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A brief history of the absurdities of the Soviet Union

164 points by Maro 1y ago

whycome 1y ago
> Recent Russian studies put the count of lost lives and unborn children as high as 170 million people. wait, does this just mean pregnancies that didn't reach full term? Or like, a hypothetical number of kids that could have been born?
- j4coh 1y ago
  Lost lives and lost potential is how I read it.
- mc32 1y ago
  The 170MM figure is referring to all losses of life like the purges, man-made famines (Holodomor), inept ww ii strategies, as well as “unborn” children. This last one has no reference so it’s impossible to know what that means or how many people they attribute to that. That said, the problem is a cultural one. The communists poured gas on the tendencies of the Tsars and modern Russia suffers from that legacy still. The legacy is a peasant (serf) : master way of thinking. Culture is hard to cure and the change has to come from within. Japan had a similar problem but most of the sharp edges were dulled when they made a deal (surrender) with the Americans. You also see this tendency to cling to bad cultural habits by some enclaves of immigrants. It can take decades of new generations to wipe some of those bad tendencies away. Some people see that as erasure of culture as a bad thing but it can also bring good.
  - H8crilA 1y ago
    I don't know who is downvoting this comment, but the comment is correct. Russia is a state, not a nation. The Kremlin, in all incarnations - the Tsars, Stalin, the Communist Party, Putin, even the Mongols that used to run it before Moscow, have always been perceived more like an alien force that has landed onto this land, and now one has to submit to it, without questions. This is a lesson that parents pass onto their children, implicitly or explicitly. It could become a nation-state in a relatively short order, though that's certainly going to be bloody. And nukes could be on the table as well - this is why the US was actually opposed to the USSR collapse, a fact that's not widely known today.
    - ivan_gammel 1y ago
      It’s a bold and unsubstantiated claim. In English language there’s a lot of confusion because the same word Russian is used both for citizenship and ethnicity, but in Russian they are different and such confusion doesn’t exist. If you run polls in Russia, ethnic minorities won’t say that they are Russians using the word for ethnicity, but they will certainly confirm that they are Russian citizens belonging to the same cultural space (and in that sense some may even use the word for ethnicity, e.g. “I’m Tatar, but I’m Russian too”). Nation is defined not by the government but by shared history and culture and may cross ethnic boundaries. Russia is big, but its people have developed the shared culture, the pride, the sense of belonging which qualify it for a nation. This comes on top of all geographical and ethnic identities, which make the picture more diverse and complex, but those identities are rarely stronger (even in regions like Chechnya).
- Spooky23 1y ago
  You can play with the scope to tell the story you want. If you scope in WW2 losses as well, about 30M Soviets died. Some other number were injured or disabled. If you look at fertility rates at the time, you can project how many children would have been born, and I’m sure you could be at that number. Additionally, the after effects of the war and Stalin persisted - the loss of men resulted in higher numbers of childless women. I lack the information to assess whether 170M is a meaningful number, but on a relative basis, the United States and even China didn’t contend with the sheer destruction and oppression that Soviet people did, and had higher fertility rates. It’s not a “pro” or “anti” Soviet/Russian discussion - the nation’s people suffered in various ways, which had an end result.
- zdragnar 1y ago
  The Bolsheviks were the first to get a country to legalize elective abortion in 1920. They did so as a temporary measure because so many women would have difficulty raising a child in the post-war environment. It got to the point where hospitals were overwhelmed and they started setting up dedicated clinics. They tried making it illegal again in the 30s but brought it back in 1955 because there was such demand. So, presumably this 170 million number is written by someone who believes a fetus is a unique human life and the prevalence of elective abortion was so high as to be a not insignificant number of "lost lives".
  - jonah 1y ago
    By what actual scientific definition is a fetus, not a unique human life? They have their own unique DNA, brain, circulatory system, fingerprints, etc, etc. In my understanding, any definition that discounts there individuality is primarily there to depersonalize them and thus justify their killing.
    - unnamed76ri 1y ago
      To justify their killing and assuage the conscience of any who have had one/had their wife/girlfriend have one.
    - totallynothoney 1y ago
      That's a philosophical discussion, not scientific fact. (The scientific facts of fetal development are of course important for the discussion) I'm sure we would entirely disagree when a fetus gets qualia or becomes a human being, but that doesn't necessarily mean one of us is ignoring science. Unique DNA is irrelevant (a clone would be a person), lacking a viable circulatory system or fingerprints doesn't mean lack of personhood. Someone completely braindead a person or closer to a cadaver? Not everybody agrees on the same. >In my understanding, any definition that discounts there individuality is primarily there to depersonalize them and thus justify their killing. That's bad faith. Let me try one myself, all anti-choice people are just useful fools in the ultra-conservative campaign to maintain authoritarian control of the relationships and bodies of the people. In my country divorce was illegal until 2004, the same party that maligned it's legalization took condoms out of UN care packages after an earthquake. They would absolutely prohibit Plan B, limit condoms to married couples and make homosexuality illegal if they in had the power. In the US, the poor will be kept barefoot and pregnant, while the Republican senator and the megapastor will get an abortion for their mistress. Well, that's easy. Just think everyone else is evil and stupid :^)
- justsomejew 1y ago
  The fact that you cannot even see how ridiculuous this piece of propaganda is, says also about your ability to reason. The great demographic drop in the Soviet Union happened after the WWII (you remember that Soviet Union defeated the nazis, right?), but even that was not "170 million people" and was due to the war started by the nazis (whatever your propaganda claims about that).
  - hulitu 1y ago
    > The fact that you cannot even see how ridiculuous this piece of propaganda is, says also about your ability to reason. TBH, i don't believe he/she does not have the ability to reason, i think that HN has become a main place for state propaganda. Almost a third of articles are either bashing of US adversaries or "exploded but success, terrahertz transistor, could, may be, etc". The next third are AI propaganda.
  - lycopodiopsida 1y ago
    > was due to the war started by the nazis Soviet ally, nonetheless! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
    - justsomejew 1y ago
      Yes, cherrypicking the pact when the relevant part is the international context back then.. Soviet Union had to defend itself not only from nazi Germany. To remind you of western capitalists helping the nazis? Of the British royal family ties to the nazis?
      - lycopodiopsida 1y ago
        Yes, yes, the "defense" where you occupy parts of Poland, attack Finland. And of course, providing resources and training facilities to the dear ally in Berlin. There is a reason why soviets always talked about "BoB" and never about WWII - they've entered the latter as allies of Hitler, which does not fit to the soviet victim narrative.
- hulitu 1y ago
  No, the CIA just counted the lost sperm.
deleted 1y ago
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immibis 1y ago
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- kmoser 1y ago
  > While nazism and its crimes were condemned after World War II, making the return of this form of totalitarianism impossible [...] This didn't age well.
loloquwowndueo 1y ago
> death toll of communist terror I don’t think this was the fault of that socioeconomic system known as “communism”. Yet the article tries to push that assumption a few times. > Hitler as the biggest criminal and murderer of the 20th century. It is hard to believe that, actually, Stalin murdered significantly more. Not only are the crimes of communism not condemned, but they are by and large not known. Right, so it was this particular implementation of communism, epitomized by Stalin’s policies.
- rwmj 1y ago
  Ah ha, didn't have to wait long for "we've not tried real communism yet".
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago
