of all the shittyness, and suddenly you have to defend them and say they are not so bad after all.
Okay, but while the average Soviet citizen was not Stalin, the USSR having Stalins/etc was in part the product of its ideology.
