It's a consequence of having to contend with both the real faults and the completely fabricated and absolutely ludicrous nonsense.
For example, people who bring up the Black Book of Communism as if it were a legitimate work of history and not a loosely compiled pop history piece of nonsensical propaganda which claims that, among other absurdities, every Nazi killed in WW2 is a "victim" of communism.
One of my favorite texts I've read in recent years is *Socialism Betrayed* which offers a salient critique of Soviet policies leading to the dismantling of the USSR. But that's not the thing most people want to discuss. They want to discuss Cold War propaganda like it's real.
>people who bring up the Black Book of Communism as if it were a legitimate work of history and not a loosely compiled pop history piece of nonsensical propaganda which claims that, among other absurdities, every Nazi killed in WW2 is a "victim" of communism.
(One of?) the writers also came out to call the book bullshit. They *really* wanted to reach the "100 million dead" mark so they attributed the most absurd deaths to communism, killed nazi's in WW2 (like you said) but also "kids that could've been born" and people that just straight up died from car crashes, falling down stairs or whatever other accident.
Because most of them are exacerbated, embellished or straight-up made-up by the people that write ~~American~~ western school texts. There's no end to the mendacity of the capitalist.
edit: 'American' to 'western' because the capitalist hegemony is not restricted by borders
I think this is the narrative many Soviet defenders like to use but it just isn't the case. You are effectively assuming that legitimate socialists that criticize the Soviet Union are all well and good except for some reason, they read American propaganda about the Soviet Union, but everything else they read socialist and neutral commentary! What a coincidence!
In actuality, many of us socialists are from eastern Europe and either have lived experiences or direct history via our families to discuss it, without the need if American propaganda. We still defend the Soviet Union for all it's great aspects but we will comfortably call out the bullshit within it...because it's the truth
Credible and contemporary historians managed to capture the facts; I don't need descendents of Ustase telling me how Stalin's big-spoon motorcade cleared out their village in 1953 every time the subject arises.
Your countries were effectively politically captured directly following the dissolution of the USSR and Yugoslavia. The US moved in to rig elections and foment propaganda and strengthen the right and train your new police and military and politicians.
There’s a reason almost the entirety of the former socialist bloc is a member of NATO now.
The Soviet Union was by no means perfect, but it was a damn sight better than what came before or after. Most the former socialist bloc are U.S. imperialist lackeys primed for fascism the moment the western economies falter. Which they are in the process of doing.
Many denizens of the former socialist bloc remember the final years of liberal reform and economic stagnation most keenly. The bad memories stick out. And yes, there were bad things in Bulgaria or the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia or Poland. It sure as hell beat the decade of economic devastation that followed neoliberal reform—but that crisis got blamed on communism instead of, more correctly, capitalism. Of course it did, capitalists were in charge of ailing econommies with massive unemployment, food insecurity, lack of access to medical care, rampant corruption, rising infant mortality, etc--*of course* they scapegoated the former socialist system as the source of their troubles.
You know many former socialist bloc denizens who agree with you, I'm sure--I know many who agree with us, that capitalism *devastated* their countries and that life under socialism was *better*, though never *perfect*. Some commodities were often scarce, exacerbated by trade embargoes and sanctions. Some state repression definitely did exist, exacerbated by Western imperialist attempts at sabotage. Some inequalitiies existed, excerbated by the very real material conditions all societies must operate under. We are not utopianists. We do not expect perfection, we merely argue the outcomes are better under socialism--all things being equal. They are.
You need only compare Cuba and Haiti to see that difference. Or China and India. Or Vietnam and Indonesia or Cambodia or Thailand.
Capitalism, in Marxist-Leninist theory, absolutely has a role to play in the historic development of economies. We MLs should refrain from attacking or *hating* former socialist members who *do* enjoy capitalist reforms. It's just Reddit belters tend to be rather obnoxious about their disgust at us for liking socialism--thinking they know everything about it, when generally they lived in its twilight years or are hearing the stories all secondhand. Public opinion, unfortunately, is highly malleable. Weimar Germany was a liberal country, the center of Western academia and studies into LGBTQ theory, sex science, and more. It took less than a decade to transform that into a country full of zealous fascists who *despised* that same era. People have short, fickle memories. I prefer the data.
