Well… There was this thing called Soviet Union. They decided to try to speed up the transition to communism by using repression and violence. And ended up being a totalitarian state, a direct opposite of what a communist state is supposed to be like.
Of course you can argue that Soviet Union was not communist, it was just a state that had chosen to call itself communist for propaganda reasons… But still, Soviet Union is an example of a communist country that was unsuccessful as a communist project already by itself. Then came outsiders and helped make it even worse, but bad doesn’t become good by some people wanting it to be even worse.
Burma is another example. I’d say they hacked away their own leg before anyone else, such as CIA, had time to interfere in their business.
Finland decreased its poverty between 1917 and 1991 more than Soviet Union did. In the beginning of year 1917 Finland was a part of the Russian Empire, so we were extremely poor here as well. Soviet Union could be on the second place, perhaps. But, since there is at least one country that fared better, the claim you made it evidently false. There can very well be other countries than just Finland that decreased poverty more than USSR did. I do not know for sure, though, as I’m not terribly well aware of how faraway places like Chile or Burma were faring in 1917.
The 1930s famine was neither intentional, nor a large movement for reducing poverty. It was also the last famine in the USSR outside of wartime, in a country where famine was common and regular under the rule of the Tsar.
What actually caused the reduction in poverty was a rapidly growing economy with robust social programs like free healthcare and education, and a dramatic lowering of wealth inequality.
It’s not a good fix, it’s not a long-term fix, but in the short term you can claim to have lowered poverty by getting rid of a lot of mouths you’d otherwise need to feed.
The USSR had to deal with a civil war, rising up during WWI and being sabotaged by the Germans, more civil war, foreign meddling, and all while being the first successful communist revolution. Yet they still managed to raise literacy, raise health outcomes, raise average life expectancy, gender equality, science and technology, end the cycle of famines (after the first one or two they had when they were still building up), had faster growth during that period than any capitalist country (except maybe the US, which was doing imperialism at the time and the biggest hegemon), all while helping sustain other socialist countries, like Cuba, Venezuela, or North Korea.
Comparing the Nazis to the Communists is a form of Nazi Apologia, originating with Double Genocide Theory. The truth is that they are in no way comparable, read Blackshirts and Reds..
The Soviet Union existed for the workers. They doubled life expectancy, over tripled literacy rates to 99.9% from the low 30s, dramatically reduced wealth inequality, provided free and high quality healthcare and education, and democratized the economy.
Comparing Finland to the USSR is… odd. Finland funds its safety nets through Imperialism. The Soviet Union was also far larger and far more populous, and yet cared for its people while detached from much of the global economy. The Soviets did 80% of the combat against the Nazis and had half their buildings destroyed and 20 million people killed by the Nazis, while Finland saw no such comparable devastation. The Soviets largely rebuilt on their own, while Western countries had an unscathed United States propping them up. The point is that Finland didn’t accomplish any of this on their own, and moreover a lot of these concessions came to prevent revolution like was seen in Russia.
Anticommunists will tell you with a straight face that absolutely none of this is even remotely the perpetrators’ fault. In fact, it’s yours; you declared war on Finland back in ’39 (because you had nothing better to do).
I’m not comparing them.
I’m saying that doing something good does not mean that the instance that does the good is also good. The Nazis are simply the most extreme example that can be found, and therefore the most efficient way to show that the concept of “doing some good things does not automatically mean you’re a good guy” exists in general.
They doubled life expectancy, over tripled literacy rates to 99.9% from the low 30s, dramatically reduced wealth inequality, provided free and high quality healthcare and education
And the only part of the Russia that did not become Soviet did the same things in an even bigger scale. Why?
Finland funds its safety nets through Imperialism.
The eastern block got money from Moscow through Warsaw pact.
The western block got money from Marshall Aid.
There was only one country in Europe that received neither: Finland. We were considered to be in the eastern block, so we were not allowed to get Marshall Aid. And USSR’s aid required accepting that “if the country’s independence is endangered, Moscow can choose to send its forces to help”. We demanded a change to that rule so that Helsinki decides if the help is needed, not Moscow. And then Soviet Union said, “okay, no money for you people, then”. Soviet Union got reparations from Germany and Finland. Finland paid all of its reparations, fully. The last payment was made in the 1990’s. While being the only country not getting any money from foreign countries for rebuilding after the war, we also paid huge war reparations to the country that had begun the war in coöperation with Germany by attacking us in 1939. And yes, that does mean that the advances Soviet Union did after the second world war were partially financed by Finland. Which still managed to do better than Soviet Union it was helping.
