Once again, this is an actual question; and I’m hoping to broaden my horizons and have a good conversation or two. I’m relatively new to commie subs, still trying to read political theory to figure out which one I like the most, so this might come off as uneducated. But why am I seeing so many positive posts about Stalin, followed by some comments that boil down to “Stalin was good, if you think he wasn’t, that’s just western propaganda” I’m thinking of the post that mentioned the 1921 Soviet Famine as a specific example. I know that Stalin didn’t create the famine, it was a byproduct of almost a decade of war, unrest, and a ton of other factors. But Stalin did do some bad shit. Things like sending 14 million people to gulags to work as slave labor, and killing millions more in his purges. I would argue that he used communism to become an authoritarian. Similar to how Putin is ruling now, stuffing ballot boxes, starting wars, and pushing propaganda. (I realize that we get pushed propaganda, too in the form of faux news, MSNBC, and most media outlets. I don’t wish to have a discussion that boils down to “we do it too, you just don’t see it”)
Regarding the USSR:
- Where did you read that 14 million people were sent to prisons as slave labour in the USSR?
- Where did you read that millions of people were killed in purges in the USSR?
- Where did you read that the USSR didn’t have collective leadership, and that Stalin had ultimate authority?
Regarding modern Russia:
- Saying “Putin is ruling” is a very liberal standpoint. He is a president, not a monarch.
- Where did you read that Putin’s party is interfering with elections? It’s entirely possible considering it’s a capitalist country and they don’t want to lose to the KPRF, but it’s still important to be skeptical of sources, particularly those with a bad track record.
- Russia has not started any war. In Ukraine, they intervened in and escalated a nearly decade-long civil war ignited by the NATO coup in 2014. The war with Georgia was initiated by Georgia. The war in Syria was started by imperialists, and Russia joined by the Syrian government’s invitation.
Communists are materialists. If capitalist countries make claims about socialist countries without evidence, the default assumption should be that those claims are either entirely untrue or massively inflated. That doesn’t mean they’re always false, but you wouldn’t trust a habitual liar to suddenly tell the truth. There is no way to “prove” if or how a historical event happened, and Amerikan propaganda is extremely effective despite a severe lack of convincing evidence.
“Russia has not started any war. In Ukraine, they intervened in and escalated a nearly decade-long civil war ignited by the NATO coup in 2014”
So this is one of those communities. I forgot the part where Ukraine requested Russia to invade. Or the part where intervening in another country’s political affairs was a thing that neither Russia nor NATO have ever done.
This is a link to a BBC article about potential election tampering in Russia. There is a video of people stuffing ballot boxes with papers, but I ran out of time to find it. Can you explain and maybe share a source on the coup and following civil war in Ukraine?
Here, from the BBC, hardly a communist source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-26089450, and the transcribed phone call: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957
[Victoria] Nuland: Good. I don’t think Klitsch should go into the government. I don’t think it’s necessary, I don’t think it’s a good idea.
Nuland: [Breaks in] I think Yats [Arseniy Yatseniuk] is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience. He’s the… what he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside. He needs to be talking to them four times a week, you know. I just think Klitsch going in… he’s going to be at that level working for Yatseniuk, it’s just not going to work.
Guess who became prime minister of Ukraine? Precisely “Yats”, who was Nuland’s pick. The fact that such a phone call has not even been disavowed by the US government tells enough by itself. The US was clearly involved, and a phone call like this is just scratching the surface. If you want to learn more about US meddling around the world, I recommend the youtube channel The New Atlas, whose host, Brian Berlectic, dives deeply on the question.
Firstly, the BBC is a UK state-controlled media outlet that routinely spreads imperialist propaganda (and even lies about left-wing movements within the country, as shown by their defamation of Corbyn); it has absolutely no credibility. With that said, the the only citation I could find that wasn’t the BBC itself (and I checked recursively at a depth of 3 before stopping) was this, which is an article by an organization called “Golos” alleging forced voting; I’ve never heard of it before, so I can’t say whether they’re trustworthy. Aside from that citation, it seems to be nothing but anecdotal “evidence”, the credibility of which is proportional to that of the media outlet.
I can’t speak to the video as I’ve never seen it.
Here’s a summary of the coup in Ukraine. As for post-coup Ukraine, you could start by looking at a few of the sources here (I recommend that entire document for learning more about Marxism and imperialism, even if it’s a bit messy). We’ve had several people asking about the conflict, the most recent being this one; you can use the search function on Lemmygrad, just check “Local” and search by posts using a keyword like “Donbas”. Alternatively, you could make another post asking specifically about this (I’m not particularly good at saving my sources, but crowdsourcing would give better results)
Thanks! I’ll look into that. I apologize for using BBC as a source. As a recovering liberal, it was one of the few news sources I had access to that wasn’t Fox News and I’m finding it hard to find better sources in the US. I’m finding Ground News is helpful, but even that app doesn’t really include any communist sources, just a bunch of US news sources
It’s worse than you think… As a result of Stalin’s purges and famine, only communists remained in Russia. As soon as he finished killing everyone, he started running super fast and kicked a baby in the face like a football for no apparent reason…I don’t understand…Like he shouldn’t have done this.
The numbers of people executed or gulaged are widely exaggerated. For the Great Purge, he and Molotov set a maximum of 72,950 executions and 186,500 prison sentences. At the peak of the gulags, only 2.4% of the population was imprisoned (less than the percentage imprisoned in the US: 2.8%), and most were common criminals instead of political prisoners. When Khrushchev released many of them after Stalin’s death, most committed new crimes and got sent back to prison.
Comrade, do you by any chance have sources for this? Always trying to look for them, but most if not all search engines are biased or straight up empirialistic.
- The Triumph of Evil Pages 74–76
- The Truth about the Soviet Gulag - Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA
- Referenced CIA document (bullet point 10)
14 million gulags 💀 was there anyone left in the USSR after Stalin imprisoned them all???
Do you know how absurd the logistics would be for the imprisonment of 14 million people???
Exactly, how could the Nazis have killed off 12+ million people systematically while also losing troops in a war and still have people left?
By exterminating them you Nazi piece of shit. They didn’t care if they starved, got sick and died, had adequate housing, died from exposure, were infested with parasites, had adequate clothing, had enough water, or so on.
That’s why they massacred them right off of the trains and left the rest to work to death.
Eat shit you Nazi. Take your Holocaust denial and get lost.
To put this into context, the United States imprisons about 4.3% of it’s population and represents 20% of the global prison population… It’s like 2ish million people in American prisons.
Related, but does anyone know how much truth their is to the idea that Vavilov was sent to the gulags because of his opposition to Lashekoism?
