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008Zulu t1_j28c0qo wrote

A remarkable period of history it can be said.

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totallyclips t1_j28g9dr wrote

And what has it actually done, other than impoverish a nation and create so many sociopaths to run it in to the ground

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cgaWolf t1_j28jjv7 wrote

...and then it got worse.

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Jw0341 t1_j28ni1a wrote

70 years later it collapsed

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VaporLockBox t1_j28pdvq wrote

Lenin ordered the violent annexation of Ukraine into the USSR in order to steal their grain and energy resources to help pay for his New Economic Policy. This time the terrorist invaders will be crushed.

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ashwagandha_ksm66 t1_j28un43 wrote

Crazy that when USSR was created, all Western Nations opposed it, spent troops there after their Civil War including the United States in 1918.

Anyway, Collapse by Vladislav lav M. Zubok and Adam Curtis's Traumazone are great to check out for anyone who wants to avoid the redscare narrative that's somehow still prevalent and just want to read/watch history unfold.

−5

usrevenge t1_j2920ur wrote

Replying to ashwagandha_ksm66 (#1,180,783)

The effort put forth seemed pretty minor which is expected since Spanish flu was ravaging the planet and this all happened during/right after world war 1. No one wanted to actually war with communist right after fighting Germany for 4 years.

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iocan28 t1_j299x3o wrote

Replying to sd_glokta (#1,177,728)

It’s an interesting what-if. Lenin probably would’ve been better than Stalin, although he still had plenty of blood on his hands. If his stroke didn’t happen, would he have expelled Stalin, or would Stalin just have come to power through other means?

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Jhushx t1_j29pvzd wrote

Replying to 008Zulu (#1,177,039)

I genuinely believe that the Cold War brought major and minor advancements in science, tech, medicine, you name it.

I'm sure aside from obvious things like weapons, rockets and armor, everyday things like modern computers, GPS, and LED lights would've eventually been invented but the Space Race vs. the USSR and all the political/military posturing and maneuvering sped things up for sure.

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ThatGuy798 t1_j29sg2m wrote

Replying to 008Zulu (#1,177,039)

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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The_Liamster t1_j29vnye wrote

We should get it back together and call it the “Soviet Reunion”

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TomSurman t1_j2a2fae wrote

Replying to MaievSekashi (#1,187,960)

I know a lot about the atrocities of the USSR, I don't really know what happened under the Czar. I was under the impression that the Czar was just an out-of-touch distant autocrat, not really interested in the affairs of the Russian people. Whereas the USSR took a keen interest in what the ordinary people were up to, and it wasn't to the peoples' benefit.

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MaievSekashi t1_j2a3s4q wrote

Replying to TomSurman (#1,191,562)

A lot of massacres, starvation, and routine repression of the people under his rule. It is difficult to point out a specific one; While for comparison the Holodomor is often pointed out with the USSR, similar famines (and many smaller ones) happened on a regular basis under the Czar, to the point they were simply part of the normal patchwork of society rather than significant events - Despite certain famous famines in the USSR's history, it's average level of food security was significantly greater than under the Russian Empire. The Russian famine of 1891-1892 in particular was a major driver in the popularity of Marxism in Russia. The spark that lit the fire of the February revolution was a protest-turned-riot against food rationing. This was also against the background of Russia's involvement in WW1 being deeply unpopular and killing a lot of people.

He was an out of touch distant autocrat and one could debate his personal role in all this, but his government very much cared what people did; for the people dying it didn't particularly matter whether it was personally the Czar's fault or his government's fault, as the government's strongly autocratic nature directly stemmed from him regardless of his intentions. Personally as a Jewish person I think he about got what deserved - I don't have much sympathy for a man who happily condoned pogroms against us. What happened to the rest of his family should not have happened.

This was a state that still had serfdom and enforced it very violently. Secret police and mass imprisonment of political opponents was the norm; the later GULAG program effectively built off the precedent of imprisoning people for questionable political crimes as a source of forced labour.

To put it simply, people did not revolt for no reason and establish the conditions that allowed for the Bolsheviks to come to power. They did it because ordinary life was impossible under the Czar's regime.

