Citation needed for both.

If you have any follow-up questions for GarbageShoot’s links I would be happy to discuss them + add more. You may be interested to review the shock therapy doctrine as applied to the former USSR during capitalist restoration. People usually talk about it as being directed at Russia, but Ukraine also bore the brunt and had its social safety net dismantled, its industries sold to foreign interests for pennies, etc. It suffered just as much as Russia from this process and this treatment is a big part of the reason that those who were adults before and after, say, adults in the 1970s, believe times were better before. Ukraine has never fully recovered.

Do you have any idea what enforced collectivization was like? Everybody owned nothing, nobody felt the sense of ownership about anything.

This is nonsense. Everyone had personal property. People worked jobs, participated in clubs, did sports, etc.

Party officials were the folks with power, not the “common laborer”.

The two were confluent. The party ran the state and having influence over the state meant joining the party and working through it. They were not divorced, separate things.

If one was educated and energetic, able to build a better life for themselves, that person would be labeled “kulak”, property was taken away, and the person imprisoned or banished.

1. Bullshit.

2. “Able to build a better life” is not very concrete. Perhaps you could share what your source is and examples of what this means.

Happened to my great-great-grandfather.

If you were a child in the 80s (the only way you would have grown up just before capitalist restoration) then this would make your great grandfather someone born around 60-90 years prior, i.e. 1890-1920. Anti-Kulak sentiments were only made relevant in the late 1920s/early 1930s and meant basically nothing after 1960.

Assuming any of this is true, it sounds like you may be describing actual Kulak actions re: private landlordism (which would explain using euphemisms rather than saying what actually happened). Please elaborate on what your great granddather did, particularly if it was during a famine.

I know 2 elderly ladies who were children when their parents got deported to Siberia. Not sure why, back then officials didn’t need much of a reason. The older one cared for their homestead while also trying to go to school. The younger one mostly remembers how much she cried, nothing much else.

I don’t understand how this is a response to millions getting killed by capitalist restoration.

I don’t know the best way to arrange economy. It feels like capitalism isn’t one. But Soviet Union was not something I’d set as an example. Soviet Union was “OK” at best, “nightmare” at worst.

The Soviet Union developed from a semi-feudal regional monarchy to an industrialized global superpower in about 20-30 years, raising millions from serfdom, ending famine, and dramatically increasing quality of life. It did this without the Imperialism used by Western Europe and the US, without slavery. This experience is not what happens to those excluded from the imperial pie, or often, even those who are in imperialist countries but are of the (larger) lower classes. Were it not for the Soviet Union your ancestors would likely have starved, died of treatable disease, or died young. See Sub-Saharan Africa. See how it is intentionally prevented from development and how kt s economies are structured around material exports for which the people never see the profits. They don’t get the healthcare. They don’t get the industry. They don’t get the housing.

You do not have a choice to simply be a capitalist country enjoying the fruits of being on top (achieved at the dear coat to others). That is not how the system works. Your option is to overthrow that system or be dictated to by it and more likely than not when dictated to you will not only be voiceless, you will be dispossed, just like Ukraine was in the 90s, just how most of the world that has not directly confronted capitalism has suffered. Compare the stories and state of India to those of the USSR and China. Ukraine got the India treatment and has now been used as a pawn to fight another capitalist power in Russia.

To be clear I am not saying all of this just to get the point across that capitalism is bad or simply worse than the Soviet System (which I am saying was a fantastic achievement, for all its faults). My real point is that it has never been in the cards for Ukraine to be both capitalist and well-to-do. The prospect for prosperity from the 1900s to the foreseeable future came and went with the USSR. Now, the real, actual situation is a capitalist autocracy pretending to be liberal democracy laden with huge foreign debts due to the capitalist powers using Ukraine as a pawn to poke Russia. This will mean very, very bad things for the common Ukrainians not forced into disability or death through conscription. If Russia doesn’t end up bombing away electricity and clean water and food, the incoming capitalist disposession to “pay the debts” will do something horribly similar, only rather than the infrastructure being gone, it will simply be so expensive compared to the work a person is lucky enough to find that most things a person would want to do will be unachievable. If you spend all your money on electricity and food and renting an apartment you will have none for children or a health emergency. The current trajectory will have Ukraine will experience a continued diaspora, one that actually accelerates, as it becomes all but impossible to have a desirable life without leaving. Excluded from the EU due to poverty, Ukrainians may also find immigration difficult in many places as the rest of Europe experiences a contraction due to the US siphoning off its industries bit by bit via the imposed energy crisis.

I should say that there is room for experimentation in socialist state projects, in how to organize and defend revolutions, but the revolution and control of the state are both absolutely essential to leave the current global political economic system. The USSR was the first project to do so and look at what they accomplished being virtually alone outside of the global anti-colonial movements they supported.