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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Yes it was. On paper. And maybe the first one tried to be. Be the 1930 they were designed to mine, chop, place rails and so on. With an impressive death rate and population.
I think you’re confusing “taiga gulags” with “sharashka” or lagry near western USSR part if you think it was anything but slave labour camps in general.
I wonder what was happening on the Western Front that creates the conditions for more brutal labor camps? Could it have been widespread fascism, Operation Gladio, Nazi and Nazi sympathizers, and bourgeois nationalistic anti-communism?
Or is it, as you say, just the moral failing of a morally and intellectually inferior people?
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)
You’re saying that industry was plundered without looking at the context, which is that industry was massively expanded in Poland under Soviet economic policy. The fact that machinery was appropriated and reallocated throughout the USSR is precisely what one would expect if a nation that was under the bourgeois rule of production anarchy was suddenly and necessarily integrated into a centrally planned system following the destruction of the most powerful bourgeois military ever fielded at the time.
The idea that you consider the removal of pipeline to be national plundering but ignore the expansion of heavy industry under the Soviet economic program shows you don’t have a grip on what plunder means. You could count any reallocation of machinery as plunder if you are willing to ignore the entire other half of the balance sheet. The real plunder is national wealth, social services for the masses, food stores to stave off famine, art and cultural relics, etc. There was some of that, again, not to the extent of the West, but it’s worth noting. But power plant machinery? Please. You pretend that the USSR plunged Poland into an agrarian bronze age when the exact opposite is true.
Stop carrying water for the rich elite and the petite bourgeoisie who lost their livelihoods when communism came in.
You think 14 paper factories is worthy of inclusion in the national wealth of Poland and supports your claim of national plunder? Foolish.
For some reason some Western and all of Russian researchers say that P oland being occupied by USSR did wonders to Polish economy, while Polish researchers say otherwise. I wonder why. Oh, btw, the same is true if you look at any other colonized country.
The idea that you consider the removal of pipeline to be national plundering but ignore the expansion of heavy industry under the Soviet economic program shows you don’t have a grip on what plunder means. You could count any reallocation of machinery as plunder if you are willing to ignore the entire other half of the balance sheet.
You mean rebuying similar equipment to stolen one, from USSR, on credit, and then processing the resources for them and selling them back by the price USSR dictated?
You pretend that the USSR plunged Poland into an agrarian bronze age
I did nothing of the sort. You said you’re unaware of systematic wealth transfer, plunder, by USSR. So I showcased, with sources, an example of that.
Foolish
Yes. So far you’ve proven that you’re unable to think or say that USSR did anything wrong, and glorify all the actions undertaken.
If that’s not romanticizing, I don’t know what is.
For some reason some Western and all of Russian researchers say that P oland being occupied by USSR did wonders to Polish economy, while Polish researchers say otherwise. I wonder why.
Bourgeois nationalism does a lot of things, but one of the most sinister things it does is it distorts narratives about reality so effectively that people inside the bubble think everyone outside the bubble is deranged. You should take your acknowledgement that “for some reason on the Polish establishment hold these opinions” and examine what’s really going on. For example…
You said you’re unaware of systematic wealth transfer, plunder, by USSR. So I showcased, with sources, an example of that.
You think that replacing 14 paper mills with heavy industry is an example of systematic wealth transfer, when it’s nothing of the sort. If you understand the economic theses of the USSR, it’s pretty obvious what was happening - they were attempting to maximize the collective industrialization of all territories they were now responsible for after pushing back the Third Reich to Berlin. This is obviously an entirely different set of constraints than the Polish economy was working under prior to the war. Specifically, the pre-war Polish economy was dominated by the interests of the national bourgeoisie, and those interests were to produce goods for export to the international bourgeoisie for the highest price with the least salary paid to Polish workers. Hence the abject rural poverty that the majority of the Polish population lived under. After the war, during which the Third Reich waged all-out war and destroyed anything productive that they couldn’t control, it was the communist program of industrialization and wealth distribution that not only allowed Eastern Europe to recover as quickly as did but also reduced levels of rural poverty and inequality relative to the pre-war period.
Because, again, prior to the war, Poland was dominated by the interests of the ultra minority national bourgeoisie, and your cookbook comment is just wonderful evidence of it.
