Downvoters are all landlords
Unironically I love logging on and seeing which meme (it’s always a meme) is to become a battleground for the next three days
some of the arguing is legit entertaining
“Is there anything more depressing than communist architecture?”
“Mass homelessness.”
Ex soviet block kid here, even got CCCP stamp in an old passport.
This might be true, but it might be worth considering that by late 70 it would not really matter that much. You could hardly get anything with the money left, basic food products included.
Buying meat in a store would be a thing of a chance or you got nasty scraps, and there was really little other options beyond popatos and a few other very basic foods. In my country most of 80s people would que for most of the day to buy toilet paper, and one your run around the city based on rumor on where something could be gotten. This created a massive black market, but there prices would make an average pay worthless. And also any western foreign currency would be worth much more than local, as they were key for smugglers, anyone looking to escape to the other side and tightly controlled (if you were even given a passport and were allowed to travel abroad you could buy a very small amount of currency, much below what would be needed to sustain oneself). Anyways stuff like this, institutional inertia and stiffness, plus repression of any attempts at change created a feedback loop of a massive shadow economy and corruption that chocked the system and created a deeply pathological culture that has been an issue in the region since.
You understand your whole post is because capitalist systems have always fought to deny resources to communist-leaning systems, right?
So for example, the problems Cuba is facing right now aren’t problems with communism but a problem with the fascist dictatorship next door working to deny it resources.
When you’re being starved by a kidnapper, your own personal finances aren’t your primary problem.
Cool story
The experiences of my family (in the USSR) were not as you describe. Things were cheap and necessities were available. Getting some things was more difficult for non-price reasons. That also seems to align with studies like what the CIA conducted about access to nutrition in the USSR.
Overall, that was a significant improvement over what came before, as well as over what came after.
Where did they work, and did they live in Moscow? Some regions or particular stores by key plants were much better supplied, but honestly I’m not sure if you could find one family in USSR that would claim stores were well supplied in the 80s.
Also I come from one of the satellite state. Food was taken out from the country, while there were protests over look of food in the stores. Kinda hard to claim it did not happen. There were rail carts welded to tracks to by workers trying to stop it…And yeah, Russia was an absolutne shitshow both before and after, no question about it. I’m just addressing oversimplified vision of what money meant in state capitalism.
Where did they work, and did they live in Moscow?
Not in Moscow. Not in any administrative centers.
but honestly I’m not sure if you could find one family in USSR that would claim stores were well supplied in the 80s.
“Well-supplied” compared to what? Would you say that stores in most of the capitalist world were well-supplied?
Also I come from one of the satellite state. Food was taken out from the country, while there were protests over look of food in the stores. Kinda hard to claim it did not happen.
Movement of food between the republics doesn’t seem to be hard to believe, but also does not seem to be malicious.
I’m just addressing oversimplified vision of what money meant in state capitalism.
It’s rather silly to call planned economy “state capitalism”. For most of its existence, there wasn’t even the capitalist class - i.e. a class of people that owned the means of production as private property and used other people’s labour to extract profit from said means of production.
Ignoring the fact that this conversation has been steered towards an explicitly liberal/market economics/consumerist framing…
A 2013 Gallup survey showed that 66% of Armenians thought the dissolution of the USSR was harmful
In a 2016 survey, 69% of Azerbaijanis believed life was better under the USSR.
In a 2016 survey, it increased to 53% of Belarusians saying life was better under the USSR
Another Pew survey, also in 2017, showed that 43% of Georgians thought the dissolution was a good thing, compared to 42% who thought it was a bad thing.
In a 2016 survey, around 60% of Kazakhs above the age of 35 believed life was better under the USSR.
A 2013 Gallup survey showed that 61% of Kyrgyz thought the dissolution of the USSR was harmful, compared to 16% who thought it was beneficial.
A 2013 Gallup survey showed that 42% of Moldovans thought the dissolution of the USSR was harmful, compared to 26% who thought it was beneficial.[7] Regret about dissolution later increased to 70% according to a 2017 Pew survey, with only 18% saying the dissolution was a good thing.
Levada polling since the mid-1990s on the preferred political and economic system of Russians also shows nostalgia for the Soviet Union, with the most recent polling in 2021 showing 49% preferring the Soviet political system, compared to 18% preferring the current system, and 16% preferring Western democracy, as well as 62% saying they preferred a system of economic planning compared to 24% preferring a market capitalist economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalgia_for_the_Soviet_Union
And that is even ignoring various other economic indicators that showed worsened living conditions after the fall.
I think it’s pretty uncontroversial that the USSR ended on a low note.
Decades of economic isolation by western powers, constant conflict with the usa, loss of faith in the government through some of the destalinisation measures and liberalisation of the economy all took their toll.
If history had gone a bit differently and revolutions elsewhere hadn’t been stamped out paving the way for the rise of the Nazis and the ascension of the USA on the back of nuclear horror things might’ve gone a lot better.
They would not, the very the idea was corrupted to the core. By stamping out Prague spring the Chinese scenario of limited or experimental capitalism was made impossible. It would collapsed on itself anyways. Source: grew up in post communist country, seen the results
You understand prague spring was a communist movement against revisionist brezhnev govt right?