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MeatsimPD t1_j2a4a6j wrote

Replying to TomSurman (#1,191,562)

Oh the Tsar was very concerned with what the peasants were up to. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okhrana

In the decades leading up to the overthrow of the Monarchy in 1927, there were a lot of assassination attempts on the Tsars and high ranking officials, plus numerous attempts to overthrow them. They were very much aware and interested in who was supporting or influenced by these revolutionary movements

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loztriforce t1_j2a6yl8 wrote

I feel bad for the average Russian person

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AsDaUrMa t1_j2acjbb wrote

The Russian empire was an absolute nightmare. The revolution was totally justified. The bolsheviks were only one group. The mensheviks were the other. They fought to the death to hold Moscow. The last group was an all women's division. They really tried.

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Yakassa t1_j2ahfow wrote

15-20 years into Russofascism now though.

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gmil3548 t1_j2ahy9k wrote

Replying to MaievSekashi (#1,187,960)

Stalin was definitely worse than the Czar. There can be a hypothetical asked about if Stalin hadn’t gone to power how would it have been (but still Lenin and the others were pretty cut throat about holding power instead of letting Mensheviks or SRs gain influence). However, given how Stalins regime played out and how the inertia of it kept going with the next few guys, it can be objectively said that’s he czars weren’t nearly as bad. Out of touch conservatives who occasionally got too violent we’re the czars while Stalin was just a straight up mass murderer.

−3

gmil3548 t1_j2aiehn wrote

Replying to VaporLockBox (#1,179,549)

Yeah Lenin was incredible at his job as a revolutionary leader. He was however horribly ruthless in his methods (which is why he was effective) and after he was able to take power that ruthlessness didn’t tone down enough and he was a tyrant - tho not nearly as bad of one as Stalin.

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gmil3548 t1_j2aiups wrote

Replying to [deleted] (#1,177,485)

Or just if Trotsky was able to be the heir like Lenin wanted instead of being pushed out by the other leaders until Stalin eventually worked his way into control.

Trotsky was the most level headed of them all, including Lenin. That’s why he was a Menshevik for so long, only moving over when it was clear that the Bolsheviks were the only side willing to actually win a revolution.

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Aurion7 t1_j2ataa6 wrote

Part of the very long tapestry you have to unroll when trying to answer the question of why Russia is so messed up in the year 2022.

That it's only part of the tapestry says a lot about the way Russia has been run for the last several hundred years.

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Aurion7 t1_j2aucbj wrote

Replying to NerdyyPlatypus (#1,196,672)

While a popular theory, his symptoms failed to improve in any meaningful way after having the bullets removed and the oxidation theory remains unproven generally. It's more likely the stroke(s) specifically were caused by arteriosclerosis.

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Cicero912 t1_j2ayiqn wrote

Replying to gmil3548 (#1,195,248)

The tsars were 100% mass murderers aswell, they weren't like Louis the 16th and just bad monarchs during a tumultuous time but otherwise decent people.

The Okhrana is one of the scariest secret police organizations in human history.

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Hunor_Deak t1_j2b1ryp wrote

Replying to MaievSekashi (#1,191,885)

And to add, the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05.

He was told that going to war against Japan was a bad idea as Russia wasn't ready. He couldn't deliver economic progress so he wanted to be a military leader. The war was serving as a distraction to the problems in Russia. Only for them to lose the war.

The failed revolution of 1905 was partially because of Russian loss to Japan.

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JayR_97 t1_j2b2u4i wrote

Eastern Europe: "Why do I hear boss music?"

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Hunor_Deak t1_j2b2usv wrote

Replying to ThatGuy798 (#1,189,163)

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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AdminsAreLazyID10TS t1_j2b421l wrote

Replying to Yakassa (#1,195,139)

I couldn't care less about Stalin and Lenin rolling in their graves, but it sure does suck to see the deaths of 20+ million Soviet citizens in WW2 being spat on so thoroughly in the name of nationalism.

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AdminsAreLazyID10TS t1_j2bm8du wrote

Replying to SizorXM (#1,202,976)

It certainly has some parallels, but that war was far more complex than this one, and Lenin never went around advocating killing Ukrainians for being Ukrainian, as far as I'm aware.

