A brief history of the absurdities of the Soviet Union

https://laurivahtre.ee/empire-of-the-absurd/

by Maro • 12 months ago

164 376 12 months ago

whycome• 12 months ago

Recent Russian studies put the count of lost lives and unborn children as high as 170 million people.

wait, does this just mean pregnancies that didn't reach full term? Or like, a hypothetical number of kids that could have been born?

j4coh• 12 months ago

Lost lives and lost potential is how I read it.

mc32• 12 months ago

The 170MM figure is referring to all losses of life like the purges, man-made famines (Holodomor), inept ww ii strategies, as well as “unborn” children. This last one has no reference so it’s impossible to know what that means or how many people they attribute to that.

That said, the problem is a cultural one. The communists poured gas on the tendencies of the Tsars and modern Russia suffers from that legacy still. The legacy is a peasant (serf) : master way of thinking.

Culture is hard to cure and the change has to come from within. Japan had a similar problem but most of the sharp edges were dulled when they made a deal (surrender) with the Americans.

You also see this tendency to cling to bad cultural habits by some enclaves of immigrants. It can take decades of new generations to wipe some of those bad tendencies away. Some people see that as erasure of culture as a bad thing but it can also bring good.

H8crilA2• 12 months ago

I don't know who is downvoting this comment, but the comment is correct. Russia is a state, not a nation. The Kremlin, in all incarnations - the Tsars, Stalin, the Communist Party, Putin, even the Mongols that used to run it before Moscow, have always been perceived more like an alien force that has landed onto this land, and now one has to submit to it, without questions. This is a lesson that parents pass onto their children, implicitly or explicitly. It could become a nation-state in a relatively short order, though that's certainly going to be bloody. And nukes could be on the table as well - this is why the US was actually opposed to the USSR collapse, a fact that's not widely known today.

Spooky23• 12 months ago

You can play with the scope to tell the story you want. If you scope in WW2 losses as well, about 30M Soviets died. Some other number were injured or disabled. If you look at fertility rates at the time, you can project how many children would have been born, and I’m sure you could be at that number.

Additionally, the after effects of the war and Stalin persisted - the loss of men resulted in higher numbers of childless women.

I lack the information to assess whether 170M is a meaningful number, but on a relative basis, the United States and even China didn’t contend with the sheer destruction and oppression that Soviet people did, and had higher fertility rates. It’s not a “pro” or “anti” Soviet/Russian discussion - the nation’s people suffered in various ways, which had an end result.

zdragnar2• 12 months ago

The Bolsheviks were the first to get a country to legalize elective abortion in 1920. They did so as a temporary measure because so many women would have difficulty raising a child in the post-war environment.

It got to the point where hospitals were overwhelmed and they started setting up dedicated clinics.

They tried making it illegal again in the 30s but brought it back in 1955 because there was such demand.

So, presumably this 170 million number is written by someone who believes a fetus is a unique human life and the prevalence of elective abortion was so high as to be a not insignificant number of "lost lives".

jonah• 12 months ago

By what actual scientific definition is a fetus, not a unique human life? They have their own unique DNA, brain, circulatory system, fingerprints, etc, etc.

In my understanding, any definition that discounts there individuality is primarily there to depersonalize them and thus justify their killing.

justsomejew14• 12 months ago

The fact that you cannot even see how ridiculuous this piece of propaganda is, says also about your ability to reason. The great demographic drop in the Soviet Union happened after the WWII (you remember that Soviet Union defeated the nazis, right?), but even that was not "170 million people" and was due to the war started by the nazis (whatever your propaganda claims about that).

hulitu2• 12 months ago

The fact that you cannot even see how ridiculuous this piece of propaganda is, says also about your ability to reason.

TBH, i don't believe he/she does not have the ability to reason, i think that HN has become a main place for state propaganda. Almost a third of articles are either bashing of US adversaries or "exploded but success, terrahertz transistor, could, may be, etc". The next third are AI propaganda.

lycopodiopsida4• 12 months ago

was due to the war started by the nazis

Soviet ally, nonetheless! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...

hulitu2• 12 months ago

No, the CIA just counted the lost sperm.

loloquwowndueo• 12 months ago

death toll of communist terror

I don’t think this was the fault of that socioeconomic system known as “communism”. Yet the article tries to push that assumption a few times.