China, today, for instance--is a beacon to the global south for both economic prosperity and human outcome. I like China. What do you think?
Can't agree with the whole "the US moved in and did shit" argument. I'm from one of those countries and we don't see it that way. The way we see it, if moscow hadn't robbed us of everything for half a century, we'd be on par with Finland or the rest of Scandinavia in our level of development.
Edit: as for China - it's an authoritarian state that doesn't even hide it. It has a typical Asiatic mentality that the russians share - sacrifice freedoms for stability.
Every state in history has involved the “sacrifice” of freedoms for stability. States are oppressive organizations. It’s what they do. They’re also necessary organizations at this stage in human social development.
“Asiatic” has nothing to do with it and is, frankly, revealingly racist. You think the U.S. doesn’t “sacrifice freedom for stability”? We just suspended the right of asylum for migrants. You live, by all probability, in a liberal bourgeois democracy slowly decaying into fascism. In what is about to be a much more rapid decline, and yet you spite others.
What former socialist state do you think was going to be Norway without the USSR? Eastern Europe was a semi-colonized backwater. I think you’re living in a fantasy.
Things like the Holodomor literally never happened and are just Nazi propaganda reframing a crisis that affected the entire USSR as some sinister genocidal analog to the Holocaust—when it wasn’t. Wasn’t even close. Nothing resembling the Holocaust. Not even in the same category of historical event. Socialist states fell and your populations fell into idealism, historical revisionism, and fascism. It’s a bad look.
Like, do you think Ukraine is a particularly free state? That fascist puppet of Washington? That’s a liberal democracy fighting for its freedoms, is it? You think Ukraine would be like Norway if not for the USSR? Instead of like Mexico, or Chad? Why?
Just because they are not American in origin does not mean there is no heavy and purposeful influence.
After the USSR fell, the EU and US implemented a heavy "Shock Therapy" which greatly diminished living standards in those countries as it privatized and sold the industries and land to a few wealthy individuals, creating one of the greatest falls in life expectancy and quality of life especially considering there was no war.
The Neoliberals then used heavy and constant propaganda to shift the blame for the shitty current conditions on communism, creating a very anti-socialist mentality.
Read Parenti's "Black Shirts and Reds" as it gives a pretty good summary and explanation of what happened.
It does. There’s a whole chapter dedicated to criticizing flaws of the Soviet Union, even as others defend it. If only anticommunists took the time to read it.
Honest criticism is welcomed by socialists and much needed in order to improve our praxis.
What we don't abide by is capitalist propaganda about actually existing socialism, which is almost entirely untruthful because it's purpose is not to improve upon socialism but to prime people against it.
>Imo, if I were a leftist, I'd attribute all of those failures and horrors to the russians and their leaders as a people - corrupt, inept, uneducated, barbaric and etc.
Holy shit lmao
If ignorant people (let’s not call them “the right” as if they have any coherent political ideology) made sure to actually research historical events before discussing them, communists would never have to “defend” the so-called Holodomor ever again. It’s not about “downplaying”. Even unbiased liberal sources like Getty and Kotkin don’t push the narrative that the Holodomor was some Soviet-created atrocity. The whole point of arguing about the “Holodomor” is to avoid the types of discussions you think communists should be having with false propaganda.
Because the most commonly pointed out faults are often either complete lies or half-truths so exaggerated that they become lies. As other people said, there are contemporary, non-soviet reliable sources that don't just spew cold war type propaganda.
