Can I have a serious question? Are you guys real? Or am I just not on the joke?
I do not like US, but being someone from country controled by USSR. There were ton of people arested just for publicaly saying “Goverment bad”.
Please don’t discredit me, compared to US, I would be considered socialist and by US right wing maybe communist, but claiming that USSR or current Russia are your friends seems insane.
Do you have any proof or detail for your claim? Your claim sound like the many disproven slanders against the Communists that is accepted as fact in the school textbooks and “educational” documentaries in Western European diaspora countries. I know that Venezuela under the former Socialist president, Hugo Chavez, tolerate slanders and baseless conspiracy theories against the Socialist government and that “Putin’s police guards” allow people to freely sing Ukrainian anthem in Moscow without restrainment. The NATO did stage the 1989 False Flag massacre and write a false narrative that contradicts the original photo evidence by their Western European diaspora journalists (https://web.archive.org/web/19970329011405/http://www.cnd.org:8022/June4th/massacre.html) in China alongside the plothole of why the Chinese citizens somehow did not know about the repression before the 1989 false flag terrorism.
They are just scared idiots who are worried about the future of the world and instead of admitting that their is gray to the world they have taken an easy answer of saying the “other option” (because black and white is all people can think in) was perfect and that they could be 100% happy and never complain about anything ever cause surely communism would be perfect.
They are happy to ignore the rough edges because they aren’t actually living it. Not to say it couldn’t be a better system but that it would be one that needs work and effort to be best to its citizens.
Both capitalism and communism arrested its citizens for dissenting against the system they were in but this seems fucking ignorant of reality from people who put in half a thought on this at best.
I’m sorry but you need to consider that you simply have been lied to about your own history.
Fairly criticizing the government in the USSR–just like in China, just like in North Korea, and so on–is not illegal.
What these countries do crack down on is when fascists, capitalist opportunists, and foreign intelligence agents work actively to try and destroy, divide, and sabotage them.
The vast majority of people the USSR killed or imprisoned (a number far smaller than what we are told), were actively trying to destroy the USSR, and all the lives of millions of common people who were benefitting from this new system. Why when capitalists kill whoever they see fit, they can call them “traitors”, “treasonous”, or “terrorists”, but when socialists do something far more restrained and humane they are seen as devils?
Well, because, capitalist propaganda has strangled the world discourse, especially the last 30 years. The United States and its allies have spent the last century not only trying to destroy every socialist state but to muddy the waters, lie, and character assassinate its enemies. Everything from gulags, the Holodomor, WW2 war doctrine, the Great Purge, and everything before and after has been radically distorted by capitalist and fascist liars.
I believe you that in your heart you are a socialist. So please listen to me when I say: do not trust the lies about your socialist brothers and sisters that were invented by capitalist and fascist snakes who want to destroy everything you would build.
Yes, Lemmygrad is explicitly communist.
Countries weren’t controlled by the USSR, they were a member state of the USSR and had input on democratic central planning and decisions. Please feel free to provide documentation if you feel that my worldview is incorrect.
Modern Russia and the USSR are two entirely different issues.
Countries weren’t controlled by the USSR, they were a member state of the USSR and had input on democratic central planning and decisions.
So countries that were forcibly integrated, like the Baltic states, weren’t controlled? Then why couldn’t they leave the union?
They could. Article 17 of the 1936 Constitution (can be found on https://marxists.org > English > History > Soviet Union > Soviet Government) explicitly allowed every Republic to secede from the U.S.S.R.
Oh bunch of rus trolls, and us teenagers who think living under cccp was good.
Xddddd
I’ll push back on this maybe they were controlled by the ussr. However like, is thst not better than the alternatives. The local bourgeoisie were so good? Or the nazis? Or thr Americans? Sovereignty is a myth and mostly harmful to the citizens of places that have it. Like, what freedom does it bring people that their government can decide how to opress them?
If you like your government, you don’t want anyone to organize against it. And if many people think like you, a truly democratic government would act according to your desires and jail the agitators.
Or, put otherwise, if you use the democratic mechanisms in place, it’s all good. If you protest or demonstrate because you feel you aren’t heard by the government, that’ll usually have an effect. But if, deep inside, you want to overthrow the government, everyone will hate you and you’ll be jailed or worse.
But if, deep inside, you want to overthrow the government, everyone will hate you and you’ll be jailed or worse.