Hitler as the biggest criminal and murderer of the 20th century. It is hard to believe that, actually, Stalin murdered significantly more. Not only are the crimes of communism not condemned, but they are by and large not known.

Right, so it was this particular implementation of communism, epitomized by Stalin’s policies.

rwmj2• 12 months ago

Ah ha, didn't have to wait long for "we've not tried real communism yet".

dvfjsdhgfv2• 12 months ago

But if we want to be precise, he is right - in theory, it wasn't the fault of that socioeconomic system itself, and logically you can't exclude the possibility that in the future there might be a communist system without causing millions of deaths, unfortunately in practice all such systems, including the one in Russia and China, had enormous toll.

The reason for it, in my opinion, stems from the origin: in an ideal world, the whole population would agree the system is fantastic and introduce it, based on mutual respect. What actually happens is that crowds get furious and start killing and introduce a new system by violence, so it's hard to expect a nice fruit from a rotten seed.

dwb• 12 months ago

Communism is very widely defined as a classless, moneyless, stateless society. So no, it has not existed in any modern society. Criticise the Soviet Union all you like – any good Marxist should do the same – but this is a very weak put-down.

kkrs• 12 months ago

That wasn't the only issue with communism. It was so inefficient it failed to make enough food. Soviet style central planning was popular in India as well, which was a democracy. Resulting shortages and low economic growth led to what was avoidable deaths and malnutriton. Once you take price out of the picture, society stops being self-organizing and has to be told what to do. That socioeconomic system failed horribly and yet people keep trying to spin fantasies about it.

inglor_cz7• 12 months ago

Don't try this at live human beings again. I don't care about your nice theory that could theoretically work.

Just don't. I was born in such a miserable system and I certainly don't want to die in one.

One century of hell was enough.

vectorcrumb• 12 months ago

Might this be available in some ebook format somewhere?

jthnme• 12 months ago

created epub for my personal use, obviously publicly available, therefore hoping not an issue to share: https://limewire.com/d/r2ZTu#rcSoipCE3E

Herodotus383• 12 months ago

This may be covered but one absurdity that I came across was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

When I was an undergraduate working in a molecular biology lab my two mentors, Andrei and Svetlana were Russian emigrants. Andrei taught me, in the 00s, that he couldn’t do the level of molecular biology in Russia because the downstream effects decades later put them far behind in the technical and cultural knowhow. Genetics was banned.

baxtr• 12 months ago

More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents.

Scientists were executed… ok wow

Duanemclemore3• 12 months ago

There's a great episode of the podcast The Constant about Lysenkoism. Definitely worth a listen.

I can't find the link at the moment, apologies.

Duanemclemore3• 12 months ago

Ah, I guess I made up that it was The Constant... what I must have been thinking of is the episode on Lysenkoism by the legendary Melvyn Bragg on In Our Time.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00bw51j

mindslight• 12 months ago

Awareness of the concept has gained renewed importance in 2025.

cyberax• 12 months ago

Genetics was banned.

During the 1940-s. And yet it undermined the molecular biology research in the USSR. It's very easy to destroy the institutions of scientific research.

I'm sure, nothing like this can happen in the US. It's not possible that people in power will just use theological and ideological reasons to just deny sound scientific results.

IAmBroom• 11 months ago

I can only assume this is missing the "/s" tag.

agumonkey2• 12 months ago

Did they experience the rule of only studying soviet science ?

Herodotus383• 11 months ago

No they were in college in the 80s when things were more open, but Andrei’s point was that compared to a lot of other sciences, molecular biology like cloning genes was decades behind because of the past.

croes• 12 months ago

I guess the post is caused by this article

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843605

kergonath• 12 months ago

Entertaining, but not to be taken too seriously. The author himself says that it’s very subjective and not thoroughly fact-checked. Even then, the digs at the Kievan Rus’ are… well, absurd. Also, I don’t know of any European country without its share of demented and paranoid rulers. But England is not Henry VIII and Germany is not Hitler.

