Michael Parenti, roughly, in defense of the Soviet Union

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YSGjwV3TKY

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Communism, I say it without flinching, in Eastern Europe, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, brought land reform, and human services, a dramatic bettering of the living conditions of hundreds of millions of people, on a scale never before, or never since witnessed in human history...

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The problem is that a lot of more moderate regimes also did land reform (without the slaughter), and brought human services and a dramatic bettering of living conditions.

where was anything approaching the Stalinist programme of industrialization done without the aid of child labor; and/or, with a sharply rising rate of literacy?

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we can debate over the exact numbers that you cite -- and Parenti does -- but the number was likely greater during the protracted capitalist process of industrialization.  for a partial documentation, see Capital, Vol. I - The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation and succeeding chapters

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Communism, I say it without flinching, in Eastern Europe, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, brought land reform, and human services, a dramatic bettering of the living conditions of hundreds of millions of people, on a scale never before, or never since witnessed in human history...

We should really teach those misguided North Koreans who are trying to flee from their country, are suffering from hunger or from torture in concentration camps to acknowledge "the dramatic bettering of the living conditions" communism has brought to the country!

Parenti would likely identify the 1972 shift to Juche from Marxism-Leninism as state ideology as the effective end of Communism in North Korea.