without the USSR, Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals would still be a fascist empire under the reign of Hitler’s moronic children and most minorities would have been exterminated. in 2021 63% of Russians, and 84% of those under 55 (that is, those who actually lived under it) regretted the dissolution of the USSR. the USSR was a counterbalancing force for global imperialism and colonialism and helped many countries on the road to independence from the inbred monarchies of Europe, and when the USSR declined in the 1980s and fell soon after, the pressure on the global bourgeoisie mostly evaporated, meaning they could worsen conditions for the working class mostly without consequence as they had no major alternative to look on to, leading to the current desperate conditions for many workers in the imperial core - not to mention the record debt levels of peripheral countries as they are exploited by the United States. the fall of the USSR was an utter disaster for eastern Europe and Russia, leading to a massive decline in conditions for workers, massive amounts of poverty, a reduction in the life expectancy, and child prostitution as people struggled to survive - thus proving that the shift from socialism to capitalism was a huge mistake for the working class.
It’s also unfalsifiable (unless you can read people’s minds) and ignores that severe drop in material conditions that came in the wake of the USSR’s dissolution.
I saw a documentary about Gogol Bordello recently which made me so sad because I actually loved their “Gypsy punk” pan-immigrant-experience punk shtick but he was like “we fled communism, in 1994” and like fuck man you were literally fleeing capitalism.
He also included a scene where he performed a song with Ukrainian soldiers who just happened to have clarinets and accordions ready for the occasion, and another scene where he played to Ukrainian “gypsys” at a special refugee center just for “Gypsy’s”, itself a disconcerting fact, and in this scene I noticed they were lighting the scene with car lights. The car lights pointing directly into the face of the refugees who were watching him play guitar, you could even see them squinting at the pain of it but they kept watching and clapping anyway for some reason and like holy fucking shit he’s dead to me now.
If you told this story with all of its absurd details but changed some of the proper nouns, people would eat it up as an example of the evil communist regime’s buffoonish propaganda.
“Thats just because they miss being an empire!!! English people miss the British Empire too!”
While I don’t think we need to question their motives anyway, simply looking at the material realities of Russia and other former SSRs really does explain why people would feel that way.
Look at any of the data regarding economic output, development, quality of life, etc in the former USSR in the 1980s and then the years after. Without fail, you will see a steadily-increasing number throughout the 80s. Then, shortly before or right after the fall of the USSR, you can see things starting to trend down. This downward trend continues through the 90s to the point where things are significantly worse than they were in the 80s under communism - not just “low growth”, but actual declines. Then things do eventually start to turn around, and most former SSRs (notably, not Ukraine even pre-war) eventually just get back to their communism numbers in aggregate. Though it needs to be pointed out that these aggregate measures don’t reflect economic distribution within the population, so for the average Russian worker for example, it’s highly likely they are no better off now than they were in 1989 materially. And it all came at the cost of incredible misery, destruction of society, and 2-3 million excess deaths in the period. Hell, even by just the aggregate economic measures, had the USSR just continued on and delivered fairly mediocre growth, Russia and most other SSRs would probably be better off today anyway.
Even if I wasn’t a communist, I cannot fathom how anyone (at least who isn’t some petite boug scum) who remembers the USSR wouldn’t rather be living under it versus what they have now.
The people hated the fall of the USSR and what happened in the aftermath, to the point that various socialist, communist, and socdem parties were set to take over the goverment in the mid-90s. But then Boris Yeltsin - with help from Bill Clinton and the US - orchestrated things so that could not happen and consolidated power within the presidency. A move that certainly did not create any unintended consequences down the line.
Literally every major Soviet historian of any standing aside from charlatans like Applebaum or Conquest agree the Soviet Union took a collapsed society of illiterate feudal peasants and transformed them into a literate industrial superpower with skyrocketing standards of living
Sorry they didn’t create utopia on earth while dealing with one genocidal capitalist army after another, I’d like to see what US living standards look like after losing 27 million people and 1/3rd of the industrial and agricultural land destroyed, which is what the Soviets were dealing with after WW2
Applebaum is not a historian, FYI. She is a journalist with no training or education in academic historical studies. Of course she loves to tout that she’s a “historian”, but it’s just not true and even bourgeois historians like Kotkin love to dunk on her.
Her book on the famine just involved her being a stenographer for various Ukrainian neo-Nazi historians, for example.
Correct, and it’s never even been bombed, its just like this. This the society (or lack thereof) that our capitalists chose to build during their brief window of de facto world domination
This the society (or lack thereof) that our capitalists chose to build
That’s such a horrifying truth. Total world domination, trillions of dollars of wealth and all for a world where even people who are doing well can’t buy a house and is headed for environmental disaster
If your grand uncles aren’t completely made up, and if they were actually convicted of some shit in the USSR, it was probably completely heinous. It’s a safe bet. By extension, you would be a terrible person for defending them. If they are completely made up then you’re a terrible person for obvious reasons.
The big three in the fight against fascism were Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt.
The only one who didn’t enrich his own family through being in power was Stalin.