    But if we want to be precise, he is right - in theory, it wasn't the fault of that socioeconomic system itself, and logically you can't exclude the possibility that in the future there might be a communist system without causing millions of deaths, unfortunately in practice all such systems, including the one in Russia and China, had enormous toll. The reason for it, in my opinion, stems from the origin: in an ideal world, the whole population would agree the system is fantastic and introduce it, based on mutual respect. What actually happens is that crowds get furious and start killing and introduce a new system by violence, so it's hard to expect a nice fruit from a rotten seed.
    - nradov 1y ago
      [flagged]
    - GauntletWizard 1y ago
      The theory is a perfectly spherical cow - impossible in practice, laughable in imagination. We have a firm understanding from historical data of how it fails, even if it doesn't match the imagination of its proponents.
vectorcrumb 1y ago
Might this be available in some ebook format somewhere?
- jthnme 1y ago
  created epub for my personal use, obviously publicly available, therefore hoping not an issue to share: https://limewire.com/d/r2ZTu#rcSoipCE3E https://limewire.com/d/r2ZTu#rcSoipCE3E
Herodotus38 1y ago
This may be covered but one absurdity that I came across was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism When I was an undergraduate working in a molecular biology lab my two mentors, Andrei and Svetlana were Russian emigrants. Andrei taught me, in the 00s, that he couldn’t do the level of molecular biology in Russia because the downstream effects decades later put them far behind in the technical and cultural knowhow. Genetics was banned.
- baxtr 1y ago
  > More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents. Scientists were executed… ok wow
  - cowcity 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - jamiek88 1y ago
      What? Wow. There’s a bot for every crackpot now eh?
      - H8crilA 1y ago
        Low quality bots are the most jarring.
    - piombisallow 1y ago
      "Same in the West" lmao, when were scientists executed in the West? The 1500s?
    - bdamm 1y ago
      Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
croes 1y ago
I guess the post is caused by this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843605
MaxPock 1y ago
[flagged]
- stormking 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - MaxPock 1y ago
    Capitalist Nigeria and Somalia must be thriving countries
    - stormking 1y ago
      Capitalism can be inhumane, especially if it is not controlled by democracy. Communism is always inhumane. It cannot be established democratically, it cannot be run democratically. It will always end in misery, poverty and death.
      - cosmicgadget 1y ago
        By definition, capitalism is inhumane. Even if you are worried about the market looking unkindly on your accural of capital, you're doing so in a fashion that prioritizes their perception rather than actual virtue. You are right that democracy can reign capitalism's amoralism in, but so can any other form of government. I don't see why the same can't be said for communism, beyond the standard "it hasn't happened before".
        stormking 1y ago
        You mean: It has never happened once, no matter how often tried. How many communist experiments, how many ruined lives will it take until you and your kind finally get it? But I know the answer already ...
        cosmicgadget 1y ago
kergonath 1y ago
Entertaining, but not to be taken too seriously. The author himself says that it’s very subjective and not thoroughly fact-checked. Even then, the digs at the Kievan Rus’ are… well, absurd. Also, I don’t know of any European country without its share of demented and paranoid rulers. But England is not Henry VIII and Germany is not Hitler. Also, this > But let us start with the Communist Manifesto which is the holiest tome of communist ideology and can be called the red gospel. is a pearl of unintended absurd humour. In this case, when someone applies their beliefs and frame of mind to a foreign object without actually understanding it. In the end I agree with the author that all life if absurd, it’s just a matter of point of view.
keiferski 1y ago
I look forward to the day when the capitalist and communist eras of the 19th-21st century are analyzed coldly, in the way we look at mercantilism or medieval market towns today. Because it really seems like both are increasingly inadequate systems for handling modernity, and the obsession with defining one as intrinsically evil and the other the obvious superior option (I’ll let you choose which is which) is such a flattening, unhelpful approach. Personally, having moved from capitalist America to post-communist Poland, a few things seem true to me: …the communist era in Poland was a disaster and the country today is unquestionably better off as a modified capitalist one; …contemporary American culture really seems to be struggling under an unquestioned capitalist ethic; …the conflict seems artificially egged on from think tanks, corporations, academics, and maybe even the simple alliteration of the letter c (i.e., you don’t hear nearly as much about Capitalism vs. Socialism, even though historically that’s a more accurate label of what governments actually were.) …and that neither capitalism or communism has ever really been implemented in a pure sense. Which is all a long way of saying that Mark Fisher’s quote seems more true every day, not as a pessimistic statement but just one describing a lack of imagination and the inability to transcend the debate: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
- nradov 1y ago
  I can imagine a lot. In every possible scenario, the end of capitalism means disaster for the entire human race.
  - keiferski 1y ago
    This is exactly the kind of low effort, no imagination response that I was referring to. No discussion of alternatives, no acknowledgement that maybe there are some issues with the current capitalist system, etc. Just apocalyptic language, with no openness to the idea that yeah, communism was a terrible system, but maybe that doesn’t automatically imply that contemporary capitalism is inherently the best system.
    - nradov 1y ago
matheusmoreira 1y ago
> While nazism and its crimes were condemned after World War II [...] this has not happened with communism. This resonates quite deeply. In my country nazis go straight to jail but communists walk our soil completely unpunished. They have half a dozen political parties, are well coordinated, are popular and are constantly elected by the population when they promise them heaven on earth. This is especially ironic since nazism is short for national socialism. Communism is alive and well in Latin America. Brazilian president Lula declared to CNN his intention to install communism in my country not even a week ago. It has been his intention for over 40 years. He and his party has been in power for over 20 years. Yet people act as though it was fake news.
- simlevesque 1y ago
  It's not fake news it's good news.
- cosmicgadget 1y ago
  A specific, racist form of fascism can't really be compared to an economic ideology.
  - matheusmoreira 1y ago
    It absolutely can. Nazis, like socialists, centralized control of the economy in the state. It's just that they did it in order to further the goals of the so called Aryan nation as a whole. That's why it's called national socialism.
    - cosmicgadget 1y ago
      "Naziism had economic principles therefore it is a peer of any general economic system." Nah. Capitalism and communism don't have all those racist tenets. Nor the expansionism.
      - matheusmoreira 1y ago
        Principles have nothing to do with it. The key feature is totalitarian government control over the economy and the means of production. Nazi Germany certainly had it.
derelicta 1y ago
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pavel_lishin 1y ago
> On the other hand, life was secure. There were no bank loans, therefore there were no bank fees or percents. There was no real worry over one’s job or workplace; one was available for everyone. Wages were low, but fear of losing one’s job was almost nonexistent. A person pretended to work; the state pretended to pay him. Living accommodations were crowded and faint hope existed to find a better apartment, but all had a roof over their heads.There had to be, since homelessness was forbidden by law. > Nowadays, there exist people who yearn for that mollusk-like life. This isn't an inaccurate description, and yes, it's not exactly a utopian state to find yourself in. But I'm not going to chuckle at the hypothetical people we're supposed to pity for wanting this; I bet there are quite a few people in the United States alone who would love to have this life, who would love to have a guaranteed job, a guaranteed roof over their heads, and the heads of their children.
- username332211 1y ago
