/ot/ - off-topic

>common misconceptions

The main misconception I see about the Soviet Union in particular is people not understanding that the post Stalin USSR differed from the Stalinist USSR. While it's true that Stalin's USSR was wholly totalitarian and based on his paranoid whims, after Khrushchev took power and eased off the state oppression, Soviet society from that point forward was never full on oppressive, and by the late Brezhnev era any serious attempts to root out dissent had for the most part ended.

>Women had it easier in the eastern bloc

A lot of leftists and contemporary communists will say it was a great time for women and that they enjoyed the benefits of maternity leave, free childhood education and other government programs. And while that's all true on paper, women in general seemed to just have the double burden of full time work and domestic household obligations. It wasn't uncommon for women to work 40 hours a week, be the ones stuck standing in line for vegetable oil or whatever else for another few hours a week, and then come home to do most of the cooking and cleaning. Feminism in the eastern bloc effectively extended as far to women being wagies and women working STEM jobs. The heightened militarization of those societies really caused gender roles to be preserved.

>Underrated lolcows

The Ceausescu dynasty of Romania are pretty milky. Communist Romania, for those who don't know, actually regressed into Stalinism while all the other countries around them were mellowing into reform. The Nicole Ceausescu himself was a yokel peasant turned dictator, and just got lead around by his BPD wife. Being of peasant stock, both were insecure about their intelligence. Elena Ceaușescu tardwrangled her dumb husband into making sure all the scientific community in the country praised her ability as a scholar, and got her fraudulent bullshit published in many scientific journals.

My dad's family lived in East-Germany, I remember he told me once that a house was 9000 Deutsche Mark but a car was 20,000 Mark because a house was a necessity way more so than a car. The numbers might be slightly off but not by much. Crazy, I'm not a communist not even a leftist but honestly I wish we had the same system now, at least in that aspect. Also I heard once of a story where a Russian man was abandoned by his family, phoned a friend or co-worker and told him he wanted to off himself but he didn't because the other guy told him 'but what about the 5 year plan? Don't you want to see it?'. I'm dead serious, he didn't kill himself after hearing that, he had new hopes for the future. It's messed up but has always been kind of funny to me.

>>1533681
Housing, guaranteed food and full employment were the absolute priorities for communist countries (post Stalin). After the 1947 famine there was no risk of anyone actually starving to death in the eastern bloc, if worse came to worst, they'd just go into debt to import food from the west (something they regularly did).

Cars were borderline unaffordable everywhere, and were absolute garbage. East German Trabants were 1950s economy model tier and had little improvement over their 30 years. There's stories of goats munching on the outer shell if they're parked in a paddock, because the exterior was made of some cotton poly-mix and not even steel kek.

>I'm dead serious, he didn't kill himself after hearing that, he had new hopes for the future. It's messed up but has always been kind of funny to me.

That was likely during the Khrushchev era, people genuinely did seem to believe the "twenty years to communism" rhetoric during that time. By the end of the 1970s that utopian expectation was all gone. Well, kids still believed it, that's the one thing is that kids in those times all believed what they were told in school and then came around to being cynical adults once they had to actually work and see the corruption.

Khrushchev himself was a bit of an idealist and believed it too. They threw up "Khrushchevka", really crappy and sleazy houses, built cheaply, because "in twenty years we'll have communism anyway and the workers will get something better"….Decades later, and they're just getting around to tearing them all down in Moscow now.

In Russia, a few years back, they opened a Time Capsule from the Khrushchev era and read the letter inside detailing about how wonderful their future must be under communism, and how space travel is coming and about all their high hopes. And all the Russians standing around just cried.

>>1533692
Sorry I'm a bit drunk. I got the story from vidrel, she's a pretty strange woman but her videos are quite interesting. She gives a different pont of view on the Soviet Union than 'it was a hellhole', which is what is thought to Westerners often (and in many cases not untruthful, but it's interesting to hear a different perspective). Also cites a lot of sources from that time which is rare to see with commies. The almost kms man was a long long time ago though like you said. I know about this car that was used in Eastern Germany, I forget which one but the people called it 'Stalin's last revenge' because it was so shitty kek. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

My dad has a funny story about that time. When he was a kid, he wanted to join the pioneers. But once his school joined the festivities during October revolution day and they prepared to it with some other schools and factories. Anyway, one factory produced sugar from sugar beets and they made a bust of Lenin made entirely out of sugar. My dad somehow found it before the festival, took off a good chunk out of it and took a bite. His school was so pissed about it that he was prohibited from joining the pioneers. That was considered a great disgrace.

We has a socialist leader for a few months, until the USA came and said no "that's the worst evil in the world" and orcrasted a coup where he was replaced by a hardline anit-communist Islamist military dictator who installed laws such as public floggings, cutting off hands of thieves and having women raped before execution.

I'm not saying Communism is a prefect ideology but the fact is that really did go out of its to destroy any nation that even tried to be communist or socialist

>>1533692
>Housing, guaranteed food and full employment were the absolute priorities for communist countries (post Stalin). After the 1947 famine there was no risk of anyone actually starving to death in the eastern bloc, if worse came to worst, they'd just go into debt to import food from the west (something they regularly did).
It's communist propaganda you would know to be untrue if you looked deeper into any eastern bloc country. In the early 80 there were mass protests in Poland due to how poorly stores were supplied. People were indeed on the verge of starvation; empty shelves are one of the most common sights when you look at the photos of the country of that time. The only people to always have what they need and to have any western imported products were people with direct ties to the ruling communist party. Corruption was rampant and regular people were left out there struggling, waiting in lines for hours just to hear that the store is out of meat and they can try queueing earlier next month, and maybe then they'll have more luck. Or not.

So I was born and lived in Yugoslavia, it was dope.
Housing was indeed guaranteed for everyone - everyone who is a party member that is. And the housing was excellent quality. But my dad didn't want to be a party member so he got no apartment unlike all his colleagues, got pissed for not getting an apartment, and left the country with us to go live in the West.
You really had to fully embrace the ideology to reap any benefits, I probably get that from my dad but I hate the cultishness of it. You just had to be in the Party and kiss it's ass.
Other than that, I really loved my country and the standard of life was very good for the majority of people
>>1533820
As a former pioneer, I enjoyed this story

>>1533897
nobody was on the verge of starvation in poland in the 80s, of course there were enormous consumer goods shortages but people just ate potato pancakes and salceson instead of antibiotic-pumped chicken fillet and avocado or whatever capitalism has brought us since.

Born and lived in post Special Period Cuba and I was a pioneer too. So I never saw the “Golden Age” of socialism between the mid ‘70s and ‘80s that my parents saw. I know this is stupid but when I think of time traveling the destination I think about is Cuba in the early ‘80s when it was at its peak.

People who are satisfied with the government, most of which live in the island, will tell you it was so much better back then, proving that socialism does work. Barely any scarcities, grocery markets were well stocked and well-painted with no missing floor tiles or windows unlike today.

“Commie block” neighborhoods were well-maintained and had functioning laundromats, clinics, daycares, markets, banks, optical shops, schools, pharmacies, places to do recreational activities and play sports, the elevators worked, there were no blackouts. Food was plentiful and kids were spoiled with good school lunches like an entire porgy fish, every child (under 16) was given a liter of milk, hospitals and schools did not have any scarcity in supplies or equipment.

But all I see is the ruins of that system. I cannot believe my mom when she told me that the store near what was her home used to look like a tiny American supermarket grocery store with shopping carts and it was packed with canned products from the USSR, it even had fashion products too.

Nowadays that place has lost all its glass windows and doors, the tiles in the floor were stolen, the last paintjob was done decades ago, and the whole place is surrounded by an open-air flee market with horse shit, dirt, and stray dogs everywhere.

In most provincial borders or city skirts there was a rest stop were people could have something to eat and just stretch their legs, the one in my city was called Policentro but apparently the one from Matanzas to the modern-day province of Mayabeque that used to be the old province of Havana was the best. It was called el Conejito Aguada.

According to my parents these were basically food courts with all kinds of kiosks and shops that sold everything from sandwiches to fruit punch and ice cream to restaurant-style meals with steaks and congrí. Nowadays these places look like abandoned malls and only have one functioning part, like a guy making sandwiches and selling Malta and lime soda.

But if you ask the people who don’t like the government, most of which leave Cuba whenever they get the chance, they give a completely different image of Cuba. They paint Cuba before 1959 as a the Singapore of the Caribbean, saying shit like back then Cuba was richer than Italy or something. They think all the scarcities that exist today after Trump’s new sanctions which Biden kept, after the Covid era, and the currency reforms has been the constant state after 1959.

Which, like even I know that is not true because the scarcities and problems of today were not present or weren’t that bad back in 2016 and prior till like 2007-ish.

I am just sick and tired that people take the émigré community and the fervent anti-communists like Alexander Otaola as the default opinion of Cubans, especially in the island. These people, besides being wrong on many things, have a victim complex and feel like they are being censured when in reality Cuba has an AIPAC equivalent lobbying Congress: CANF.