Also, this

But let us start with the Communist Manifesto which is the holiest tome of communist ideology and can be called the red gospel.

is a pearl of unintended absurd humour. In this case, when someone applies their beliefs and frame of mind to a foreign object without actually understanding it.

In the end I agree with the author that all life if absurd, it’s just a matter of point of view.

keiferski3• 12 months ago

I look forward to the day when the capitalist and communist eras of the 19th-21st century are analyzed coldly, in the way we look at mercantilism or medieval market towns today.

Because it really seems like both are increasingly inadequate systems for handling modernity, and the obsession with defining one as intrinsically evil and the other the obvious superior option (I’ll let you choose which is which) is such a flattening, unhelpful approach.

Personally, having moved from capitalist America to post-communist Poland, a few things seem true to me:

…the communist era in Poland was a disaster and the country today is unquestionably better off as a modified capitalist one;

…contemporary American culture really seems to be struggling under an unquestioned capitalist ethic;

…the conflict seems artificially egged on from think tanks, corporations, academics, and maybe even the simple alliteration of the letter c (i.e., you don’t hear nearly as much about Capitalism vs. Socialism, even though historically that’s a more accurate label of what governments actually were.)

…and that neither capitalism or communism has ever really been implemented in a pure sense.

Which is all a long way of saying that Mark Fisher’s quote seems more true every day, not as a pessimistic statement but just one describing a lack of imagination and the inability to transcend the debate:

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

nradov7• 12 months ago

I can imagine a lot. In every possible scenario, the end of capitalism means disaster for the entire human race.

keiferski3• 12 months ago

This is exactly the kind of low effort, no imagination response that I was referring to. No discussion of alternatives, no acknowledgement that maybe there are some issues with the current capitalist system, etc.

Just apocalyptic language, with no openness to the idea that yeah, communism was a terrible system, but maybe that doesn’t automatically imply that contemporary capitalism is inherently the best system.

nilamo2• 12 months ago

That seems awfully defeatist and with a very negative view of the human spirit.

I can imagine the end of Capitalism, and it looks like Star Trek.

simlevesque5• 12 months ago

Can you prove that capitalism isn't gonna end the entire human race ?

I'm sure you can imagine anything but that's not really helpful.

saubeidl6• 12 months ago

This is what ideological indoctrination looks like - it's worse than even amongst the CCP cadres.

littlestymaar• 12 months ago

Because it really seems like both are increasingly inadequate systems for handling modernity, and the obsession with defining one as intrinsically evil and the other the obvious superior option (I’ll let you choose which is which) is such a flattening, unhelpful approach

As the post-soviet Russian joke went:

everything the communists said about communism was false, everything they said about capitalism was true.

armchairhacker• 12 months ago

IMO the problem is extremes. The best system is capitalism with some “socialist” government regulation, services, and welfare. How much and what specific policies are unknown.

titzer5• 12 months ago

The best system

The best system for growth. It's important to point out that Capitalism won because it grew faster. But nothing can grow forever--certainly not exponentially--so we're now finding out how poorly late stage Capitalism copes with slowing growth and population. Oh, and that little looming thing about environmental consequences.

jack_h• 12 months ago

I tend to be in the camp that believes capitalism will generally produce better results than socialism but it will not produce anything close to a utopia. However, I don't believe capitalism is a stable economic system within a democratic society. It will inevitably lead to some results that are repugnant to the electorate who will advocate for political action to prevent such outcomes from occurring in the future. This will lead to stronger government authority and increasing market manipulation which will (potentially) prevent those outcomes but simultaneously it can produce different negative outcomes[1]. In the end it seems as though despite good intentions we end up with a system that nobody understands, nobody is satisfied with, and nobody can fix. I suppose it's like software engineering in a way, we want perfection but instead we are constrained by trade-offs and we never reach a state that everyone is happy with.

[1] A classic example is rent control which tends to lead to shortages.

shakow5• 12 months ago

having moved from capitalist America to post-communist Poland

Poland is definitely a very nice place to live right now, and improvements since the fall of the communist government is undeniable.