  The really funny part is that this is probably fairly easy to achieve in the United States. The only part of the Soviet system you'd need to implement is the migration and residency control regime. Currently people all over the world are free to move to New York, which makes the city unaffordable. If you forbade anyone not born within it from moving there, Manhattan would be fairly affordable and homelessness would be much reduced. All you need to do is to free yourself from that bourgeois delusion that a man from Mexico (or worse, West Virginia) has any right to live in that city.
  - vintagedave 1y ago
    > The only part of the Soviet system you'd need to implement is the migration and residency control regime. Ouch: straight to being against others. No, the part you'd need to implement to get socialised housing is socialised housing. Similarly, there are modern equivalents to guaranteed jobs. Communism believed everyone had to work: today we have different ideas of purpose than Marx had, plus are more aware of those who cannot work, or the value of non-work social contributions, and tech folks like us might believe in or hope for an upcoming post-scarcity society, with a transition period of UBI. I expect you want to control migration and residency in order to avoid freeloaders. Freeloaders are remarkably rare, most people have self-respect and enjoy being productive, and interestingly systems that exterminate freeloaders entirely tend to be less efficient.[1] Plus, if you have a wonderful system, the best way to handle other people wanting it is to help it grow, not limit it to yourself. A better policy would be one encouraging its growth elsewhere in other countries where all those folk who are coming to your shores are coming from. The US has a long (mixed) history of that approach re democracy. [1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
nikanj 1y ago
Nazi Germany never put up fences to stop their people from leaving. The Soviet Union did. That’s my metric for the standard of living in them
- seiferteric 1y ago
  Except for the ones around the concentration camps.
- chihuahua 1y ago
  I'm virulently opposed to communism and the Soviet Union, as well as Nazism, and it is tempting to say that the Soviet Union was worse than Nazi Germany. In some ways that's true if you look at the number of their own citizens that were killed by Stalin vs Hitler. On the other hand, Stalin had a longer period of time for his mass murder than Hitler did. But Hitler caused the almost complete destruction of Germany with the war he started. In terms of living conditions, you are probably correct; although again, Hitler's starting point in terms of economy, civilization, and living conditions was much better than Stalin's, and we didn't see Nazism play out over decades. Nazi Germany's soldiers on the advance engaged in systematic killing and regarded most of the population of the conquered territories as vermin; Soviet soldiers merely raped most of the women and did not engage in systematic killing campaigns, with some exceptions (e.g. Katyn massacre) I'd say it's difficult to say which is more deplorable: Hitler killing millions just because of their ancestry, or Stalin killing millions in the Gulag because of paranoia and because it was a convenient source of labor. If we're just looking at the success of the economic systems, leaving aside the mass murder and the devastating war, then what you're saying is correct.
  - throwaway3060 1y ago
    IMO, when thinking about this question it's useful to look at the full scope of their objectives. We don't know much about what else Stalin planned, but given the time he had it probably would not fundamentally change the order of magnitude. On the other hand, we do know some of what the Nazis planned to do if they had won, and it was on a scale far beyond even the millions they did murder.
  - 1y ago
kibwen 1y ago
> While nazism and its crimes were condemned after World War II, making the return of this form of totalitarianism impossible Even written in 2021 rather than today, it's difficult to take the OP seriously after this. Both Hitler's nazism and Stalin's communism are manifestations of the deeper authoritarian sympathies that infect the human psyche and to which the modern world is quickly succumbing.
- sublimefire 1y ago
  > deeper authoritarian sympathies It is not that but systematic destruction of any institution standing in the way. Once that is done it is easier to wield power and suppress people to do stuff. Just look at Russia today, where dissent is extremely risky to you and people around you, where shitnews television is pumping people with weird narratives, etc. Similarly T.Snyder argues that a precursor to the atrocities (not the war per se) in WWII were the destruction of the institutions.
- justsomejew 1y ago
  Communism was quite different from nazism, whatever they tell and told you in the west. You just did not live there, and some people rewrote the history for you. Equating communism and nazism is one of the most abominable aspects of western propaganda
  - nec4b 1y ago
    They are both the same. One wants one true race society and the the other one true class society. The only way tho achieve one or the other state is by eliminating those who don't conform (Holocaust and Holodomor). It's despicable some pretend one is better then the other.
    - LtWorf 1y ago
      Accusing Karl Marx of what Stalin did is like saying Lincoln is guilty of Trump.
      - 1y ago
xyzelement 1y ago
I was about 10 when the USSR has collapsed and have lived in the use for over 30 years yet I still see in my parents and even myself the remnants of dehumanizing ridiculousness that existed there. Eg my dad is instinctively terrified of dealing with anyone from the government even like the mailman because that person can wield their position against you even though that's not the case here at all. Or for example I had to point out to my dad that his neighbor open carries. Like my dad is intellectually aware of the 2nd amendment but it didn't fit in his brain that people could actually exercise a freedom so his eyes were literally blind to it (obviously I drove him to the gun shop that evening)
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  > (obviously I drove him to the gun shop that evening) Why would that be obvious?
  - simlevesque 1y ago
    Yeah to non-americans this sentence sounds so weird.
    - pavel_lishin 1y ago
      I'm an American, and it sounds wild to me. I still don't understand it.
    - agumonkey 1y ago
      He might have meant it humorously too. You don't know about gun laws at all, so next stop is the gun store.
- Mars008 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - LtWorf 1y ago
    Yeah but the USA wokeness is only about words, not about solving anyone's problems for real.
divan 1y ago
Important to understand that these are "absurdities" only when viewed from the angle of market economy and democratic society. For people living in Soviet Union this was just a "state of the world". Communist values (or lack of values) shaped the political and social systems in which people were born and raised. First we shape systems, then systems shape us.
- bevr1337 1y ago
  This was written and edited by folks who lived in the USSR, so we know that these people held complexity. More than "just..." Just is a great word. It alerts the author and reader that there's little substance in the claim. Just trust me!
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  People were shaped by the rules they lived under. That doesn't make the rules any less insane.
  - divan 1y ago
    Yes. What I was trying to say that people who live within those rules (and keep propagating/making them!) can't just live in the constant congitive dissonance state. They rationalize this state of the world, they tell stories (to themselves and to each other) to make sense of these rules, so it doesn't feel insane.
    - obscurette 1y ago
      They absolutely can live in the constant congitive dissonance state. I did 30 years of my life. Many of us did. I know it's hard to believe for people living all their life in the free world, but constant congitive dissonance was just part of the reality for us.
- justsomejew 1y ago
  Well, the very real absurdities and nightmare of your "way of life", you don't see them as well. What happens now in Gaza? Do you "see" it?
hagendaasalpine 1y ago
historians have described the USSR as an 'affirmitive action empire', a contradictory one
- jostylr 1y ago
  This might be a good article for such a perspective: https://reason.com/2021/11/01/yes-it-was-an-evil-empire/ https://reason.com/2021/11/01/yes-it-was-an-evil-empire/
csours 1y ago