Source: grew up in post communist country, seen the results
You saw the results of capitalism’s shock therapy. I dunno how you can be this dumb at blaming at a problem on something’s ABSCENCE
So you’ve seen the results of neoliberalism and you blame Communism for that?
By stamping out Prague spring
Suppressing NATO-backed nazis is not a bad thing, contrary to what you claim.
I would disagree, even tho NATO had some influence in prague spring, it was still largely a pro communist movement against the revisionist USSR
Deleted my original reply - I do think I was too rude.
But no, I cannot agree with you. I find it naive to, at this point, believe that NATO-backed groups - whether they pretend to be for workers’ rights like Solidarnosc, or are more openly anti-socialist like the Mujahideen - were in any way socialist.
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I have many friends that were children of the block like you. Talk to them and they all share your same opinion. It is fucked up today the western youth is now glazing on the old USSR days when you talk to everyone who experienced them and they were garbage.
Personally speaking I don’t want to have to wait in a bread line every morning.
You understand 9 million people starve to death every year under capitalism right? while simultaneously humanity wastes 1/3rd of food rightt?
You have many friends that are either fictional or fucking morons
Everyone I talk to that comes from the USSR says the same as OP. It was horrible, and capitalism is way better.
So maybe you’re the one who’s a moron, or maybe (and this is the most likely thing) the truth is in the middle.
You know what happens at the end of the bread line?
You get bread. For free.
Here you have to wait in line too. But when you get to the end, you have to pay, and millions of people can no longer afford it.
I’m 41 in the USA and there are blocks and clocks of tent cities in my city.
I never realised Lemmy is full of 60+ year olds who would have been old enough to have any meaningful experience of the USSR. (And even then at 61 you’d only just be catching the end where everything was going to shit due to many complex factors).
- I am 49
- My friends are older and younger but the messaging is the same
- USSR fell in 1991
- Who are you to define “meaningful”?
Ok so you were 14 when the USSR fell and 8 when Gorbachev came to power. You were a child. At that age you simply don’t have the depth or breath of experience for it to be meaningful. Same as 14 or 8 year olds now don’t have the experience to really have wider political input. If you haven’t worked, had to get a house, engaged with the state using your “experience” to derive conclusions about it is nonsense. Not to say younger people can’t have opinions but they simply can’t defer to experience as generally they lack it but this can be substituted with study, statistics etc.
Edit:
Also again you were 8 when Gorbachev came to power and everything was going to shit you have 0 experience of the pre Gorbachev era. Appealing to personal experience to draw conclusions about that is even more nonsense.
Lol I’m Canadian I’m talking about my friends with the real world experience growing up in the bloc.
And to throw is back how old are you? What is your experience? Pray tell what makes you an expert?
how old are you?
Mid-30’s
What is your experience
Personal experience with the USSR? None. But I never claimed to have any. Otherwise experience: I’m Chinese originally rural but through scholarships I was put in the position to be able to earn a PhD and 2 masters and now live in a city. But this really has nothing to do with what we were talking about. I never claimed to have personal experience of the USSR.
Pray tell what makes you an expert?
I wouldn’t call myself an expert but I’ve read many studies and books about the USSR as well as my second masters being in Marxist Theory so I would call myself relatively informed.
All of this is however a dodge that has nothing to do with the point at hand which is that appealing to experience when in reality you have effectively 0 makes no sense. If you’ve never worked or engaged with any facets of the state appealing to experience to draw general conclusions about it is plainly ridiculous.
Not the person whom you asked, but
Who are you to define “meaningful”?
To get a good view on the matter, it would require having worked and having gone through a process of getting new housing both before Gorbachyov and after the fall of the USSR. Something tells me that people who earn, say, 30 000 or so rubles (or an analogous sum) per month today were in a much better spot back before Gorbachyov.
I won’t disagree but you’re (intentionally?) shifting goalposts.
As already stated and the easiest example is I’ve been told by multiple friends about waiting in the bread line for their parents for hours. As a North American imagine having to wait for the state to give you your bread for the day and having to wait 6 hours in line to get it. Is this really what people want to glaze?
This is also ignoring the rampant corruption that also existed in the USSR at the time too. You could argue it was more corrupt than we have in North America now.
People in the UK today wait in line to get access to food banks run by charities and mutual aid groups because they can’t afford to feed themselves and their children.
You are an arrogant buffoon.
I won’t disagree but you’re (intentionally?) shifting goalposts.
In what way would this be a shifting of goalposts?
A child is likely not going to have much familiarity with important things that are important in this context - in particular, things like getting a job, prices compared to salaries, not having to deal with layoffs, and being able to get new housing. Those things do need to be accounted for.
We also need to take into consideration that Gorbachyov’s administration significantly reduced the living standards, and it was his goal to dismantle the USSR. So, we should compare the years before him with the full on restoration of capitalism that people keep claiming to be an improvement.
As already stated and the easiest example is I’ve been told by multiple friends about waiting in the bread line for their parents for hours.
Not great that they had to wait for hours, but this is an inconvenience compared to not having access to food at all. Going to remind you that many people do die by being unable to access food under capitalism. Would you actually say that the situation in, say, Africa, or non-socialist Asia, or in post-USSR Russia and Ukraine was somehow better?
As a North American imagine having to wait for the state to give you your bread for the day and having to wait 6 hours in line to get it.