The gulag system wasn’t pretty but the death rate, excluding WW2 famine years, is about the same as the modern US prison system. I would agree even that is too harsh and they could have been kinder but the error you make is to believe the massively repeated but factually untrue claim that it was equivalent to the Nazi concentration camps. It wasn’t that bad, it was as bad as modern US labor prison farms. Believing it was another kind of Nazi state concentration camp system is tantamount to Holocaust denial.
The USSR simply wasn’t the caricature that over a century of propaganda has convinced you it was. You need to realize that for a century the USSR was the enemy so the elites in the west in class-based institutions such as Harvard spent a century talking about how awful it was.
Of course the people who stood the most to lose were convinced it was awful and importantly they held the power in the west to convince those who stood the most to gain that it was awful.
If you look at the facts, the USSR took a barely even industrializing economy where half the people were living either as de facto serfs or in urban poverty and just two generations later everyone had a middle-income job, half the population had not just a city apartment but also a country cottage, and the biggest problem people complained about was the insufficient quantity of televisions to satisfy consumer demand. What a fucking horrible system.
It was also far more democratic than you’ve been led to believe with power devolved to a local level that allowed local communities to largely run their own affairs via workers councils and democratic influence working from the bottom up with those workers councils exercising control over the level above, and that level upon the next highest etc.
Bottom-up democracy while you’re used to seeing top-down democracy which is enough of a difference for you to simply see a dictatorship because you’ve never bothered to actually read for yourself except for the class-serving accounts that elites in Harvard want to present to you.
Refreshing to see someone here write an actual argument instead of hurdling insults.
I agree, you can’t compare gulags to the Nazi concentration camps. In 2 days, some 21 thousand Estonians were taken to gulags in Siberia, which was roughly 3% of Estonia’s then population. Around 3 thousand of them perished on those camps before they started letting people return home in '56. However, the fact that it was arguably less deadly than the holocaust, does not make it any more acceptable, it was not a good thing, it was cruelty, so many innocent people.
I agree with you on some level, the soviet union was not all bad, there were good things as well, such as the availability of housing. My grandma actually lived (until recently due to health issues) in one of the apartments she got in the soviet union because she was a crane operator like my uncle and helped build Annelinn.
I appreciate the politeness and take that as a signal of good faith so I’ll respond to you with good faith too.
The problem with the “horrible gulags, all those innocent nationalists imprisoned after WW2” thing is that
It’s called the “double genocide” theory which is an emotional argument trying to tie the German atrocities with the Soviet system in an emotional way.
Estonia was not simply occupied by the Nazis, it was occupied so it’s not the same as Hungary but it wasn’t like Poland either. There were many collaborators. Given the scale probably there was some injustice but to pretend the post-WW2 cleaning up after fascism wasn’t part of that is also denial. It’s wrong to pretend they were simply nationalists or that they were being forced to participate in the Holocaust of Jews and Slavs against their will. A great number actively participated and part of the problem with this nationalist victim narrative you’re embracing is that it seeks to obscure and deny or at least forget that fact and pretend they were nothing more than victims, innocents. Probably some were, it was rough justice in a chaotic time, but collaborating with the Nazis by Estonians wasn’t forced and was often enthusiastic. Denying that is also Holocaust denial.
Going case by individual case probably you’ll find some injustice but 3% being collaborators in need of processing and denazification is entirely believable. If only the west had been that thorough in denazifying west Germany.
Nah comrade, really bad argument imo. People’s lives don’t stop mattering just because they’re near some larger tragedy. Each and every one of those 3000 peoples’ existence has the same weight as your own. It’s impossible to comprehend when you read about an unbelievable number of people dying but it’s true. If there are reasons they died then focus on those but saying “3000 dead is nothing” is just honestly really fucking thoughtless.
My point was in a proper analysis of this situation you dont blame the people being genocided for actions that are a response to people enacting a genocide on there own people, such as in the case we’re talking about where the soviets sent people who where enthusiastically selling out there neighbours to be transported to german ovens and gas chambers en masse; when such social conditions are enacted by the Germans and there collabartors there is no response that doesnt end in innocent people dying in some way.
The USSR did not create these conditions or social reality, I wont blame them for not making the perfect choices given that.
Thats why 3000 dead in this specific context is nothing; give your sympathy to the hundreds of thousands of people who died in German, Polish and Ukranian concentration camps before the USSR sent anyone away and your scorn for the people who put the USSR into this situation.
Okay so yeah exactly what I said, focus on the reasons for them dying and not discounting 3000 lives as nothing then talking about Napoleon losing half his army (?)
If your point of conparison is utopia – no one is harmed by any decision, ever – even one broken family is an atrocity.
If your point of conparison is peer states, or what could have been reasonably done under the real-life circumstances, then yeah, 3000 people pales in conparison to the overall human cost of WWII.
Refreshing to see someone here write an actual argument instead of hurdling insults.
Shut the fuck up, you aggrieved piece of shit. This is what they were responding to:
I’m a leftist, but I dont understand why people keep dickriding the soviet union, people were poor and a lot of people were killed and sent to Siberia, like my grand uncles. Most people who praise the soviet union never lived it.