It’s so funny, literally all videos on the internet about Cuba are titled something along the lines of “the REAL Cuba that THEY don’t tell you about” or “life in Cuba as THEY don’t tell you” but in reality most Cubans and foreigners are well aware of this depiction of Cuba because it’s all they see in social media and cable news meanwhile the opposite side is given almost no coverage.

The problem with having a state ideology is that whenever the system is in crisis people lash against your ideology. And also, since the Cuban Revolution was a bit different from the socialism of the Soviets, China, or the Eastern Bloc, because it was more about national liberation than communism. The M-26-7 were not some kind of communist party vanguard, and socialism was not imposed in Cuba in the aftermath of a world war.

Cuban communists see the Cuban Revolution as a continuation of the independence wars, the Ejército Mambí, and of José Martí’s ideas against US imperialism and of a united Latin America. Therefore being pro-Revolution or a “communist” in Cuba goes hand-in-hand with being patriotic. It is assumed as a default and the norm so in practice very few people are genuine communists with in-depth knowledge about the theory of Marxism-Leninism. It is treated like being a Kemalist for Turks.

To be honest though I think we have it way worse than the USSR in its final days, except in the grounds of ethnic conflict. Our population is small, we are a third-world island with few resources, we have a mostly agrarian-based economy, the country cannot buy in credit and is labeled a sponsor of terrorism meaning all major banks have left us and nobody wants to risk trading with us, especially in any products that are 10% American-made as that is not allowed.

There is a brain drain and human capital flight of young people going to the USA which the USA incentivizes by giving Cubans who enter a legal port of entry an automatic process of naturalization and welfare benefits that other immigrants don’t get. Hell, that natural-born Americans don’t get, like getting pensions when you never have worked a day of your life in America.

All this combined with the financial and economic Blockade is why the situation is so bad.

The funny thing is that Cubans in the USA complain so much about socialism but the second they get their degree in Cuba they leave to the USA and become rabid anticommunists getting a much better starting salary because their titles and years’ experience are recognized in their USA all without having to go through the student debt Americans go through.

This combined with the fact Cubans in the USA inherit the family-oriented lifestyle of multigenerational families from Cuba just makes them better off financially, sometimes buying McMansions through the combined income of 4 professionals.

Despite everything I said, when I talk with other Latin Americans – Mexicans, Hondurans, Guatemalans, etc. – and ask them about their experience in their countries they describe to me a life with poverty. They even say Cubans are entitled/lazy fucks who complain about having it hard but don't know what actually being hungry and poor is like, or what a day’s work is really like.

The Cubans went “to see volcanoes", an expression referring to now discontinued practice of flying to Nicaragua and going through the hard and long journey to the US border, also admit this.

They took journey because they thought they could no longer live in Cuba because they were too hungry or whatever, but then they are hit with the harsh reality that Cuba is not the center of the world and see that people are living in way worse and more miserable conditions in the countries they traversed through.

Those that took the journey with their young children end up regretting because they put their children through so much psychological and physical pain, much worse than anything they had in Cuba. Getting kidnapped, robbed, lost, deported and forced to start the journey all over again, raped, etc. Many say that it would've been better if they waited for a Visa or sponsorship from a family member in the USA rather than make their kids lose 5-10 kilos. Grown ass men have admitted to me crying in tears that they should've never taken that journey.

Some of those that went “to see volcanoes” still believe Cuba is especially evil or bad off, the cognitive dissonance for these people is very high.

>>1533897
>People were indeed on the verge of starvation

There's a huge difference between going occasionally hungry and having a pretty bland/bad diet, and actually starving to death. Full on starvation and death from malnutrition did end after the 1947 famine.

>Poland

Pic related: Monthly ration for one person in Poland in the mid eighties. This is for one person and only includes rationed goods, potatoes,cereal grains and vegetables were typically unrationed and just bought from the market. It's not great, there's practically no meat in there, and it almost always was topped up a bit with under the table favors or semi-illegal farmers markets, but you wouldn't die.

Poland was in the same position as Romania in the 1980s, they were in severe debt to western banks and had to export to get the foreign currency to cover that debt and buy further imports. By the time the 1980s rolled around, commie products were pretty uncompetitive on the global scene, so Poland resorted to exporting more of its agricultural products. But because the US had gone through the green revolution and had an abundance of grain it was itself dumping on global markets, Poland was left exporting milks, cheese, meats, all the more "luxury" agricultural goods. Meaning that stuff was less available for the actual polish consumers. So going hungry in Poland at that time meant not having any meat for the day, and having to just get by on cereal grains and potatoes.

Even before martial law, Poland was getting the raw end of the deal in terms of trade. East Germans used to think Poland had things good because all their meats and cheese came imported from Poland. It was only when they visited Poland for whatever reason that they were surprised to notice how scarce those things were in Poland itself, they only seemed abundant in Poland because Poland exported it so much more.

>>1534187
God yes, it sucks to have avocado, I wish we could go back to times when we could only see oranges during christmas. PRL was amazing!

>>1533673
>women in general seemed to just have the double burden of full time work and domestic household obligations
Yeah, I read a discussion on that a while ago, and the general consensus was that communism basically gave women education and jobs, but at the same time didn't unburden them from their domestic work, and there was no attempt to make any social changes of men's attitude towards helping at home. I know many mothers were more willing to make their sons do some household chores then their western counterparts, but many others obviously didn't bother with it.

Working was compulsory in commie countries and officially unemployment didn't exist. In practice of, course it looked different. Factories, offices etc. employed overblown amounts of people who often didn't really have anything to do. You could basically come to your workplace, sit on your hands all day and just collect your pay, no matter if you did your job well or didn't do shit. It may sound fun, but it eventually had a huge demoralizing effect on people's mentality. When this facade crumbled after capitalism rolled in in the 90s and plenty of people found themselves unemployed, it caused some serious downfall, particularly in small towns and villages, which were previously dependent on nearby factories and other state-owned enterprises that inevitably had to be closed down and dismantled due to being inefficient.

>>1533681
Housing (mostly apartments) in commie countries was actually pretty affordable, but you had to either be in the party or pull some strings to get it quickly enough (preferably both), otherwise you had to wait years for it. Same goes for luxuries like washing machine, car, etc. My mother had her own apartment in one of the commieblocs in a major city when she was in her mid-20s. These apartments were up for grabs even after communism fell, sometimes for literal pennies.

As for actual houses, they were a bit trickier to build due to material shortages (depends on the era, though), so people often literally stole it from building sites.

No idea about lolcows, since I was never really interested in Polish commie government (they were all Soviet sockpuppets anyway), but the murder of former commie prime minister Piotr Jaroszewicz and his wife in 1992 is probably the most interesting unsolved Polish crime case ever, because literally all theories about who and why did it are fucking crazy, as well as the fact that the police was obviously trying very hard to to be even more incompetent than usual.

>>1534223
I was born in 1989, a few months before the communism in Poland fell. By early 90s the shops were already full of good food and fresh produce, and I was a fat kid, because after years of living under constant food shortages my mother was still paranoid I would be malnourished and kept overfeeding me, lol.

>>1534379
The fact that every person who lived under communism has nothing to complain about but oranges is telling. It's always the oranges. Like, I'm sorry that fruit is seasonal?

Post-war central Ukraine, 50s, my great grandmother got her own place (if you can even say so because it wasn't true ownership) for working as a street cleaner. Might sound nice, but it was a single windowless tiny room, two square meters, in the half-basement of the 18th century house, where 4 people would have to live together for the next 10 or so years: my great grandma, grandma, her first husband, and their son.

My grandma had to work at various factories since she was 14 or 15, while studying at a tekhnikum, technological college, for a few years. At 16 or 17 she met her future husband, ten years older than her. Later he died of complications caused by untreated pneumonia. My grandma says he truly loved her, unlike my grandpa, because he "bought her everything." And by that, she means some clothes and shoes. He was a Jew, and my late uncle got his surname, which seriously hindered his job seeking at the end of 70s, until he got married, took his wife's last name and changed his patronym to a Slavic form.

At some point, they would move people from the area where my grandma lived, so there was an opportunity to get a new apartment. Still, it wasn't that easy, my grandma had to be very persistent and bold, and once she just stayed for the whole day at the local executive committee with my uncle, a toddler at the moment. She said she wouldn't go anywhere until she'd get a key, so to say. My uncle was screaming and crying, pissing and shitting himself, but in the end they got a flat. It was like, the hell with you, you can take this crappy flat no one else wants or you can take nothing. Something got mixed in this story though, because grandma got this flat at the end of 60s, but my uncle was older then. She could've been trying to get a new place for her mother or maybe she had to wait until moving in… Either way, it was a flat where builders used to live and it wasn't actually supposed to be a living space, I think. There was a lot of rubbish, paint on the bare walls and floors, broken doors. Also shit planning, but it was common for the houses of that era, nothing special. Still, it definitely was an upgrade from the underground coffin they used to live in: more space, one bedroom, one living room, kitchen, bath and toilet they didn't have to share with anyone else, a balcony… windows. When my grandma moved there, she celebrated it with her workers sitting at the table made out of two crates and a door. My great grandma also got a flat, but after she died, it wasn't inherited neither by grandma, because she already had a flat, nor by her brother that was in jail. It belonged to the government.