You are talking about a place with “food deserts”, and where people do die by being unable to access food at all.
Also, consider that most of the world does not live in the Imperial Core. Rather, the Imperial Core’s wealth is predicated on plundering the rest of the world. You likely only considered the living conditions in the USSR and in the Imperial Core (and not the Russian Empire, not the post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine, and not elsewhere).Also, you do realise that breadlines are sometimes a thing in the US to this day, as well, right?
This is also ignoring the rampant corruption that also existed in the USSR at the time too. You could argue it was more corrupt than we have in North America now.
“Corruption” is a very nebulous accusation that liberals love to throw at NATO’s enemies. Anyway, can’t exactly compete in corruption with states that have literal lobbying.
It is hilarious to try and negatively compare a country where corruption can sometimes be a threat to the rule of law, to a country where corruption IS the rule of law.
Meanwhile every edgy teenager on .ml is an expert who lived through the entirety of the soviet union
When you can’t attack the message, simply attack the messenger.
Of course, this will raise questions later about why a bunch of edgy teenagers are better at predicting the course of world events than you.
I don’t think I’ve seen even a single person on ml claim personal experience but instead deffer to data and other sources which is entirely valid in my opinion
You are keep implying that the vast majority of people lived better in the Russian Empire, and that praising the Russian Empire this way is somehow not edgy.
I have a friend in China that pays around 3500rmb a year (incl electric, heating, ac, internet) for a place in a mid tier Chinese city. It’s a 10 minute walk from a metro, fairly new, and she prepaid two years of rent working a gig job at minimum wage for 2 months. Her girlfriend also works minimum wage and they said they aren’t even employed right now and they saved some money up from their sporadic gig jobs and are now taking a 2 year vacation because they just wanted to chill, I guess. They send me cute lesbian pictures of them on the beach somewhat regularly. They say no one bothers them about being queer, though their families are still in a somewhat hilarious feud over who should take on whose name. They don’t pay any taxes, they are exempt due to a wage cutoff.
I’m sure everyone here has it cheaper! 🤡 China is a capitalist nightmare don’t you know?
mid tier Chinese city
Which one?
3500rmb a year
That seems insanely cheap, did you miss a zero in there? I’ve seen nice apartments for 2-3K rmb/mo in T2 cities, per year seems crazy.
I’ll ask if I can mention the location, I didn’t say specifically for privacy reasons. Its possible the specific region she is in subsidizes the housing for low income people, idk the specific logistics of how she came to that price. She did mention they don’t live in a city center but it didn’t matter because it had train access.
People online, and especially newspapers, always act like China is having a gig nightmare, and that everyone is stuck in unemployment hell. But they obviously don’t see the totality of the economy, they are just looking at one number or another. A large number of unemployed people can be good because that can be a long period of personal, consensual downtime from work. So many newspapers were also reporting what you just posted as a brutal bust in the housing market ripping wealth away from millions of Chinese. But they do not understand the context of the economy whatsoever. A house isn’t an investment, and its something that takes up such a little part of someone’s total wealth in China that they do not care if the prices keep going down. You can pay off a big 80k rmb house in the countryside in about 3.3 years of minimum wage work, and by countryside I mean a rural/suburb area, you still have access to a fast train to the local big city. You typically pay nothing for the land the house is on, its free when allotted by the collective lands comittee, so you’re pretty incentivized to set up your own house by ordering a prebuilt one to be shipped there or paying builders to do it. Or if you really wanted to save money, you can hook up a fancy yurt to the free electric and sewage lines and grow your own food, this style of life is so cheap and easy to maintain in China that it really isn’t even worth mentioning the numbers. I talked to a trans lady that did that.
This sort of life being possible in China makes me desire immigration to non-major city areas over there. I only have concerns of freedom of information and access to the greater internet- censorship on a national firewall level is something I’m simply not able to tolerate.
IMPORTANT: I am an American with a public education, and have no real knowledge of what life’s like there in terms of freedoms. I’ve just heard things.
Would you mind going into a bit of detail about how accessing the greater internet works over there? That is, if you know anything. I think I am correct in assuming you are not currently residing there. Would love another’s take on this.
The big issue with immigrating directly to China is that you will only be allowed to stay in their higher tier cities afaik, this is because of the Hukou system which treats every region of China like its own country with visa restrictions, essentially. Its great for preserving cultures but not so great if you like to travel a lot. So its unlikely that you could take advantage of the collective lands rules as a foreigner unless you married into a family in an area with collective lands. You can obviously visit any region of China but visas/hukou do have limits if you try to go for residency.
There are some loopholes to getting Chinese citizenship, you can move to for example Taiwan or Hong Kong, get residency / citizenship in those places, and then the mainland would consider you a citizen by proxy. But usually if you’re moving from one region to another you can only live in the higher tier cities. You can read a little more about it here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou
Thanks a lot! This is invaluable to know and look into before I ever begin to seriously considering uprooting my life. I wouldn’t mind going through the paces to attain a life I find desirable, but it depends on how prohibitive things are if the time comes to make decisions like this.