However, please note that not all Polish growth is just due to capitalism knocking to the door – the country is the recipient of a huge amount of EU funds[0]. To illustrate it, France, the 2nd largest net contributor to the EU budget, gives barely more than Poland receives, even though the population is a bit half as big.

Is it a bad thing? Not necessarily. But it is definitely not an illustration of a post-communist country standing by its own self.

[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/18794/net-contributors-to-eu-...

voytec• 12 months ago

the country is the recipient of a huge amount of EU funds

What shaped Poland into something acceptable as a NATO member was USAID - the program Musk and Big Balls axed.

USAID allowed Poland to join NATO and later the EU. I've snatched the 188-pages long PDF[0] (English/Polish) before it was publicly erased.

[0] https://sysartist.com/usaid-and-the-polish-decade.pdf

rasz• 12 months ago

West owed this to Poland after selling it to ussr in Yalta. West Germany got Marshall plan, we got 35 years of russian occupation.

jiggawatts• 12 months ago

A simple model is that most countries internally are made up of many "competing communist orgs". Each large company is internally a communist dictatorship. Employees don't choose their bosses, and have no voting power whatsoever in the general case. Employees share the means of production, and the fruits of their labour is redistributed largely evenly, even if some employees are 10x or 100x as productive as others. It's only entire companies that compete in the capitalist free market sense.

This is... fine. Capitalism encourages innovation and efficiency, while Communism provides individual safety and reduces wealth inequality. Neither works in pure form, so just about every country combines the two.

17186274407• 12 months ago

Employees can choose their boss, that's called a work contract. And in my country workers do have voting powers on the company, but that is rejected by the US, because they dislike unions.

Communism has no wealth inequality, because it's forbidden to have any wealth at all. Maybe you actually think of social democracy?

jopsen• 11 months ago

I think this book makes a solid argument that communism is evil.

And moreover that comparing the two is irrational and causes false equivalences.

I think the book makes a solid argument that Communism, Marxism or socialism whatever you call it is absurd. And invariably leads to absurd outcomes.

Granted I think it was pretty enlightening to point out that our free western economies are not without planning. We have subsidies, tax policies, social programs, etc. But that doesn't mean we're trying to do away money or private ownership.

matheusmoreira10• 12 months ago

While nazism and its crimes were condemned after World War II [...] this has not happened with communism.

This resonates quite deeply. In my country nazis go straight to jail but communists walk our soil completely unpunished. They have half a dozen political parties, are well coordinated, are popular and are constantly elected by the population when they promise them heaven on earth. This is especially ironic since nazism is short for national socialism.

Communism is alive and well in Latin America. Brazilian president Lula declared to CNN his intention to install communism in my country not even a week ago. It has been his intention for over 40 years. He and his party has been in power for over 20 years. Yet people act as though it was fake news.

simlevesque5• 12 months ago

It's not fake news it's good news.

cosmicgadget9• 12 months ago

A specific, racist form of fascism can't really be compared to an economic ideology.

matheusmoreira10• 12 months ago

It absolutely can. Nazis, like socialists, centralized control of the economy in the state. It's just that they did it in order to further the goals of the so called Aryan nation as a whole. That's why it's called national socialism.

pavel_lishin9• 12 months ago

On the other hand, life was secure. There were no bank loans, therefore there were no bank fees or percents. There was no real worry over one’s job or workplace; one was available for everyone. Wages were low, but fear of losing one’s job was almost nonexistent. A person pretended to work; the state pretended to pay him. Living accommodations were crowded and faint hope existed to find a better apartment, but all had a roof over their heads.There had to be, since homelessness was forbidden by law.
Nowadays, there exist people who yearn for that mollusk-like life.

This isn't an inaccurate description, and yes, it's not exactly a utopian state to find yourself in.

But I'm not going to chuckle at the hypothetical people we're supposed to pity for wanting this; I bet there are quite a few people in the United States alone who would love to have this life, who would love to have a guaranteed job, a guaranteed roof over their heads, and the heads of their children.

username3322114• 12 months ago

The really funny part is that this is probably fairly easy to achieve in the United States. The only part of the Soviet system you'd need to implement is the migration and residency control regime.

Currently people all over the world are free to move to New York, which makes the city unaffordable. If you forbade anyone not born within it from moving there, Manhattan would be fairly affordable and homelessness would be much reduced.

