I’ve spent the last few years devouring Soviet history. Books, papers, blog posts, podcasts, all of it. I can’t get enough. Not to brag, but I do feel as though I’ve achieved a certain level of understanding about the USSR, its history, and eventual collapse. But I’ve also put the work in.
And yet, whenever I engage people I know IRL or online, I’m amazed by how doggedly people will defend what they just inherently “know”: that the Soviet Union was an evil totalitarian authority dictatorship that killed 100 million of its own people and eventually collapsed because communism never works. None of these people (at least the people I know IRL) have learned anything about Soviet history beyond maybe a couple days of lectures and a textbook chapter in high school history classes. Like, I get that this is the narrative that nearly every American holds in their heads. The fact that people believe this isn’t surprising. But what is a little surprising to me is that, when confronted with a challenge to that narrative from someone they know has always loved history and has bothered to learn more, they dig their heels in and insist they are right and I am wrong.
This isn’t about me, I’m just sharing my experience with this. I’m just amazed at how Americans will be completely ignorant about a topic (not just the USSR) but will be utterly convinced their views on that topic are correct, despite their own lack of investigation into that topic. This is the same country where tens of millions of people think dinosaurs and humans walked around together and will not listen to what any “scientist” has to say about it, after all.
Which is kind of changing as more millennials and gen-z are getting more okay with not just simply hating basically all forms of anti-capitalism. Even taking time to get some random information while on their phones/social media from folks that are pro-leftist. I now find it easier to point to Lenin without dealing with all the “he was evil and killed people” lines. Stalin and Mao are still hard given that they seem to be more directly brought up in media/classes as being at Hitler levels. While they both went with some bad options (some of which was based on being given those options by advisers with bad understanding of a topic at the time), they did see how important it was to get caught up to western industrial nations quick as fuck.
It is hard to get to real critiques of which things didn’t work or were correct but maybe could have been done better based on what we know now. Because lots of people don’t want to hear anything as it (to them) is like Holocaust denial based on the very very black and white way they are treated in history classes and media. Though even both of them are getting a bit more critical support by those millennials and gen-z folks that go deeper. Also helps that more formerly classified documents from the US intelligence agencies from those times are finally getting old enough to declassify and release them.
Even Cuba is becoming less of a automatic trigger for being seen as some “purely evil nation”. Though it being so close geographically to the US means the hawks will keep trying to find ways to paint them as such. The anti-communist people that fled are the real thing allowing the US to keep up the blockade and sanctions that are literally only in place to torture the people of Cuba into overthrowing their government. Those anti-communist Cubans here are enough of a bloc to be able to scare most candidates for state and federal elections from saying anything positive. We saw how Bernie saying a simple truth about how literacy under communism went way up was treated like he said we should just let Cuba take over the US or something. His point was that education should matter more here beyond the very bad policies that claim to push education but actually make it about numbers and not about real learning.