One time, when my grandma still lived with her first husband in the half-basement, they went to get a sewing machine for one coupon they had. It was winter, and, for some reason, they couldn't transport it the normal way and, unfortunately, I don't remember why, and even if grandma remembers she won't be able to tell. The machine was kind of like a dresser, pretty big, so it probably would not even fit into the public transport, or they'd have to pay more, maybe they couldn't even pay for themselves. Anyway, they were going back home pushing the machine in front of them, it had little wheels. It was sleeting, and it was a 10-12 km route in overall. Halfway there, the machine suddenly fell apart. They were devastated, and didn't know what else to do other than going back to where they got it, even though there was no guarantee or anything, so they didn't really have a hope. They were both crying. The "boss" of the place took pity on them and gave them another one, although he wasn't supposed to.

By the way, they lived near the place where "Kurenivka mudslide" tragedy (1961) happened, an industrial disaster that took many lives away. Not near enough to be affected by it but they knew it had happened, while many other Kyivans had no idea. It had been hidden from the general public for a few days (although western sources reported about it sooner, just like it was with Chornobyl), then they would give limited details and diminish the number of deaths. All means of communication didn't work that day, no telegram that mentioned it reached the recipient, all info was heavily censored for the next 20 or more years. Planes changed their routes for the next few weeks so no one would be able to see the scale of the disaster. I learned about it only as a teen when I saw a documentary on the tv, it was truly horrifying. If anyone's interested, there's a brief description with photos here https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-kurenivka-1961-babyn-yar-mudslide-deaths/31151981.html
Also there's an article in Ukrainian with more details about the cause of the tragedy https://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/features-56361990 I hope translation won't twist the meaning too much. Two more Ukrainian-language sources with memories of eyewitnesses: https://web.archive.org/web/20160416062929/http://vilavi.ru/prot/180306/180306.shtml and https://web.archive.org/web/20160314010809/http://kiev.unian.ua/620815-kurenivska-tragediya-vichniy-dokir-ta-pamyat.html

I'll end the post with a little grim story from that times that I've just remembered. When my grandma was a college student, she got invited to the party but she didn't have anything to wear. Some kind woman gave her a nice dress. Back then, despite poverty in the war and post-war times, people would bury the dead in the best clothes they had. So there were people who would basically rob the graves to get those nice clothes. And as it turned out, that's where the dress came from, too. My grandma was shocked, infuriated and disgusted when she found out, and she threw that dress into the woman's face. It sounds suspiciously mild given my grandma's temper though.

>>1534982
People didn't know much of the variety they became familar with after berlin wall fell. Oranges are this iconic example because it was a celebration happening just briefly once a year to have this very basic fruit we can now have in every single store on a whim. That's why it's an example, not because people had literally everything else they could possibly dream of except oranges. Don't be dense and pretend you don't get it.

One thing I think I should mention that sort of gets lost on the discussion of communist countries, is that your standard of living often depended on informal factors rather than what was written down on legislation.

So like, if you worked in car factory, you'd be better off than someone working in a toothbrush factory. The reason being is that people often needed replacement parts for cars pretty urgently, but a new toothbrush came cheap enough. There's a story of a man in Romania who worked at a Dacia factory, who, after work, would carry one part of a car home each night, and then over time just assembled a new car for himself.

So there was this added stroke of randomness to things. Certain cities had higher standards of living by virtue of what they produced and what favors you could get from what you produced. This informal black market greased the wheels of the inefficient communist system, and is how people got by not having to stand in lines and live on basic gruel. Bottles of vodka and cigarettes served as the informal currency of this illicit trade of favors.

And just like you could get lucky working in a good job where you could extort bribes or get favorable black market trades, you could get unlucky. You could end up living in an apartment across the city from where you work, based on some bureaucratic whim you didn't understand.

Also, NEETs did exist in the Soviet Union. Officially unemployment was criminalized and you had to report to the state that you were not working so you could be provided a job. But some people got by simply by not going out during the day and leeching off their relatively wealthy family, similar to today's NEETs.

I like how the tread on communism is full of walls of text, it's really in the spirit, everything used to be so long-winded then.
Before capitalism came with its short catchy phrases and calls to action.

>>1535115
Ok well I'm sorry capitalist countries refused to sell you oranges but it's hilarious to think you all were crying about oranges while my family was being turned away from hospitals for being the wrong color.

>>1536704
Did you seriously come to a thread where people share stories about their commie countries to play oppression olympics?

Not everything has to be about you, JFC.

>>1536704
clearly they didn't get turned away often enough, since they managed to survive and reproduce so that now we are blessed with your brain-dead takes

Despite hysterical leftist takes that the USA dismantled the Soviet Union through Yeltsin, in truth it was the opposite. By the late 1980s the USA was actually trying to prop the Soviet Union up, and after the Afghan War was becoming pretty close to the country.

The George H W Bush administration tried to dissuade the Baltic States and the Ukraine from seeking independence, and there was a general belief that the USSR could be reformed into something akin to the EU, except with a social democratic flair. There was a big concern at the time of a regression back towards Stalinism, or a collapse of the union which would result in nuclear weapons being loose and handed around.

Really a big cause of the collapse was the Ukraine seeking independence. The Ukrainians dominated the poliburo from the Khrushchev era onward, and after Gorbachev came to power, he switched off the nepotistic pipeline that was funneling people from the Ukrainian SSR into the central committee. The truth was the Ukraine was content to be part of the Union while they had disproportionate influence, but without it, they sought independence.

Yeltsin was hated by basically everybody but the public early on, and the Americans were reluctant to work with him. It was only after the failed Coup attempt in 1991 that they sort of realized they had no choice. Yeltsin was such a fuck up that the Americans knew he was barely functional, he came to a visit to the USA in 1991 and he got absolutely shitfaced in his hotel room and turned up the next morning for a meeting barely functioning. They thought at the time he had bipolar disorder.

Gorbachev himself was another cause of the collapse through his own incompetence. As things were burning around him, he was taking celebrity tours through Western Europe and the States. After 1987 the situation was deteriorating beyond his control and he decided to just escape into his safe world of repetitively visiting the west and basking in glory. Before 1987 he wasn't really this great reformer at all, he was basically continuing Andropov's policies and was relatively hardline, which goes to show that situations were forcing his hand.

>>1536704
Whats funny is that none of the people shouting capitalism as the best system are rich or ever will be. We live on a planet with finite resources and human rights are being plundered for the sake of corporations. Fuck you I want free healthcare, education, and housing. If you hate taxes so much move to a tax haven country. I don't see why we should continue a system where a few small corporations own more and more wealth and continue to price gouge, health insurance companies fuck you on coverage, and wages can't keep up with rents. Not to mention the landfills piling up with fast fashion stitched by literal slave children and climate change as a result of overconsumption. Socialism is the best system I don't give a fuck about some Russian or South American dictator its worth fucking trying.

>>1533673
Funniest part is when they tried to flee Romania, got yeeted out of a Helicopter and given a trial with the death penalty for disappearing a bunch of innocent people during their regime. Elena Ceaușescu, the famed "chemist" would always mispronounce the word for CO2, and during the trial the judge would call her this mispronunciation as a nickname.

>>1554338
The USSR was always a vampire economy, they kept themselves afloat by pillaging poor Eastern European countries like Ukraine and the Baltic States in the prelude to WW2 and then moved to "liberate" (colonize) the rest of Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the war. Once they ran out of nations to pillage, their economy entered a decades long stagnation, before gracelessly expiring with a whimper. The Soviets were always seen as a foreign imperialistic force in these countries- note how as soon as Soviet power started waning people began mass demonstrations against communist rule.

>>1554345
No amount of help from NATO is going to turn Ukraine into a Western European power like Germany or the U.K. thats earned the majority of their wealth through colonialism. The Soviet Union is not the reason you are poor. Anyway I don't care about any of that I care about living in a system that respects the working class and the planet and we are heading to certain extinction fast with capitalism.

>>1554345
>The USSR was always a vampire economy, they kept themselves afloat by pillaging poor Eastern European countries like Ukraine and the Baltic States in the prelude to WW2 and then moved to "liberate" (colonize) the rest of Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the war.

Early on this was definitely the case, but the general consensus is that this relationship basically reversed during the course of the 1970s. The truth is that eventually, the satellite states did start to exert some autonomy, and cracks were starting to appear as early as 1968 with Romania and Albania breaking off from Satellite status and becoming functionally independent. From then on the damage came from being locked out of western markets and having a planned economy, not because the Soviets were directly looting everything.

Erich Apel in East Germany, head of the State Planning commission, committed suicide due to the trade deal he was forced to sign with the USSR. He basically noticed in horror that the Soviets were looting his country and couldn't handle being a part of it.

During the Brezhnev era and the OPEC crisis, the situation reversed as cheap oil was used to buy up compliance and influence across the world, including the satellite states. Places like Cuba and North Korea could always count on discounted Soviet oil and were happy they were free from the OPEC shocks that the western world suffered. One thing you'll notice about the Brehznev era is that the Soviets just took the easy way out of everything. Cheap oil and financial support ensured loyalty, and with high oil prices this policy was fiscally easy to maintain. The problem came during the oil glut in the 1980s when Soviet oil was worth less on the common market and the satellite states started to brood about what they were getting.