Stop defending a fake socialist state that is long gone, and work towards a better future according to your ideologies!
i.e., low-effort flaming, and you talk like it’s unthinkable people would respond in kind. Do you often make a habit of lecturing strangers on politeness after you walk up and spit on them?
In the eyes of liberal historiographers, every criminal in the USSR, every fascist collaborator, every petty-bourgeois tyrant becomes a victimized innocent who Stalin personally killed because he had a Tourette Syndrome where his tics were murder and kidnapping. There is no other reason anyone could possibly be put by the government in a place they wouldn’t like to be in the context of a civil war or a genocidal invasion.
Go fuck yourself, go back to masturbating about syndicates and, on the off-off chance that you succeed, prepare to have ten million other shitheads like you declare that you aren’t a real socialist because anticommunists told them you aren’t.
Most people praise the Soviet Union never lived in it because the vast, vast majority of people who commented on it never lived in it. Most people who attack it never lived in it by the same token. However, most of the people who lived in it for any meaningful length of time praise it, as survey after survey produces (see other responses in this thread).
21 thousand Estonians were taken to gulags in Siberia
You can’t criticize this without asking “well why were they sent away?” It’s like criticizing anyone else who’s been imprisoned without asking “well what did they do?”
There were (and are) fascist sympathizers in Estonia. Fascist sympathizers all over Europe worked directly with the Nazis. What would you have done with those sympathizers if fascists declared a genocidal war on the socialist state you’re in charge of? Did the WWII-era USSR have the resources to do your better plan?
How do you feel about the fact that after the financial crisis in 2009 your shitty little ethnostate sacrificed the pensions of Estonians to cover the losses of Swedish banks?
The pure (libertarian) socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.
Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
Bro if you deny that 72 trillion sperms were genocided personally by Stalin while he stroked a white cat saying “gentlemen… to evil!” then you’re a tankie.
Liberals cannot ever engage with us about our support of various projects without inserting “dickriding” or “dick sucking” or other various pejorative attacks with homophobic/misogynistic connotations. It’s like their brain short-circuits that someone could have a different view of these “evil dictatorships” than they have been taught their whole lives, so they just assume we worship the evil monster in their head instead of having a completely different view of it than them
You should question that absurd death count in the OP. Even the Black Book of Communism “only” claims about 20 million dead in the Soviet Union, and some of the authors have later distanced themselves from the book because it’s not accurate.
The death count is laughably, provably false. So I’ll stick to talking about repression. Or rather, I’ll let Moshe Lewin - one of the most pre-eminent Sovietologists of the last few decades - do the talking. From *The Soviet Century:
Laws against political critics, targeted at ‘especially dangerous crimes against the state’, achieved notoriety during the Cold War when the phenomenon of dissidence emerged. Criminal prosecution of it was based on the following set of articles:
Article 64: flight abroad or refusal to return to the USSR – act of treason.
Article 70: anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.
Article 72: activity by organized groups leading to especially dangerous crimes against the state and participation in anti-Soviet organizations.
Article 142: violation of the law on the separation of Church and state, including in education, punishable by a year’s imprisonment or a fine of up to 50 roubles. In the event of a repeat offence, the maximum sentence was three years’ imprisonment.
Article 190: the circulation or composition of texts defaming the Soviet state and its social system (up to three years’ imprisonment or one year’s mandatory labour, or a minimum fine of 100 roubles).
Article 227: infringement of citizens’ rights under the guise of religious ceremonies (e.g. ‘forced’ baptism), punishable by three-five years’ imprisonment or exile, with or without confiscation of property. Active participation in a group, or active propaganda in favour of committing such acts, could mean up to three years’ imprisonment or exile, or a year’s mandatory labour. Note that if the acts and individuals pursued presented no danger to society, methods of social pressure were applied instead.6
Most cases of a political character were brought for ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’, ‘organizational activities’, defamation of the state, or (in lesser numbers) violation of the law on separation of Church and state. According to the KGB, 8,124 trials were held for ‘anti-Soviet manifestations’ during the Khrushchev–Brezhnev–Chernenko periods (1957–85), most of them on the basis of the articles targeting anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda and the deliberate circulation of calumnies against the state – the two most widely used articles.7
The actual number of people proceeded against (including by way of prophylaxis) does not in itself alter the fact that the Soviet system was politically retrograde, allowing its opponents’ propaganda to score points. The regime possessed repulsive features that cost it dear in the international arena. But the scope of the repression we are dealing with for the post-Stalinist period – an average of 312 cases a year for twenty-six years for the two main political crimes (and in some cases, reduction or quashing of sentences by a higher court) – constitutes not merely a statistic, but an index: this was no longer Stalinism and it does not warrant description of the USSR as the ‘Evil Empire’, which was common in the West. Apocalyptic invective of this sort makes the Soviet Union seem rather innocent by comparison.