Also are you in USA? Afaik there are new rules for Canada that are more lenient
I got permission to talk about the feud! Traditionally in this region, the wife of a husband would go live in the husband’s family’s house and help take care of the house and his family, usually indefinitely. Nowadays, everyone can afford a cheap apartment so usually a certain time each year (usually Chinese New Year and a couple of other holidays) wives go live in the husband’s family’s house during the celebrations and are a part of the husband’s clan, then they go back to their own apartment afterward. Basically, both extended families of this lesbian couple are really salty and wanna double dip on having their kid and the wife stay in their house so they can have two extra women around to gossip and clean with around the holidays lol. They really don’t want to share! They’ve floated a lot of ideas but have come to a stalemate on the matter, I’m really curious how it’ll resolve when they get “married” (as much as you can be legally in China rn, anyways, which is basically American-style civil partnerships with joint bank accounts prior to Obergefell). The antics each clan gets up to to try to impress them to join is getting really hilarious, they keep bribing them with gifts (flowers, food, money, cute dresses) all the time, its gotten to be a competition for some of the old grandmas with nothing to do. My friend says this is a little stressful. They really don’t want to disappoint either family because they’ve been so nice.
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Is it too scary?
Cartoon person with cartoon opinions
The fact that you seriously think that people were not paid in the USSR is extremely silly.
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Oh you’re someone who thinks communists work for free or something lol
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In the morning 10 comments. Now 110.
Let’s see who is the debatelord vibe basing facts against cowbee…
He has the patience of a saint. We should all aspire to ground our views as thoroughly as him and to be as charitable when explaining our reasoning to others.
Seeing Cowbee around after joining Lemmy has reinforced my belief that I’m doing the right thing by being ruthlessly patient and positive with others. That dude’s awesome, he recommended me, a total stranger, some introductory ML literature (and I haven’t had the time to read it yet…), which I’m sure he gets questions about very often.
(If you see this, Cowbee, thanks again! I’d love to chat some after I’m done reading what you’ve provided me. :) )
Here we go again
Meanwhile people who lived in eastern europe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF0JdAim6Pc
Which eastern Europeans? Certainly not the ones that saw their life metrics shoot up immediately after centuries of feudal serfdom. Or did you mean the deposed petty aristocrats and Holocaust collaborators?
The labels should be swapped.
It is overwhelmingly the western 12 year-olds that complain about praise for communism/communist revolutions.Also, let’s not pretend as if Eastern Europeans were oppressed by the Warsaw Pact, unlike how NATO treats the vast majority of the world.
Examples?
.ml, hexbear, etc.
I’m almost 40
sorry, I meant give examples on how bad communism was :)
I highly recommend the recent Deprogram podcast (ep #248) where they go into a discussion of the daily life experiences of people in socialist countries. Hakim’s father lived in the USSR and Yugo, living in a the former Yugoslavia, has a ton of anecdotal experiences from family and friends.
Thank you for sharing, this seems interesting
And public transport was dirt cheap, a third of the population had summer houses. If we could replicate the capital distribution without the human rights infringement, that would be amazing. But recently the US is doing the opposite: replicate sky high prison population with skyrocketing inequalities
Human rights were also quite strong in the USSR, especially compared to capitalist countries. The soviets were nearly always at the forefront of social liberties.
Hold on there bud let’s not jump the shark. Yes there was advancements for women’s rights and they did have some laws against racism and colonialism although you can definitely argue they didn’t exactly respect that colonialism part. Fantastic workplace and education.
But there were a massive lack of human rights – religious freedoms, freedom of movement which is fucking huge you cannot even go where you wanna go, extreme lack of political freedom and above all being gay was completely illegal.
So not really quite strong and not really that far ahead of capitalist countries, maybe in some facets but saying it was just straight better is completely untrue. The only point it wasn’t illegal to engage in homosexual relationships was when they forgot to codify it into law basically but they fixed as soon as Stalin consolidated his power.
Both countries had their problems which was more reflective of global culture than anything. Across the globe women were handling more work, across the globe racism was growing as people started to integrate, and across the globe people still hated being queer. Countries you would argue are socialist or formally socialist today lag behind drastically compared to western countries, many repress it out right and ban anything about it, some criminalize it entirely. Today Russia is completely barbaric in how it handles same sex relationships so clearly the cultural shift didn’t happen and some of that progress was never made.
religious freedoms
I.e. the most powerful pedophilic cults that worship slaver gods were not given power.
freedom of movement
How much freedom of movement did the people colonised by the European powers enjoy?
In the USSR one could, in fact, do both tourism travel and move to other places.extreme lack of political freedom
I.e. nazis were not given power.
Not sure why you are even claiming that the USSR was behind in this area, considering that states in general do not give opposing opposing movements power.being gay was completely illegal.
Also a feature of NATO.
Going to mention, though, that the early USSR decriminalised that, and some of the socialist republics - like the GDR - were better in this regard.Yes there was advancement for women’s rights
I’m not trying to have a go at you personally, but this is something I see from anti-communists and it drives me up a wall. The way it’s just casually handwaved away that former socialist countries had significantly better rights for one half of the entire population, and it gets relegated to a footnote. It shows just how more work still needs to be done to respect women’s rights. Even if these counties accomplished nothing else, the fact that they actually successfully addressed the needs and rights of HALF the population is a monumental achievement. In the GDR a woman could divorce her husband on her initiative while at the same time in the FRG a woman needed her husband’s permission to work outside the home. This should not be waived off as “yeah yeah I guess women had rights but you couldn’t find a good pair of blue jeans”.