Don’t you guys also want to overthrow a government?
Or, put otherwise, if you use the democratic mechanisms in place, it’s all good. If you protest or demonstrate because you feel you aren’t heard by the government, that’ll usually have an effect.
Tell that to the people in china.
Don’t you guys also want to overthrow a government?
According to communist theory, our current liberal governments are not democratic, because capital exerts control over them by various means. Thus, overthrowing them is necessary. Of course, if we had a democratic government, we wouldn’t wish to overthrow it.
Tell that to the people in china.
If I’m not mistaken, there were extremely small-scale protests about COVID-19 measures and the government immediately listened and removed them.
Chinese people overwhelming support their government.
Source: Harvard (We know how you western chauvinists don’t trust anything from a non-euroamerikkkan source)
In contrast to low US political approval ratings, 96% of Chinese are satisfied with the national government (Edelmans 2016). World Values Surveys says that 83% think the country is run for their benefit rather than for the benefit of special groups. A Harvard research center study of long-term public opinion survey finds that > 95% of Chinese citizens approved their government. How is this possible in a one-party state? (TED talk by Eric X Li)
claiming that USSR or current Russia are your friends seems insane
The USSR is gone. It’s not around to be anyone’s friend. This means that communists who talk highly of the USSR are analysing the USSR and concluding that it was the greatest experiment in raising living standards in history. (Maybe that’s now China, but it’s going to be a difficult and possibility incoherent comparison.)
Compare the standard of living before and after the Soviets gained power. Success is the only word for it, even if they’re are valid criticisms. (Do not do that silly thing where you compare life for the average person at any time in the Soviet Union with the life of the most decadent and rich person in the US. That’s not logical.)
I doubt there are many communists who see Russia as a friend. What you see instead are communists acknowledging that Russia is fighting US imperialism. Considering how much death, tragedy, and destruction the US brings and has brought to the world, any work against the US is a net positive for humanity.
(To preclude misunderstanding, no I am not saying that people dying in the Ukraine war is a good thing. Except die hard Nazis. They can get fucked. It’s up to the reader to decide where they think the Nazis are.)
I want to emphasise and follow up something that KiG V2 said:
What these countries do crack down on is when fascists, capitalist opportunists, and foreign intelligence agents work actively to try and destroy, divide, and sabotage them.
Liberals tend to read things like this and say that it is a ‘conspiracy’. But think about it like this: if we know one thing for a fact, it is that “capitalist opportunists, and foreign intelligence agents work[ed] actively to … destroy, divide, and sabotage” the USSR until they won. The capitalists won. They got what they wanted. They got what the communists were saying that the reactionaries wanted all along—the end of the USSR.
Now we have 30 years of evidence of how capitalists would run the regions of the USSR differently. If you can compare what life in the USSR looked like before and after the Soviets gained power, you can also compare what life was like before and after the Soviets lost power.
So what happened after the Berlin wall fell? Can you honestly look at the statistics, the records, the economy, the stories, and say that life got better?
If you can, I’d ask you to look again at all segments of society, not just the lucky few in the middle and upper classes. If you think life got worse after the USSR (it did—living standards plummeted), ask: what changed? You, too, will answer that for all it’s flaws, the change was from socialism to capitalism and that socialism was by far a superior system for the mass of people.
(PS using ‘insane’ as a way of criticising something is ableism.)
This kinda whitewashes a lot of terrible shit that happened behind the Iron Curtain. Many Romanians suffered under the tyrannical rule of Ceaușescu, or the Yugoslavians under Tito. For many good honest proletariats, especially during the latter days of the Soviet Union, suffering was about the only thing being evenly distributed.
Now certainly, you can point much of the blame at Soviet leadership of the time who were content to allow these monsters to remain in power as long as quotas were met, as opposed to a particular failing of any political system, but I’d never go as far as to belittle people who were starving.
That Romanian dude (fuck that name) was an insane right winger not “communist.” Please fuck off and try again.
Ok I typed that before finishing- his statement got more stupid!
Tito is nearly universally beloved by former-Yugoslavians. Ask them. Not the Nazi ones, the normal ones. You will find few harsh words against him. They did not all love him, but few hated him. And the rule of Tito and Yugoslavia is CERTAINLY preferable to the hellscape that neoliberalism (brought, kindly, by the US and western EU post soviet and then Yugoslavia collapse) has wrought upon that part of the world.