Could you please tell, how precisely does all this mean that Finland was funding its safety nets through imperialism? Was the Finnish imperialism visible in the huge decrease of Finno-Ugric population, from whose colonized territories Soviet Union got almost all of its oil and minerals? Or where did the Finnish imperialism physically take place?
Finland saw no such comparable devastation
During just three nights in 1940, Soviet Union dropped 16489 bombs in Helsinki alone. How is that not devastation? And of course those were only the most intense nights of bombing, there were of course maaany more of them between 1939 and 1944.
The Soviet Union existed for the workers.
The Soviet Union said that it exists for the workers. But the workers were who got sent to the camps to die, not the ruling class.
You stated that the Nazis did some good things, but that they also did many horrible things, and used that to show that the good the USSR did was outweighed by the bad. That right there is Nazi apologia, the sheer scale of bad in the Nazis far surpassed that of the Soviets, just like the sheer good of the Soviets far outweighed that of the Nazis, to incomparable levels. Using the Nazis as an “easy example” doesn’t prove your point better, it serves as Nazi apologia.
No, Finland did not achieve better metrics at a larger scale, and further I already explained that Finland is Imperialist. It’s a landlord in country form, like the rest of Western Europe, and especially the US.
As for how Finnish Imperialism works, through various international loans and overseas production, Finland extracts superprofits off of exploitation of the Global South. To get into specifics of this takes up entire volumes, but you can start with Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism to see how the system generally works, though not specific to Finland.
20 million soviet citizens died in World War 2, and half of their buildings were destroyed. The Winter War does not compare, neither in proportion nor in raw quantity, to the sheer amount of rebuilding necessary. That’s also ignoring Finland’s history of anticommunism and cozying up to fascists.
The Workers in the Soviet Union were not sent to camps to die en mass. The "ruling class’ was the Proletariat. There was Prison labor, but overall incarceration rates, even despite having genuine Tsarists and fascists to contend with, were usually lower than the United States as a comparison. Consider reading Russian Justice.
The Soviet Union served the Working Class. Free, high quality healthcare and education, dramatically lowered wealth inequality, support for national liberation movements globally, defeated the Nazis, provided childcare, large movements in women’s rights, democratized the economy, and more.
The notion that there was a “ruling class” that exploited the workers is ludicrous, because they would have sucked at their job given that they dramatically lowered wealth inequality. They walked the walk as well as talked the talk.
On the southern Kazak steppe an aged yellow-skinned herdsman, dying, sent a last message to his son who had been village president and who was now elected delegate to the All-Union Congress: “All the years of my life were dark with toil and hunger. But I lived to see the new day. Take care of the Soviet power, my son; it is our power, our happiness.”
The russians got sick of dying for the tsar during ww1. They revolted. Six months later, ww1 “ended” (between germans and british, that is) and everybody was redeployed to russia.
Of course a country that’s being invaded is totalitarian, wtf do you expect?
The USSR didn’t “do repression and violence to speed up Communism,” they had a successful revolution and established Socialism. By all accounts it was quite successful overall, but we can learn from where they erred and adapt for the future.
The only ones who believe the Soviet Union wasn’t Socialist are generally Western Trots or liberals/Anarchists who already don’t want the form of society Marxists want, which is a government that publicly owns its large and key industries and gradually folds in the new firms that grow to that level until the entire economy is publicly owned.
No, the Mensheviks had a poor understanding of Historical Materialism and didn’t think the Peasantry could truly be allied to the Proletariat. What I am describing is what the Bolsheviks did. To a better extent the PRC also fulfills this.
I don’t think reeducation camps should be considered “concentration camps,” which brings to mind the mass killings of the Holocaust, but regardless the reeducation program is pretty much complete.
As far as can be considered a successful country, the PRC absolutely fits that. Conditions for the people are rapidly improving, the economy when adjusted for purchasing power parity is the largest in the world, it’s a world leader in renewable energy, and is overtaking the rest of the world in key metrics.
When people ask me what communist country was successful I usually say all of them until cia decided to go there and spread freedom 🇺🇸🦅
This guy has never lived in any communist country.
Yeah kinda hard to do so when a world power decides to end your country.
tariffs and threats did happen suspiciously fast after canada started offering free dental…
Well… There was this thing called Soviet Union. They decided to try to speed up the transition to communism by using repression and violence. And ended up being a totalitarian state, a direct opposite of what a communist state is supposed to be like.