Misogyny is massive. Half the population was liberated from lives of utter dependence on and vulnerability at the hands of the other. Allowed to do stuff like leave abusive marriages and testify against their husbands and shit but it’s “Yes yes they got some rights”.
It’s one of the most significant liberations in human history god damn it. My own grandmother’s life was transformed from one of illiterate servitude to one where she could keep her own apartment and do technical work (and get recognition and respect for doing so, not condemnation!).
She was just one among millions. millions!
I’m reading Albert Szymanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union right now and they made massive changes. I would recommend it.
I’m not gonna be offended trust me. But it drives me equally up a wall when I read anything from .ml that acts this way. A huge tenet of socialist views is the idea of proletariat internationalism, the idea that the working class globally should be working together to fix the entire system everywhere. Instead there is a constant desire to frame east vs west, socialist vs capitalist, Russia vs the US. And that’s disingenuous and really just makes everyone dumb.
The West absolutely has a laundry list of the evil cruel awful terrible shit it has done, I rarely see that denied. What I do see is that same lens not applied the same to socialist/communist countries especially the USSR.
Women were still barred from any position of power through an invisible glass ceiling, they were still completely expected to work a full time job AND handle women’s works, feminist movements were pursued by a state and often crushed, the USSR denied spousal abuse even existed and offered no solution for abused women. Not to mention to overall economic limitations, at least in the west women could own real estate/invest in a stock market/run a business, that wasn’t really the same in the USSR where things were mostly state run or decided by the state which limited everyone’s freedom equally which I guess you could argue is better in some ways but that’s still completely against socialist sentiment.
So yeah I guess women had rights, but it wasn’t paradise and in ways it lacked in contrast to their contemporaries.
You just can’t have actual discussions here because everyone wants to defend the USSR and it is evident in the culture of former soviet countries how they fared and what the government pushed culturally. Spousal abuse is terrible in these parts of the world, racism runs amok, anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiment is massive. People in this thread are literally arguing the USSR was better, yet somehow their culture has completely 180’d? Someone said how the west attributed homosexuality to pedophilia, so did the USSR and so does Russia today because no ground has been made in all those decades since. So what are people even talking about?
I have a Russian communist friend, he says that every young Communist he knows in Russia supports LGBT rights, and he worked in the current Russian Communist Party. I can’t help but wonder, if the USSR existed now, would it have better LGBT laws? After all, the youngest cadre is very supportive now.
The two biggest gaps between communists and your views are that communists recognize the imperialist stage of capitalism as the dominant contradiction globally, which pits the imperialist countries like the US against the global south, as well as the insistence that we place our analysis within the specific historical context that it exists in. This latter process is part of Historical Materialism, which is one of the most significant advancements of Karl Marx.
And this all falls away when you accept every country does an imperialism if it has the ability to do so. The Aral Sea didn’t dry itself, people didn’t deport themselves, languages got erased by the state and cultural repression was a tenet of the USSR.
Imperialism is not an action to be committed on a whim, in the eyes of communists, but relevantly is a stage in capitalist development. As bank and industrial capital consolidate and monopolize, they form finance capital, which seeks to expand internationally and thus the economy shifts from focusing on commodity export to capital export. This is a material system, with definite material causes, not something to be engaged upon at a whim.
The idea that countries would simply be evil if they had the opportunity to is an idealist argument, not a materialist one, and thus is anti-scientific. This is closer to a religious look on life than a scientific one.
Further, as we are placing the Soviet Union in its actual, historical context, nationalities were protected, languages that were never written were alphabetized, and the right of secession was protected. Tremendous development happened, and ethnic minorities were culturally protected and celebrated. There were instances of population transfer, and this by modern standards would be considered barbaric. However, this practice was enormously common among capitalist peers like the UK and US, and neither of them had the same level of thought and care placed into respecting and uplifting various ethnicities.
The only conclusion here is that you either are entirely unfamiliar with the true severity of repressions committed by the west, and therefore the shift to the positive direction as compared to their peers, or are entirely unfamiliar with the sheer care and uplifting that did go on when it comes to ethnic minority rights in the USSR, despite failures like population transfer.
This is why we are pointing out that you do not take a scientific approach to history.
The soviets absolutely respected their anti-colonial stance, not only did they free Russia’s colonies but they also contributed to anti-colonial movements. Regarding religious freedom, it was actually quite high. Atheism was pushed by the state, but protections on nationalities also protected right to religion. Political freedom was also much, much higher for the majority of society, who remain disenfranchised by capitalist systems.
As for queer rights, penalties for being gay were often lower than in capitalist countries, and usually gay rights were at the forefront for capitalist countries. They were severely lacking compared to today, but compared to their peers, they were progressive.
I don’t see how referencing post-socialist states, where reactionaries took power, indicates anything of meaning when it comes to human rights under socialism.
Regarding religious freedom, it was actually quite high.
You mean like straight up shooting priests, until Stalin did a 180 during the war because he needed people’s unity? Interesting ‘freedom’ you got there.