Also the deaths towards the end of the Soviet Union cannot ALL be attributed to the west, but, then again… the west did absolutely undermine time after time after time the Soviet government. And certainly past like 1990 that massive spike in deaths, much of it suicide, WAS basically a EU and US joint mass genocide upon the Russian people and other former Soviet states. They could’ve helped, they could’ve done anything, but instead they forced further despair and eventually forced the handing over of formerly publicly owned properties, entire industries sometimes, to what we like to call now “Russian oligarchs.” We created those guys who robbed their country and countrymen fucking blind. Imagine living 50 years in the great Soviet Union, born after WWII. You live there, see amazing feats from your country, and then one day it all comes tumbling down and Americans and your collaborating brethren are over on the side buying up and shiti-fying (I made a word) your formerly glorious country that you had some part in creating. And we did that. The “west” ripped apart a great experiment in socialism, not perfect by any means, but infinitely more noble than ultra capitalist genocidial US, etc. And they did it a smile on their faces and a silent understanding that “the Russians had brought this on themselves, really. tut tut They never should’ve even bothered trying to create a better world!”
In my country, communist killed so many people for political reasons. They ruined so many people’s lives. They stole landowners land and ruined it. They denied people from studying because their parents owned a shop or a company. They condemned or executed czech RAF pilots who escaped from Czechoslovakia when nazis occupied it to fought against nazis and communists did it to them because the pilots fought against nazis with the British army and Great Britain was now enemy of USSR. Communist executed woman called Milada Horáková (who were also active in underground resistance against nazis). They executed her because she was in other political party and communists banned all other parties except communist party. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milada_Horáková People who profited from communism the most was people who informed the secret police about who said something negative about communists. From wikipedia article about that secret police:
…obtained forced confessions by means of torture, including the use of psychoactive drugs, blackmail, and kidnapping.
Other common practices included telephone tapping, permanent monitoring of apartments, intercepting private mail, house searches, surveillance, and arrests and indictment for so-called “subversion of the republic”.
Some of the practices that communist were using were taken from nazis or even worse than the nazi ones. We had our version of gulags in Czechoslovakia. Their purpose wasn’t to kill people like in the nazi concentration camps, but working conditions were similar or even worse that in the nazi concentration camp. This is just few random things that I’ve had on my mind and it’s just a fragment of what communists did in Czechoslovakia and very similar things were happening in other Soviet block countries. I don’t believe anybody who lived in communism could create meme like this, because working communism without dictatorship and abusing of human rights is a pure utopia. So yes, millions of families suffered and still suffer under communism and in most cases, it’s not their fault. And yes, communism bad.
For what exactly? It’s things that even communists in the Czechia do not deny, it’s like general knowledge here. For example for the work camps in Jáchymov where prisoners were forced to mine uranium, I was there year ago. I saw what remains from the camps. There was a museum with some photos, list of people who died there and which ones were political prisoners. There was letters that prisoners were smuggling from the camp to inform their families that they are alive. There were also video interviews with people who survived it. What I find the most convincing is the testimony of people who lived in communism in Czechoslovakia. Many people who survived the work camps are still alive and there is a project called “Memory of the nation”. In this project, people are interviewing the old people who lived in communism. I personally done it once, I interviewed mr. Brožek. There are over 16000 people who were interviewed and when you listen to it, when you see the old people talking about the monstrosities they experienced or when you even do the interview, it’s really convincing. I do not believe that these people all made it up or that somebody told them to say that. As I said, there’s nobody denying it. And in Czechoslovakia there were basically no communists arrested or punished after the revolution, so I belive that if it was made up, somebody would say it’s made up. Also you can’t pay that many people to lie. I’m pretty sure that in 20 years when all these people will be dead, people will start to deny it, but now when all these people are alive and lots of them had family members or friends executed, falsely sentenced or persecuted in other ways, nobody will say it’s not true. Also strangely, communist party was never banned, even after revolution, but in the most recent elections in 2021, they had 3,6% of the votes. That also proves that nobody wants communism in Czechia after 40 years of their dictatorship. Here is the link for the Memory of the nation project, it’s in czech, but you can use the translate page feature and most of the interviews are also avaivable in text form, so you should be able to translate them: https://www.pametnaroda.cz/cs/archive
EDIT: Also, I was in the archive in Prague where lots of documents are stored, mostly StB folder of people they were were watching for various reasons. There are tons of material and I don’t think anybody would want to fake it, it would be lot of work for no real reason.