Yes. So far you’ve proven that you’re unable to think or say that USSR did anything wrong, and glorify all the actions undertaken.
This is what anti-communist bourgeois nationalism does to you. It makes you think people who disagree with you are blindly glorifying all actions undertaken. This is a lie. There were huge problems. Stalin did terrible things and he directed people to do terrible things and he didn’t stop people from doing terrible things. The other elected leaders also did terrible things and they directed people to do terrible things and they didn’t stop people from doing terrible things. But here’s the thing the bourgeois ideology blinds you to - the ruling classes in the world have been doing the same and worse for centuries. We cannot make determinations about the USSR based on the actions of individual soldiers, individual squadrons, even individual generals. We have to judge the USSR based on whether or not they fought and defeated the Nazis at great cost. The reason we have to judge that way is that when we analyze the ruling classes of other nations, we find that instead of resisting the Third Reich, they supported it, they pushed it further, they made it worse. No, defeating the Nazis doesn’t mean we can excuse every wrongdoing, but it does mean that we need to see those wrongdoings in the context of the alternative, which was total dominance by the Third Reich and total enslavement of the Slavic peoples across Eurasia, as well as the total extermination of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and many others in Europe.
So yes, Poland lost 14 paper mills that previously made paper that could be sold on the international market for a profit, and they were replaced by heavy industry that produced things that could only be exchanged within the Soviet bloc because once you were in the communist bloc you were cutoff from the international markets. All of that is true. But the alternative was to have an antebellum period where every occupied country in Eastern Europe became a recruiting and staging ground for fascist organizing that would continue the bourgeois assault against the world’s first ever modern proletarian state. Operation Gladio shows us that this is true, the glorification of Nazis and Nazi collaborators across Eastern Europe shows this to be true and the existence of active neo-Nazi paramilitary forces literally killing Russians shows us that this is true.
If that’s not romanticizing, I don’t know what is.
This is a correct statement. You don’t know what romanticizing is. You have been blinded by bourgeois nationalism and an ideology of anti-communism disguised as resentment and national injury. You think losing 14 paper factories is meaningful and that people who disagree with you are blind zealots who don’t understand reality and operate on romantic fantasies. So yes, you don’t know what romanticizing is.
I wish you luck breaking free from the mental prison you are in.
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.
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).
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
It’s going to be a separate message to keep the discussion focused.
That’s the end of discussion here. You know nothing about gulags. It does not. Gulag is an acronym. Even wikipedia knows better.
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.
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.
Yes it was. On paper. And maybe the first one tried to be. Be the 1930 they were designed to mine, chop, place rails and so on. With an impressive death rate and population.
I think you’re confusing “taiga gulags” with “sharashka” or lagry near western USSR part if you think it was anything but slave labour camps in general.
I wonder what was happening on the Western Front that creates the conditions for more brutal labor camps? Could it have been widespread fascism, Operation Gladio, Nazi and Nazi sympathizers, and bourgeois nationalistic anti-communism?
Or is it, as you say, just the moral failing of a morally and intellectually inferior people?
You can stop being condescending, it’s not welcomed.
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!):
Source - Rolicki “Gierek”, pages 110-120 summarized Gomułka notes
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3001363
You’re saying that industry was plundered without looking at the context, which is that industry was massively expanded in Poland under Soviet economic policy. The fact that machinery was appropriated and reallocated throughout the USSR is precisely what one would expect if a nation that was under the bourgeois rule of production anarchy was suddenly and necessarily integrated into a centrally planned system following the destruction of the most powerful bourgeois military ever fielded at the time.
The idea that you consider the removal of pipeline to be national plundering but ignore the expansion of heavy industry under the Soviet economic program shows you don’t have a grip on what plunder means. You could count any reallocation of machinery as plunder if you are willing to ignore the entire other half of the balance sheet. The real plunder is national wealth, social services for the masses, food stores to stave off famine, art and cultural relics, etc. There was some of that, again, not to the extent of the West, but it’s worth noting. But power plant machinery? Please. You pretend that the USSR plunged Poland into an agrarian bronze age when the exact opposite is true.
Stop carrying water for the rich elite and the petite bourgeoisie who lost their livelihoods when communism came in.