Yeah man Joseph Stalin went around beheading baby protestor dissenter Uyghur priests and shoving them in his nuclear human shredder
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nice, ableism with the r-word. Good to see how liberals are always the good guys huh
Don’t forget how the West rewarded Alan Turing for his contributions during WW2 by castrating him for being gay. Or how the west linked homosexuality with pedophilia.
Or a bigger example being Ronald Reagan letting AIDS run rampant in the LGBTQ+ community?
Yep, even with the homophobia of the early Soviet Union, they were generally at or near the top when it comes to queer rights in their peer countries. That’s both depressing to think about, and also indicative of their own progressive nature as they sit in their historical context.
A case of Homosexuality. Feifer, George. Justice in Moscow. Simon and Schuster, 1964. pp 207–8
To return to the cases behind closed doors: There is an article in the code that I would have thought unnecessary; it deals with homosexuality.* Muscovites are so strongly heterosexual—so little titillating talk, so much real activity. One never sees obvious homosexuals in public places, and I had assumed that I would never see them in court. Russians seemed too healthy for that.
The exception proved the rule. Late one afternoon I came across it in a wretchedly damp, low-ceilinged basement room in the form of two elderly men, fifty-five and sixty-one, the first with a full eighteenth-century peasant beard, the other in high boots and a tunic. Insensibly drunk, they had exposed themselves on a bitter November day in a park and made some sort of contact with each other. They listened in deep embarrassment while the court found them guilty; but “considering their ages, their families, their honest confessions, and their promises of future good behavior,” it decided not to deprive them of freedom but merely to fine them 20 per cent of their salaries for a year.
The men sputtered thanks to the judge and left separately without exchanging a glance. A once-very-pretty, fortyish woman who heard the sentence with me shook her head incredulously. “I just don’t believe it. You mean they . . .? The two of them? Good God, what for?”* Article 121: Homosexuality.
Sexual relations of a man with a man (homosexuality) is punishable by deprivation of freedom for a period of up to five years. Homosexuality committed by means of application of physical force, threat, or in relation to a minor, or by taking advantage of a dependent position of the victim, is punishable by deprivation of freedom for a period of up to eight years.Yep, they weren’t great by any stretch, but the cartoonish idea that queer people were executed in the streets is horrendously false. Meanwhile, Turing was chemically castrated and driven to suicide despite being a hero, simply because he was gay.
The Soviet union literally occupied parts of central and eastern europe? They crushed uprisings in Hungray and Czechoslovakia that still impact how those countries exist today. They even deported Tartars and Chechens. That’s some pretty colonial stances. Their funding for anti-colonial movements was really just anti-western colonialism so it kinda became a “which flavor of colonialism do you want” game. That’s literally what was the basis of the Cold War.
No religions were not protected. They nationalized most church property from the get-go, they abolished muslim schools and actively forced people to stop learning Arabic and Hebrew which was pretty necessary for them to engage in their religion.
As for queer rights, penalties for being gay were often lower than in capitalist countries.
They were not progressive at all, 7 years in prison is nowhere near progressive. You can literally just look up Article 121 Soviet Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_history_in_the_Soviet_Union what are you talking about?
I don’t see how referencing post-socialist states, where reactionaries took power, indicates anything of meaning when it comes to human rights under socialism.
Because it is reflective of the culture that was pushed. You’re basically saying being queer was free and everyone was cool with it, today the sentiment in post-soviet countries is extremely negative, some of the worst on the planet. You don’t get that shift overnight, that is a cultural standard that has been reinforced by a legal system for decades.
On the flip side, even though the US went through the lavender scare and the AIDs crisis it was far better. It still is far better because of the cultural impact of those experiences, there is massive queer support in the US because of events like the Stonewall Riots. A plethora of people famous and rich in the US are openly queer, I can see queer couples when I look out my window and pride flags on most streets.
The Soviet union literally occupied parts of central and eastern europe?
Weird way to describe liberation from maxi Germany this way.
Ah, wait, you bemoan the fact that those countries were not allowed to plunder Africa and Asia, don’t you?They crushed uprisings in Hungray and Czechoslovakia
Suppressing NATO-backed nazis is good, actually. Not sure what you disagree with.
That’s some pretty colonial stances.
No, those are not. None of those things were enforcing relations of severely unequal exchange.
Their funding for anti-colonial movements was really just anti-western colonialism
In what way was that colonialism when those actions actually had a decolonising effect?
The Soviet Union did not “occupy” the other countries in the socialist bloc or otherwise. They had favorable trade relations, but were not colonial. Ethnic deportations were wrong, and did happen, but their peers were worse, for example see how Churchill treated Bengal. Their funding for anti-colonial movements was tremendously freeing, it wasn’t a “parallel colonialism” but genuine anti-imperialism. You can only make this “parallel colonialism” argument if you ignore any and all hard evidence and numbers comparing interactions between western countries and their colonies, and the Soviet Union and formerly colonized countries.
Regarding Hungary and Czechoslovakia, both had counterrevolutionary uprisings that were dealt with as any country would. Far-right elements took up arms against the left wing states, and as such these were contested by the Warsaw Pact countries. This isn’t colonialism.
As for queer rights, I specifically said their penalties were often more lax than capitalist countries at the time. Alan Turing was castrated and pushed to suicide, homosexuality was strongly punished in the west. In the Soviet Union, the 5 year mark was a maximum sentence, one that was rarely carried out. Hence it was more lax, and in some socialist countries like the GDR eventually free gender affirming care began to be rolled out, far ahead of trans acceptance in the west.
