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>instead, get a little creative and include things like segregation There is a persistent myth that Communist Russia was an egalitarian paradise. I believe tha

>instead, get a little creative and include things like segregation There is a persistent myth that Communist Russia was an egalitarian paradise. I believe that his is primarily due to propagandistic efforts to pull third world countries into their sphere of influence through token displays of friendship. During the Cold War, ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union were treated just as bad as US minorities. Today the situation is even worse. The Ukraine war is being used as, among other things, an excuse to ethnically cleanse the Russian Federation of ethnic minorities. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/02/24/2-years-into-ukraine-war-russias-ethnic-minorities-disproportionately-killed-in-battle-a84170 https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/02/24/2-years-into-ukrai...

_pi 3y ago
> During the Cold War, ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union were treated just as bad as US minorities. This part is simply not true. > Today the situation is even worse. This part is. The USSR was never institutionally racist. Russian chauvanism was still a thing in the USSR and that was relic of the Tsarist era that keeps on giving. The USSR's repressions were not a cut and dry wealth transfer between ethnicities unlike the US policies. At their worst in terms of American morality, institutionally targeted programs were to enforce political control and break nationalistic tendencies of ethnic groups. The vast majority of the repressions in the USSR were a result of the explosive growth of productive forces. It's very hard to make the case for the USSR that the benefits of those productive forces inherently benefitted Russians over everyone else. It's very easy to make the case in the US for white supremacy.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > The USSR was never institutionally racist. I think you are misusing “institutionally” and mean something more like “openly” or “explicitly”, because everything you cite in support of this describes rather than refutes institutional racism.
  - _pi 3y ago
    > because everything you cite in support of this describes rather than refutes institutional racism. Please expand on this.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      Institutional racism includes institutional policies, practices, and structures with racially/ethnically biased effects, not just those with explicit racial/ethnic targeting, and even moreso not just those based on racial/ethnic animus. The justifications upthread are a mix of explaining deliberate bias as not based on animus and explaining biased effects as not being deliberate bias; neither refutes institutional racism.
      - _pi 3y ago
        Okay how about this. Tell me which policies of the USSR were racist, who they were racist against and why you think they were racist.
        kelnos 3y ago
        You mention one yourself: > institutionally targeted programs were to enforce political control and break nationalistic tendencies of ethnic groups. If that's not "institutional racism", I don't know what is.
        _pi 3y ago
        "enforce political control and nationalistic tendencies of ethnic groups"? This literally means stop nationalist secession movements. Literally no country on earth basically lets their citizens secede dude. Russians were ALSO the target of such programs. It's like saying state atheism is uniquely Islamophobic or uniquely anti christian or uniquely antisemitic. I'm not saying it's not repression. It totally is, but it's not racist.
- azmodeus 3y ago
  Looking at your statements from a Hungarian perspective, I think you are wrong 1. The USSR always discriminated non Russian speakers. 2. Collectivisation and military occupation was used as a large scale wealth transfer. In addition forced reeducation camps and population swaps were used to put Russian observers into positions where they were first amongst equals Russian imperialism has always been the core of the Soviet union. When people rised up against Russian occupation they got slaughtered in Hungary in 1956 and later in 1968 with the Prague Spring Russian oppression continued
marcosdumay 3y ago
> During the Cold War, ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union were treated just as bad as US minorities. Even that is a blatant understatement. AFAIK, the US didn't do any explicit genocide.
- _pi 3y ago
  Uhh Japanese internment and Mexican repatriation were genocidal actions. The US only stopped mass stochastic involuntary sterilization of natives in the 1970's. Some still happen to this day. If you don't know your own country's history why are you speculating on the history of the USSR?
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Uhh Japanese internment and Mexican repatriation were genocidal actions No, they weren't, “genocide" has a meaning, and neither of those fit it; it doesn't just mean “bad”. (OTOH, you ar every much correct that the Native American genocide continued in the period in question.)
    - _pi 3y ago
      This is a semantic argument that I have no real interest in arguing. Call it genocide, call it ethnic cleansing. Genocide as a criminal charge is mostly a political matter. California literally admitted that they targeted citizens of Mexican descent for the explicit purpose of illegally cajoling them into emigration and enforced deportation. You learn about it euphemistically as "repatriation" (if at all because almost no HS curriculum teaches this) because oopsie. If the USSR rounded up all the Japanese and put them in a camp, you wouldn't hear the end of it in the West. Roosevelt himself used the term concentration camps. You learn about it euphemistically as "internment" because "they had a good reason to do it, and sometimes you know we get things wrong!!". An argument that can really only be used if you prelabel good guys and bad guys. The main difference between US camps and USSR camps is that the US camps were nicer and had food. The quality of repression scales with the wealth to some degree. The USSR couldn't support the same quality of life for their prisoners that the US could. Today the US refuses to provide the same quality of life for their prisoners that less wealthy OECD countries do provide.
kelnos 3y ago
> There is a persistent myth that Communist Russia was an egalitarian paradise And that hasn't changed to this day. There are lots of migrants from former Soviet republics in central Asia that come to Russia for work and life, and they experience bigotry and discrimination. The recent theater shooting & fire in Moscow has inflamed tensions, as many people blame Tajiks for the violence, and take it out on any random Tajik in the city. Similar to the anti-Arab racism and violence in the US post-9/11. In 2021 a Tajik woman represented Russia in the Eurovision Song Contest, and many Russians were angry about this "not a real Russian" representing them. Some of the online discourse about it (according to my Russian-speaking friends) was truly disgusting. Russia is no better than the US (and many other ethnically-diverse countries) on this metric.
underlipton 3y ago
I can't speak on corruption in the USSR. I'm just pointing out corruption in our own history that we're often blind to because we don't think of it as corruption, even though the examples above do constitute an unnatural OR unfair warping of the natural flow of resources/influence/capital.