What Lewin is pointing out here is that the total number of people brought to trial (not convicted, and plenty that were sentenced had those sentences overturned) for “political” crimes, per the KGB’s own records from the Soviet archives, amounts to a little over 300 per year. In a nation of over 200 million people. That is such an incredibly small number objectively, but even moreso when compared to Westerner’s beliefs that from 1917 through 1991, the USSR was just one big gulag and anyone who dared make fun of Brezhnev’s eyebrows would be locked away for life. In that same section Lewin highlights that plenty more people were subject to prophylaxis (i.e. dissidents getting a talking-to and being told to cut it out, and it stopped there)… but to be outraged over that or the 312 per year trials frankly assumes most of those people didn’t deserve it. But that’s not true either. It’s not like the USSR had any reason to go after randos and there’s no evidence (at least post-Stalin) that USSR went after anyone but genuine threats. Wreckers get wrecked, sorry not sorry, I support the USSR going after wreckers when they are in a life-and-death struggle with a West that was really out to get them.
Because most of the shit you just said are straight up lies. Socialism turned a war torn backwards feudal country into a spacefaring world power. People’s lives improved immensely (unless they were either bourgeois or some kind of nazi collaborator)
Legend says that Stalin aimlessly filled up the prisons and gulags to the point where the streets were essentially empty. Those in prison? Shot dead. After this was done, he sat in a back room, twirled his mustache and laughed maniacally while the communism death toll counter went to work. Further, anyone seen on the street moving was shot on command like the red light green light game in squid game—that’s unfortunately what communism does and why we must fight for freedom and democracy. Note how I didn’t even mention anything about the large spoon he had built to steal all of the grain. There’s not enough time in the world to list the atrocities, but if you do enough research, you’ll be able to find the truth.
You seriously still think communism and the act of distributing resources equally isn’t evil?
work towards a better future according to your ideologies!
My ideology calls for a full restoration of the Soviet Union, the creation of a Soviet America, the creation of the Soviet equivalent for each country, and ensuring every backwards reactionary dipshit gets sent to a reeducation school so they can simultaneously learn technical and life skills they need or want to have a successful and fulfilling life while getting all their anti-communist brainworms pulled out of their skulls.
It would be interesting to know what they were charged with, I regret not getting a more detailed understanding of my grandfather’s experiences while he was alive.
The Stalinist penal system can be profitably studied with the same sociological tools we use to analyze penal structures elsewhere. It contained large numbers of common criminals serving relatively short sentences, many of whom were released each year and replaced by newly convicted persons. It included a wide variety of sanctions, including non-custodial ones. For most of those drawn into it, it was in fact a penal system: a particularly harsh, cruel, and arbitrary one, to be sure, but not necessarily a one-way ticket to oblivion for the majority of inmates.
I’m not sure which part of This Soviet World I should extract and send in this comment. I guess I’ll go for the gulags, chapter 14 in the book. But please! PLEASE! And I know you’re a lib, but can you do me this favour: read it, it is a really really good book. It will take a few hours, but it’s an easy read. I made an EPUB of it (there is also a link to a PDF scan if you would rather use that).
quotes
Dr. Mary Stevens Callcott, the American penologist who has studied prisons all over the world and who has had the unique experience of visiting the larger part of the Soviet camps, including those for the worst—and for political—offenders, has commented both in her book Soviet justice[1] and in conversations with me personally, on the “amazingly normal” life that differentiates these camps from prisons in any other part of the world.
She notes the freedom of movement over large areas of territory, the very small amount of guarding, the work done under normal conditions—seven hours for ordinary labor to ten for men whose tasks, such as driving a truck, permitted frequent rests during work. She could find no speed-up; laws of labor protection operated as in factories. Wages were the same as those outside, with deductions for living expenses; all above this could be sent by the prisoner to his family, saved or spent as he chose. “No uniforms with their psychological implications, no physical abuse; isolation only in extreme instances. Privileges and special rewards replace the system of special penalties.” Among these special rewards are the two weeks’ vacation in which the prisoner may leave the camp, and the opportunities given for his family not only to visit him but even to live with him for extended periods. Normal human association goes on; men and women meet and may even marry while serving sentence, in which case they are given separate quarters.
What most impressed Dr. Callcott, however, was the type of men in charge of these camps, and the relation they had to the prisoners. She tells of going through the Moscow-Volga Canal camp with its director. Prisoners hailed him with obvious pleasure and informality. A girl rushed up to detain him by seizing the belt of his uniform lest he get away before she could tell him something. A teacher whose term was about to expire expressed a wish to stay on and work under him. There were only five officials in the central administration office of this camp of many thousand prisoners; all the work, including most of the guarding, was done by the convicted men themselves. “In fact,” said Dr. Callcott, “I could never see what kept men in this camp unless they wanted to stay there. No convicts I have known would have any difficulty if they wanted to break away.” Both prisoners and officials, of whom Dr. Callcott asked this question—she talked with prisoners freely without the presence of officials—replied they didn’t run away because if they did, “nobody in my working gang would speak to me when I came back. They would say I disgraced them.” There are, however, a certain number of incorrigibles who run away repeatedly, and these are given somewhat closer guarding for a time. Political prisoners, she noted, were treated like everyone else, except that those who had been persistent and dangerous in their attacks on the government were sent further away from the possibility of connection with their past associates. In all her conversations with these “politicals,” she was unable to find one who had been sentenced merely for expressing anti-Soviet views. All were charged with definite action against the government.