As for comparing post-socialist countries to contemporary capitalist countries, you are not making an honest comparison of socialism to capitalism. This already throws out your point, but again, we were comparing the Soviet Union over its whole existence to their western peers over their whole existence, as peers. This is not a comparison of reactionary regimes, but socialist countries vs. their capitalist peers.
The Soviet Union even did trans state funded surgeries in Riga in iirc the 1970s. The Baltics and Leningrad were seen as the most progressive LGBT wise, and it wasn’t likely to be tried for those crimes in any of those areas.
were worse,
You’re just not gonna budge it doesn’t matter believe what you want. Thousands of queers were imprisoned. Millions lost their cultural and religious identity. The Soviet Union did not have favorable trade deals, they had full scale occupations. We can sit here all day and say who was worse but the bigger thing is NOBODY WAS SAFE so it’s completely irrelevant it isn’t even a light slap vs a death penalty, it is straight up government-funded harassment campaigns everywhere. There is no “lax” when it comes to government repression dude.
And then you look at today and the West has absolutely come out far ahead for the LGBTQIA+ community by a long shot because it actually was better in the West.
As for comparing post-socialist countries to contemporary capitalist countries, you are not making an honest comparison of socialism to capitalism.
I don’t have to because fortunately human rights don’t apply directly to those structures, they’re different across each nation that embraces those ideals. Socialists governments want to pretend they champion for human rights but they don’t if anyone is oppressed, they’re just choosing which demographics to support which is exactly how the rest of the world does it too. You’re being completely disingenuous trying to frame it as a this or that argument, there are not two sides to human rights.
But you’re not interested in being fair, you just want the soviet union to be some rainbow paradise or something when it was not. It constricted so hard on the queer community that the identity was completely shadowed and still to this day is goes largely unidentified and unrecorded except for a few like Gennady Trifonov who barely managed to get his story out. Whatever man.
The claim I gave was that the Soviet Union was historically progressive compared to peer capitalist countries. I never said they were progressive compared to modern western countries when it comes to queer rights, and when it comes to women’s rights, worker’s rights, and more, the Soviet Union was more progressive than the US is today. You are shifting the goalpost to the idea that I said the Soviet Union was flawless even by modern standards, which I never said.
Further, you again try to draw a direct line from a socialist federation of countries to the horrendously reactionary states that replaced them. There is no material basis for this, otherwise the Tsarist system would have continued culturally into the Soviet system. They clearly did not, the Soviet Union was enormously progressive compared to the Tsarist system, just like the modern reactionary states are far more reactionary than the Soviet Union was.
You have no leg to stand on.
It feels like you are struggling to understand historical events and entities as parts of historical processes. Yes the USSR did stuff we look back at and go, wow that was fucked up huh. That’s to be expected as we have historically progressed from the point they were at. The USSR wasn’t gonna undo centuries of social conditioning in a decade, that was not feasible. You can’t thanos snap homophobia from existence by royal decree. I would have loved if the Soviet Union spawned into existence with all the values I have today but it didn’t. It was birthed with all the prejudices of working people in Czarist Russia and had to eat away at them over time. Not only this, it came about in a world of prejudices and was consistently surrounded by them. They weren’t going to have an ideological epiphany that severely broke from their tradition and world culture for no reason.
You’re doing historical anachronism
Just wait until you find out about what the US was doing in East and Southeast Asia at the time. There isn’t a single criticism you can make of the USSR that the West wasn’t doing bigger and more savagely.
I 10000% agree and that is my entire point.
Is it? Because it’s the same point I made, yet you seem to be arguing against it.
Five years.
- Religious freedom is an oxymoron. Religions must be suppressed
- Your assertion regarding homosexuality in USSR is wrong, they knowingly decriminalised homosexuality before but stalin recriminalized it - which is his fault
- Today russia is hyper conservative because thats what liberals wanted - to dissolve the USSR they needed a strong nationalist movement which they got.
As a communist myself, point number 1 was proven to be incorrect by the USSR. Suppressing all religious expression was the wrong move and created a massive reactionary backlash that could not be managed. Religions must be allowed to wither away and repression only employed when the religion is being used as a cover for counter-revolutionary organizing.
Agreed, this is a lesson from the USSR we must take to heart (and to be fair, a lesson the USSR itself seemed to learn over time).
stalin recriminalized it - which is his fault
This seems like Great Man theory. Was he really single-handedly imposing this? Or where there more to it?
I am blaming the collective leadership but took stalins name coz he was at the top
Religion is synonymous with culture to some groups. I have seen the sentiment of how Indigenous Americans were treated to be genocide, which I agree with. For largely the exact same reasons and metrics as religious prosecution in the Soviet Union, destroying a national identity, forceful integration, language erasure, basically indoctrination.
They didn’t support it, they wanted to abolish the entire concept of marriage. Which included same-sex relationships. Saying they supported it is disingenuous.
Russia is hyper conservative because of a ton of reasons, a lot of those cultural. Which the Soviet Union reinforced in many ways and didn’t push against in many other ways. Saying the entire culture flipped because liberals is just not true, c’mon.