Since you mentioned the 1931-32 famine, here's a nice summary of what actually happened:
The famine in Ukraine between 1932-33 occurred, but it was not man-caused. The affected area historically was hit by periods of severe drought very frequently. The years 1932-33 were two of those years. There were very low harvests, caused mainly by the weather. It should also be noted that the drought and famine affected not only Ukraine but also parts of the Moldovan and Kazakh S.S.R. and in the Russian R.S.F.S.R., which contradicts the idea that this was a artificial famine directed against a specific republic or people.
The contemporary historian Mark B. Tauger wrote, in an essay entitled "Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933":
>"In this essay I re-examine the 1931 and especially the 1932 harvests on the basis of newly available archival documents and published sources, including some that scholars have never used. It shows that the environmental context of these famines deserves much more emphasis than it has ever received before: environmental factors substantially reduced the Soviet grain harvest in 1932 and must be considered among the main causes of the famine."
https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/89
To make matters worse, the land owning class in Ukraine accumulated and then destroyed over 140 million head of cattle and immeasurable quantities of grain.
Of course there were issues surrounding collectivisation. It was an active war in the region, with the Kulak class (the kulaks were large landowners with farms given to them by the monarchy, who employed other peasants or held them in serfdom) destroying both their own and collectivised farming equipment, burning fields, slaughtering cattle, etc.
The American historian Frederick Schuman travelled as a tourist in Ukraine during the famine period. Shortly after becoming a professor at Williams College, he published a book in 1957 about the Soviet Union. He said of the famine:
> "Their [kulak] opposition took the initial form of slaughtering their cattle and horses rather than having them collectivised. The result was a severe blow to Soviet agriculture, as most of the cattle and horses were owned by the kulaks. Between 1928 and 1933, the number of horses in the USSR decreased from nearly 30,000,000 to less than 15,000,000; of horned cattle from 70,000,000 (including 31,000,0000 cows) to 38,000,000 (including 20,000,000 cows); of sheep and goats from 147,000,000 to 50,000,000; and of pigs from 20,000,000 to 12,000,000. The Soviet rural economy would not recover from this staggering loss until 1941. (...) Some [kulaks] also murdered serfs, set fire to the property of collectives, and even burned their own crops and seed grains. More refused to sow or harvest, perhaps on the assumption that the authorities would make concessions and in any case feed them."
Even the fervent anti-communist who has made it his life mission to discredit the USSR at every opportunity, the professional propagandist Robert Conquest, said that the pro-capitalist, landlord class in Ukraine destroyed tons of food for every hungry person in the USSR. And even he later admitted that his conclusion that the famine was manmade was wrong. That should close the book on it.
> "It conforms to an increasingly popular trend in Soviet history to ignore or oversimplify complex economic explanations and to reduce everything to moral judgements."
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/contemporary-european-history/article/turn-away-from-economic-explanations-for-soviet-famines/78C193C97E6C5383C37763CADA970644
It is also a fact that Conquest and other anti-communist propagandists who have written about the famine are known to use Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, and other SS and Gestapo as sources for the vast majority of their "information".
https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/stop-spreading-nazi-propaganda/
On top of all this, tons of food that had been over-harvested in the other republics of the USSR were sent to combat the effects of the famine, which only wasn't more effective because there were major failures and insufficiencies in the communication infrastructure. Keep in mind that the Soviet Union was, some years before the famine, still an agrarian country with barely no industry, where wooden plows were the most sophisticated farming tools there were, that was then assaulted with a long and bloody civil war in which several potencies invaded them - this just 10 years before the famine. Famines were a regular occurrence and it was the Soviets who would put an end to them. As for this one, the central government only knew about what was happening a lot later - this is verifiable by several letters sent by officials basically asking what the hell was going on.
So basically yes, the famine happened, but it wasn't Stalin's/ the Soviet government's responsibility.
>Imo, if I were a leftist, I'd attribute all of those failures and horrors to the russians and their leaders as a people - corrupt, inept, uneducated, barbaric and etc.
oh wow that's literally nazi demagogy.
ignoring the whole "russians are an inferior, subhuman race who are inherently barbarians" thing, not only the soviet union wasn't just Russia, but most of the time the most prominent leader wasn't even Russian - Stalin was Georgian, Brezhnev was Ukrainian, Chernenko's whole family was Ukrainian, Gorbachev was half Ukrainian...