Of course you can argue that Soviet Union was not communist, it was just a state that had chosen to call itself communist for propaganda reasons… But still, Soviet Union is an example of a communist country that was unsuccessful as a communist project already by itself. Then came outsiders and helped make it even worse, but bad doesn’t become good by some people wanting it to be even worse. Burma is another example. I’d say they hacked away their own leg before anyone else, such as CIA, had time to interfere in their business.
The USSR is responsible for the largest decrease in poverty in all of world history
Finland decreased its poverty between 1917 and 1991 more than Soviet Union did. In the beginning of year 1917 Finland was a part of the Russian Empire, so we were extremely poor here as well. Soviet Union could be on the second place, perhaps. But, since there is at least one country that fared better, the claim you made it evidently false. There can very well be other countries than just Finland that decreased poverty more than USSR did. I do not know for sure, though, as I’m not terribly well aware of how faraway places like Chile or Burma were faring in 1917.
Removed by mod
The 1930s famine was neither intentional, nor a large movement for reducing poverty. It was also the last famine in the USSR outside of wartime, in a country where famine was common and regular under the rule of the Tsar.
What actually caused the reduction in poverty was a rapidly growing economy with robust social programs like free healthcare and education, and a dramatic lowering of wealth inequality.
https://jewishcurrents.org/the-double-genocide-theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
How very Malthusian of you to think killing poor people lowers poverty.
1 apple, 2 people, 1/2 apple per person.
1 apple, 1 person, 1 apple per person.
It’s not a good fix, it’s not a long-term fix, but in the short term you can claim to have lowered poverty by getting rid of a lot of mouths you’d otherwise need to feed.
The USSR had to deal with a civil war, rising up during WWI and being sabotaged by the Germans, more civil war, foreign meddling, and all while being the first successful communist revolution. Yet they still managed to raise literacy, raise health outcomes, raise average life expectancy, gender equality, science and technology, end the cycle of famines (after the first one or two they had when they were still building up), had faster growth during that period than any capitalist country (except maybe the US, which was doing imperialism at the time and the biggest hegemon), all while helping sustain other socialist countries, like Cuba, Venezuela, or North Korea.
Removed by mod
Comparing the Nazis to the Communists is a form of Nazi Apologia, originating with Double Genocide Theory. The truth is that they are in no way comparable, read Blackshirts and Reds..
The Soviet Union existed for the workers. They doubled life expectancy, over tripled literacy rates to 99.9% from the low 30s, dramatically reduced wealth inequality, provided free and high quality healthcare and education, and democratized the economy.
Comparing Finland to the USSR is… odd. Finland funds its safety nets through Imperialism. The Soviet Union was also far larger and far more populous, and yet cared for its people while detached from much of the global economy. The Soviets did 80% of the combat against the Nazis and had half their buildings destroyed and 20 million people killed by the Nazis, while Finland saw no such comparable devastation. The Soviets largely rebuilt on their own, while Western countries had an unscathed United States propping them up. The point is that Finland didn’t accomplish any of this on their own, and moreover a lot of these concessions came to prevent revolution like was seen in Russia.
I recommend reading Blackshirts and Reds.
You forgot to mention that the Finnish ruling class tolerated Fascist propaganda, tolerated antisemitic propaganda, was happy to market nickel to the Third Reich, interned 24,000 ethnic Russians in concentration camps, let 4,200 of them die, collaborated with the Empire of Japan, allowed the Axis to use its military sites even before redeclaring war on the USSR, deported more than 2.8k POWs (including many Jews) to the Third Reich, let some of its men massacre Jews, sought a Greater Finland, and has cemeteries for Axis soldiers.
Anticommunists will tell you with a straight face that absolutely none of this is even remotely the perpetrators’ fault. In fact, it’s yours; you declared war on Finland back in ’39 (because you had nothing better to do).
I’m not comparing them. I’m saying that doing something good does not mean that the instance that does the good is also good. The Nazis are simply the most extreme example that can be found, and therefore the most efficient way to show that the concept of “doing some good things does not automatically mean you’re a good guy” exists in general.
And the only part of the Russia that did not become Soviet did the same things in an even bigger scale. Why?
