west west bad big bad very bad stalin good lenin good ignore starvation ignore deaths ignore everything just read state and revolution bro
west west bad big bad very bad stalin good lenin good ignore starvation ignore deaths ignore everything just read state and revolution bro
Yes, Stalin, famous believer in justice and human dignity.
EDIT: You do understand that it’s possible to be a believer in those principles without becoming a revisionist who starts brown nosing autocrats?
So, since you claim to study history, how well do those quotes align with his actual actions? Or are you simply glossing over how the USSR leadership lived in luxury while the population were little more than mere serfs?
As for starvation, I’m sure you have an interesting take on the Holodomor and how the definition of “Kulak” meant basically anyone with a potato patch, and how the quotas that caused a genocide were totally reasonable.
Extracting big words from famous speeches is easy. Squaring propaganda with actual events and behaviors not so much.
Under Lenin and Stalin? MASSIVE improvements for the masses. To not understand this is the result of not studying ANY of the history of the project.
Besides the obvious defeat of the Nazis and liberation of the 100s of millions of occupied Europeans there’s the obvious number of the life expectancy growing massively. This ONLY happens when you address the issues of the masses. You can’t get life expectancy numbers only working for the minority wealthy. Incidentally, that’s why life expectancy in Russia was so bad pre-revolution, because the Tsarist government actually lived in luxury while the people were literally serfs.
There’s the food situation. Under the Tsarists they never invested in feeding the people and suffered famines every 4 - 7 years for over a century. Lenin and Stalin led the most rapid expansion of food production in the history of the world prior to the Chinese revolution. The famines ended after they got the whole system working, up until WW2, when they had one more induced by the war, and then that was it. Famines were gone. CIA analysis shows that the USSR was 2nd best fed country in the world, second to the USA.
Massive expansion of education, of literacy, of gender equality, elimination of homelessness, rents below 10% of wages, complete overhaul of the economy leading to serfs becoming highly paid workers. Innovations in medicine that are still used globally today. Massive reduction in health crises from preventable illnesses.
In short, it was a HUGE improvement under Lenin and Stalin, and that improvement continued under Kruschev for a long while until the 1970s under Brezhnev.
As for “living in luxury”, Stalin died owning almost nothing - some clothes, a couch, a couple weeks of savings. No, the USSR was not egalitarian, but it wasn’t egalitarian before the USSR and it wasn’t egalitarian after the USSR. What we can say is that it was WAY closer to egalitarian than what came before and what came after and that was because of the ideological commitment to the liberation of the working class from the oppression.
Most of those are fair points in a vacuum, but they all collapse when looking at the rest of the world: These weren’t Stalins improvements. Said improvements happened in many (most?) other countries too, as the industrialization of early 1900s improved life for basically everyone. The only real difference is the repression involved.
Anyway, we’re not going to change each other’s mind, so I see no point in continuing this conversation. Live long and prosper, provided that the state apparatus approves of you doing so.
In the early 1900s, the US was leasing black convicts back to their former plantations. In the 1950s, US doctors were lobotomizing women with ice picks to make them docile while not scarring their “pretty faces” for their husbands. In the 1900s there was MASSIVE domestic repression in the US with race riots (a.k.a. white people attacking non-white people) and huge labor repression including bombings and machine gunning of miners by the National Guard.
As it turns out, just because the green revolution happened in the US and changed agriculture doesn’t mean that it immediately became a thing elsewhere. China was still a serf-based agrarian system where NONE of the advances from the West had an impact until finally the communists came to power and they implemented a program to overhaul agriculture. It’s not enough for agriculture to be solved somewhere else. It requires a massive amount of effort to solve in each context. Lenin and Stalin led the USSR’s effort in this regard. I never said Stalin was a plant breeder that invented better agriculture, but it’s undeniable that without the communist party taking power the Tsarists would have let the cycle of famines and the serf economy continue to exist for decades.
It’s not even that you and I will never convince each other. It’s that your position is completely divorced from reality because it’s driven by an absolute need to establish the irredeemable evil of the Communist USSR up to and including making such obviously incorrect statements as to suggest that workers in the USSR were serfs, when that is literally exactly what the feudal system was and exactly what industrialization ended.
OK, I’ll bite one last time:
For starters, you don’t even know what my position is, as evident in you attacking US history, as if I have any interest in defending it.
Secondly, if the USSR population weren’t de facto serfs, why was travel so restricted? Why was the wall built? Why are there so few accounts of people fleeing to the soviet union? Are you really claiming that some dairy farmer in Turkmenistan could decide one day that he instead would like to serve borscht in Moscow for a living, and then just get up and do so?
That’s not what a serf is, by any definition. There are LOTS of reasons why travel was so restricted. One of them was because the vary majority of the population were serfs under the Tsar and literally could never afford to fly. Another was because commercial air travel wasn’t really a thing around the world until the mid-50s, basically after Stalin died. Stalin restricted travel in the decade preceding the war with the Nazis, basically right around the time Mein Kampf was published where Hitler openly declared that his goal was to invade Russia, dismantle the USSR, and enslave the population. There was a LOT of resentment over the revolution and there were many people who were sympathetic to the fascists and even collaborating with counter-revolutionary forces outside of the country in an attempt to build a movement to restore the Tsar.
But the BIGGEST reason for travel restriction was, and continues to be for all countries that do it, economics. Brain drain is a real phenomenon, and wealth distribution in the world is skewed to the imperialists. Brain drain is the result of a structural process of stealing vast sums of wealth from the rest of the world and then bribing all the best and the brightest from the exploited countries to move to the imperial core, which further impoverishes the exploited countries. There’s really no way to stop that unless you restrict travel. If you don’t restrict travel, international economics basically dictates that you will always lose talent to the imperialists. Travel restrictions are essentially nation-level non-compete restrictions.
You mean the Berlin Wall? In Berlin? Or do you think the Iron Curtain was a literal wall around the entire USSR? The Berlin Wall was built because of the absolute MESS of the situation in Berlin. The Red Army had defeated 80% of the Nazi forces, marched fully through Berlin, and liberated many concentration camps. But the imperialist allies demanded that they get to control part of Berlin. So the Soviets controlled East Germany, but the imperialists had half a city INSIDE East Germany. The Soviets built the Berlin Wall to completely encircle West Berlin.
Think about that for a second and then ask yourself why the literal physics were such that the Soviets built a wall around West Berlin to contain it but you and everyone you know (including me) were raised to believe that the wall was built to keep people from leaving the USSR? Why, when it is just so obvious that the wall was built to contain the imperialists?
To me, that was some strong evidence that many of the things I had believed about the whole situation was deeply suspect and highly propagandized. It drove me to actually research as much of this stuff as I could.
Because even years after the worst economic times of the USSR the majority of people polled say that the dissolution of the USSR was a net negative for them and their families? https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/649fe1/25_years_later_polls_in_eastern_europe_show/
I’m sorry. This is just so funny. Do you realize that Stalin was the poor son of a poor shoemaker and a laundress in Georgia and became the General Secretary in Moscow? Like what even is this question? Yes! Literally tens of millions of poor farmers all over the USSR moved to the cities for a better life and found it. That’s literally what industrialization does.