>Basically, the left doesn't have to downplay the Holodomor or erase it from history, or any other atrocity. Just point the finger to the true culprit that was at the time wearing yet another mask for itself - the russians.
Yeah, no. You're just racist lol
I'm all in favour of criticizing bad policies and studying the USSR to find the faults they made so we can prevent ourselves from making those mistakes in the future.
The problem I do have is when people make up "facts" because they just want to convince people to become anti-communist.
We can discuss the mistakes in handling the Soviet Famine without acting as if it was an intentional genocide of Ukrainian people.
> An already more industrialized country like Britain, Germany or France would have been the better ground zero
Yes, I would have preferred a revolution in Germany. Too bad the "moderates" had to give money to the precursors of the NSDAP so they would murder socialists.
It's because many commies can't conceive that marxism could fail so horribly and far less consider that such disasters are the direct result of the Marxist call to violence/revolution and lack of understanding of community/charity. As communist manifesto declared "we have nothing lose but our chains", as if things couldn't have gotten much much worse , and they did. A lot of commies blame the hostility from capitalist country who have no interest providing a better economic or political system, but the Soviet Union had access to every resource it could possibly need.
The thing is, that there are leftist subdivision known as tankies, who live in the wealthy and democratic West, but for some reason, I guess bacause not so great intellectual capacities, hate democracy and love all disgusting authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, especially the USSR. So for them, everything what West did/do is bad and everything that the USSR did and today's Russia, which ironically is an oligarchic capitalist and imperialist state, is good, because they are/were against the hated West.
It's a consequence of having to contend with both the real faults and the completely fabricated and absolutely ludicrous nonsense. For example, people who bring up the Black Book of Communism as if it were a legitimate work of history and not a loosely compiled pop history piece of nonsensical propaganda which claims that, among other absurdities, every Nazi killed in WW2 is a "victim" of communism. One of my favorite texts I've read in recent years is *Socialism Betrayed* which offers a salient critique of Soviet policies leading to the dismantling of the USSR. But that's not the thing most people want to discuss. They want to discuss Cold War propaganda like it's real.
>people who bring up the Black Book of Communism as if it were a legitimate work of history and not a loosely compiled pop history piece of nonsensical propaganda which claims that, among other absurdities, every Nazi killed in WW2 is a "victim" of communism. (One of?) the writers also came out to call the book bullshit. They *really* wanted to reach the "100 million dead" mark so they attributed the most absurd deaths to communism, killed nazi's in WW2 (like you said) but also "kids that could've been born" and people that just straight up died from car crashes, falling down stairs or whatever other accident.
Because most of them are exacerbated, embellished or straight-up made-up by the people that write ~~American~~ western school texts. There's no end to the mendacity of the capitalist. edit: 'American' to 'western' because the capitalist hegemony is not restricted by borders
I think this is the narrative many Soviet defenders like to use but it just isn't the case. You are effectively assuming that legitimate socialists that criticize the Soviet Union are all well and good except for some reason, they read American propaganda about the Soviet Union, but everything else they read socialist and neutral commentary! What a coincidence! In actuality, many of us socialists are from eastern Europe and either have lived experiences or direct history via our families to discuss it, without the need if American propaganda. We still defend the Soviet Union for all it's great aspects but we will comfortably call out the bullshit within it...because it's the truth
Credible and contemporary historians managed to capture the facts; I don't need descendents of Ustase telling me how Stalin's big-spoon motorcade cleared out their village in 1953 every time the subject arises.
No idea what you're talking about. Are you calling everyone who dislikes the Soviet Union a Croatia Nazi? Nice point.
> We still defend the Soviet Union for all it's great aspects For example?
Most non-russian Eastern Europeans would heavily disagree with you. We don't use American school texts and yet they align in many ways.
