• freagle@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      121·
      1 day ago

      So evil for ending the cycle of famines, defeating the Third Reich, establishing autonomy for historically repressed cultures, improving quality of life and standard of living for millions, pioneering an entirely new form of democracy, advancing the science and engineering of spaceflight, space exploration, medical practices, and vaccines, advancing women’s liberation beyond anything in the Western world, and tirelessly working against the effects of North Atlantic imperialism - that is until the revisionists began the process of liberalization and European rapprochement that ultimately led to the suffering of its people, the dismantling of the Union, massive morality from liberal economic shock therapy.

      • ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml
        1·
        2 hours ago

        While Gladio is a thing, and the history we are taught in Europe is colourized, it feels like you have very romanticized view of USSR.

        Gulags were a thing. So was plunder of “liberated” nations (e.g. Poland), and destruction of the individual countries culture (e.g. Polish cookbooks from before USSR occupation vs after are worlds apart).

        • freagle@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
          21·
          58 minutes ago

          Gulag literally means prison. It’s a scare word to use it the way you’re using it. Prisoners in the Gulag worked, but they were paid the national minimum wage and it was saved for them when they left prison. Compare that to US prisons even today and it’s not even a contest which is more humane and moral. US prisoners are charged hundreds of dollars per day for the privilege of being imprisoned and then leave with massive debt which becomes a condition of their parole - they have to find work and they have to make debt payments or they get disciplined, which maintains state control over them long after they have served their sentence. Additionally the gulag population was highest when it imprisoned Nazis during the war. But the US has a per capital imprisonment rate higher than the USSR, and those prisoners are slave laborers that make products for for-profit companies to the tune of multiple billions annually. So, if I have a romantic view of the USSR, it’s not my because my perspective ignores their carceral system.

          As for national plunder, all of the claims I have seen are of soldiers taking things. Not exactly a massive wealth transfer. Some cultural artifacts were taken and probably should be returned, but a) plundering is a universal problem of every single military adventure and not unique to anything done by the Soviets, and b) what the Soviets did is absolutely a minor infraction compared to the looting done by the Western colonial powers during their 500-years of continuous global terror. So no, national plunder is not something I am ignoring in my assessment.

          As for culture, Ukraine shows how much individual cultures were supported and elevated under the Soviet system. Even AI can explain the cookbook evidence you bring up - prewar Polish cookbooks were focused on the upper class and Polish peasant food barely ever made it into cookbooks. After the war, with the abolition of the upper class, Polish cookbooks represent the food of the common people, the super majority.

          So no. I don’t think my view is romantic, I think you are still working through the sedimentary layers of propaganda that make you believe no one could support the Soviets if they really understood what you understand. The reality is that you don’t actually understand those things - you don’t understand the prison system nor the comparative analysis of prison systems between the USSR and the US; you don’t understand the comparative analysis of the behavior of the Soviets post-war vs the behavior of other militaries post-war and what it represents regarding the relative nature of “good and evil”; you don’t understand the cultural policies of the USSR and the comparative analysis of those policies versus the cultural policies of the West in similar situations (hint, the idea that native Americans would even have cookbooks, let alone in their own language, is beyond the pale).

          Keep working through it. I was where you were at one point. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would be a “tankie”, I got banned from communist communities for saying things I thought were not just reasonable but universally accepted and understood. But over enough years of research and discourse, I came to realize just how deep the propaganda and narrative control has been and just how wrong my positions were.

          Good luck to you

          • ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml
            1·
            5 minutes ago

            It’s going to be a separate message to keep the discussion focused.

            Gulag literally means prison.

            That’s the end of discussion here. You know nothing about gulags. It does not. Gulag is an acronym. Even wikipedia knows better.

            Prisoners in the Gulag worked, but they were paid the national minimum wage and it was saved for them when they left prison.

            Source please. Because while not everyone died, and gulags differed, my great-grandfather was not offered “salary” for forced slave labour.

            I’m not an USian, we’re not talking about US here. Don’t steer the conversation there, as it’s “whataboutism” and bears no relevance to you romanticizing USSR.

            • freagle@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
              1·
              3 minutes ago

              Yes. An acronym for administering corrective labor prisons. It was the primary prison system of the USSR and was in no way some grand evil. It was created as a way of making prisoners productive instead of letting them rot in a cell. It was designed to be rehabilitative.

              Yes, I am fairly positive your great-grandfather was accounted for in the prison salary system because that’s how bureaucracies work. The only way he wouldn’t have been is if he was a prisoner of war and all that implies.

          • ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml
            1·
            3 minutes ago

            You can stop being condescending, it’s not welcomed.

            As for national plunder, all of the claims I have seen are of soldiers taking things. Not exactly a massive wealth transfer.

            In 1956, when First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party Gomułka was summoned to Moscow, he made some secret notes (that are now public) counting what infrastructure did Moscow stole (as in - systematically took apart, moved to USSR) from Poland (by 1956!):

            • hundreds different factories lost all machinery
            • thousands of small manufactories (think pa & ma small manufactories)
            • 8 (!) power stations (from Górny Śląśk)
            • coke oven gas pipeline 115km,
            • all big chemistry factories from Polic to Kędzierzyn (value of 1 200 000 000 pre-war $)
            • 4000 km of rails!
            • heavy machine factories in Jelcz, Łabędy, Zielona Góra, Wrocław, Elbląg, Szczecin
            • machinery from Mines in Bolesławiec
            • about 2/3 of machines from the biggest shipyard in Poland (the rest were too big to move)
            • 14 factories of paper and cellulose

            Source - Rolicki “Gierek”, pages 110-120 summarized Gomułka notes