I feel like some people are trying for the sequel right now. Moral relativism is like digging a latrine. Almost nobody wants to do it for somebody else, it's a chore to do it for one's self, but pretty much everyone appreciates when it's already done for them. Anyway, I feel like 'liberalism' is under broad attack by both conservatives and progressives, largely because it is very unsatisfying right now. Speaking for myself, liberalism is a way to understand the world. Liberalism in this sense does not especially imply progressivism or conservatism, and can be practiced by anyone. To re-phrase the Robustness Principle: "be opinionated in what you do, be open minded in what you accept from others". I feel like the stronger you push your opinions into your understanding of the world, the harder it gets to actually understand what is going on in the world. As Colbert said: "reality has a well-known liberal bias". This statement makes more sense if run in reverse: "An open-minded understanding of the world is more likely to be durably and broadly true than a strongly opinionated understanding". Unfortunately, it has become VERY difficult to talk about what is going on in the world right now, largely because a lot of disparate groups are pushing their opinions into their understanding very very hard. There are many people who currently disagree with their own in-group, but are restricted in what they can say because of social loyalty constraints. If you can't be the first person to speak up, consider being the second. The absolute strongest superpower that humans have is the the ability to tell another story. Don't get stuck in the first satisfying story you hear. ---- If you are satisfied with blame, try examining the situation closer. If you are satisfied that a whole political party is evil, try examining the situation closer. Here are some questions: What is the person or organization doing socially economically emotionally political as in policy objectives political as in electoral strategy political as in internal power structure - is the internal power structure sound or fragmented? When a person or organization says something, is it complete accurate satisfying (to anyone? to someone? to me?) Sometimes, it is a trap to fight the obvious fight. Perhaps the other side is fine with losing the obvious fight for some reason. People don't believe crazy things because of correct facts, they believe them because of satisfying stories. --- May I humbly ask 2 things of you: 1. Please don't assume I'm saying or implying something beyond what I've said here. You may feel free to go beyond what I've said, just don't put it on me. 2. Please don't join a death cult. You can look up the characteristics of a high control group; a death cult is all that plus their definition of morality narrows over time, excluding more and more people. Death cults ramp up anger over time. It's very easy to fall into one right now, and they are not exclusive to either side of the political spectrum. It's better to endure a little moral dissatisfaction than to join a high control group.
binary132 1y ago
I’m the farthest thing imaginable from a Bolshevik sympathizer but I often wonder whether big-C Communism could have survived and how it would have fared if the United States hadn’t engaged in sustained economic warfare against it. I imagine it might look something a bit like Chinese Communism does today, although perhaps those days came and went in the later eras of the Party system.
- nradov 1y ago
  What economic warfare? Even after WWII the USA literally sold food to the USSR. Without that their food shortages would have been even worse.
- unnamed76ri 1y ago
  Chinese communism survives because the US spends an insane amount of money on their goods each year. It would have collapsed by now if not for the US demand for stuff.
- flyinghamster 1y ago
  People who got too serious about communism tended to get eliminated by Stalin, and then the people in charge of the elimination (Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria) were in turn eliminated in later purges.
- sublimefire 1y ago
  The premise of its “success” was based on half the population working for free in the camps for the other half. Many major projects were executed with little thought for the slaves/workers that perished, all for the goals of socialism. Then oligarchy followed, without the way to increase worker productivity. The only well funded programmes were in the defence sector which bankrupted the country eventually
- qcnguy 1y ago
  Communism depended on the west and was sustained by it. Obviously they exported raw materials to purchase the many things they failed to produce themselves including food. But also particularly, the Soviets had no way to set prices in their centrally planned economy that actually worked, so they kept the show on the road by copying prices from western free market economies. This is one reason the USSR was always lagging behind western economies despite being scientifically advanced. They had to wait for the west to develop products and do price discovery, because GOSPLAN didn't have any way to price things properly themselves.
gampleman 1y ago
Reminds me a bit of the “Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel.
wormius 1y ago
1. Black Book of Communism 2. "Unborn" Yeah, no. I'm not saying USSR was a panacea or that Stalin did nothing wrong (Tankies are the fucking worst. I hung out on /r/communism for a while, and, as the kids used to say "gross"). I take writing like the OP with a HUGE grain of salt. There are plenty of crimes and problems with what happened in the Soviet Union. Some of these were intentional by the leadership both before, during, and after Stalin. Some of these were self-owns (War Communism much?) some of these were forced errors (when doing battle one makes tough choices, and this includes in ideological/economic/actual war). Some of these were straight up evil policies (gulags, great purges, Katyn, etc...) If someone can do real analysis I'm down, but once you start quoting Black Book of Communism, I know you're coming with an agenda and it's hard for me to take you in good faith. Especially if you're counting "The Unborn" - go on, just call the US a "Nazi Nation with the unborn holocaust" (I grew up in that shit, so saw the propaganda first hand).
- nec4b 1y ago
  >>1. Black Book of Communism Are you contending existence of mass murders under almost any communist regime? What agenda are you talking about? You are making it sound communism is a noble idea, which someone is trying to discredit undeservingly. >>2. "Unborn" It was about an estimation of how much more people would Soviet Union have in time if it hadn't murdered so many of its citizens. Imagine children of children of missing 20 million people.
davejagoda 1y ago
> In their subconscious hopes that a societal formula is as simple and as universal as the famous E=mc², people are prepared to believe nonsense if it only sounds good. This is an interesting insight on human nature.
robotnikman 1y ago
Somewhat related, one of my favorite 'absurdities' to come from the USSR was the hydraulic computer https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/12/vladimir-lukyanovs-water-computer.html https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/12/vladimir-lukyanovs-wat...
inglor_cz 1y ago
One thing that only the "survivors" realize is just how materialistic the Soviet Bloc societies were. And I don't mean philosophically materialistic, like "there is no soul". That too, but I mainly mean that in the shortage of everything (and there usually was a shortage of everything) people would become fixated on owning relatively banal objects. Girls would prostitute themselves for a nice pair of Western jeans, people would snitch and steal, break the law, run illegal smuggling rings while bribing the police, take bribes themselves etc., over things such as stockings, tires or calculators. I was not able to persuade one young American that not paying a fat bribe to a doctor could have fatal consequences back then. "But in socialism, there must be a common free healthcare for everybody!" - Yeah, lad, on paper. Paper tolerates everything. The one thing that was never in shortage were slogans, propaganda, red flags and red stars.
- m4rtink 1y ago
  Giving "presents" to doctors is still very much ingrained in the older generation up to this day. :P
  - inglor_cz 1y ago
    True. I visited a doctor friend in a fairly good institution (IKEM) and he showed me a comode. When he opened it, it was full of alcohol. Hard liquor and wine. He said: "This is what the patients brought us last week. How are we supposed not to become alcoholics?" He was seriously worried, btw. No light joking. In every work collective, healthcare included, there are some people prone to alcoholism and this is just a dangerous temptation to them.
- decimalenough 1y ago
  The book tells a story of how bananas were nearly unobtainable and thus became an almost totemic status symbol. An Estonian actress pilfers a banana from a high-level Party function, risking grave consequences, just so her daughter could taste one at least once in her life. Alas, the daughter is too young to appreciate this and declares that it tastes like "poopoo".
sexyman48 1y ago
Wtf is it with Russians (or their Estonian clients) needing 500 pages before getting to the point?
blks 1y ago
What a load of politicised rubbish.