While he lived he even supported Ukrainian identity... And then he weakened, and died, and Stalin seized the reins.

But whatever you think about whether either was a true believer in communist ideals, I think we can both agree Putin doesn't believe for one second this invasion is an anti-fascist war.

And, of course, there's the simple fact that WW2 came after their invasion of Ukraine and had a whole different generation of troops.

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tcmart14 t1_j2btzfp wrote

Replying to MaievSekashi (#1,191,885)

Yea, large famines were the norm and happened often. Eastern Europe and Russia were some of the last to industrialized. I believe Marx himself even called Russia a backwater and the last place communism could happen in because they were so far behind in industrializing. And Russia didn’t get properly industrialized until it had to out of war time necessity from World War 2.

As for personal involvement in daily lives. The czar was, you can say the USSR learned a lot of tricks from the Czar when it came to the Cheka and the KGB. Lenin being an example was jailed and sent to Siberia for a time due to his political writing and the Imperial police very much had spies walking amongst the people. So in a way, the Chela and KGB for the Soviet Union was not out of the ordinary, it was business as usual since a lot of these type of government activities predate the USSR.

Unfortunately, people seem to think Russian history only started in 1917 when in reality it’s been a shit show for hundred of years prior.

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Tropink t1_j2c8chb wrote

Replying to An_Overt_Amalgam (#1,187,082)

Russia was already an economic powerhouse, fastest growing economy after the abolition of serfdom, and while they did get richer by exploiting and looting their neighbors with the help of the Nazis (what happened to the eastern part of Poland; and who drove tanks into Hungary to keep them their puppet?), they were much poorer than all their European counterparts; and even Japan, a country with less than a third of its population, no natural resources, that had been ravaged by the war, and had not one but two atomic bombs dropped in them, as well as intense napalm strikes over its country, had a greater economy than the USSR (in absolute terms, per Capita it wasn’t even close). The USSR was a total failure, only second to Mao’s China, or Pol Pots Cambodia.

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An_Overt_Amalgam t1_j2cf4yg wrote

Replying to Tropink (#1,211,480)

No, my point was that it was not a total failure by reasoning of it being different from Maoist China or Cambodia, as you pointed out. Unlike these countries the USSR had enough capital to keep the lights on despite losing more than 20 million people in World War II and the purges/famines, and for being a planned economy in a time before digital computing they were pretty resourceful and were able to accomplish quite a lot in terms of economic and scientific development. It was unquestionably a disaster, but it was a worthwhile attempt that unquestionably could have gotten further given a different postwar political landscape, and I think it’s a loss for humanity that we didn’t get to see some of the historical alternatives that could have permitted. The failure, really, was that the violent restructuring of the twentieth century was coalesced into a liberal order that required and was capable of undercutting mass politics the world over to enforce its own terms of geopolitics.

Addressing the comparison to Japan, the two are incomparable: Japan got aid money thrown at them to rebuild and then enjoyed a massive boost as the staging ground for the Korean War, all in a homogenous society in an area the size of a postage stamp with nary a competitor in the region, while the USSR had to recover behind the iron curtain with the same Stalinist regime it was stuck with before. (It’s worth noting that the US was able to do a lot with Japan because their leadership had lost. We came in and immediately enacted massive land reforms, which we turned around and denounced as soon as Cuba tried to do it in their own country because it meant American companies would have to cede land to the public.)

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aqua_zesty_man t1_j2cm8q5 wrote

Meanwhile, Putin has been working feverishly on the remake.

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Gravelord-_Nito t1_j2cmp6y wrote

Replying to gmil3548 (#1,195,349)

This is very easy for modern liberals to moralize about from the position of incredibly cossetted and, frankly, delusional modern attitudes that don't have to stand up to the rigors of reality. This all happened IMMEDIATELY after WW1. Any mask or veil of civility or high minded political sophistry was ripped entirely off a long time ago, and the reality was very apparent for every political actor of the time: The only thing that matters is power. And if you don't use it, your enemies will, at your violent expense. Churchill literally immediately gave all the help he could to the Whites in the civil war to 'strangle Bolshevism in it's cradle', this was the USSR's welcome party to global politics and their relationship with the West only got worse from then on.

