I said basically this to my friend group politics chat and then had 3 different friends all try and quibble with me about it.
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!”
A guy I know, real nice guy but super liberal, was telling me how his Cuban grandfather suffered under Castro. Sure enough, when he got into more details, it turns out his grandfather was a wealthy landlord whose farmland got collectivized and he only had to go to jail after he got very vocal about trying to get people to oppose the revolution (in which he was very much the minority BTW, his own friend turned him in)
Reminds me of when a Finn told me about how the Soviets killed his grandad…and I was like…yeah? 😏 how come? 🥺🥺🥺
Admittedly I don’t remember much! But only that I remember coming to the conclusion that he was talking about the Winter War, especially as he kept referring to his grandfather as a proud defender of homeland and the Soviets as barbarian invaders. I clocked out halfway through.
Im curious if there’s even an attempt to reconcile that in your friend’s brain or did he just kinda wave it away?
We didn’t have much chance to discuss it in depth. He was hosting a local event where selected speakers take about 5 minutes to speak on a subject they are passionate about and he invited me to speak. I told him I wanted to talk about ending the embargo on cuba (which I did) and he said, oh that’s ironic because I will be opening the event by celebrating our right to free speech and saying how my grandfather didn’t have that right in Cuba. We both laughed and agreed we onviously don’t agree on some things, then just focused on boring procedural stuff about the event. At the actual event he elaborated the details I included in op but not with the exact same words I chose
To be clear I don’t think he supports embargoes or sanctions and certainly doesn’t support war or invasions, but he just doesn’t like communism at all and believes a lot of misinformation about communist led governments
Even the school textbooks in Western European diaspora that often publish false information to slander successful Communists admited that the Cuban working class support Fidel Castro against the Pig of Bay invasion. The Pig of Bay invasion by the Cuban emigrants was staged by the US government who falsely assumed that the Cubans oppose Castro’s rule and the failure of the invasion was from the false belief that the Cuban commoners that stayed in Cuba are unhappy with the new Communist government. The Western European diaspora school textbook attributed the mass support of Castro by the Cuban lower class to deception, but this assumes that the Cubans cannot compare the new communist rule with the previous Liberal puppet regime or that democracy cannot work unless the European emigrants have authoritarian rule over the people of color.
I have a relative that lived in the USSR and they didn’t complain about being imprisoned or questioned, they complained that Nazis destroyed their old village, they complained that there was not as much food (note: as much, not none)during the war, issues that people face during war, not during times of poor leadership.
Same thing about the (I’m pretty confident it’s fake) stories about people who would escape gulags by using another escapee as food - if you’re willing to kill and eat another person, you probably should be in a gulag!