You think 14 paper factories is worthy of inclusion in the national wealth of Poland and supports your claim of national plunder? Foolish.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365316318_Stosunki_gospodarcze_miedzy_Polska_a_ZSRR_Economic_relations_between_People’s_Poland_and_the_USSR
For some reason some Western and all of Russian researchers say that P oland being occupied by USSR did wonders to Polish economy, while Polish researchers say otherwise. I wonder why. Oh, btw, the same is true if you look at any other colonized country.
You mean rebuying similar equipment to stolen one, from USSR, on credit, and then processing the resources for them and selling them back by the price USSR dictated?
I did nothing of the sort. You said you’re unaware of systematic wealth transfer, plunder, by USSR. So I showcased, with sources, an example of that.
Yes. So far you’ve proven that you’re unable to think or say that USSR did anything wrong, and glorify all the actions undertaken.
If that’s not romanticizing, I don’t know what is.
Bourgeois nationalism does a lot of things, but one of the most sinister things it does is it distorts narratives about reality so effectively that people inside the bubble think everyone outside the bubble is deranged. You should take your acknowledgement that “for some reason on the Polish establishment hold these opinions” and examine what’s really going on. For example…
You think that replacing 14 paper mills with heavy industry is an example of systematic wealth transfer, when it’s nothing of the sort. If you understand the economic theses of the USSR, it’s pretty obvious what was happening - they were attempting to maximize the collective industrialization of all territories they were now responsible for after pushing back the Third Reich to Berlin. This is obviously an entirely different set of constraints than the Polish economy was working under prior to the war. Specifically, the pre-war Polish economy was dominated by the interests of the national bourgeoisie, and those interests were to produce goods for export to the international bourgeoisie for the highest price with the least salary paid to Polish workers. Hence the abject rural poverty that the majority of the Polish population lived under. After the war, during which the Third Reich waged all-out war and destroyed anything productive that they couldn’t control, it was the communist program of industrialization and wealth distribution that not only allowed Eastern Europe to recover as quickly as did but also reduced levels of rural poverty and inequality relative to the pre-war period.
Because, again, prior to the war, Poland was dominated by the interests of the ultra minority national bourgeoisie, and your cookbook comment is just wonderful evidence of it.
This is what anti-communist bourgeois nationalism does to you. It makes you think people who disagree with you are blindly glorifying all actions undertaken. This is a lie. There were huge problems. Stalin did terrible things and he directed people to do terrible things and he didn’t stop people from doing terrible things. The other elected leaders also did terrible things and they directed people to do terrible things and they didn’t stop people from doing terrible things. But here’s the thing the bourgeois ideology blinds you to - the ruling classes in the world have been doing the same and worse for centuries. We cannot make determinations about the USSR based on the actions of individual soldiers, individual squadrons, even individual generals. We have to judge the USSR based on whether or not they fought and defeated the Nazis at great cost. The reason we have to judge that way is that when we analyze the ruling classes of other nations, we find that instead of resisting the Third Reich, they supported it, they pushed it further, they made it worse. No, defeating the Nazis doesn’t mean we can excuse every wrongdoing, but it does mean that we need to see those wrongdoings in the context of the alternative, which was total dominance by the Third Reich and total enslavement of the Slavic peoples across Eurasia, as well as the total extermination of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and many others in Europe.
So yes, Poland lost 14 paper mills that previously made paper that could be sold on the international market for a profit, and they were replaced by heavy industry that produced things that could only be exchanged within the Soviet bloc because once you were in the communist bloc you were cutoff from the international markets. All of that is true. But the alternative was to have an antebellum period where every occupied country in Eastern Europe became a recruiting and staging ground for fascist organizing that would continue the bourgeois assault against the world’s first ever modern proletarian state. Operation Gladio shows us that this is true, the glorification of Nazis and Nazi collaborators across Eastern Europe shows this to be true and the existence of active neo-Nazi paramilitary forces literally killing Russians shows us that this is true.
This is a correct statement. You don’t know what romanticizing is. You have been blinded by bourgeois nationalism and an ideology of anti-communism disguised as resentment and national injury. You think losing 14 paper factories is meaningful and that people who disagree with you are blind zealots who don’t understand reality and operate on romantic fantasies. So yes, you don’t know what romanticizing is.
I wish you luck breaking free from the mental prison you are in.