this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
1433 points (96.8% liked)
Memes
45868 readers
1283 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No, it wasn't. It was not imperialist, and supported countless anticolonial and anti-imperialist movements. It was not genocidal either.
This is ahistorical, again, the majority voted to retain the USSR and the majority of people say their lives were better under Socialism than Capitalism. This tracks with higher life expectancy, lower poverty rates, and other metrics in the USSR than in present post-Soviet Capitalist states. There wasn't a "moment of lifting repression," in fact repression increased under Capitalism with Shock Doctrine.
Quality of life skyrocketed over time, they went from one of the poorest states in Europe to one of the most developed in less than a century. It is very well documented that the Soviets went from immense poverty to doubled life expectancy, 99%+ literacy rates, free healthcare and education, food security, democratization of the economy, mass scientific achievement, high rates of home ownership, and more throughout its lifetime.
Oh, even more absurd, you're pretending countries have souls.
Read Blackshirts and Reds. It's 10 times as hard to debunk anticommunist red scare-era nonsense than it is to firehose falsehoods and half-truths.
Do you know what decossackization was.
Do you know what the Kazakh famine was.
Do you know what the Holomodor was.
Do you know what the Finnish, Estonian and Polish Operations were.
Do you know what the Khaibakh massacre was.
Do you know what the Deportation of the Crimean Tatars was.
Do you know what the Sumgait pogrom was
As a few examples, all straight from Wikipedia, none of what you listed is accepted as genocide, decreasingly so after the openings of the Soviet Archives. It is extremely easy to randomly look up a western list of soviet repressions, and far harder to actually dig into what happened and if it truly constituted genocide. It's especially telling that you ignore the rest of your nonsense that I debunked in favor of perpetuating your firehose tactics, seemingly not caring if even western historians agree with you.
Several scholars have categorised this as a form of genocide,[6][7][8][9][10] whilst other historians have highly disputed this classification due to the contentious figures which range from "a few thousand to incredible claims of hundreds of thousands".[11][12][13]
Some historians describe the famine as legally recognizable as a genocide perpetrated by the Soviet state, under the definition outlined by the United Nations; however, some argue otherwise.
While scholars are in consensus that the cause of the famine was man-made,[10][11] it remains in dispute whether the Holodomor was directed at Ukrainians and whether it constitutes a genocide, the point of contention being the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union.
Nothing in the Wikipedia article covers genocide.
And so on. Again, read Blackshirts and Reds. You might learn something. No, the USSR was by no means perfect, but it wasn't the monstrosity you depict it as either.
yeah I'm not taking homework assignments from someone who thinks I'm trying to ascribe souls to states lol.
You did, though. The USSR was dissolved by people very different from the original founders, in very different times and very different circumstances. Pretending member-states were in any way "founders" of Socialism is silly, it was people that did that, and different people that dissolved it.