I'd like to see any modern liberal lead the nascent USSR under all these threats while maintaining these fanciful modern attitudes that are essentially just performances of personal virtue projected onto politics.

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Gravelord-_Nito t1_j2cn2ro wrote

Replying to Rhetam (#1,187,613)

Nobody on earth has any leg to stand on when criticizing someone else for ethnic cleansings in the 20th century. The US and all the other colonial powers enthusiastically sold entire races into slavery for banana corporations and murdered millions who didn't like it. It really irks me how smug and judgmental Westerners in fucking COLONIAL STATES get over other people's violent checkered pasts.

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gmil3548 t1_j2cq03t wrote

Replying to Gravelord-_Nito (#1,215,526)

Eh, I mean this is just overreaching the other way. Even Lenin’s contemporaries outside of hardcore Bolsheviks thought he was extreme. He had to be, I will grant that but he did take it too far at times like the Cheka.

Also, the whites never got much western support so to say anyone threw all the help they could’ve behind them it would’ve probably stopped the Revolution. The thing was that coming out of WW1 no one really wanted to get tangled into what looked like it could easily be a part 2. The Bolsheviks thought it would happen (which is why hindsight does admittedly look worse, since they truly believed the entire west would back and aid the whites).

I’m fairly socialist (I don’t think anyone can be really into learning early modern period history like I am and not end up that way) so I’m not attacking the ideas. It’s just that it’s naive to say it wasn’t carried out by a ruthless guy then overtaken by one of the most ruthless and paranoid dictators ever, resulting in something even more oppressive and worse than what came before. If for no other reason than the Cheka/KGB was WAY better at their job than the Okhrana which was often underfunded and undermotivated to truly shut down the left opposition the way the Soviets were able to shut down any dissenters.

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Rhetam t1_j2ctg9q wrote

Replying to Gravelord-_Nito (#1,215,625)

Here's a hot take: You can condemn both the Western colonial powers and Russia for their genocidal, imperialist pasts.

Fuck 'em both. The only ones who can't are dumbfuck nationalists or even dumber tankies who try to act morally superior but deny the Holodomor or the Uyghur Genocide in the same breath.

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Cunninghams_right t1_j2d0mhd wrote

Replying to Hunor_Deak (#1,200,484)

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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United_Target8942 t1_j2d41zq wrote

Replying to pegothejerk (#1,189,040)

I don't think so, living standards increased a lot. For most people, its better than living in a colonial extraction based economy where there is poverty for 80% of the population, (on top of a tyrannical dictator).

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United_Target8942 t1_j2d6cp4 wrote

Replying to Rhetam (#1,217,293)

This is true, fuck both systems.

However, I rarely ever see people mention that over a hundred million people died due to structural violence, from the british control over india. Yet everytime the USSR is mentioned, people immediately point to the genocides and oppression. Thankfully people are finally adopting the attitude that people like Winston Churchill were in fact a monsters much like the ones that westerners are used to hypocritically pointing at.

The reality is, every single country indoctrinates the public to be hypocrites on geopolitical crimes. At least, i can't think of a single country that isn't.

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MaievSekashi t1_j2efrdi wrote

Replying to 9lobaldude (#1,221,003)

You clearly have not heard of the Russian EMPIRE. Who do you think it was that colonised Russia as far as North Korea and invaded Manchuria?

Seriously, you don't understand what you're talking about if you think the Czar solely ruled what is now modern-day Russia.

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Mythosaurus t1_j2fqtod wrote

Replying to AsDaUrMa (#1,194,036)

Listened to the “Revolutions” podcast cover the fall of the Romanovs and rise of the Soviets, and you’re absolutely right.

Most people don’t learn about just how horrible and desperate life was in the Russian Empire, and have this warped view of history where communism just rose up like fascism to haunt Europe.

And when you understand how much effort went into stopping peaceful reforms by the imperial state, you understand how violent revolution became inevitable.

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United_Target8942 t1_j2ft5j8 wrote

Replying to 9lobaldude (#1,221,003)

North Korea was supported by the USSR to a large extent though. It was a richer country than south korea up until the 1970's. The really bad times in North Korea happened during the war (from american bombing) and after the collapse of the USSR, which resulted in a famine (the arduous march).

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