164 points by Maro 1y ago

> Recent Russian studies put the count of lost lives and unborn children as high as 170 million people. wait, does this just mean pregnancies that didn't reach full term? Or like, a hypothetical number of kids that could have been born?

j4coh 1y ago
Lost lives and lost potential is how I read it.
mc32 1y ago
The 170MM figure is referring to all losses of life like the purges, man-made famines (Holodomor), inept ww ii strategies, as well as “unborn” children. This last one has no reference so it’s impossible to know what that means or how many people they attribute to that. That said, the problem is a cultural one. The communists poured gas on the tendencies of the Tsars and modern Russia suffers from that legacy still. The legacy is a peasant (serf) : master way of thinking. Culture is hard to cure and the change has to come from within. Japan had a similar problem but most of the sharp edges were dulled when they made a deal (surrender) with the Americans. You also see this tendency to cling to bad cultural habits by some enclaves of immigrants. It can take decades of new generations to wipe some of those bad tendencies away. Some people see that as erasure of culture as a bad thing but it can also bring good.
- H8crilA 1y ago
  I don't know who is downvoting this comment, but the comment is correct. Russia is a state, not a nation. The Kremlin, in all incarnations - the Tsars, Stalin, the Communist Party, Putin, even the Mongols that used to run it before Moscow, have always been perceived more like an alien force that has landed onto this land, and now one has to submit to it, without questions. This is a lesson that parents pass onto their children, implicitly or explicitly. It could become a nation-state in a relatively short order, though that's certainly going to be bloody. And nukes could be on the table as well - this is why the US was actually opposed to the USSR collapse, a fact that's not widely known today.
  - ivan_gammel 1y ago
    It’s a bold and unsubstantiated claim. In English language there’s a lot of confusion because the same word Russian is used both for citizenship and ethnicity, but in Russian they are different and such confusion doesn’t exist. If you run polls in Russia, ethnic minorities won’t say that they are Russians using the word for ethnicity, but they will certainly confirm that they are Russian citizens belonging to the same cultural space (and in that sense some may even use the word for ethnicity, e.g. “I’m Tatar, but I’m Russian too”). Nation is defined not by the government but by shared history and culture and may cross ethnic boundaries. Russia is big, but its people have developed the shared culture, the pride, the sense of belonging which qualify it for a nation. This comes on top of all geographical and ethnic identities, which make the picture more diverse and complex, but those identities are rarely stronger (even in regions like Chechnya).
Spooky23 1y ago
You can play with the scope to tell the story you want. If you scope in WW2 losses as well, about 30M Soviets died. Some other number were injured or disabled. If you look at fertility rates at the time, you can project how many children would have been born, and I’m sure you could be at that number. Additionally, the after effects of the war and Stalin persisted - the loss of men resulted in higher numbers of childless women. I lack the information to assess whether 170M is a meaningful number, but on a relative basis, the United States and even China didn’t contend with the sheer destruction and oppression that Soviet people did, and had higher fertility rates. It’s not a “pro” or “anti” Soviet/Russian discussion - the nation’s people suffered in various ways, which had an end result.
zdragnar 1y ago
The Bolsheviks were the first to get a country to legalize elective abortion in 1920. They did so as a temporary measure because so many women would have difficulty raising a child in the post-war environment. It got to the point where hospitals were overwhelmed and they started setting up dedicated clinics. They tried making it illegal again in the 30s but brought it back in 1955 because there was such demand. So, presumably this 170 million number is written by someone who believes a fetus is a unique human life and the prevalence of elective abortion was so high as to be a not insignificant number of "lost lives".
- jonah 1y ago
  By what actual scientific definition is a fetus, not a unique human life? They have their own unique DNA, brain, circulatory system, fingerprints, etc, etc. In my understanding, any definition that discounts there individuality is primarily there to depersonalize them and thus justify their killing.
  - unnamed76ri 1y ago
    To justify their killing and assuage the conscience of any who have had one/had their wife/girlfriend have one.
  - totallynothoney 1y ago
    That's a philosophical discussion, not scientific fact. (The scientific facts of fetal development are of course important for the discussion) I'm sure we would entirely disagree when a fetus gets qualia or becomes a human being, but that doesn't necessarily mean one of us is ignoring science. Unique DNA is irrelevant (a clone would be a person), lacking a viable circulatory system or fingerprints doesn't mean lack of personhood. Someone completely braindead a person or closer to a cadaver? Not everybody agrees on the same. >In my understanding, any definition that discounts there individuality is primarily there to depersonalize them and thus justify their killing. That's bad faith. Let me try one myself, all anti-choice people are just useful fools in the ultra-conservative campaign to maintain authoritarian control of the relationships and bodies of the people. In my country divorce was illegal until 2004, the same party that maligned it's legalization took condoms out of UN care packages after an earthquake. They would absolutely prohibit Plan B, limit condoms to married couples and make homosexuality illegal if they in had the power. In the US, the poor will be kept barefoot and pregnant, while the Republican senator and the megapastor will get an abortion for their mistress. Well, that's easy. Just think everyone else is evil and stupid :^)
justsomejew 1y ago
The fact that you cannot even see how ridiculuous this piece of propaganda is, says also about your ability to reason. The great demographic drop in the Soviet Union happened after the WWII (you remember that Soviet Union defeated the nazis, right?), but even that was not "170 million people" and was due to the war started by the nazis (whatever your propaganda claims about that).
- hulitu 1y ago
  > The fact that you cannot even see how ridiculuous this piece of propaganda is, says also about your ability to reason. TBH, i don't believe he/she does not have the ability to reason, i think that HN has become a main place for state propaganda. Almost a third of articles are either bashing of US adversaries or "exploded but success, terrahertz transistor, could, may be, etc". The next third are AI propaganda.
- lycopodiopsida 1y ago
  > was due to the war started by the nazis Soviet ally, nonetheless! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
  - justsomejew 1y ago
    Yes, cherrypicking the pact when the relevant part is the international context back then.. Soviet Union had to defend itself not only from nazi Germany. To remind you of western capitalists helping the nazis? Of the British royal family ties to the nazis?
    - lycopodiopsida 1y ago
      Yes, yes, the "defense" where you occupy parts of Poland, attack Finland. And of course, providing resources and training facilities to the dear ally in Berlin. There is a reason why soviets always talked about "BoB" and never about WWII - they've entered the latter as allies of Hitler, which does not fit to the soviet victim narrative.
hulitu 1y ago
No, the CIA just counted the lost sperm.

deleted 1y ago

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immibis 1y ago

[flagged]

kmoser 1y ago
> While nazism and its crimes were condemned after World War II, making the return of this form of totalitarianism impossible [...] This didn't age well.

loloquwowndueo 1y ago

> death toll of communist terror I don’t think this was the fault of that socioeconomic system known as “communism”. Yet the article tries to push that assumption a few times. > Hitler as the biggest criminal and murderer of the 20th century. It is hard to believe that, actually, Stalin murdered significantly more. Not only are the crimes of communism not condemned, but they are by and large not known. Right, so it was this particular implementation of communism, epitomized by Stalin’s policies.