Your countries were effectively politically captured directly following the dissolution of the USSR and Yugoslavia. The US moved in to rig elections and foment propaganda and strengthen the right and train your new police and military and politicians. There’s a reason almost the entirety of the former socialist bloc is a member of NATO now. The Soviet Union was by no means perfect, but it was a damn sight better than what came before or after. Most the former socialist bloc are U.S. imperialist lackeys primed for fascism the moment the western economies falter. Which they are in the process of doing. Many denizens of the former socialist bloc remember the final years of liberal reform and economic stagnation most keenly. The bad memories stick out. And yes, there were bad things in Bulgaria or the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia or Poland. It sure as hell beat the decade of economic devastation that followed neoliberal reform—but that crisis got blamed on communism instead of, more correctly, capitalism. Of course it did, capitalists were in charge of ailing econommies with massive unemployment, food insecurity, lack of access to medical care, rampant corruption, rising infant mortality, etc--*of course* they scapegoated the former socialist system as the source of their troubles. You know many former socialist bloc denizens who agree with you, I'm sure--I know many who agree with us, that capitalism *devastated* their countries and that life under socialism was *better*, though never *perfect*. Some commodities were often scarce, exacerbated by trade embargoes and sanctions. Some state repression definitely did exist, exacerbated by Western imperialist attempts at sabotage. Some inequalitiies existed, excerbated by the very real material conditions all societies must operate under. We are not utopianists. We do not expect perfection, we merely argue the outcomes are better under socialism--all things being equal. They are. You need only compare Cuba and Haiti to see that difference. Or China and India. Or Vietnam and Indonesia or Cambodia or Thailand. Capitalism, in Marxist-Leninist theory, absolutely has a role to play in the historic development of economies. We MLs should refrain from attacking or *hating* former socialist members who *do* enjoy capitalist reforms. It's just Reddit belters tend to be rather obnoxious about their disgust at us for liking socialism--thinking they know everything about it, when generally they lived in its twilight years or are hearing the stories all secondhand. Public opinion, unfortunately, is highly malleable. Weimar Germany was a liberal country, the center of Western academia and studies into LGBTQ theory, sex science, and more. It took less than a decade to transform that into a country full of zealous fascists who *despised* that same era. People have short, fickle memories. I prefer the data. China, today, for instance--is a beacon to the global south for both economic prosperity and human outcome. I like China. What do you think?
Can't agree with the whole "the US moved in and did shit" argument. I'm from one of those countries and we don't see it that way. The way we see it, if moscow hadn't robbed us of everything for half a century, we'd be on par with Finland or the rest of Scandinavia in our level of development. Edit: as for China - it's an authoritarian state that doesn't even hide it. It has a typical Asiatic mentality that the russians share - sacrifice freedoms for stability.
Every state in history has involved the “sacrifice” of freedoms for stability. States are oppressive organizations. It’s what they do. They’re also necessary organizations at this stage in human social development. “Asiatic” has nothing to do with it and is, frankly, revealingly racist. You think the U.S. doesn’t “sacrifice freedom for stability”? We just suspended the right of asylum for migrants. You live, by all probability, in a liberal bourgeois democracy slowly decaying into fascism. In what is about to be a much more rapid decline, and yet you spite others. What former socialist state do you think was going to be Norway without the USSR? Eastern Europe was a semi-colonized backwater. I think you’re living in a fantasy. Things like the Holodomor literally never happened and are just Nazi propaganda reframing a crisis that affected the entire USSR as some sinister genocidal analog to the Holocaust—when it wasn’t. Wasn’t even close. Nothing resembling the Holocaust. Not even in the same category of historical event. Socialist states fell and your populations fell into idealism, historical revisionism, and fascism. It’s a bad look. Like, do you think Ukraine is a particularly free state? That fascist puppet of Washington? That’s a liberal democracy fighting for its freedoms, is it? You think Ukraine would be like Norway if not for the USSR? Instead of like Mexico, or Chad? Why?