So you are saying that the people in your country did not receive enough repression to retaliate against the Communist after the dissolution of the USSR, that prisoners get jobs, and that the witness in the prison camps were not executed to hide the ‘horror’ of prison camps. Also, the Communists somehow use enough conspiracy to maintain rule and deception, but do little to stop the delivery of letters from the prisoners to their families outside of the prisons. You mentioned videos and testimony of the witnesses, but have no link to them. You only cite a source that mentions the list of witnesses without the actual testimonies of the witnesses. You should at least mention the examples of the acts of “horrors” by the Communists.
Všetci v Jachýmove boli určite nevinný. Rovnako boli nevinný Biela Légia, Černý Lev 777 a teroristi Mašínovci a nesmiem zabudnúť na Horákovú ktorá na 101% neviedla proti vládne aktivity. A KSČM nemá ani riadny program tých by som nevolil ani ja rovnako ako KSS. Najviac sa mi páči ako každý rok máme nových antikomunistických hrdinov ktorí boli vraj mučený komunistami a určite nič není pritiahnuté za vlasy. (Everyone in Jachýmov was definitely innocent. The White Legion, Černý Lev 777 and the Mašín terrorists were also innocent, and I must not forget Horáková, who 101% did not lead against government activities. And KSČM doesn’t even have a proper program, I wouldn’t vote for them either, just like KSS. What I like most is how every year we have new anti-communist heroes who were allegedly tortured by the communists and certainly nothing is far-fetched.)
When Poland was occupied by communists after the second world war, it was pretty bad. There was very little food, if any at all in stores. I remember specifically that the only thing being in stock in stores was vinegar because the shelves were empty. Everything of value Poland produced, like food, went to the USSR. The only import Poland got were things like matchsticks.
Everything of value Poland produced, like food, went to the USSR.
Let’s see some sources to support this bold claim. I’ll wait.
Stalin was extra hungry after the war, so he personally ate all of Poland’s food. Everyone in Poland starved to death 5 times each! I know it is true because I was Poland from 1945-51.
What a nonsense.
occupied by communists after the second world war
Polish communists occupied their own country?
There was very little food, if any at all in stores.
You might have heard about, you know, the war and the real occupation, nazi one. Requisition, destruction, mass murders, death camps. I wonder why that stopped. Who ended it.
I remember specifically
Unless you are 95 years old i doubt it was “you specifically”. And also:
I remember specifically that the only thing being in stock in stores was vinegar because the shelves were empty
At least get your propaganda sorted out, dumbass, those were two different separate pieces, the vinegar one was about the 80’s (and equally false as the other one).
Everything of value Poland produced, like food, went to the USSR. The only import Poland got were things like matchsticks.
As evidenced by the rapidly rebuilding and repopulating country being made entirely of matchsticks. Yawn. Seriously at least get something less boring, go read some IPN book or something for more plausibly spun propaganda instead of taking your historical knowledge from Jebzdzidy.
I wonder if they are so used to liberals just going “OMG! That’s so horrible! Evil commies! Thank you for sharing your story brave hero!” that they forget when they are talking to people who can use their brains and actually bother to try and understand history.
A Poland immigrant in Canada had testified about Communist rule in Poland, so I can expand on your story. There was free food under Communism, but people need to wait in a long line because the Soviet Union used the financial institutions from the Western European countries for the recovery after World War 2. Since the Western Europeans want to sabotage Communism, their institutions attempted to overchange the Eastern European countries with huge debt for the financial assistance and this debt-trapping is the current practice of the Bretton Woods institutions like World Bank and International Monetary Fund to create third world problems in former European colonies. Also when there are evidence that a person is subverting Communist rule, the Communist government will conduct search within a more reasonable ethical boundary than the police search in the US.
Sounds like the stories I’ve heard from people of that generation in west Germany. Things didn’t get better until the Währungsreform of 1948, and didn’t get markedly better until the US dumped in money (with strings attached mind) via the Marshall Plan. Europe was decimated by the war, regardless of which class was in charge.
I said basically this to my friend group politics chat and then had 3 different friends all try and quibble with me about it.