rwmj 1y ago
Ah ha, didn't have to wait long for "we've not tried real communism yet".
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago
  But if we want to be precise, he is right - in theory, it wasn't the fault of that socioeconomic system itself, and logically you can't exclude the possibility that in the future there might be a communist system without causing millions of deaths, unfortunately in practice all such systems, including the one in Russia and China, had enormous toll. The reason for it, in my opinion, stems from the origin: in an ideal world, the whole population would agree the system is fantastic and introduce it, based on mutual respect. What actually happens is that crowds get furious and start killing and introduce a new system by violence, so it's hard to expect a nice fruit from a rotten seed.
  - nradov 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - GauntletWizard 1y ago
    The theory is a perfectly spherical cow - impossible in practice, laughable in imagination. We have a firm understanding from historical data of how it fails, even if it doesn't match the imagination of its proponents.

vectorcrumb 1y ago

Might this be available in some ebook format somewhere?

jthnme 1y ago
created epub for my personal use, obviously publicly available, therefore hoping not an issue to share: https://limewire.com/d/r2ZTu#rcSoipCE3E https://limewire.com/d/r2ZTu#rcSoipCE3E

Herodotus38 1y ago

This may be covered but one absurdity that I came across was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism When I was an undergraduate working in a molecular biology lab my two mentors, Andrei and Svetlana were Russian emigrants. Andrei taught me, in the 00s, that he couldn’t do the level of molecular biology in Russia because the downstream effects decades later put them far behind in the technical and cultural knowhow. Genetics was banned.

baxtr 1y ago
> More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents. Scientists were executed… ok wow
- cowcity 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - jamiek88 1y ago
    What? Wow. There’s a bot for every crackpot now eh?
    - H8crilA 1y ago
      Low quality bots are the most jarring.
  - piombisallow 1y ago
    "Same in the West" lmao, when were scientists executed in the West? The 1500s?
  - bdamm 1y ago
    Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

croes 1y ago

I guess the post is caused by this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843605

MaxPock 1y ago

[flagged]

stormking 1y ago
[flagged]
- MaxPock 1y ago
  Capitalist Nigeria and Somalia must be thriving countries
  - stormking 1y ago
    Capitalism can be inhumane, especially if it is not controlled by democracy. Communism is always inhumane. It cannot be established democratically, it cannot be run democratically. It will always end in misery, poverty and death.
    - cosmicgadget 1y ago
      By definition, capitalism is inhumane. Even if you are worried about the market looking unkindly on your accural of capital, you're doing so in a fashion that prioritizes their perception rather than actual virtue. You are right that democracy can reign capitalism's amoralism in, but so can any other form of government. I don't see why the same can't be said for communism, beyond the standard "it hasn't happened before".
      - stormking 1y ago
        You mean: It has never happened once, no matter how often tried. How many communist experiments, how many ruined lives will it take until you and your kind finally get it? But I know the answer already ...
        cosmicgadget 1y ago

kergonath 1y ago

Entertaining, but not to be taken too seriously. The author himself says that it’s very subjective and not thoroughly fact-checked. Even then, the digs at the Kievan Rus’ are… well, absurd. Also, I don’t know of any European country without its share of demented and paranoid rulers. But England is not Henry VIII and Germany is not Hitler. Also, this > But let us start with the Communist Manifesto which is the holiest tome of communist ideology and can be called the red gospel. is a pearl of unintended absurd humour. In this case, when someone applies their beliefs and frame of mind to a foreign object without actually understanding it. In the end I agree with the author that all life if absurd, it’s just a matter of point of view.

keiferski 1y ago

I look forward to the day when the capitalist and communist eras of the 19th-21st century are analyzed coldly, in the way we look at mercantilism or medieval market towns today. Because it really seems like both are increasingly inadequate systems for handling modernity, and the obsession with defining one as intrinsically evil and the other the obvious superior option (I’ll let you choose which is which) is such a flattening, unhelpful approach. Personally, having moved from capitalist America to post-communist Poland, a few things seem true to me: …the communist era in Poland was a disaster and the country today is unquestionably better off as a modified capitalist one; …contemporary American culture really seems to be struggling under an unquestioned capitalist ethic; …the conflict seems artificially egged on from think tanks, corporations, academics, and maybe even the simple alliteration of the letter c (i.e., you don’t hear nearly as much about Capitalism vs. Socialism, even though historically that’s a more accurate label of what governments actually were.) …and that neither capitalism or communism has ever really been implemented in a pure sense. Which is all a long way of saying that Mark Fisher’s quote seems more true every day, not as a pessimistic statement but just one describing a lack of imagination and the inability to transcend the debate: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

nradov 1y ago
I can imagine a lot. In every possible scenario, the end of capitalism means disaster for the entire human race.
- keiferski 1y ago
  This is exactly the kind of low effort, no imagination response that I was referring to. No discussion of alternatives, no acknowledgement that maybe there are some issues with the current capitalist system, etc. Just apocalyptic language, with no openness to the idea that yeah, communism was a terrible system, but maybe that doesn’t automatically imply that contemporary capitalism is inherently the best system.
  - nradov 1y ago

matheusmoreira 1y ago

> While nazism and its crimes were condemned after World War II [...] this has not happened with communism. This resonates quite deeply. In my country nazis go straight to jail but communists walk our soil completely unpunished. They have half a dozen political parties, are well coordinated, are popular and are constantly elected by the population when they promise them heaven on earth. This is especially ironic since nazism is short for national socialism. Communism is alive and well in Latin America. Brazilian president Lula declared to CNN his intention to install communism in my country not even a week ago. It has been his intention for over 40 years. He and his party has been in power for over 20 years. Yet people act as though it was fake news.

simlevesque 1y ago
It's not fake news it's good news.
cosmicgadget 1y ago
A specific, racist form of fascism can't really be compared to an economic ideology.
- matheusmoreira 1y ago
  It absolutely can. Nazis, like socialists, centralized control of the economy in the state. It's just that they did it in order to further the goals of the so called Aryan nation as a whole. That's why it's called national socialism.
  - cosmicgadget 1y ago
    "Naziism had economic principles therefore it is a peer of any general economic system." Nah. Capitalism and communism don't have all those racist tenets. Nor the expansionism.
    - matheusmoreira 1y ago
      Principles have nothing to do with it. The key feature is totalitarian government control over the economy and the means of production. Nazi Germany certainly had it.

derelicta 1y ago

[flagged]

pavel_lishin 1y ago

> On the other hand, life was secure. There were no bank loans, therefore there were no bank fees or percents. There was no real worry over one’s job or workplace; one was available for everyone. Wages were low, but fear of losing one’s job was almost nonexistent. A person pretended to work; the state pretended to pay him. Living accommodations were crowded and faint hope existed to find a better apartment, but all had a roof over their heads.There had to be, since homelessness was forbidden by law. > Nowadays, there exist people who yearn for that mollusk-like life. This isn't an inaccurate description, and yes, it's not exactly a utopian state to find yourself in. But I'm not going to chuckle at the hypothetical people we're supposed to pity for wanting this; I bet there are quite a few people in the United States alone who would love to have this life, who would love to have a guaranteed job, a guaranteed roof over their heads, and the heads of their children.

