From the book “Stalin” the seminal work of Historian Domenico Losurdo

  • ddkman@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Yes, this is an awful thing phased as a good one. “The standard of living in russia in 1950 was so incredibly low, that not even an entire world war made all that much of a difference in the standard of livng.”

    • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Incredibly low compared to whom? The US that had a couple hundred years of head start from exploiting black slaves (where do you think all the wealth in the American South came from) and looting resources from overseas colonies?

      The fact that the USSR was able to close the gap in such a short period of time was exactly the reason of widespread anti-communist propaganda, the meddling of political affairs in post-war Europe including arming fascists through Gladio to destroy the European left, and ironically, financial aid to rebuild Western Europe because they were really afraid of workers uprisings bringing post-war Europe towards the Soviet sphere.

      • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        The US that had a couple hundred years of head start

        tsarist russia wasn’t a barren patch of dirt, they’d also collected a bunch of capital from imperialism, it was certainly behind the US or germany in the 1890s but not so severely as to constitute ‘hundreds of years’ of development. the bolsheviks actually in large part came from and used a genuine industrial proletariat, in contrast to China which had to have a much higher reliance on the peasantry. let’s not muddle our narratives of communist development here

        • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          The Russian Civil War from 1917-1922 created massive destruction with millions of casualties, together with great famines that were partially caused by petty bourgeoisie destroying their stock. The bourgeoisie would rather burn down the country rather than having the communists have them. That was why Lenin had to introduce NEP because supplies and goods were in such shortage that they could barely get their economy going.

          Stalin said in 1931:

          We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall be crushed.

          Socialist industrialization was what saved the world from Nazism.

          • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            that Stalin quote is a perfect support for what i said, thanks!

            i’m urging against exaggeration, i’m not ignorant of the civil war & challenges of industrialization

      • ddkman@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Yeah have you ever lived in the USSR? Have you ever been to a post soviet country? Yeah…

        • Omegamint [comrade/them, doe/deer]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          The USSR took a backwater state that was still stuck in feudalism (meaning fucking serfdom) and within a single human generation sent the first person into space. They started from a way worse state than the west and made incredible achievements. They did this without the help of first world powers, and were even hindered by constant economic warfare to boot.

          Yeah, you can visit ex Soviet states and see the degradation. Most of their failing infrastructure was built under Soviet planning and has since gone to rot. Economic liberalization has brought nothing to the table, and has obviously failed utterly at whatever promises we’re made initially.

          None of what I’m saying is even debatable. The economic truths of the USSR are easily learned. YOU are a western chauvinist dipshit who looks at the achievements of actual socialism and without a single bit of historical material understanding spouts some ignorant bullshit. I’ll be clear: save your breath to instead talk about whatever authoritarian atrocities were supposedly dealt out. When you talk about the economic failures of the USSR you are treading on ahistorical bullshit that has no real ground.

        • SuperNovaCouchGuy2 [any]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Yes I do wish I lived in the USSR at it’s prime. gigachad

          Also it’s a bit rich to use the “muh post soviet poverty shit hole” line when it was the wests neoliberal economic shock doctrine that caused such a tragedy in the first place.

        • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          You said the standards of living in the USSR in 1950 was “incredibly low”, have you ever lived in former British and French colonies in Asia?

          Many countries in Asia still haven’t yet achieved independence by 1950, and I can assure you that the standards of living in the USSR was already leaps and bounds beyond most of the world at the time, and comparable to post-war Western Europe and would have easily surpassed them if Western Europe never had the luxury of receiving the vast amount of financial aid from their American masters through the Marshall Plan.

          • ddkman@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Yes because this is how geopolitics work. The USSR basically entirely in Europe. The living standards should be comparable to what europe was like. And not what africa was like. Or Mars.

              • ddkman@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                Like honestly, I won’t comment on any of this anymore. But where are you guys from? Because you are either Russian, and sucking the dicks of a failed dictator, or you are from several continents away, with no context to any of this, and then you just are a bunch of useful idiots to a failed dictator. Answer this one honestly. Either to me or to yourselves…

                • Ossay [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  man got owned so hard he dropped the mask, went straight for homophobia, then dropped the dorkiest line i’ve ever read on lemmy lmao

                • alcoholicorn [comrade/them, doe/deer]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  I hardly think the guy who beat the nazis and raised standards of living in the USSR from borderline starvation to comparable with western Europe in a couple decades a failure. There were regular famines before Stalin; after Stalin there were none until capitalism reversed all that progress, immiserated the populace, and decreased all measurements of human development by similar numbers to WWII.

                  The CIA admits he wasn’t a dictator, merely representing the dictatorship of the proletariat.

                  • ddkman@lemm.ee
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                    1 year ago

                    I don’t care what the CIA thinks of stalin. Like how is the fucking CIA an authority on europe in the 60-s. Also Stalin didn’t beat the nazis. The british did.

            • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              The living standards should be comparable to what europe was like. And not what africa was like. Or Mars.

              I don’t think geographic location is as significant as a country’s, you know, history. Just because they were in Europe doesn’t mean that they were starting out on equal footing. If you compare the state of Russia under the tsar to somewhere like Britain or France, then it’s clear that the Soviets were starting from a disadvantage. Moreover, they were under constant economic and military threats from most of the developed world. In spite of all of that, they were able to develop quickly enough to defeat the Nazis and become a global superpower.

        • AbbysMuscles [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          If you look for it, you can find a video of children offering themselves up as prostitutes in post-Soviet collapse Russia. Please really stop and think about what would force someone to have to do that. When we think of some generic image of an Eastern Bloc, post-Soviet shithole, whatever your mental picture is wasn’t created by that nation. You’re thinking of a post-collapse nation. We have our own in America called the Rust Belt. We don’t blame the existence of ford and general motors as causing the dilapidation of Detroit. Their departure and subsequent economic collapse destroyed that region. It’s a similar story writ large all over the former Second World.

          And sure, Soviet cars sucked. Fortunately most people didn’t need them.

    • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.netOP
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      1 year ago

      Making shit up and hoping no one will notice huh? You really aren’t giving it your best

      The Soviet Union was the fastest industrializing state in the interwar period, come up with better propaganda