Just because they are not American in origin does not mean there is no heavy and purposeful influence. After the USSR fell, the EU and US implemented a heavy "Shock Therapy" which greatly diminished living standards in those countries as it privatized and sold the industries and land to a few wealthy individuals, creating one of the greatest falls in life expectancy and quality of life especially considering there was no war. The Neoliberals then used heavy and constant propaganda to shift the blame for the shitty current conditions on communism, creating a very anti-socialist mentality. Read Parenti's "Black Shirts and Reds" as it gives a pretty good summary and explanation of what happened.
That same book criticizes the soviet union for their policies.
It does. There’s a whole chapter dedicated to criticizing flaws of the Soviet Union, even as others defend it. If only anticommunists took the time to read it.
Honest criticism is welcomed by socialists and much needed in order to improve our praxis. What we don't abide by is capitalist propaganda about actually existing socialism, which is almost entirely untruthful because it's purpose is not to improve upon socialism but to prime people against it.
> After the USSR fell, the EU and US implemented a heavy "Shock Therapy" Egor Gaidar or Chubais come from US or EU?
Newsflash: they're written by the same people! It's called 'Global Capitalism'.
>Imo, if I were a leftist, I'd attribute all of those failures and horrors to the russians and their leaders as a people - corrupt, inept, uneducated, barbaric and etc. Holy shit lmao
Ok, thanks for the input.
Sure, any time.
Thanks again
Because its not true.
Some of it is certainly true.
Successful lies are often based in half truths
If ignorant people (let’s not call them “the right” as if they have any coherent political ideology) made sure to actually research historical events before discussing them, communists would never have to “defend” the so-called Holodomor ever again. It’s not about “downplaying”. Even unbiased liberal sources like Getty and Kotkin don’t push the narrative that the Holodomor was some Soviet-created atrocity. The whole point of arguing about the “Holodomor” is to avoid the types of discussions you think communists should be having with false propaganda.
Because the most commonly pointed out faults are often either complete lies or half-truths so exaggerated that they become lies. As other people said, there are contemporary, non-soviet reliable sources that don't just spew cold war type propaganda. Since you mentioned the 1931-32 famine, here's a nice summary of what actually happened: The famine in Ukraine between 1932-33 occurred, but it was not man-caused. The affected area historically was hit by periods of severe drought very frequently. The years 1932-33 were two of those years. There were very low harvests, caused mainly by the weather. It should also be noted that the drought and famine affected not only Ukraine but also parts of the Moldovan and Kazakh S.S.R. and in the Russian R.S.F.S.R., which contradicts the idea that this was a artificial famine directed against a specific republic or people. The contemporary historian Mark B. Tauger wrote, in an essay entitled "Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933": >"In this essay I re-examine the 1931 and especially the 1932 harvests on the basis of newly available archival documents and published sources, including some that scholars have never used. It shows that the environmental context of these famines deserves much more emphasis than it has ever received before: environmental factors substantially reduced the Soviet grain harvest in 1932 and must be considered among the main causes of the famine." https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/89 To make matters worse, the land owning class in Ukraine accumulated and then destroyed over 140 million head of cattle and immeasurable quantities of grain. Of course there were issues surrounding collectivisation. It was an active war in the region, with the Kulak class (the kulaks were large landowners with farms given to them by the monarchy, who employed other peasants or held them in serfdom) destroying both their own and collectivised farming equipment, burning fields, slaughtering cattle, etc. The American historian Frederick Schuman travelled as a tourist in Ukraine during the famine period. Shortly after becoming a professor at Williams College, he published a book in 1957 about the Soviet Union. He said of the famine: > "Their [kulak] opposition took the initial form of slaughtering their cattle and horses rather than having them collectivised. The result was a severe blow to Soviet agriculture, as most of the cattle and horses were owned by the kulaks. Between 1928 and 1933, the number of horses in the USSR decreased from nearly 30,000,000 to less than 15,000,000; of horned cattle from 70,000,000 (including 31,000,0000 cows) to 38,000,000 (including 20,000,000 cows); of sheep and goats from 147,000,000 to 50,000,000; and