username332211 1y ago
The really funny part is that this is probably fairly easy to achieve in the United States. The only part of the Soviet system you'd need to implement is the migration and residency control regime. Currently people all over the world are free to move to New York, which makes the city unaffordable. If you forbade anyone not born within it from moving there, Manhattan would be fairly affordable and homelessness would be much reduced. All you need to do is to free yourself from that bourgeois delusion that a man from Mexico (or worse, West Virginia) has any right to live in that city.
- vintagedave 1y ago
  > The only part of the Soviet system you'd need to implement is the migration and residency control regime. Ouch: straight to being against others. No, the part you'd need to implement to get socialised housing is socialised housing. Similarly, there are modern equivalents to guaranteed jobs. Communism believed everyone had to work: today we have different ideas of purpose than Marx had, plus are more aware of those who cannot work, or the value of non-work social contributions, and tech folks like us might believe in or hope for an upcoming post-scarcity society, with a transition period of UBI. I expect you want to control migration and residency in order to avoid freeloaders. Freeloaders are remarkably rare, most people have self-respect and enjoy being productive, and interestingly systems that exterminate freeloaders entirely tend to be less efficient.[1] Plus, if you have a wonderful system, the best way to handle other people wanting it is to help it grow, not limit it to yourself. A better policy would be one encouraging its growth elsewhere in other countries where all those folk who are coming to your shores are coming from. The US has a long (mixed) history of that approach re democracy. [1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

nikanj 1y ago

Nazi Germany never put up fences to stop their people from leaving. The Soviet Union did. That’s my metric for the standard of living in them

seiferteric 1y ago
Except for the ones around the concentration camps.
chihuahua 1y ago
I'm virulently opposed to communism and the Soviet Union, as well as Nazism, and it is tempting to say that the Soviet Union was worse than Nazi Germany. In some ways that's true if you look at the number of their own citizens that were killed by Stalin vs Hitler. On the other hand, Stalin had a longer period of time for his mass murder than Hitler did. But Hitler caused the almost complete destruction of Germany with the war he started. In terms of living conditions, you are probably correct; although again, Hitler's starting point in terms of economy, civilization, and living conditions was much better than Stalin's, and we didn't see Nazism play out over decades. Nazi Germany's soldiers on the advance engaged in systematic killing and regarded most of the population of the conquered territories as vermin; Soviet soldiers merely raped most of the women and did not engage in systematic killing campaigns, with some exceptions (e.g. Katyn massacre) I'd say it's difficult to say which is more deplorable: Hitler killing millions just because of their ancestry, or Stalin killing millions in the Gulag because of paranoia and because it was a convenient source of labor. If we're just looking at the success of the economic systems, leaving aside the mass murder and the devastating war, then what you're saying is correct.
- throwaway3060 1y ago
  IMO, when thinking about this question it's useful to look at the full scope of their objectives. We don't know much about what else Stalin planned, but given the time he had it probably would not fundamentally change the order of magnitude. On the other hand, we do know some of what the Nazis planned to do if they had won, and it was on a scale far beyond even the millions they did murder.
- 1y ago

kibwen 1y ago

> While nazism and its crimes were condemned after World War II, making the return of this form of totalitarianism impossible Even written in 2021 rather than today, it's difficult to take the OP seriously after this. Both Hitler's nazism and Stalin's communism are manifestations of the deeper authoritarian sympathies that infect the human psyche and to which the modern world is quickly succumbing.

sublimefire 1y ago
> deeper authoritarian sympathies It is not that but systematic destruction of any institution standing in the way. Once that is done it is easier to wield power and suppress people to do stuff. Just look at Russia today, where dissent is extremely risky to you and people around you, where shitnews television is pumping people with weird narratives, etc. Similarly T.Snyder argues that a precursor to the atrocities (not the war per se) in WWII were the destruction of the institutions.
justsomejew 1y ago
Communism was quite different from nazism, whatever they tell and told you in the west. You just did not live there, and some people rewrote the history for you. Equating communism and nazism is one of the most abominable aspects of western propaganda
- nec4b 1y ago
  They are both the same. One wants one true race society and the the other one true class society. The only way tho achieve one or the other state is by eliminating those who don't conform (Holocaust and Holodomor). It's despicable some pretend one is better then the other.
  - LtWorf 1y ago
    Accusing Karl Marx of what Stalin did is like saying Lincoln is guilty of Trump.
    - 1y ago

xyzelement 1y ago

I was about 10 when the USSR has collapsed and have lived in the use for over 30 years yet I still see in my parents and even myself the remnants of dehumanizing ridiculousness that existed there. Eg my dad is instinctively terrified of dealing with anyone from the government even like the mailman because that person can wield their position against you even though that's not the case here at all. Or for example I had to point out to my dad that his neighbor open carries. Like my dad is intellectually aware of the 2nd amendment but it didn't fit in his brain that people could actually exercise a freedom so his eyes were literally blind to it (obviously I drove him to the gun shop that evening)

pavel_lishin 1y ago
> (obviously I drove him to the gun shop that evening) Why would that be obvious?
- simlevesque 1y ago
  Yeah to non-americans this sentence sounds so weird.
  - pavel_lishin 1y ago
    I'm an American, and it sounds wild to me. I still don't understand it.
  - agumonkey 1y ago
    He might have meant it humorously too. You don't know about gun laws at all, so next stop is the gun store.
Mars008 1y ago
[flagged]
- LtWorf 1y ago
  Yeah but the USA wokeness is only about words, not about solving anyone's problems for real.

divan 1y ago

Important to understand that these are "absurdities" only when viewed from the angle of market economy and democratic society. For people living in Soviet Union this was just a "state of the world". Communist values (or lack of values) shaped the political and social systems in which people were born and raised. First we shape systems, then systems shape us.

bevr1337 1y ago
This was written and edited by folks who lived in the USSR, so we know that these people held complexity. More than "just..." Just is a great word. It alerts the author and reader that there's little substance in the claim. Just trust me!
AnimalMuppet 1y ago
People were shaped by the rules they lived under. That doesn't make the rules any less insane.
- divan 1y ago
  Yes. What I was trying to say that people who live within those rules (and keep propagating/making them!) can't just live in the constant congitive dissonance state. They rationalize this state of the world, they tell stories (to themselves and to each other) to make sense of these rules, so it doesn't feel insane.
  - obscurette 1y ago
    They absolutely can live in the constant congitive dissonance state. I did 30 years of my life. Many of us did. I know it's hard to believe for people living all their life in the free world, but constant congitive dissonance was just part of the reality for us.
justsomejew 1y ago
Well, the very real absurdities and nightmare of your "way of life", you don't see them as well. What happens now in Gaza? Do you "see" it?

