You're right in that it's a pretty big question, or rather several big questions. But at least you're asking these. In truth, I don't think you'll gain much from engaging with Stalinists but let me at least address some of your points.

In lieu of a comprehensive overview of Stalinist state and society, which would require several books, the below will be a quick sketch for each of your questions.

Before I jump in, there's been a huge amount of scholarship on Stalinism over the past three decades. The Stalinist period is typically defined as stretching from the breakdown of the NEP and launch of the First Five Year Plan (1928) to Stalin's death (1953). In practice, most attention has fallen on the pre-war period (1928-39) on the understanding that it was this decade that saw the fundamental foundations of the USSR take shape.

This post will only skim the surface of the period and leave large tracts untouched. For example, they don't touch on the industrial growth or the accompanying collapse in living standards. But, while we'll limit the scope for now, let's be clear that repression on a mass scale was absolutely central to the Stalinist regime. That's not to say that the state relied solely on violence but it was an integral part of what we now call Stalinism.

How democratic were elections in the Soviet Union under Stalin?

The Soviet Union was a dictatorship. Elections did exist but at no point from 1918 onwards did they serve to institutionally pressure or effect change in government or policy. Actual power at a national level was held not in state structures (ie election to the soviets or Supreme Soviet) but by the Communist Party. And, despite pretences, this was in no way a democratic body under Stalin; by the mid-1930s there was, from top to bottom, very limited scope for dissent from the party line.

Nonetheless, elections played an important role as propaganda and mobilisation instruments in Soviet society. /u/Smilin_Dave and /u/kieslowskifan provide some good points here on the nature of Soviet elections and their ultimate impotence.

How was life for independent trade unions, were they even allowed to exist in any fashion?

Independent trade unions didn't exist in the USSR. The Bolsheviks had long had an ambiguous relationship with the unions; from the Revolution onwards they'd formed a central support of the Soviet state but had always retained a degree of autonomy. (This was the background of the infamous trade union controversy of 1921.) During the NEP they were both part of the state and yet acted independently of it - Tomsky, head of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions, was a major political player and member of the Politburo, yet the unions reserved the right to opposed management at a factory level.

This autonomy was sharply clipped with the onset of the Five Year Plans. Tomsky was deposed during the struggle with the Rightists in 1928 and the unions were instructed to 'face toward production'. Hitting production targets was the new holy grail and unions, party cells and factory management were all expected to support this. Striking was made illegal, quality suffered, work was intensified, piece rates continually rose, etc. The picture that comes through is of a steady intensification of labour in the name of 'productivism'. As the war loomed, draconian labour laws were introduced that promised punishment for being late for work or changing jobs without permission.

Unions therefore continued to exist but lost any effective role in representing worker rights against the state.

How often were political prisoners sent off to Gulags? Were they just prisons for the harshest criminals, like some told me?

The first point to make here is the difficulty in categorisation. We have plenty of stats, even if the usual caveats apply, but these can themselves be misleading. For example, what makes a political prisoner political? And when is a criminal actually a criminal? We use these terms because the Soviet police did but these were hardly impartial or consistent in their categorisation. Is someone who protests a lack of bread or is arrested to make up the numbers really a counter-revolutionary? Soviet assignment of such labels was arbitrary and the lines between them blurred.

Nonetheless, however imperfect they are, we do have figures available. The key paper in English is Getty et al's Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years, from which the below are drawn. Keeping in mind the above caveat (eg a 'wrecker' could be fit into several categories below), Table 1 provides a snapshot of the Gulag population in 1940. The percentages varied over the years but it can be seen that even after the Purges, counter-revolutionary prisoners as a category were never a majority of the camp and colony population.

Table 1: Breakdown of Gulag Population on 1 Jan 1940

Category	Population %
Counter-revolutionary offences	33.1
Dangerous crimes	3.6
Other crimes against the admin. order	13.9
Economic crimes	7.3
Crimes against persons	5.2
Crimes against property	12.1
Theft of public property	1.9
Socially harmfully elements	18.9
Violation of passport law	1.3
Military offences	0.7
Other crimes	3.3

But some of the other categories should also give pause for thought. 'Socially harmful elements' was a catch-all term for homeless, homosexuals, beggars, addicts, prostitutes, etc who lived on the margins of Soviet society. They were a prime target for the violence of the Stalin years.

Similarly, there was significant 'flow' through the labour system. The image provided by Solzhenitsyn of bitter camps populated by criminal gangs and old 'politicals' is misleading. The majority of Gulag inmates (57% in 1940) served sentences of less than five years. Vast numbers of people moved through the camps but most - and supposed 'counter-revolutionaries' were not amongst these - served relatively short terms. This doesn't make the camps and colonies less horrible, it just reinforced their central role in Soviet repression during these decades.

What were his policies on the peasantry, and what was his track record with hunger and starvation?

In short, not good on either count. Obtaining grain from the peasantry had long been a problem for the NEP and been central to the intra-party debates of that decade. By the late 1920s Stalin had effectively, if not publicly, shifted to a position of extreme 'primitive socialist accumulation', whereby cheap grain would be extracted from the peasantry to fuel the industrialisation drive. The mechanism for getting peasants to surrender grain at below-market prices was collectivisation: restructuring the peasant world to allow for greater economic and political control over the peasantry. (More details of collective farms here)

The result was an agricultural disaster. Agricultural output across all categories fell in the early 1930s, with the livestock crisis (a 50% decrease in draught power) being particularly severe. Failed harvests gave way to famine and approximately 5-7 million Soviet citizens died of starvation in the early 1930s. These famine deaths were ultimately products of Stalinist agricultural policy and much of the post-Soviet research has situated them in the broader context of Soviet agricultural mismanagement and economic gambling. That is, the degree to which collectivisation created the conditions for famine and how the state reacted to this (ie callously).

The failed harvests of the early 1930s had a major impact on the economy and the population. In economic terms it was essentially a lost decade, with agricultural output not returning to 1928 levels until the post-war years. Soviet agricultural had needed modernisation, all were agreed on that, but the Stalinist option turned out to be incredibly costly, inefficient and chaotic.

Recommended Reading

There's a lot to digest above and, as I say, a mountain of literature to work through. Some general works that I'd recommend, plus specific sources for the above, are below.

As a word of advice however, I'd caution using the below to try to win arguments with Marxist-Leninists. Anyone invested enough that they'll play apologist for Stalin already has a loose grip on history. It's more likely that they'll resort to fellow travellers like Grover Furr than accept mainstream academic consensus.

General Reading

• Mark Edele, Stalinist Society

• Shelia Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism

• Arch J Getty, The Road to Terror

• Alec Nove, Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union

Specific Sources

• RW Davies, The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia Vol 3

• Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialisation

• Arch J Getty, State and Society under Stalin

• Arch J Getty et al, Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years