“I did everything I could to destroy this government,” one such man frankly told her, “sabotage of the most serious kind. But the way they have treated me here has convinced me that they are right.”
Another prisoner, who had been in Sing Sing, San Quentin, as well as in jails of England, Spain and Germany, before he was picked up by the Soviets for grand larceny, had been reclaimed by the Baltic-White Sea Canal. He had done a bit of engineering in his youth, and was promptly given a chance to work at this specialty. He won a medal, pursued his studies further, and was doing brilliant work on the Moscow-Volga Canal when Dr. Callcott met him. To her query about his reformation he replied:
“In the other countries they treated me like a prisoner, clapped me in jail and taught me my place. Here they clapped me on the back and said ‘What can we do to make you into a useful citizen?’” Dr. Callcott conversed with many men now high in Soviet industry who had previously been reclaimed by the labor camps. Nothing in their attitude or that of those about them showed any stigma remaining from their prison life. “Of course, when it’s over, it’s forgotten,” one of them said to her. “That,” says Dr. Callcott, “is real restoration.”
[1] This book sounded interesting, so I am actually in the process of making an EPUB of it. If I were done with it, I might have chosen to throw it at you.
it looks like the cossack oseledet. maybe they’re meant to be cossack mercenaries who were paid by the tsar to do 1910s style police brutality on Jews living in The Pale of Settlement or something. Those are the kind of people to cry about Communism.
Removed by mod
without the USSR, Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals would still be a fascist empire under the reign of Hitler’s moronic children and most minorities would have been exterminated. in 2021 63% of Russians, and 84% of those under 55 (that is, those who actually lived under it) regretted the dissolution of the USSR. the USSR was a counterbalancing force for global imperialism and colonialism and helped many countries on the road to independence from the inbred monarchies of Europe, and when the USSR declined in the 1980s and fell soon after, the pressure on the global bourgeoisie mostly evaporated, meaning they could worsen conditions for the working class mostly without consequence as they had no major alternative to look on to, leading to the current desperate conditions for many workers in the imperial core - not to mention the record debt levels of peripheral countries as they are exploited by the United States. the fall of the USSR was an utter disaster for eastern Europe and Russia, leading to a massive decline in conditions for workers, massive amounts of poverty, a reduction in the life expectancy, and child prostitution as people struggled to survive - thus proving that the shift from socialism to capitalism was a huge mistake for the working class.
so shut the fuck up, you demented fucking weasel. if your grand uncles were murdered in Siberia, then I will Fortnite dance over their graves because they were probably reactionary dipshits. it’s statistically unlikely that they were though, as the gulags have been propagandized by the West to appear worse by several orders of magnitude than they actually were according to the real historical data we possess (and not works of fiction by dipshits) it wasn’t a “fake socialist state”, you’re a fake fucking leftist. go join your jack-booted, swastika-tattoo’d buddies in eastern Europe that you love so much who are destroying their countries with nationalistic fascism, and get the fuck out of the Left.
Here, ill do op’s reply for them
“Thats just because they miss being an empire!!! English people miss the British Empire too!”
This is of course, chauvinistic and reductive, but its the reponse ive seen.
It’s also unfalsifiable (unless you can read people’s minds) and ignores that severe drop in material conditions that came in the wake of the USSR’s dissolution.
I saw a documentary about Gogol Bordello recently which made me so sad because I actually loved their “Gypsy punk” pan-immigrant-experience punk shtick but he was like “we fled communism, in 1994” and like fuck man you were literally fleeing capitalism.
He also included a scene where he performed a song with Ukrainian soldiers who just happened to have clarinets and accordions ready for the occasion, and another scene where he played to Ukrainian “gypsys” at a special refugee center just for “Gypsy’s”, itself a disconcerting fact, and in this scene I noticed they were lighting the scene with car lights. The car lights pointing directly into the face of the refugees who were watching him play guitar, you could even see them squinting at the pain of it but they kept watching and clapping anyway for some reason and like holy fucking shit he’s dead to me now.
If you told this story with all of its absurd details but changed some of the proper nouns, people would eat it up as an example of the evil communist regime’s buffoonish propaganda.
While I don’t think we need to question their motives anyway, simply looking at the material realities of Russia and other former SSRs really does explain why people would feel that way.
Look at any of the data regarding economic output, development, quality of life, etc in the former USSR in the 1980s and then the years after. Without fail, you will see a steadily-increasing number throughout the 80s. Then, shortly before or right after the fall of the USSR, you can see things starting to trend down. This downward trend continues through the 90s to the point where things are significantly worse than they were in the 80s under communism - not just “low growth”, but actual declines. Then things do eventually start to turn around, and most former SSRs (notably, not Ukraine even pre-war) eventually just get back to their communism numbers in aggregate. Though it needs to be pointed out that these aggregate measures don’t reflect economic distribution within the population, so for the average Russian worker for example, it’s highly likely they are no better off now than they were in 1989 materially. And it all came at the cost of incredible misery, destruction of society, and 2-3 million excess deaths in the period. Hell, even by just the aggregate economic measures, had the USSR just continued on and delivered fairly mediocre growth, Russia and most other SSRs would probably be better off today anyway.