>>1554344
It's funny because wealth inequality never got solved by any of the communist societies, they had their own version of millionaires in the nomenclature that drove in limos and enjoyed a lavish lifestyle that was put on the expense books of some factory. Environmental damage is pretty bad in communist countries too, they are ideologically opposed to Malthusian concerns and regard labour as the source of value, they gave no shits that the Ural oceans in Central Asia were drying up due to cotton farming.

>>1554350
>Ivanka immediately starts ranting about the Ukraine War

Very good comrade, Order of Putin First Class for you.

Now, please sage your posts if you're going to be dumping offtopic garbage in this thread.

>>1554356
Yes, that's another good point. The entire USSR economy was hedged on volatile gas imports and took a massive downturn once oil prices imploded.

>>1554363
*volatile gas exports

>>1554350
So true, Finland, Iceland and Switzerland are notably wealthy because of their great colonial empires.

This is sort of unrelated but here we go. I wish Polish people and a lot of other western slavic countries would chill with their hatred for Russians. I don't doubt the Soviet Union was pretty evil at times but so were the Nazi's and so were many other European powers in history. Sometimes I've merely mentioned my parents were Russian and Polish people turned their noses up or proceeded to give me historical lectures on the Katyn massacre or whatever and I'm just like "I didn't say I support Russia I just said I'm Russian" the real irony is how close my ties to Poland are anyway, I'm mostly Polish according to 23andme even though my parents are from Russia. Not every Russian is your enemy and wants to take over your country so chill out a bit.

>>1554414
nta but fun fact at least Finland got rich in the 80s by selling crappy products to Soviet Union through some "friendship" trade pact thing. The 90s depression that followed was partially caused by the collapse of USSR, because it turned out nobody in the western market was willing to buy shitty Finnish tricot pants kek

I was thinking how communism would look these days with all the Big Brother technology, and I think this post encapsulates it >>1553237

Public shaming is big in communist societies. When someone would fuck up something in school, they weren't sent to the principal, they were stood in front of the entire class for their peers to judge them. This of course had a 1000000x stronger effect on kids. It'd teach both the perpetrators not to step out of line, and the rest of kids to be active rule-enforcers of society. If two kids fought, they would be made to sit on the same chair in front of the calls, and weren't let go until they reach a truce.

That said, the West has it's own public shaming in form of cancel culture. It's the exact same ideological peer pressure. And it's the West that made Big Brother a reality.

>>1555561
>Struggle sessions or denunciation rallies were violent public spectacles in Maoist China where people accused of being "class enemies" were publicly humiliated, accused, beaten and tortured by people with whom they were close. Usually conducted at the workplace, classrooms and auditoriums, "students were pitted against their teachers, friends and spouses were pressured to betray one another, and children were manipulated into exposing their parents". Staging, scripts and agitators were prearranged by the Maoists to incite crowd support. The aim was to instill a crusading spirit among the crowd to promote the Maoist thought reform. These rallies were most popular in the mass campaigns immediately before and after the establishment of the People's Republic of China and during the Cultural Revolution.

Sounds kinda like waterboarding, IE the government goes in expecting a confession and will pile pressure on you until you relent even if you're innocent.

>>1554414
Finland has no colonial empires kek it wasn't even barely a country 100 years ago, where did you get your education, Twitter?

>>1555570
I'm not talking about Maoist china, I'm talking about Tito's Yugoslavia. That's where I went to school and where my anecdotes come from. There were no "denunciation rallies" and beatings, it was a really chill place and time.

>>1555578
She was being sarcastic you autist. Or did you need her to type /s to understand that?

I don't care about the le evil dictators of the Soviet Union but I'm a socialist until I die, I will always support whatever system at least recognizes the majorities needs. Come to the U.S. and see what the horrors of capitalism have lead to and we already have big brother here. You still get mass surveillance and mass incarceration by the government and all without fair treatment by your employer or a right to housing and being price gouged out of everything other than fast fashion which supports slavery anyhow.

>>1555773
Why are you in this thread? We don’t give a fuck about modern day America, we’re here to discuss Cold War era Communist countries. No matter how much you and other shit-stirrers in this thread want it to be, this thread is not a Communism vs Capitalism slap-fighting arena, fuck off.

>>1555768
Considering I've seen some tankies calling Finland fascist I expect nothing tbh

>>1554344
>>1554350
>>1555773
>I don't care about the literal thread topic!!!

Ok then, fuck off? You sound unhinged at this point.

>I'm a socialist until I die

Hopefully sooner than later

>>1554543
Poland has a weird relationship with Russia. They used to be two biggest Slav nations competing with each other until Poland was partitioned in 18th century and to this day Poland views Russia as its most enduring historical enemy, moreso than even Germany.

Both my parents are seriously Russophobic, but in a strange way. My mother kept telling me Russia is a terrible country and a terrible nation, but Russian people as individuals are fine. She was actually fascinated with Russia and we had a lot of books about Russian culture and history at home. My father openly admits to having Russian ancestry, but I remember him giving me a rambling lecture when I was like 15 or so about how I should never date a Russian guy (which isn't exactly a bad advice considering Slav men are garbage in general) and to avoid Russians in general, lol. Both my parents actually sometimes spoke Russian, quoted Russian poems and songs at home. I noticed similar attitudes in my extended family as well, on both sides.

Poland actually had a decent cultural exchange with Russia until 1989, when virtually all of that got removed from schools and cultural institutions, as we decided to turn westward, so to speak.
People nowadays have extremely negative view of Russia due to Ukraine war, and I'm afraid it'll take many years to change it to the prewar level (which wasn't that great to begin with).

Latvian here. Getting annexed by Soviet Union for 50 years was about as damaging to my people as getting enslaved by germans for 700 years after the northern crusades.

>>1557382
was it really that bad? I thought the Russians left you alone for the most part

>>1557398
It was a cultural genocide with elements of a regular genocide.

>>1557412
sorry about that. still there must be some people who miss the Soviet Union.

>>1557382
>>1557398
>>1557412
It was horrifically bad during the initial annexations in 1940, and there were clear-cut genocidal intentions. Not full on genocide where their entire culture was extinguished, but Stalin did force migrate in ethnic Russians to dilute the ethnic make-up of the Baltic region to ensure it didn't break away. To this day there's a huge amount of Ivans in Lativa, Estonia and Lithuania for that very reason. The Soviets were often Russian supremacists at certain times (multicultural in Lenin's time, russian imperialists in Stalin's, back to multicultural under Gorbachev).

From about the 1960 onwards, they were basically just like any other SSR, and were actually slightly more developed than parts of Russia itself in a lot of ways. The USSR eventually started to reap what Stalin sowed as soon as crisis hit, and the Baltic states took the window of opportunity and broke away immediately after the wave of revolutions in 1989. They had more just cause than anyone else, because it was a secret protocol between the Nazis and the Soviets that lead to their incorporation/annexation.

>>1557418
Of course, but moreso than everywhere else, they're just nostalgic for their childhood. Even in the periphery parts of the USSR, they all felt like they were part of a great empire together and interlinked. The 90s severed all that and they were just small little states afterwards having to go through a messy privatization. That's counteracted with every Baltic State boomer having one parent or grandparent that had their life absolutely ruined by the Soviets.

The Baltic states had guerilla warfare lasting right into the 1950s, with separatist terrorists hiding in the woods refusing to accept they lost the country.

>>1557243
>Poland actually had a decent cultural exchange with Russia until 1989, when virtually all of that got removed from schools and cultural institutions, as we decided to turn westward, so to speak.
I wonder why, maybe because of years of effort prior because people weren't actually that excited about USSR laying it's hands on poland and russia controlling polish government. It wasn't that people wanted to be this close to Russia and excited about "cultural exchange" and then suddenly changed their minds, it was always forced.

>>1557420
I don't think it's because the Soviet Union was a better period, but because the resulting neoliberal capitalism was so fundamentally abominable that just about everything seems better in comparison.

>>1557431
Still better than being colonized by a bunch of zombies following a dead ideology

On August 4, 1968, Mao was presented with about 40 mangoes by the Pakistani foreign minister, Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada, in an apparent diplomatic gesture. Mao had his aide send the box of mangoes to his Mao Zedong Propaganda Team at Tsinghua University on August 5, the team stationed there to quiet strife among Red Guard factions. On August 7, an article was published in the People's Daily saying:

"In the afternoon of the fifth, when the great happy news of Chairman Mao giving mangoes to the Capital Worker and Peasant Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team reached the Tsinghua University campus, people immediately gathered around the gift given by the Great Leader Chairman Mao. They cried out enthusiastically and sang with wild abandonment. Tears swelled up in their eyes, and they again and again sincerely wished that our most beloved Great Leader lived ten thousand years without bounds … They all made phone calls to their own work units to spread this happy news; and they also organised all kinds of celebratory activities all night long, and arrived at [the national leadership compound] Zhongnanhai despite the rain to report the good news, and to express their loyalty to the Great Leader Chairman Mao."