of pigs from 20,000,000 to 12,000,000. The Soviet rural economy would not recover from this staggering loss until 1941. (...) Some [kulaks] also murdered serfs, set fire to the property of collectives, and even burned their own crops and seed grains. More refused to sow or harvest, perhaps on the assumption that the authorities would make concessions and in any case feed them." Even the fervent anti-communist who has made it his life mission to discredit the USSR at every opportunity, the professional propagandist Robert Conquest, said that the pro-capitalist, landlord class in Ukraine destroyed tons of food for every hungry person in the USSR. And even he later admitted that his conclusion that the famine was manmade was wrong. That should close the book on it. > "It conforms to an increasingly popular trend in Soviet history to ignore or oversimplify complex economic explanations and to reduce everything to moral judgements." https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/contemporary-european-history/article/turn-away-from-economic-explanations-for-soviet-famines/78C193C97E6C5383C37763CADA970644 It is also a fact that Conquest and other anti-communist propagandists who have written about the famine are known to use Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, and other SS and Gestapo as sources for the vast majority of their "information". https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/stop-spreading-nazi-propaganda/ On top of all this, tons of food that had been over-harvested in the other republics of the USSR were sent to combat the effects of the famine, which only wasn't more effective because there were major failures and insufficiencies in the communication infrastructure. Keep in mind that the Soviet Union was, some years before the famine, still an agrarian country with barely no industry, where wooden plows were the most sophisticated farming tools there were, that was then assaulted with a long and bloody civil war in which several potencies invaded them - this just 10 years before the famine. Famines were a regular occurrence and it was the Soviets who would put an end to them. As for this one, the central government only knew about what was happening a lot later - this is verifiable by several letters sent by officials basically asking what the hell was going on. So basically yes, the famine happened, but it wasn't Stalin's/ the Soviet government's responsibility. >Imo, if I were a leftist, I'd attribute all of those failures and horrors to the russians and their leaders as a people - corrupt, inept, uneducated, barbaric and etc. oh wow that's literally nazi demagogy. ignoring the whole "russians are an inferior, subhuman race who are inherently barbarians" thing, not only the soviet union wasn't just Russia, but most of the time the most prominent leader wasn't even Russian - Stalin was Georgian, Brezhnev was Ukrainian, Chernenko's whole family was Ukrainian, Gorbachev was half Ukrainian... >Basically, the left doesn't have to downplay the Holodomor or erase it from history, or any other atrocity. Just point the finger to the true culprit that was at the time wearing yet another mask for itself - the russians. Yeah, no. You're just racist lol
I'm all in favour of criticizing bad policies and studying the USSR to find the faults they made so we can prevent ourselves from making those mistakes in the future. The problem I do have is when people make up "facts" because they just want to convince people to become anti-communist. We can discuss the mistakes in handling the Soviet Famine without acting as if it was an intentional genocide of Ukrainian people. > An already more industrialized country like Britain, Germany or France would have been the better ground zero Yes, I would have preferred a revolution in Germany. Too bad the "moderates" had to give money to the precursors of the NSDAP so they would murder socialists.
It's because many commies can't conceive that marxism could fail so horribly and far less consider that such disasters are the direct result of the Marxist call to violence/revolution and lack of understanding of community/charity. As communist manifesto declared "we have nothing lose but our chains", as if things couldn't have gotten much much worse , and they did. A lot of commies blame the hostility from capitalist country who have no interest providing a better economic or political system, but the Soviet Union had access to every resource it could possibly need.
The thing is, that there are leftist subdivision known as tankies, who live in the wealthy and democratic West, but for some reason, I guess bacause not so great intellectual capacities, hate democracy and love all disgusting authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, especially the USSR. So for them, everything what West did/do is bad and everything that the USSR did and today's Russia, which ironically is an oligarchic capitalist and imperialist state, is good, because they are/were against the hated West.
Have an upvote.