Even if I wasn’t a communist, I cannot fathom how anyone (at least who isn’t some petite boug scum) who remembers the USSR wouldn’t rather be living under it versus what they have now.
The people hated the fall of the USSR and what happened in the aftermath, to the point that various socialist, communist, and socdem parties were set to take over the goverment in the mid-90s. But then Boris Yeltsin - with help from Bill Clinton and the US - orchestrated things so that could not happen and consolidated power within the presidency. A move that certainly did not create any unintended consequences down the line.
Literally every major Soviet historian of any standing aside from charlatans like Applebaum or Conquest agree the Soviet Union took a collapsed society of illiterate feudal peasants and transformed them into a literate industrial superpower with skyrocketing standards of living
Sorry they didn’t create utopia on earth while dealing with one genocidal capitalist army after another, I’d like to see what US living standards look like after losing 27 million people and 1/3rd of the industrial and agricultural land destroyed, which is what the Soviets were dealing with after WW2
Applebaum is not a historian, FYI. She is a journalist with no training or education in academic historical studies. Of course she loves to tout that she’s a “historian”, but it’s just not true and even bourgeois historians like Kotkin love to dunk on her.
Her book on the famine just involved her being a stenographer for various Ukrainian neo-Nazi historians, for example.
I consider the united states a shithole tbh
You want a cookie or somethin?
Correct, and it’s never even been bombed, its just like this. This the society (or lack thereof) that our capitalists chose to build during their brief window of de facto world domination
That’s such a horrifying truth. Total world domination, trillions of dollars of wealth and all for a world where even people who are doing well can’t buy a house and is headed for environmental disaster
not enough evidently if you think USSR is anywhere comparable to the barbaric genocidal monstrosity you sit astride
Do you have an example of a state worth even critical support?
Your grand uncles probably deserved worse and you probably do too
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Not much how bout you
If your grand uncles aren’t completely made up, and if they were actually convicted of some shit in the USSR, it was probably completely heinous. It’s a safe bet. By extension, you would be a terrible person for defending them. If they are completely made up then you’re a terrible person for obvious reasons.
Either way, please report to the pit
What’s your connection to the USSR, why do you keep defending it? Did you live a luxurious life in the Soviet Union?
What’s your connection to the USSR, why do you keep attacking it? Were you mistreated in the USSR?
The big three in the fight against fascism were Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt.
The only one who didn’t enrich his own family through being in power was Stalin.
The gulag system wasn’t pretty but the death rate, excluding WW2 famine years, is about the same as the modern US prison system. I would agree even that is too harsh and they could have been kinder but the error you make is to believe the massively repeated but factually untrue claim that it was equivalent to the Nazi concentration camps. It wasn’t that bad, it was as bad as modern US labor prison farms. Believing it was another kind of Nazi state concentration camp system is tantamount to Holocaust denial.
The USSR simply wasn’t the caricature that over a century of propaganda has convinced you it was. You need to realize that for a century the USSR was the enemy so the elites in the west in class-based institutions such as Harvard spent a century talking about how awful it was.
Of course the people who stood the most to lose were convinced it was awful and importantly they held the power in the west to convince those who stood the most to gain that it was awful.
If you look at the facts, the USSR took a barely even industrializing economy where half the people were living either as de facto serfs or in urban poverty and just two generations later everyone had a middle-income job, half the population had not just a city apartment but also a country cottage, and the biggest problem people complained about was the insufficient quantity of televisions to satisfy consumer demand. What a fucking horrible system.
It was also far more democratic than you’ve been led to believe with power devolved to a local level that allowed local communities to largely run their own affairs via workers councils and democratic influence working from the bottom up with those workers councils exercising control over the level above, and that level upon the next highest etc.
Bottom-up democracy while you’re used to seeing top-down democracy which is enough of a difference for you to simply see a dictatorship because you’ve never bothered to actually read for yourself except for the class-serving accounts that elites in Harvard want to present to you.
Refreshing to see someone here write an actual argument instead of hurdling insults.
I agree, you can’t compare gulags to the Nazi concentration camps. In 2 days, some 21 thousand Estonians were taken to gulags in Siberia, which was roughly 3% of Estonia’s then population. Around 3 thousand of them perished on those camps before they started letting people return home in '56. However, the fact that it was arguably less deadly than the holocaust, does not make it any more acceptable, it was not a good thing, it was cruelty, so many innocent people.
I agree with you on some level, the soviet union was not all bad, there were good things as well, such as the availability of housing. My grandma actually lived (until recently due to health issues) in one of the apartments she got in the soviet union because she was a crane operator like my uncle and helped build Annelinn.
I appreciate the politeness and take that as a signal of good faith so I’ll respond to you with good faith too.