Subsequent articles were also written by government officials propagandizing the reception of the mangoes, and another poem in the People's Daily said: "Seeing that golden mango/Was as if seeing the great leader Chairman Mao … Again and again touching that golden mango/the golden mango was so warm." Few people at this time in China had ever seen a mango before, and a mango was seen as "a fruit of extreme rarity, like Mushrooms of Immortality."

One of the mangoes was sent to the Beijing Textile Factory, whose revolutionary committee organised a rally in the mangoes' honour. Workers read out quotations from Mao and celebrated the gift. Altars were erected to display the fruit prominently. When the mango peel began to rot after a few days, the fruit was peeled and boiled in a pot of water. Workers then filed by and each was given a spoonful of mango water. The revolutionary committee also made a wax replica of the mango and displayed this as a centrepiece in the factory.

There followed several months of "mango fever," as the fruit became a focus of a "boundless loyalty" campaign for Chairman Mao. More replica mangoes were created, and the replicas were sent on tour around Beijing and elsewhere in China. Many revolutionary committees visited the mangoes in Beijing from outlying provinces. Approximately half a million people greeted the replicas when they arrived in Chengdu. Badges and wall posters featuring the mangoes and Mao were produced in the millions.

The fruit was shared among all institutions that had been a part of the propaganda team, and large processions were organised in support of the zhengui lipin or 珍贵礼品 ("precious gift"), as the mangoes were known. One dentist in a small town, Dr. Han, saw the mango and said it was nothing special and looked just like sweet potato. He was put on trial for malicious slander, found guilty, paraded publicly throughout the town, and then executed with one shot to the head.

I should have posted this here originally as it fits better, But what are your thoughts on Western leftists who argue that Eastern European countries after World War II were not truly communist? I would like to hear from both pro-communist/socialist individuals, as well as those who do not support these ideologies

>>1562609
Not Real Communism(tm) is an age old cope. I'm sure the terminally online e-Revolutionaries have banged out the true path to communism with their dozen or so Discord sycophants and are ready to show us all the true path once they over throw capitalism, revisionists, rival leftists, their landlord, and Honda financial services.

>>1562609
>But what are your thoughts on Western leftists who argue that Eastern European countries after World War II were not truly communist?

I'm the OP and I'm pretty anti-communist, just for perspective.

Saying Eastern European countries after WW II aren't really communist is the same to me as Jehovah's Witnesses saying that Trinitarian Christianity isn't real Christianity. You have to actually believe in Marxist philosophy for the "Not real communism" to even apply as a criticism. And just like with Jesus and Saint Paul, there's enough bloat in what Marx and Engels wrote that you can hodgepodge arguments for all sorts of contradictory shit. The Communist manifesto itself was considered by Marx to be outdated and irrelevant by the time he got to old age. He was a very scatterbrained philosopher, Marxism could arguably be called Engelsism because Engeles edited his shit to actually be readable.

You shouldn't be actually looking at the Communist governments so much as the Communist Parties, because it's the Communist Parties that are forming the Communist States. Communist parties are fanatical, cult like things that demand absolute loyalty, where people repeat slogans as a signal of support, where violence and pushing for more radicalization is supported in a feedback loop. It's no coincidence that Lenin and Mao, the two most brutal and ruthless personalities of the far left in the time of civil war, won, while the moderate left ended up purged as menscheviks or counterrevolutionaries. Moaning about how "It's not real communism" misses the point as to why the worst people won.

Communist parties are peculiar institutions. They're typically not very corrupt, which is why the reds won out over the whites in places like China, Vietnam and Russia. They're cultish, they are skilled at building their own separate institutions from the state and then transplanting the communist party over on the people once they take power. Communist parties also demand loyalty to the party over loyalty to communism. If you are seen to be a true believer, you're marked as a target because you're at risk of splitting the party over some bullshit disagreement. "Splitter" is a common communist insult against other sects, and to cause a split is seen as being a traitor.

It's easy to talk about what's true communism and what's not from an armchair. But when you're in a communist party, you'll find it's a machivallian thing. People watch for shifts in the slogans and rhetoric and adjust themselves to keep safe and get ahead, there's a stringent power hierarchy.

>>1563005
They weren't really Communist in the sense they didn't achieve communism which is probably what they mean by it, at most they were socialist in practice. But they were definitely communist in ideology.

>>1563020
Communist countries never called themselves "Communist" that's a western term used to describe them. They called themselves a mixture of different things through their time, from socialist states, to worker's and peasant's states to advanced socialist state. They did garb it in Marxist rhetoric, with Khrushchev saying that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat that existed under Stalin was coming to an end, and Brezhnev declaring the Soviet Union in the process of achieving advanced socialism.

>>1562890
>They were building things.
This should definitely be recognised and celebrated. Yugoslavia was left in ruins after WW2, and the Communists made a nation-wide plan for rebuilding the country. They succeeded. There were 3 cornerstones of this plan: Electrification, Education, and I cannot for the life of me remember the third. Every young person was encouraged to go into one of these 3 fields so they can do what the country needs.

Even though the focus of my thread was on the post-Lenin era of communism, I think it's worth turning an eye on the cowish behavior of Marx himself.

>Wrote the most pulp fiction tier moid edgelordism poetry during his early 20s, shit so embarrassing, like, fantasies about being aligned with satan and fighting god.
>Giga-leech, beyond anything I've ever heard of. Paypigged his best friend Engels extensively, leeching an income off of him that put him in the top 10%
>Even with this income, he constantly whined to Engels for more money in private letters
>Married into aristocracy, impregnated the maid that came with the marriage
>In a true petty noble fashion, he disowned the bastard son, and to top it all off, bewilderingly got Engels to adopt him.
>Engels eventually start seething at this cuckoo bird like behavior coming from Marx, and treats the adopted son abusively. Still sends him the 19th century equivalent of a six figure income though
>The irony of the "champion of the working class" disowning his one child that came from the common stock
>Stunk like shit and barely washed himself
>Privately flaunted the fact that he married into royalty, making sure his wife always included the family seal on letters sent to and from the household

Also Engels getting a job in daddy's textile factory, that consisted of sleeping in a hammock, drinking cider and smoking cigars for over half his working day. All the while whining in a letter to Marx about how hard it was waking up early for work. jfl, the more I read up on these people, the more absolute contempt I have for them. They're the exact sort of people Stalin definitely would've killed.

>>1679804
Didn't all his daughters have the same name?

>>1679804
One of my uncles (an Army Major) actually read Marx sometime back when he was studying guerrilla warfare. When I was more communist-leaning, I actually arguing him about communism, and he said that Marx's greatest fault was that he didn't know anything about fighting. If he did, he would have realized that workers' militias can't beat real armies, they even lose against the worst, most corrupt police forces. At first, I didn't believe it, but then I looked it up. Every single example of a communist group forming a workers' militia failed miserably, as they would always lose to the local cops or regional army, so his Ideals got a lot of men and women killed.

>>1679804
why did engels do this, was he just that rich or did he fancy marx

>>1680205
Basically, Engels was very insecure about his own intelligence due to his father's pressure on him since he was a kid. So, when he met Marx in university, he was amazed by how much energy Marx had and how much knew about Hegel and believed that Marx was a genius. Engels spent his entire life bankrolling Marx, and funnily Engels ideas turned out to be a lot better. Engels' "Origins of the Family" will be included in even staunch man-hating radical feminist libraries, and his ideas of state management were also more grounded in reality. but, Engels genuinely thought he was dumb compared to Marx.

>>1533681
>a house was 9000 Deutsche Mark but a car was 20,000 Mark because a house was a necessity way more so than a car
That was the case in the US until very recently too, until they banned building new housing. It was not so much that a house was a necessity as much as a house was a basic cheap commodity that could be found or created anywhere, rather than an appreciating asset hoarded by boomers.

As a non-american, I find it really odd when americans turn away from their cultural anti-state stance and choose commie govtmaxxing when so many of their problems are caused by corrupt state regulation or deregulation favoring their own interests. You think the answer is more and more powerful government? That's totes not leading to a Putin-style oligarchy? Kek, at least my shithole has a long cultural history of bootlicking, I can't imagine squandering an imperfectly executed but otherwise pretty solid culture like that

>>1679804
>They're the exact sort of people Stalin definitely would've killed
You're right about Stalin. He had a whole plan to 'remake the Jews' because he thought they were inherently bourgeoisie degenerates and needed to be 'remade'. Some Stalinists try to defend this by stating, 'Oh, he wasn't actually anti-Semitic, he was just trying to remove his political opponents who happened to be Jewish.' The plan basically involved sending them all to Siberia and believing that through hard work and mixing with the native Siberians, the Jews would be transformed into a new people. This was the belief of a person who trusted in Shaman magic over actual medicine.

>>1680298
>and funnily Engels ideas turned out to be a lot better.

Yeah, and the Chinese Communist Party of today more draws influence from Engels when they can over Marx. I guess the cultural revolution has left a distaste for class warfare in that country, and so they turned to the less extreme of the two.

