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ThatGuy798 t1_j29sg2m wrote

Reply to comment by 008Zulu in This day, 100 years ago, the USSR was created by SENPA-A-A-A-I-I

I've been reading Midnight in Chernobyl by Michael Higginbotham and its really incredible how the USSR operated vs what the people believed. While there was genuine support of the idea of a Utopia, the higher ups especially after Stalin didn't seem to think so, which is what brought the decline that would ultimately lead to the disaster and the fall of the union.

Do I support the USSR? Not really but I do feel bad for the people who achieved incredible things for nothing.

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Hunor_Deak t1_j2b2usv wrote

It partially boils down to Hobbes's idea of the social contract.

Communism had a social contract with the population. You surrender individual sovereignty and we deliver improvement in material conditions to a point where we reach Utopia as described by Marx and Engels.

Once the cynicism sets in and the inevitability of utopia through Marxism gets replaced with Brezhnev's eternity of the same (the stagnation of the 1970s), the social contract fails.

That is why Communism was gone by 1989 and 1991. It failed to uphold its own end of the social contract while the population gave up everything.

I heard this comment before. Majority of the people believed till Chernobyl. Not after.

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Cunninghams_right t1_j2d0mhd wrote

It was doomed from the start. It basically depended on everyone being honest and altruistic at all times. The moment you have people elevating loyal followers or exercising their power for personal or factional gain, then the leadership will naturally move more factional and more sycophantic

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ThatGuy798 t1_j2b7kby wrote

That's a really good summary and its a shame really because based on what was created during that time who knows what would've happened.

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