hagendaasalpine 1y ago

historians have described the USSR as an 'affirmitive action empire', a contradictory one

jostylr 1y ago
This might be a good article for such a perspective: https://reason.com/2021/11/01/yes-it-was-an-evil-empire/ https://reason.com/2021/11/01/yes-it-was-an-evil-empire/

csours 1y ago

I feel like some people are trying for the sequel right now. Moral relativism is like digging a latrine. Almost nobody wants to do it for somebody else, it's a chore to do it for one's self, but pretty much everyone appreciates when it's already done for them. Anyway, I feel like 'liberalism' is under broad attack by both conservatives and progressives, largely because it is very unsatisfying right now. Speaking for myself, liberalism is a way to understand the world. Liberalism in this sense does not especially imply progressivism or conservatism, and can be practiced by anyone. To re-phrase the Robustness Principle: "be opinionated in what you do, be open minded in what you accept from others". I feel like the stronger you push your opinions into your understanding of the world, the harder it gets to actually understand what is going on in the world. As Colbert said: "reality has a well-known liberal bias". This statement makes more sense if run in reverse: "An open-minded understanding of the world is more likely to be durably and broadly true than a strongly opinionated understanding". Unfortunately, it has become VERY difficult to talk about what is going on in the world right now, largely because a lot of disparate groups are pushing their opinions into their understanding very very hard. There are many people who currently disagree with their own in-group, but are restricted in what they can say because of social loyalty constraints. If you can't be the first person to speak up, consider being the second. The absolute strongest superpower that humans have is the the ability to tell another story. Don't get stuck in the first satisfying story you hear. ---- If you are satisfied with blame, try examining the situation closer. If you are satisfied that a whole political party is evil, try examining the situation closer. Here are some questions: What is the person or organization doing socially economically emotionally political as in policy objectives political as in electoral strategy political as in internal power structure - is the internal power structure sound or fragmented? When a person or organization says something, is it complete accurate satisfying (to anyone? to someone? to me?) Sometimes, it is a trap to fight the obvious fight. Perhaps the other side is fine with losing the obvious fight for some reason. People don't believe crazy things because of correct facts, they believe them because of satisfying stories. --- May I humbly ask 2 things of you: 1. Please don't assume I'm saying or implying something beyond what I've said here. You may feel free to go beyond what I've said, just don't put it on me. 2. Please don't join a death cult. You can look up the characteristics of a high control group; a death cult is all that plus their definition of morality narrows over time, excluding more and more people. Death cults ramp up anger over time. It's very easy to fall into one right now, and they are not exclusive to either side of the political spectrum. It's better to endure a little moral dissatisfaction than to join a high control group.

binary132 1y ago

I’m the farthest thing imaginable from a Bolshevik sympathizer but I often wonder whether big-C Communism could have survived and how it would have fared if the United States hadn’t engaged in sustained economic warfare against it. I imagine it might look something a bit like Chinese Communism does today, although perhaps those days came and went in the later eras of the Party system.

nradov 1y ago
What economic warfare? Even after WWII the USA literally sold food to the USSR. Without that their food shortages would have been even worse.
unnamed76ri 1y ago
Chinese communism survives because the US spends an insane amount of money on their goods each year. It would have collapsed by now if not for the US demand for stuff.
flyinghamster 1y ago
People who got too serious about communism tended to get eliminated by Stalin, and then the people in charge of the elimination (Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria) were in turn eliminated in later purges.
sublimefire 1y ago
The premise of its “success” was based on half the population working for free in the camps for the other half. Many major projects were executed with little thought for the slaves/workers that perished, all for the goals of socialism. Then oligarchy followed, without the way to increase worker productivity. The only well funded programmes were in the defence sector which bankrupted the country eventually
qcnguy 1y ago
Communism depended on the west and was sustained by it. Obviously they exported raw materials to purchase the many things they failed to produce themselves including food. But also particularly, the Soviets had no way to set prices in their centrally planned economy that actually worked, so they kept the show on the road by copying prices from western free market economies. This is one reason the USSR was always lagging behind western economies despite being scientifically advanced. They had to wait for the west to develop products and do price discovery, because GOSPLAN didn't have any way to price things properly themselves.

gampleman 1y ago

Reminds me a bit of the “Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel.

wormius 1y ago

1. Black Book of Communism 2. "Unborn" Yeah, no. I'm not saying USSR was a panacea or that Stalin did nothing wrong (Tankies are the fucking worst. I hung out on /r/communism for a while, and, as the kids used to say "gross"). I take writing like the OP with a HUGE grain of salt. There are plenty of crimes and problems with what happened in the Soviet Union. Some of these were intentional by the leadership both before, during, and after Stalin. Some of these were self-owns (War Communism much?) some of these were forced errors (when doing battle one makes tough choices, and this includes in ideological/economic/actual war). Some of these were straight up evil policies (gulags, great purges, Katyn, etc...) If someone can do real analysis I'm down, but once you start quoting Black Book of Communism, I know you're coming with an agenda and it's hard for me to take you in good faith. Especially if you're counting "The Unborn" - go on, just call the US a "Nazi Nation with the unborn holocaust" (I grew up in that shit, so saw the propaganda first hand).

nec4b 1y ago
>>1. Black Book of Communism Are you contending existence of mass murders under almost any communist regime? What agenda are you talking about? You are making it sound communism is a noble idea, which someone is trying to discredit undeservingly. >>2. "Unborn" It was about an estimation of how much more people would Soviet Union have in time if it hadn't murdered so many of its citizens. Imagine children of children of missing 20 million people.

davejagoda 1y ago

> In their subconscious hopes that a societal formula is as simple and as universal as the famous E=mc², people are prepared to believe nonsense if it only sounds good. This is an interesting insight on human nature.

robotnikman 1y ago

Somewhat related, one of my favorite 'absurdities' to come from the USSR was the hydraulic computer https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/12/vladimir-lukyanovs-water-computer.html https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/12/vladimir-lukyanovs-wat...

inglor_cz 1y ago

One thing that only the "survivors" realize is just how materialistic the Soviet Bloc societies were. And I don't mean philosophically materialistic, like "there is no soul". That too, but I mainly mean that in the shortage of everything (and there usually was a shortage of everything) people would become fixated on owning relatively banal objects. Girls would prostitute themselves for a nice pair of Western jeans, people would snitch and steal, break the law, run illegal smuggling rings while bribing the police, take bribes themselves etc., over things such as stockings, tires or calculators. I was not able to persuade one young American that not paying a fat bribe to a doctor could have fatal consequences back then. "But in socialism, there must be a common free healthcare for everybody!" - Yeah, lad, on paper. Paper tolerates everything. The one thing that was never in shortage were slogans, propaganda, red flags and red stars.

m4rtink 1y ago
Giving "presents" to doctors is still very much ingrained in the older generation up to this day. :P
- inglor_cz 1y ago
  True. I visited a doctor friend in a fairly good institution (IKEM) and he showed me a comode. When he opened it, it was full of alcohol. Hard liquor and wine. He said: "This is what the patients brought us last week. How are we supposed not to become alcoholics?" He was seriously worried, btw. No light joking. In every work collective, healthcare included, there are some people prone to alcoholism and this is just a dangerous temptation to them.
decimalenough 1y ago
The book tells a story of how bananas were nearly unobtainable and thus became an almost totemic status symbol. An Estonian actress pilfers a banana from a high-level Party function, risking grave consequences, just so her daughter could taste one at least once in her life. Alas, the daughter is too young to appreciate this and declares that it tastes like "poopoo".

sexyman48 1y ago

Wtf is it with Russians (or their Estonian clients) needing 500 pages before getting to the point?

blks 1y ago

What a load of politicised rubbish.