Engels also had a hand in editing a lot of Marx's work, and I suspect it was a heavy hand, considering Marx's temperament. Communism arguably could even be called Engelism rather than Marxism, considering he tempered the rough edges of Marxian philosophy and tardwrangled in Marx's Millenarianist fanaticism. Marx was a very scatterbrained philosopher and writer. He goes off on tangents for years at a time, like his entire work on Napoleon III, where he came to the conclusion that The Second French Empire definitely wouldn't go to war, only for the Franco-Prussian war to end the regime.

The whole "Early Marx/Later Marx" dichotomy that apologists use is more due to Marx somewhat coping/backtracking when being proved wrong, and also Engel's influence. Things like the Base/Superstructure theory of society, where material factors dictate all culture and laws, they rapidly fall apart with a little scrutiny. Engels backtracked a bit on that when it failed to explain ideas influencing things, like with the Crusades and the spread of Islam.

If Communism can be compared to a religion, then Engels was the Paul to Marx's Jesus, the Abu Bakr to the Mahomet, the Brigham Young to the Joseph Smith. Marx was the fanatical doomsday preacher that spewed extreme ideas with passion, and Engels codified it and gave it organizational form.

>>1680813
With the French Revolution and the advent of the industrial era in Europe, you really got the advent of the "Breadtuber" type. Maybe they've always been with us, but I don't think so, you don't read about people this insufferable in earlier times. It's not just today that you have champagne socialists being the spoiled kids of yuppies advocating for revolution. The First International was notably pretty barren of actual industrial workers, they struggled to find enough to put to the forefront. Philosophy Troon taking hormones and posing in front of his bookshelf for videos on youtube is just the 21st century equivalent of them, back then they took holidays to Italy and hunted foxes on their manor in between writing.

The victory of Marxism over the Utopian Socialist and Anarchist philosophies of the time was that it won over the other breadtuber types. They won out in their version of epic takedown response videos, the bloat of their writing on whatever random shit they wanted to tie to alienation is their version of "the politics of [childish video game]". Nobody outside of their circles really cared about all that bloat and waffling, because it is bloated waffling. The real world moved on, with the Marginalist Theory of Value refuting the entire Labour Theory of Value effortlessly, in one tenth of the words, and with grace. Marx didn't even respond during his lifetime, he knew he couldn't, and as far as I know neither did Engels.

There's very little of value in all of this, very little enjoyment either, unless you have a weirdo interest like me. Even with my historical fascination of the communist era, I ended up bored and frustrated reading Marx and Engels.

>>1680834
>>1680813
>>1680298
oh my god absolute based nonnies teaching me things I never even knew and I've read Das cAPIAAAL and pretty much all of the post 68 marxists, please invite me to your club and lecture me

>>1680479
>Some Stalinists try to defend this by stating, 'Oh, he wasn't actually anti-Semitic, he was just trying to remove his political opponents who happened to be Jewish.
I don't think he was as anti-Semitic as the Nazis, but he was as anti-Semitic as the average lower-class person in the Russian Empire would have been. He believed in many negative stereotypes about Jewish people and so I do think it's dumb for Western communist to think his policies weren't specifically anti-Semitic when Stalinists in Russia and Georgia agree they were, but say 'and that was a good thing.' The Bolsheviks had been 78% Jewish, and by the end, there were absolutely none. It was reduced to a small clique of men that Stalin knew, He Beria in Georgia, Molotov who worked with him in St. Petersburg before the October Revolution, Khrushchev's wife was friends with Stalin's wife during exile, Malenkov and Mikoyan just liked Stalin and supported him during the power struggle after Lenin's death. None of these men were qualified for their positions and all came from poorer backgrounds, but they were thugs who understood violence better than the other Bolsheviks, who were literally arguing ideology and something something Marx said. This made it easy for Stalin and this group to take power under everyone's noses.

>>1681392
>I don't think he was as anti-Semitic as the Nazis, but he was as anti-Semitic as the average lower-class person in the Russian Empire would have been.

Pretty much this, Stalin grew up in a pretty blue collar and rural environment. Hence he was a pretty socially conservative figure, he is pretty much responsible for mainstreaming homosexuality as "bourgeoisie decadence" in far left circles. He effectively behaved like a member of the mafia during his revolutionary years, and although Soviet history glorified his bank robbery in 1907 ("Erivansky Square expropriation"), it really was basically an act of organized crime. I think a lot of his racism against jews was in a sense a reflection of the circumstances of the revolution. The Bolshievik revolution empowered certain periphery minorities over the ethnic Russians, and during the civil war a lot exacted revenge against groups they hated. I remember reading about some Chekist jew who exacted revenge against Russians in the Circassian region for some pogrom that happened years ago, just wholesale slaughtering them. Stalin was buddy-buddy with Beria and they often colluded together, speaking in his native Georgian. He probably noticed a similar thing with jews speaking in yiddish and got paranoid.

Stalin is funny in that he had a lot of self awareness about what the game was about. In a private conversation to his mother he went face off and said he was basically the Tsar. People on the far left credit him for collectivization, and make out that this signified he was a true believing communist. But I think they have a misunderstanding about what collectivization was about. It was effectively a regression to Russia pre 1961, and de-facto a reinstatement of serfdom. The passport system of the Russian Empire, which the early Bolsheviks agitated against as oppressive feudalism, was made entirely absolute after the revolution. Just like in feudal times, Stalin kept the serfs on their plantations. The bolshieviks started off their revolution by being rootless and travelling around, Stalin put an end to that possibility so the same thing wouldn't happen to him.

Another thing people overlook is the amount of foreign jewish support for the Soviet Union in the 20s and early 30s. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast by the Ussuri River is literally due to this, wanting the country to look good to American jews so they'd keep on getting investments, donations and foreign support from the States. Before Israel came into existence, American Jews bizarrely had a powerful lobby for the USSR. Probably because Imperial Russia was the worst country to them up until that time.

Anti-semitism never really ended entirely in the Soviet Union, and is still a thing in the region now. I was reading a book "The dragon and the bear" about China and the USSR, published in the 1980s. And even during the 80s you had just average people in Russia saying "Hitler should've finished them all off". Jews were kept out of positions of influence all through the USSR after Stalin, even being denied security clearances for a lot of things as they were suspected of having loyalty to Israel. Israel being aligned with the west and the Soviets with the Arab chud states didn't help at all either, being dicks to the jews probably won the Soviets points with the Arab League.

>>1682970
>Stalin is funny in that he had a lot of self awareness about what the game was about. In a private conversation to his mother he went face off and said he was basically the Tsar. People on the far left credit him for collectivization, and make out that this signified he was a true believing communist. But I think they have a misunderstanding about what collectivization was about.
In my country, most of the major communist parties were taken over by feudal landlords and gangsters, resulting the largest one becoming a party for straight up feudal landlords and the other one's being taken over by ethnic nationalists. thus a "communist party" in my country went into basically a gang-war between them an ethnic minority rights party in the 2000's
Similar cases can be observed in different countries, where left wing parties initiated by the upper-class intelligentsia are gradually taken over by thugs, military men or tribal nationalists. In my country, we refer to this phenomenon as 'gunda saysat'(gangster politics)

>>1534223
Most food on people's tables came from outside the ratios though. Whomever had a garden, bred chicken (even pigs - like my mom's family and that was within town borders, not the countryside), grew veggies, fruit trees etc. Having a family in the countryside also helped. Black market was everywhere.

>>1533673
>Women had it easier in the eastern bloc
Everybody had it shittier, so whether there was more equality between men and women under shittier conditions is not the relevant part.

>>1533681
To be honest, many suicidal people can be irrational and their decisions of whether to proceed with it or not are not based on logical arguments. Sometimes just listening to a friend's voice can make a suicidal person change their mind.

>>1554543
I won't. The Germans did de-nazification themselves, Russians are such fragile snowflakes that they cannot stand people analysing the recent history or painting their past leaders in bad light. They can never chill, they are always easily-offended or hurt. Compare them to Americans who don't get butthurt when the entire planet makes fun of them, wishes them dead or shits on their politicians and laws. I see that the urge to control people's speech is alive and well in Russians to this day. Just get your own intranet where you won't be exposed to content that 'hurts your feelings'.

>>1682970
If not Stalin, it would have been someone else, The Bolsheviks were simply too idealistic and too divided. If just six men managed to take over the whole system, it means your group had no foundation to stand on in the first place. Like Stalin was brutal and intelligent, but all he did to set up to take power was promote his own allies to the Politburo and not get into petty arguments with them over theory.

>>1681392
>>1680479
Soviet anti-Semitism literally hindered their scientific development, Jewish scientists were viewed with suspicion.

>>1557243
It’s a bit funny tho. Some Russians are still butthurt about the Time of Troubles, when Polish intervened. Poland was definitely a serious enemy of Russia until up to 1700s. But I get why Polish people hate us. After all the stuff with partition, the 1939, and the rest. It’s a good thing Poland turned Western.

I’m Russian, and I don’t have a lot of knowledge about Polish culture. We only got some glimpses, like translated kids books in the USSR. Like, Akademia pana Kleksa or Król Marciuś Pierwszy. The last one was actuallY my mother’s favorite, but it’s a bit too depressing for a children’s book, imo.

