Great! You’ll probably fly through Blackshirts and Reds, it’s a quick read.

My not-very-developed perspective is: When I think of capitalism as a ‘metastable’, I think that this meta-stability is achieved by allocating some resources to keep the masses just comfortable enough to remain somewhat pacific and complacent. It is not essential to achieve this globally, but it is somewhat important locally. So those who have accumulated more can simply apply the more violent and extractive practices abroad while things locally OK.

Not to overload you, but this is 100% correct. This process is known to Marxists as Imperialism, in the Global North, concessions are often made in order to pacify the proletariat using the spoils expropriated from the Global South, a complicated process stabilized through bodies like the IMF, NATO, and US overseas millitary presense. Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is the best text outlining how this process came to be from Capitalism specifically (colonialism and other forms of Imperialism of course predate Capitalism). I also recommend Alice Malone’s Concessions for how thst worked.

The consequence of Imperialism is that, rather than cropping up in the most developed countries like Marx initially predicted, Socialist Revolution occurs first in the Global South. That’s why a lot of rapid industrialization and millitarization to protect from outside threats has solidified in every surviving Socialist state.

Your holdouts regarding revolution, however, take a much longer time to study. Revolutionary strategy and tactics, historical applications, and more is more of a deep topic. I could simply link Lenin’s The State and Revolution as well as an abridged version of Lenin’s What is to be Done? but that’s an unsatisfying answer without familiarizing yourself with the history of Socialist struggles and victories, from a proletarian point of view, and not bourgeois. After you read Blackshirts and Reds, I can make other recommendations, in absence of that I will link Blowback, a podcast on US Imperialism and taking a sympathetic view of the victims of it, and the why behind the actions on all sides of, say, the Iraq War or Cuban Missile Crisis.

Regarding your section on not knowing if events are true, or if they are being justified, etc, this unfortunately as you already hinted is clouded in decades of Red Scare misinformation. Usually those upholding Actually Existing Socialism are less likely to outright fabricate information, but that does exist to a degree, usually among supporters of Gonzalo and Pol Pot (and these people usually have absurd claims about AES, and are nowhere to be found among Marxist-Leninist orgs, usually small isolated groups). There is no one-size fits all answer, each event, figure, etc has a different answer. Some may distort the quantities, some may distort the qualities, some may distort both. There’s no “one indisputable history of Socialism” I can recommend that covers all the countries and figures you listed, so if after finishing Blackshirts and Reds you have a specific country or figure you’d like to delve into, I can do my best to help. I’ll also plug Zhenli’s Why do Marxists Fail to Bring the “Worker’s Paradise?” as an example of a Marxist critique of existing Socialism, in a manner that still ends up pro-Socialism and upholds existing Socialism.

And no worries! Sorry that the historical answer isn’t very satisfying, I’m not trying to dodge it so much as ask that you specify further if you want an answer that does such a question any kind of due justice. The history of Socialism is, as I said, hotly debated and frequently distorted heavily, Blackshirts and Reds is going to be a much better intro and give you good points to jump into other areas. Personally, I recommend starting with Cuba, as it’s usually easier to grasp historically, but the USSR and PRC are the two largest examples in history we can look to if you want to dive into the deep end.

Additionally, the website Red Sails (which I have linked throughout this conversation) often has speeches and interviews from some of these figures, and modern analysis of some of these countries. This can help you found a more “multi-sided” understanding, rather than a one-sided one as presented in “normal,” presumably western society. My favorite description of Red Sails is in the footnotes on their Mission Statement:

Red Sails has been described as “Marxists.org Criterion Collection with Home Videos mixed in” and “woke ML-MZT.”

Hope that helps!