The eastern block got money from Moscow through Warsaw pact. The western block got money from Marshall Aid. There was only one country in Europe that received neither: Finland. We were considered to be in the eastern block, so we were not allowed to get Marshall Aid. And USSR’s aid required accepting that “if the country’s independence is endangered, Moscow can choose to send its forces to help”. We demanded a change to that rule so that Helsinki decides if the help is needed, not Moscow. And then Soviet Union said, “okay, no money for you people, then”. Soviet Union got reparations from Germany and Finland. Finland paid all of its reparations, fully. The last payment was made in the 1990’s. While being the only country not getting any money from foreign countries for rebuilding after the war, we also paid huge war reparations to the country that had begun the war in coöperation with Germany by attacking us in 1939. And yes, that does mean that the advances Soviet Union did after the second world war were partially financed by Finland. Which still managed to do better than Soviet Union it was helping. Could you please tell, how precisely does all this mean that Finland was funding its safety nets through imperialism? Was the Finnish imperialism visible in the huge decrease of Finno-Ugric population, from whose colonized territories Soviet Union got almost all of its oil and minerals? Or where did the Finnish imperialism physically take place?
During just three nights in 1940, Soviet Union dropped 16489 bombs in Helsinki alone. How is that not devastation? And of course those were only the most intense nights of bombing, there were of course maaany more of them between 1939 and 1944.
The Soviet Union said that it exists for the workers. But the workers were who got sent to the camps to die, not the ruling class.
You stated that the Nazis did some good things, but that they also did many horrible things, and used that to show that the good the USSR did was outweighed by the bad. That right there is Nazi apologia, the sheer scale of bad in the Nazis far surpassed that of the Soviets, just like the sheer good of the Soviets far outweighed that of the Nazis, to incomparable levels. Using the Nazis as an “easy example” doesn’t prove your point better, it serves as Nazi apologia.
No, Finland did not achieve better metrics at a larger scale, and further I already explained that Finland is Imperialist. It’s a landlord in country form, like the rest of Western Europe, and especially the US.
As for how Finnish Imperialism works, through various international loans and overseas production, Finland extracts superprofits off of exploitation of the Global South. To get into specifics of this takes up entire volumes, but you can start with Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism to see how the system generally works, though not specific to Finland.
20 million soviet citizens died in World War 2, and half of their buildings were destroyed. The Winter War does not compare, neither in proportion nor in raw quantity, to the sheer amount of rebuilding necessary. That’s also ignoring Finland’s history of anticommunism and cozying up to fascists.
The Workers in the Soviet Union were not sent to camps to die en mass. The "ruling class’ was the Proletariat. There was Prison labor, but overall incarceration rates, even despite having genuine Tsarists and fascists to contend with, were usually lower than the United States as a comparison. Consider reading Russian Justice.
The Soviet Union served the Working Class. Free, high quality healthcare and education, dramatically lowered wealth inequality, support for national liberation movements globally, defeated the Nazis, provided childcare, large movements in women’s rights, democratized the economy, and more.
The notion that there was a “ruling class” that exploited the workers is ludicrous, because they would have sucked at their job given that they dramatically lowered wealth inequality. They walked the walk as well as talked the talk.
Removed by mod
What no theory does to an mf
Maybe don’t brag about your ignorance publicly and keep your mouth shut about things you know nothing about?
What a rude thing to say, they are so very well versed and so very knowledgeable, they learned it in school today.
TheRe Was THiS THinG CallEd The SoviEt UnioN
The russians got sick of dying for the tsar during ww1. They revolted. Six months later, ww1 “ended” (between germans and british, that is) and everybody was redeployed to russia.
Of course a country that’s being invaded is totalitarian, wtf do you expect?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Russian_Civil_War
The USSR didn’t “do repression and violence to speed up Communism,” they had a successful revolution and established Socialism. By all accounts it was quite successful overall, but we can learn from where they erred and adapt for the future.
The only ones who believe the Soviet Union wasn’t Socialist are generally Western Trots or liberals/Anarchists who already don’t want the form of society Marxists want, which is a government that publicly owns its large and key industries and gradually folds in the new firms that grow to that level until the entire economy is publicly owned.
Have you never heard of bolševiks and menševiks? What you’re explaining is what menševiks wanted, but what happened was what bolševiks aimed for.
And that was inhumane horror.
No, the Mensheviks had a poor understanding of Historical Materialism and didn’t think the Peasantry could truly be allied to the Proletariat. What I am describing is what the Bolsheviks did. To a better extent the PRC also fulfills this.
Removed by mod
I don’t think reeducation camps should be considered “concentration camps,” which brings to mind the mass killings of the Holocaust, but regardless the reeducation program is pretty much complete.
As far as can be considered a successful country, the PRC absolutely fits that. Conditions for the people are rapidly improving, the economy when adjusted for purchasing power parity is the largest in the world, it’s a world leader in renewable energy, and is overtaking the rest of the world in key metrics.
Least smug shitlib
Removed by mod
Motherfucker what was the Vietnam War?