>>1562609
>>1562667
>>1684166
I think a lot of this behaviour can be blamed on the fact that many westerners genuinely have no idea what socialism, let alone communism, even is. Most of them are thinking of Scandinavian welfare states as being ideal socialism, and so both conservatives and liberals tend to call any sort of social welfare policy as being "socialism".

>>1704112
Tbf I moved to a town that used to be GDR, learned myself a great deal from my colleagues about how it was like here on this side of the wall, I was born after the fall of the Berlin wall after all. And a buncha kids my age or even younger, from here or who moved here have no fucking idea what it was like and then they dare parade on Labor day with the Communist flag and it's painful to think they could have spent a bit of time hearing about GDR from so many people who've lived it here and then they wouldn't idealize and parade with the flag.
That labor day parade also shocked my Polish friend because of the even harder history they had on that side of the iron wall.
All of this is just very unfortunate.

>>1704425
The problem is that decently planned social welfare negates any need for communism or socialism. However, those policies aren't as flashy or far-reaching for bored intellectuals. What ends up happening, however, if a revolution ever succeeds, is that those intellectuals always get killed off, usually by some lower-class party members and their cronies or a military officer.

>>1696567
From 1950 until about 1980, the USA was constantly in fear that the Soviets were outpacing them technologically.

The Soviets were, funnily enough, in a way less egalitarian with their education system. They were egalitarian in the sense that everyone started from the same point with public schooling, but they were less egalitarian in that they honed in on expressions of innate talent and poured all their technical resources on those few geniuses, filtering everyone else down to a trade school. Communist China during the Mao era took the opposite approach, barely literate peasants were trained in hard sciences while the smart kids of the landlords were made to work in the fields. That's what held China back significantly, and why Deng Xiaoping did his massive overcorrection where he basically brought back the Imperial Chinese system of meritocracy.

Western engineers often learned to read Russian because a good half of the engineering papers and studies were coming from the eastern bloc. I think until very recently, you could still find retired engineers that could read Russian. (A similar thing is happening with Chinese in the hard sciences, Chinese undergraduates often have a leg up because of the huge plethora of technical resources on the Chinese internet).

What held the Soviets back wasn't education, they had that well sorted, it was a lack of facilities. Mathematicians often had to wait a good three weeks to get an allocated time on the computer to run their algorithms. You have anecdotal stories of Soviet scientists visiting the west buying out personal computers and calculators to take back home, because they still had to book a time to use some piece of shit mainframe computer built in the late 1960s.

With the few areas of focus, such as the space race and eye surgery (for some reason), the Soviets were on par or more advanced than the west. In Computer science they were a good 3-5 years behind all the way through the cold war, but really fell off with the Personal Computer revolution in the 1980s. At that point they were just stealing Apple IIs, reverse engineering them and copying western software. Chinese style IP theft basically.

>>1684166
>Compare them to Americans who don't get butthurt when the entire planet makes fun of them
What planet do you come from?

>>1704702
She's right, Americans take all the fatty jokes in stride. Meanwhile if you insinuate to a Scandinavian begpacker tourist that their socialist paradise isn't the land milk and honey in every way, the mask of false modesty falls off and you start to see some genuine coping.

>>1704650
>Communist China during the Mao era took the opposite approach, barely literate peasants were trained in hard sciences while the smart kids of the landlords were made to work in the fields.
What kind of bullshit is this? Mao distrusted intellectuals and it showed in how the country was run. He banished unruly college kids to the countryside FOR YEARS. There was hardly any education at any level during the Cultural Revolution. Intellectuals had to 'serve the masses', but even that didn't save them from struggle sessions (which started right from the takeover, not the Cultural Revolution). Maoist China had 0 scientific advancement - whatever 'technical' they had they inherited from Japan's colonisation of Manchuria or received from the Soviets. Their idea of medical progress was to invest in traditional Chinese medicine clinics. The entire system was even more inefficient than the Soviets.

>>1705092
Mao wasn't the leader of the Chinese Communists, it was just that all the intellectuals in charge sucked at fighting the war, while he was successful. As everyone got demoted or died, he rose through the ranks and eventually took over.

>>1535056
>>1534213
>>1534715
thank you for your stories, anons! they are super interesting and i appreciate how wonderful all of you are at writing.

>>1561349
>One dentist in a small town, Dr. Han, saw the mango and said it was nothing special and looked just like sweet potato. He was put on trial for malicious slander


this shouldn't have made me laugh but kek

>>1562609
Some of them weren't "just" communist but totalitarian dictatorships like Albany and Romania and some of them were vassal states of the soviets like Poland. Like China isn't actually a communist state but rather state capitalist. I think East Germany was the only place which wasn't just the afterbirth of the Soviet Union but followed a communist model, just their problem was that during the oppressive soviet rule they suffered major brain drain that was running the country to the ground and wasn't able to recover from and drove them into drastic measures.

>>1704564
And intellectuals have enough clairvoyance to see the unrest and the means to escape, just like they did in East Germany. So when a revolution takes place you're left with power hungry parties and a bunch of uneducated people subjectable to populism and exploitation.

>>1684166
>Compare them to Americans who don't get butthurt when the entire planet makes fun of them
Nope, both Americans and Russians get incredibly asspained when you criticize their countries. Russians of today will accuse you of being a soycuck brainwashed by western LGBT propaganda and Americans will cry and moan about muh rapefugee gang violence when you tell them you didn't have to pay $50,000 out of pocket to fund a dentist visit in your country.

>>1705196
Well, they usually have the means to escape. Also, their "intellectuals" in these senses they usually are fields like philosophy or sociology and are from rich families. The point is that I have seen this in real time when I was in university, in my third world nation (and many third world nations). All the "leftist" movements that are usually started in some university end up being taken over by tribals or literal gangsters because a tribal or a gangster is still more "astute" than the average ideologically driven communist who can't really get the masses on their side. Lenin was a big exception, and even though he was sharing power with Trotsky, the latter just could not ever be as popular as him.

>>1705092
Even if technology doesn't advance, nerds are still needed to keep the oil rigs and refineries running. You are right on the mark that the Chinese shot themselves in the foot with ideological bullshittery, there were still scientists and engineers, but they were increasingly mediocre as they were basically affirmative action students from the lower classes. It's like if over the course of 10 years, Harvard and Yale university became 80% full of white trash from Appalachia and African Americans from the ghetto.

The Soviet Union was extremely meritocratic with their STEM studies, China wasn't. In the Soviet Union, the government accepted that the children of the old educated elite were disproportionately doing well even under the Soviet system, kids of engineers were more likely to become engineers themselves. China couldn't accept that and made those groups go work in the fields and had some barely educated peasant in his classroom in their place, believing genetics weren't a factor and the environmental factors shaped everything. I don't know why you're raging at me, we pretty much agree. The Chinese Maoist system was pretty shit and inefficient, worse than the Soviets.

Even after all the persecution of landlords, even after being thrown into the lower classes and made to work the fields. Today the descendants of the former landlords in Mainland China are 17% more wealthy on average. The more you look at history the more you see that discrete social castes do exist.

North Korea is a country where this sort of thing never really ended. They let their hatred of the landlord and collaborationist classes transmogrify into a full on caste system. Descendants of communist rebels at the top (the poors), descendants of Japanese collaborationists at the bottom (the rich living in Pyongyang). The way the Kim dynasty behaves, being fat gluttonous pigs with gawdy palaces, showcases how they're pretty much new money.

>>1705196
Literally everyone gets offended when you make fun of their country. But if I was American I wouldn’t get offended when Europeans from failed states make fun of my country
>>1705196
>China isn't actually a communist state but rather state capitalist.
Wtf is state capitalism? It’s run by a communist party, the economy is centrally planned and has 5 year plans like the Soviet Union did. Xi has even said that socialism is the backbone of China, just because China has rich people doesn’t mean it’s capitalist.

>>1706026
State capitalism was a sort of a cope by Western communists to dismiss the USSR and the Eastern Block. However, China can no longer be considered as such. Under Deng, China pursued a policy of opening up and utilizing capitalism to bolster its financial and Industrialist gains, with the intention of later transitioning to socialism and eventually communism. Currently, China's major infrastructure projects are carried out by the state, while businesses are allowed to establish monopolies and invest in China. However, there is a time limit in place. The official CPC plan is to switch over to socialism (whatever that means) between 2035 and 2040. Chinese billionaires are already leaving the country, along with their families. This development is beneficial for the CPC as it simplifies the process of gaining state control over various assets and products within the nation.

>>1706032
Deng doesn’t say anything about utilising capitalism. China opened up to develop the productive forces so China could reach the standards of developed countries, which would indicate that the CPC has successfully built socialism. They have reached above the standards of developed countries obviously meaning that China is communist. I’m not sure what state capitalism is so could anyone define with examples?

>>1706032
>>1706094
Deng being responsible for the opening up is a bit of an overstatement. Everyone except for the schizo fanatic redguards and Jiang Qing with her gang of four, were for reform. Hua Guofeng, the most mediocre of nobodies chosen by Mao for succession because he was a nobody and couldn't outshine him, was for reform after Mao died. The fact the very first thing that happened was the PLA went and yeeted the Redguard clowns and arrested Jiang Qing showed how over it they were. Just utterly tied of the chaos and sick of it all.