_pi 3y ago

> During the Cold War, ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union were treated just as bad as US minorities. This part is simply not true. > Today the situation is even worse. This part is. The USSR was never institutionally racist. Russian chauvanism was still a thing in the USSR and that was relic of the Tsarist era that keeps on giving. The USSR's repressions were not a cut and dry wealth transfer between ethnicities unlike the US policies. At their worst in terms of American morality, institutionally targeted programs were to enforce political control and break nationalistic tendencies of ethnic groups. The vast majority of the repressions in the USSR were a result of the explosive growth of productive forces. It's very hard to make the case for the USSR that the benefits of those productive forces inherently benefitted Russians over everyone else. It's very easy to make the case in the US for white supremacy.

dragonwriter 3y ago
> The USSR was never institutionally racist. I think you are misusing “institutionally” and mean something more like “openly” or “explicitly”, because everything you cite in support of this describes rather than refutes institutional racism.
- _pi 3y ago
  > because everything you cite in support of this describes rather than refutes institutional racism. Please expand on this.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    Institutional racism includes institutional policies, practices, and structures with racially/ethnically biased effects, not just those with explicit racial/ethnic targeting, and even moreso not just those based on racial/ethnic animus. The justifications upthread are a mix of explaining deliberate bias as not based on animus and explaining biased effects as not being deliberate bias; neither refutes institutional racism.
    - _pi 3y ago
      Okay how about this. Tell me which policies of the USSR were racist, who they were racist against and why you think they were racist.
      - kelnos 3y ago
        You mention one yourself: > institutionally targeted programs were to enforce political control and break nationalistic tendencies of ethnic groups. If that's not "institutional racism", I don't know what is.
        _pi 3y ago
        "enforce political control and nationalistic tendencies of ethnic groups"? This literally means stop nationalist secession movements. Literally no country on earth basically lets their citizens secede dude. Russians were ALSO the target of such programs. It's like saying state atheism is uniquely Islamophobic or uniquely anti christian or uniquely antisemitic. I'm not saying it's not repression. It totally is, but it's not racist.
azmodeus 3y ago
Looking at your statements from a Hungarian perspective, I think you are wrong 1. The USSR always discriminated non Russian speakers. 2. Collectivisation and military occupation was used as a large scale wealth transfer. In addition forced reeducation camps and population swaps were used to put Russian observers into positions where they were first amongst equals Russian imperialism has always been the core of the Soviet union. When people rised up against Russian occupation they got slaughtered in Hungary in 1956 and later in 1968 with the Prague Spring Russian oppression continued

marcosdumay 3y ago

> During the Cold War, ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union were treated just as bad as US minorities. Even that is a blatant understatement. AFAIK, the US didn't do any explicit genocide.

_pi 3y ago
Uhh Japanese internment and Mexican repatriation were genocidal actions. The US only stopped mass stochastic involuntary sterilization of natives in the 1970's. Some still happen to this day. If you don't know your own country's history why are you speculating on the history of the USSR?
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Uhh Japanese internment and Mexican repatriation were genocidal actions No, they weren't, “genocide" has a meaning, and neither of those fit it; it doesn't just mean “bad”. (OTOH, you ar every much correct that the Native American genocide continued in the period in question.)
  - _pi 3y ago
    This is a semantic argument that I have no real interest in arguing. Call it genocide, call it ethnic cleansing. Genocide as a criminal charge is mostly a political matter. California literally admitted that they targeted citizens of Mexican descent for the explicit purpose of illegally cajoling them into emigration and enforced deportation. You learn about it euphemistically as "repatriation" (if at all because almost no HS curriculum teaches this) because oopsie. If the USSR rounded up all the Japanese and put them in a camp, you wouldn't hear the end of it in the West. Roosevelt himself used the term concentration camps. You learn about it euphemistically as "internment" because "they had a good reason to do it, and sometimes you know we get things wrong!!". An argument that can really only be used if you prelabel good guys and bad guys. The main difference between US camps and USSR camps is that the US camps were nicer and had food. The quality of repression scales with the wealth to some degree. The USSR couldn't support the same quality of life for their prisoners that the US could. Today the US refuses to provide the same quality of life for their prisoners that less wealthy OECD countries do provide.

kelnos 3y ago

> There is a persistent myth that Communist Russia was an egalitarian paradise And that hasn't changed to this day. There are lots of migrants from former Soviet republics in central Asia that come to Russia for work and life, and they experience bigotry and discrimination. The recent theater shooting & fire in Moscow has inflamed tensions, as many people blame Tajiks for the violence, and take it out on any random Tajik in the city. Similar to the anti-Arab racism and violence in the US post-9/11. In 2021 a Tajik woman represented Russia in the Eurovision Song Contest, and many Russians were angry about this "not a real Russian" representing them. Some of the online discourse about it (according to my Russian-speaking friends) was truly disgusting. Russia is no better than the US (and many other ethnically-diverse countries) on this metric.

underlipton 3y ago

I can't speak on corruption in the USSR. I'm just pointing out corruption in our own history that we're often blind to because we don't think of it as corruption, even though the examples above do constitute an unnatural OR unfair warping of the natural flow of resources/influence/capital.