The problem with the “horrible gulags, all those innocent nationalists imprisoned after WW2” thing is that
Going case by individual case probably you’ll find some injustice but 3% being collaborators in need of processing and denazification is entirely believable. If only the west had been that thorough in denazifying west Germany.
In the grand scheme of things three thousand dead is nothing. Napeleon lost half his army simply retreating from his failed invasion of Russia.
Would those 3 thousand people still be alive if the Nazis didnt try to genocide Russia? Of course they would, blame the right people.
Nah comrade, really bad argument imo. People’s lives don’t stop mattering just because they’re near some larger tragedy. Each and every one of those 3000 peoples’ existence has the same weight as your own. It’s impossible to comprehend when you read about an unbelievable number of people dying but it’s true. If there are reasons they died then focus on those but saying “3000 dead is nothing” is just honestly really fucking thoughtless.
My point was in a proper analysis of this situation you dont blame the people being genocided for actions that are a response to people enacting a genocide on there own people, such as in the case we’re talking about where the soviets sent people who where enthusiastically selling out there neighbours to be transported to german ovens and gas chambers en masse; when such social conditions are enacted by the Germans and there collabartors there is no response that doesnt end in innocent people dying in some way.
The USSR did not create these conditions or social reality, I wont blame them for not making the perfect choices given that.
Thats why 3000 dead in this specific context is nothing; give your sympathy to the hundreds of thousands of people who died in German, Polish and Ukranian concentration camps before the USSR sent anyone away and your scorn for the people who put the USSR into this situation.
Okay so yeah exactly what I said, focus on the reasons for them dying and not discounting 3000 lives as nothing then talking about Napoleon losing half his army (?)
3000 broken families is nothing?
Send the bill to Germany.
If your point of conparison is utopia – no one is harmed by any decision, ever – even one broken family is an atrocity.
If your point of conparison is peer states, or what could have been reasonably done under the real-life circumstances, then yeah, 3000 people pales in conparison to the overall human cost of WWII.
Shut the fuck up, you aggrieved piece of shit. This is what they were responding to:
i.e., low-effort flaming, and you talk like it’s unthinkable people would respond in kind. Do you often make a habit of lecturing strangers on politeness after you walk up and spit on them?
In the eyes of liberal historiographers, every criminal in the USSR, every fascist collaborator, every petty-bourgeois tyrant becomes a victimized innocent who Stalin personally killed because he had a Tourette Syndrome where his tics were murder and kidnapping. There is no other reason anyone could possibly be put by the government in a place they wouldn’t like to be in the context of a civil war or a genocidal invasion.
Go fuck yourself, go back to masturbating about syndicates and, on the off-off chance that you succeed, prepare to have ten million other shitheads like you declare that you aren’t a real socialist because anticommunists told them you aren’t.
Most people praise the Soviet Union never lived in it because the vast, vast majority of people who commented on it never lived in it. Most people who attack it never lived in it by the same token. However, most of the people who lived in it for any meaningful length of time praise it, as survey after survey produces (see other responses in this thread).
You can’t criticize this without asking “well why were they sent away?” It’s like criticizing anyone else who’s been imprisoned without asking “well what did they do?”
There were (and are) fascist sympathizers in Estonia. Fascist sympathizers all over Europe worked directly with the Nazis. What would you have done with those sympathizers if fascists declared a genocidal war on the socialist state you’re in charge of? Did the WWII-era USSR have the resources to do your better plan?
Wow I wonder why Estonians who collaborated with Nazis were arrested
Fuck off smuglord
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Come to eastern europe, ask people around in Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine or Lithuania, see if they want to go back.
Maybe see some Nazi memorials while you’re at it!
Ask people in eastern Ukraine if they want it back, Il wait.
The people getting bombed by Western Ukraine since 2014? Pretty sure they’d love the Soviet Union back. They’ll even take modern Russia over Ukraine
Not an accident most of them use USSR icongraphy
You didn’t either
edit: lmao, based on your banner you’re Finnish, succdem who was taught in school about ebil Stalin gorillion dead detected
I’m finnish estonian, currently residing in estonia as well.
How do you feel about the fact that after the financial crisis in 2009 your shitty little ethnostate sacrificed the pensions of Estonians to cover the losses of Swedish banks?
Never voted for EKRE
My condolences that you have to live in that shit country.
Not much to complain here, except that bastard Kaja Kallas, free bus tickets are going away in January.
Neoliberal shithole becomes even more of a neoliberal shithole?
The USSR built all the houses, you can thank them for Estonias 90% house ownership rate.
Oof, I’m sorry man
That doesn’t answer the question without the inclusion of your age
https://youtu.be/RBQ0WToKvQ4&t=46
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Fake socialist state, but ever since it collapsed workers rights have deteriorated without fail worldwide.
Hmmmmmm…
Except in the other fake socialist state
No investigation, no right to speak
Why does a thread mocking absurd death tolls with an even more absurd margin of error come off ad “dickriding” to you?
Bro if you deny that 72 trillion sperms were genocided personally by Stalin while he stroked a white cat saying “gentlemen… to evil!” then you’re a tankie.