There was all good,just the government was always right. So,if person kept low profile,lived his life,didn’t spoke against the president, he could live life working and nit bothering about tomorrow. Roof over head, some food always available. Free med care,education, ect. It was very suitable for normies, lazy people were made work, and the smart ones… eh,those suffered in Russia…
I don’t like the implication that workers are unintelligent, lazy, “Normie’s,” while rentiers, capitalists, etc. are “smart people.”
Your comprehension of text is outstanding, but please, try to read again and point were I said that normies were lazy or not intelligent? Where I am saying that capitalist are smart? If not minding , I will ask you personal question- what is your direct experience with Russia?
Under the soviet union, the large majority of those who benefited were the working classes, while those who lost out were the formerly owning classes. You don’t directly reference them by their classes, you indirectly do by describing those who won and those who lost accordingly.
Considering the conversation is about the USSR and not Russia (in its modern form) then everyone on this site likely has the same personal anecdotal experience of roughly 0 and is instead working off data and stories they’ve been told. (Apologies if any senior citizens happen to be lurking Lemmy I just don’t think it’s likely).
In my experience with “smart” people from former Eastern Bloc countries now living in the West, what they “suffered” from was the idea that they didn’t get to live a life of significantly higher material comforts than “normal” workers in their country, similar to how things were in the West.
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damn you are super enlightened
Ah yes, the “smart” ones.
Stable geniuses, and very high IQ, always having had a very high IQ, according to many people.
And with very strong instincts, more important than any degree in a university.
Always known how to make the right moves in business.
You know, the ones people say about that they’re geniuses, and they don’t disagree with them because they’ve been building empires from the ground up.
It’s not like authoritarian governments ever lied with their official statistics to prove a point or anything…
No the soviets didnt. Hope this helps
Can you name a non-authoritarian government?
Authoritarianism is a meaningless word created by an actual anti-semite as a way to minimise the Holocaust by claiming the Soviet Union and the Nazis where the same because they both used state power to do things. Every state is authoritarian, all it is is a word to describe enemy-countries, like saying “regime” instead of government
It’s always very funny to me when people react to socialist accomplishments with literal disbelief. Because when I show you a scientific paper backing up the claim in the meme, you’re now in the position of either trying to rapidly backtrack and pretend that the thing you considered so good it was literally unbelievable is actually not that impressive, or doubling down and accusing Western sources of being compromised by some insidious communist conspiracy, that somehow survived the collapse of the USSR.
So which one is it gonna be?
Saved, this is a really good thing to have on hand. Thanks for posting.
Do you know anything about the data behind this paper? Why was there a spike in rent costs in 1928?
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Why did the USSR allow rent? Isn’t that stealing from the workers with a Landlord who didn’t earn it?
Mao had the right idea of Landlords.
Because buildings don’t maintain themselves?
It wasn’t private rent. More like a housing cooperative where the members are pitching in for common maintenance.
In modern China they have landlords, but it actually makes rent cheaper because the managerial cost is offloaded and the government has driven rent prices to the floor by creating a massive oversupply of housing production. It’s very fascinating that there are landlords at all, it almost feels like a trap. I’d kill to talk to one, I wonder how the numbers work
Presumably the rent went to the government, which was considered as a stand in for the people, right?
i love this picture, it’s right before the men get sent down into the radioactive nuclear power plant that’s nearly about to wipe out all life on the planet because of the soviet unions communist corruption and incompetence👍
wipe out all life on the planet
I really would love to know where you guys hallucinate this shit
Lmfao you are insane
Party loyalty > actually knowing what you’re doing with nuclear power
They knew what they were doing, and thats why a worse catastrophe was prevented
Lmfao you are insane
You get your real life opinions from TV shows.
I see something in the commentary I can’t exactly define. It’s probably bigger than a single word can encompass. Regardless of how revolutionary and forward thinking the leaders of a polity are they are still leading groups and individuals who have their own cultural beliefs, of which their positions would be inherently antithetical towards revolutionary ideas–if they were not the revolution would have occurred earlier. There’s a cultural threshold that must be passed before revolutionary activities can occur, but that threshold may be with a minority of people who can enable those activities to start. They will still be leading a majority who simply do not care intellectually. Most people do not give a thought towards the economic system they live under.
A white-class who materially benefits from a black-class’ oppression will be racist towards that class regardless of what the leading mouthpieces say, especially if that benefit has been enforced throughout many generations. “Equality feels like suppression to the privileged.” When a strong revolutionary polity enters a territory they–by definition–are fought against. It’s intellectually lazy to call this push-back the “suppression” of religion–ethnicity, sexuality or any other category–by the revolutionaries.
Revolutionaries were on the correct lines. One cannot attack the revolution’s failings on the actions of uninterested participants or more accurately: counter-revolutionary actors. The communists were more socially progressive than the capitalists. That’s a fact not up for debate. Communists are more socially progressive than capitalists.
Rents should be abolished. It’s a tax and I do wonder why taxes are still in use by national-governments today. They’re inefficient and create absolutely needless friction and dissent amongst payers. Money has long left the bounds of reality. Of a nation state to issue money, but then tack back a small fraction due to cultural-legacy, should it not be ridiculed? Likewise the ill effects of landlords has been well documented economically: their patronage is solely for the oppressive effects on you–the worker.
