They might say things like “triage,” “greater good,” and “ends justify the means”;
It's almost like they will say anything to justify the status quo - perfectly in line with all those seeking to enforce it.
Stalin got things done,
Only if you believe "got things done" includes almost handing the Soviet Union over to the nazis through his criminal mismanagement of the Red Army and/or forcing a murderously hamfisted, top-down industrialization program on the working class that the actual soviet councils would have achieved in a far, far more efficient manner without massive amounts of bloodshed and famine if the Bolsheviks hadn't hijacked them and turned them into glorified rubberstamping bureucracies in their bloody counter-revolution back in the early 20s.
You should be careful of "Great Man" fallacies. They are usually perfectly ahistorical. Whatever the Soviet Union achieved, it didn't achieve them because of Joseph Stalin - it achieved them in spite of him.