Liberals cannot ever engage with us about our support of various projects without inserting “dickriding” or “dick sucking” or other various pejorative attacks with homophobic/misogynistic connotations. It’s like their brain short-circuits that someone could have a different view of these “evil dictatorships” than they have been taught their whole lives, so they just assume we worship the evil monster in their head instead of having a completely different view of it than them
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You should question that absurd death count in the OP. Even the Black Book of Communism “only” claims about 20 million dead in the Soviet Union, and some of the authors have later distanced themselves from the book because it’s not accurate.
Repressions happened. Most were justified but not perfect in execution, some were unjustified. This death tole cited here is patantly absurd.
Every government, ever, has repressed people. One common definition of a state is the means by which one class represses another.
The death count is laughably, provably false. So I’ll stick to talking about repression. Or rather, I’ll let Moshe Lewin - one of the most pre-eminent Sovietologists of the last few decades - do the talking. From *The Soviet Century:
What Lewin is pointing out here is that the total number of people brought to trial (not convicted, and plenty that were sentenced had those sentences overturned) for “political” crimes, per the KGB’s own records from the Soviet archives, amounts to a little over 300 per year. In a nation of over 200 million people. That is such an incredibly small number objectively, but even moreso when compared to Westerner’s beliefs that from 1917 through 1991, the USSR was just one big gulag and anyone who dared make fun of Brezhnev’s eyebrows would be locked away for life. In that same section Lewin highlights that plenty more people were subject to prophylaxis (i.e. dissidents getting a talking-to and being told to cut it out, and it stopped there)… but to be outraged over that or the 312 per year trials frankly assumes most of those people didn’t deserve it. But that’s not true either. It’s not like the USSR had any reason to go after randos and there’s no evidence (at least post-Stalin) that USSR went after anyone but genuine threats. Wreckers get wrecked, sorry not sorry, I support the USSR going after wreckers when they are in a life-and-death struggle with a West that was really out to get them.
101 guide on how to spot an anti-communist
they most likely deserved it
Because most of the shit you just said are straight up lies. Socialism turned a war torn backwards feudal country into a spacefaring world power. People’s lives improved immensely (unless they were either bourgeois or some kind of nazi collaborator)
What crime did your uncles do to get arrested and sent to jail
Legend says that Stalin aimlessly filled up the prisons and gulags to the point where the streets were essentially empty. Those in prison? Shot dead. After this was done, he sat in a back room, twirled his mustache and laughed maniacally while the communism death toll counter went to work. Further, anyone seen on the street moving was shot on command like the red light green light game in squid game—that’s unfortunately what communism does and why we must fight for freedom and democracy. Note how I didn’t even mention anything about the large spoon he had built to steal all of the grain. There’s not enough time in the world to list the atrocities, but if you do enough research, you’ll be able to find the truth.
You seriously still think communism and the act of distributing resources equally isn’t evil?
:stalin
yes
“Why are you so attached to this thing?”
-Guy who’d rather you attack the thing but won’t admit it
My ideology calls for a full restoration of the Soviet Union, the creation of a Soviet America, the creation of the Soviet equivalent for each country, and ensuring every backwards reactionary dipshit gets sent to a reeducation school so they can simultaneously learn technical and life skills they need or want to have a successful and fulfilling life while getting all their anti-communist brainworms pulled out of their skulls.
What did your grand uncles do for a living?
One was a crane operator and the other worked at a colhose
What did they do to get them sent to Gulag?
They were just taken one day. My grandma might know more about it
It would be interesting to know what they were charged with, I regret not getting a more detailed understanding of my grandfather’s experiences while he was alive.
I’ll see if I can find out, not sure if we have any documents left (if we even got any paperwork for that).
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They just grabbed random people for no reason at all.
It all makes sense and contributes to the stability of society when people are punished for no reason at all.
You admittedly don’t know the full story but are for some reason sure of their innocence? You know plenty of prisoners in the USSR were imprisoned for stuff you’d get imprisoned for in any country, right?
Wasn’t this posted on trumps account or something?
I’m not even from the USA, what does Trump have to do with this?
you brought him up.
a different agent clocked in and forgot to read the conversation
Astonishing.
I judge every revolution by the results
I’m not sure which part of This Soviet World I should extract and send in this comment. I guess I’ll go for the gulags, chapter 14 in the book. But please! PLEASE! And I know you’re a lib, but can you do me this favour: read it, it is a really really good book. It will take a few hours, but it’s an easy read. I made an EPUB of it (there is also a link to a PDF scan if you would rather use that).
quotes
[1] This book sounded interesting, so I am actually in the process of making an EPUB of it. If I were done with it, I might have chosen to throw it at you.
Leftists are first and foremost anti-capitalists, and the SU was the greatest threat to capitalism in history.
I love how they all have the nonsensical hair swoopy
it looks like the cossack oseledet. maybe they’re meant to be cossack mercenaries who were paid by the tsar to do 1910s style police brutality on Jews living in The Pale of Settlement or something. Those are the kind of people to cry about Communism.
FuknSlammer made it as a response to this:
Hog out or log out.
This is the dickriding soviet union instance (not quite, but sort of) and we apparently post way too much haha