The battle after Mao's death was between the radical reformers represented by Deng and the moderate reformers represented by Hua Guofeng. Reform was coming one way or another. It just turned out that Hua Guofeng was a nobody without support so he got outclassed and replaced. Deng Xiaoping was the one everyone coalesced around because he was the most patient and calm, even when Mao flicked him off to work on tractors in the countryside, he just accepted it and patiently sent letters saying "get me when you need me". And inevitably Mao did need him, because the economy went to shit due to the Redguards and isolation, so he came back in. He was an elderly man with lots of nepotistic connections, so naturally he won out. He was an elderly man during the 80s too, as smart as the original CCP leadership was, at the age of 80 you are basically an elderly puppet. The reform wasn't all him, it was the will of china at the time.

But people have the wrong idea of the reforms. What actually happened is the PRC borderline collapsed into civil war during the 1970s. The cultural revolution reached its apotheosis with pitched artillery battles between redguards, other redguards and the PLA. With that chaos, the regional governors did the only thing they could to ward off starvation since the central government wasn't answering their messages, they deregulated the economy. The people themselves, the average chinese people, embraced free enterprise and ended collectivization. It was either that or starve to death. Shit was so fucked up that it went literally unnoticed for years, and then Deng legalized what was already happening and took all the credit for it.

Deng was a moderating force as well. Anyone else younger and more inexperienced would've trashed Mao's legacy like the peasant Khrushchev did with Stalin, and we wouldn't be talking about a communist china today at all.

>>1771044
>just re-reading my post now

Bit drunk and rambling but the post is coherent enough I hope kek.

The point is Marxists themselves seem to fall into the "Great man theory" when talking about the history of communist countries. The figures of Deng, Stalin, Gorbachev, etc don't exist in a vacuum, they had factions behind them and didn't just emerge from the ether.

>>1771044
>more inexperienced would've trashed Mao's legacy like the peasant Khrushchev did with Stalin, and we wouldn't be talking about a communist china today at all.
OT but why is it men who are peasants and or are brutish who always end up taking power in communist movements.

>>1771053
I don't think it's necessarily the case honestly. The Latin American communist parties seem to be dominated by the more european white kids from spanish/italian stock (allende, Che, both castros) while the poor amerindian browns are nowhere to be seen. Ortega in Nicagura being the exception there, coming from a working class family who seemed to behave like a cartel family in how they were all involved in the cause violently. And being like a cockroach that survives everything, he kept around with his hustle for decades. And like Stalin, had a sort of chuddy/conservative streak in that he did something contrarian to what you'd expect from communists. While every intellectual communist magazine and periodical was advocating for covid lockdowns and criticizing "vaccine imperialism", Ortega had policies little different to the far right Belarusian president on the issue.

I think the peasant aspect is because communist parties attract the criminal refuse of the lower class. There's the two archetypes I sort of see. The Stalins and the Trotskys. The gangster minded lower class and cerebral minded intellectual from an upper middle class family with an intense psychological intensity. Allende in Chile was a Trotsky, he ended up eating the barrel of the gun as white forces stormed the presidential palace. The Kim family I see as being brutish peasants, I've gone into this a bit before in the thread. But even in the North Korean thread people have identified the lolcow tendencies of the family. Take your average white trash from rural Arkansas and give them a cult of personality, and you'd have the same sort of gay-ops assasinations, retarded heirs that can't be given power due to being too weird and being fat gluttonous pieces of shit. All things that have happened with the Kim dynasty in those three short generations. It's lynchian to think of North Korea being ruled over by a family with the congenial intelligence of a redneck, with said family being revered as a god by those with an IQ a full standard deviation above.

>>1771060
I'm talking about the one's who end up taking and accomplishing things.

saw this comment on a video discussing the issues of surrogacy and its inherent exploitation of women and children. just by looking at the pfp it was clear that the commenter was a troon. This was even before I read his moronic "communist" views on why the state exploitation of women as surrogates is supposedly a good thing. his points amount too

>thinking mothers and new-born babies have an inherent bond is biological determinism and anti-feminist.
>poor trans-women and gay-men have a right to have babies if they so choose.
>some women like doing sex-work and so some women like doing surrogacy work and should be allowed to do so.
>the Youtuber made a comment about addicts pimping out their wives as surrogates to get money to fund their addiction and that's offensive towards people with addictions.

and this is the average "communist" troons view on communism, women(and likely children) become a public resource for them to rent and also the state allowing and funding their complete degenerate lifestyles.

>>1771097
>thinking mothers and new-born babies have an inherent bond is biological determinism and anti-feminist.
i've seen some retards here say the same thing lol

>>1771044
>But people have the wrong idea of the reforms. What actually happened is the PRC borderline collapsed into civil war during the 1970s. The cultural revolution reached its apotheosis with pitched artillery battles between redguards, other redguards and the PLA. With that chaos, the regional governors did the only thing they could to ward off starvation since the central government wasn't answering their messages, they deregulated the economy. The people themselves, the average chinese people, embraced free enterprise and ended collectivization. It was either that or starve to death. Shit was so fucked up that it went literally unnoticed for years, and then Deng legalized what was already happening and took all the credit for it.

This book I'm reading at the moment better explains it honestly. Basically Deng was bought into power, and went touring around to foreign countries to court capital investment. He went to China and Japan and just behaved like a total asslicker, going "yes yes, we're all friends, we want to be developed like you". And then the second he got back into China just started bleating about how the west was on the verge of collapse and needs an excess place to dump capital. The author seemed to think it wasn't just a cynical ploy, and that the Chinese elites at the time were so brainwormed with Marxist theory they couldn't conceptualize a free market at all even when seeing it.

Whether or not Deng was a genuine traitor to the revolution as tankies say or not isn't the point, the army elites basically stood there and told him "We're returning to the previous collectivization, you're not wasting this much money on buying foreign factories". "Retrenchment" was the name of the policy from 1979-1982, and it was basically the government and military wanting to reform the economy back to how it was before Mao trashed it, further along Soviet lines. But as they got about doing so, they suddenly realized how much of a free market had developed under their nose, and the financial impossibility of stopping it. Each time they tried stopping it, the budget blew out and shortages got out of control. There wasn't the resources left to run collective factories because, to put it bluntly, the peasantry now refused to give resources out. Cotton wasn't reaching the factories, it was instead being funneled to private enterprise and people were just buying fabric directly from illegal private producers. Tens of thousands of illegal street peddlers wheeled and dealed around Shanghai, scattering like cockroaches when the police turned up. Guangzhong and Fujian had people ignore orders to farm rice and instead farmed other crops for 4x the money, which they transported illegally in trucks illegal to own, even across to Hong Kong. It was spontaneous order, the sort the capitalist economist Mises talks about.

The government genuinely tried to curb this private enterprise, but it was like a third quiet Chinese revolution that went unnoticed. To save face they sort of legitimized what they couldn't stop, to a degree, but even this was bringing this private enterprise under quasi state control again. And after a few years the peasants were sour again that they had been tricked out of what they had. The quiet revolution followed a brutal counterrevolution. People weren't just sick of Mao, they were sick of Communism, and were openly saying how they hated communism. The 1980s in China was a period of reestablishment of government control, culminating in the decade's end with Tiananmen Square.

>>1782671
Just read a bit further in and it seems like quite literally yeah, the -entire- 1980s were a game of cat and mouse between the Communist Party and the people. A tug of war that went on and on. Retrenchment ended in 1982, but was followed by a crisis of inflation spiraling out of control as the government was stupidly lending out unlimited amounts of money to plug the holes in the economy. They tried floating some prices, and elaborate two tier pricing systems, but every time they did people would just exploit gaps in the market with the black market, defraud the banks some more, ending up with more inflation. It got so bad that the average bureaucrat was just going into a bank and getting a loan for lunch if he forgot his wallet. The average bureaucrat had two years of salary in debt at near zero interest rates he'd pay off with more debt, using that money to gamble, on dinners or just for whatever he wanted.

The soft war between the farmers and the government went on through the 1980s, with the government's loss during the first retrenchment. They licked their wounds, built up power, and then in 1985 came back again in a stronger position to bring the farmers back to heel. Demanding a return to low prices like in the Mao days. It worked at first but then people seen it precariously wouldn't, even the elderly communist party members seen the risks. The Chinese peasants became pretty much Kulaks, and every village had a lookout of kids watching for sedans coming over the horizon, and would sound the gongs warning everyone to hide everything. Government officials were shown up ladders to grain silos and the ladders were kicked out from under them. Other times they were simply dragged out of their car and beaten to death in the street.

But there's this same pattern of government nostalgia for the old days. None of those old toads -really- wanted markets, they didn't even want markets to get developed at first. At every opportunity it seems like they were trying their best to be like North Korea is today. They kept on going to war with the average everyday people, and just losing.

>>1771060
Makes sense, Lil Ju-ae is the equivalent of Honey Boo Boo

Growing up, I was always kinda jealous of the kids who came from former Soviet families because they had such good math skills. Lots of good mat books have been translated since then. Nonnies who grew up in the USSR or knew someone who did, what was the math education like?

>>1533836
And thanks to the USA, we have radical islamists on every continent. thanks Assholes!