All you need to do is to free yourself from that bourgeois delusion that a man from Mexico (or worse, West Virginia) has any right to live in that city.

vintagedave2• 12 months ago

The only part of the Soviet system you'd need to implement is the migration and residency control regime.

Ouch: straight to being against others.

No, the part you'd need to implement to get socialised housing is socialised housing. Similarly, there are modern equivalents to guaranteed jobs. Communism believed everyone had to work: today we have different ideas of purpose than Marx had, plus are more aware of those who cannot work, or the value of non-work social contributions, and tech folks like us might believe in or hope for an upcoming post-scarcity society, with a transition period of UBI.

I expect you want to control migration and residency in order to avoid freeloaders. Freeloaders are remarkably rare, most people have self-respect and enjoy being productive, and interestingly systems that exterminate freeloaders entirely tend to be less efficient.[1] Plus, if you have a wonderful system, the best way to handle other people wanting it is to help it grow, not limit it to yourself. A better policy would be one encouraging its growth elsewhere in other countries where all those folk who are coming to your shores are coming from. The US has a long (mixed) history of that approach re democracy.

[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

sedawkgrep• 12 months ago

I bet there are quite a few people in the United States alone who would love to have this life, who would love to have a guaranteed job, a guaranteed roof over their heads, and the heads of their children.

I'd almost venture to say the majority of people, and definitely those who suffer from a disability of some sort; especially mental health, where one may not mentally function well enough from one day to the next to be able to reliably hold a job.

spwa43• 12 months ago

At the cost that the Soviet union imposed? I doubt there's even 100.

There is nothing stopping people from living like communists in the US. There have been many communist communes here and in other countries, like famously Israel and Columbia. All but single digits have been abandoned or sold by their inhabitants.

So we've got plenty of historical evidence whether people would choose to have this life. All but a few dozen, out of hundreds of million, choose against it. Including all socialists, everyone in those demonstrations, ... demonstrating extremely clearly:

without constant terror, socialism cannot exist.

H8crilA2• 12 months ago

The problem is you'll probably live on something like $300/month, and the $ won't even be exchangeable internationally - think like food stamps but for everything. Or less. Unless you have connections in the nomenklatura, i.e. those who decide who gets which positions. University admission is handled by a similar circle.

Let me quote the text:

An anecdote on this very topic became popular in the later Soviet Union. A young communist proclaimed victoriously: “We have founded a society where there are no rich people!” To which an old social democrat shook his head and muttered, “Actually our intention was to found a society were there were no poor people.”

inglor_cz7• 12 months ago

You underestimate the inability of the Soviet regime to provide its own people with basic consumer goods.

You would have a job and some money, but your money would buy nothing, because goods were scarce. Even finding good shoes would be a challenge and you would need to cultivate relationships with warehouse clerks etc. to get some access to stuff before it was stealthily distributed by underground channels to relatives, friends etc.

Modern Americans would go absolutely ballistic if they came to a shop with empty shelves and a bored arrogant assistant who would jeer at their very question "I want to buy X".

pointlessone• 12 months ago

The description is not too dissimilar from a badly photoshopped motel ad. Yes, it nominally resembles reality but just barely and doesn’t tell you about all the nasty things that come with the tiny pool.

Yes, everyone had a job. It was illegal not to have one. Jobs were basically assigned by the state. Most “normal” people could choose among a few OK-ish options. But if you got a hair out of line or crossed wrong people you could get assigned shoveling coal in a small boiler room or building railroads in Siberia. And if you didn’t want that job you became a criminal and went to some mine or quarry working double shifts for gruel in Gulag.

Yes, everyone had a roof over their head. But that doesn’t mean space, comfort, or even privacy. It wasn’t uncommon to have no more than a bed and a small cabinet or chest. Most of the living spaces and urban areas were extremely depressing. It’s all grey boxes and muddy trails. The best you could hope for in most places is some trees and bushes adding a bit of green in the summer.

There was very little people could do to change any of that. You couldn’t move elsewhere just because you wanted. People in cities with better professions could move if they managed to know the right people and could get a job elsewhere. People in villages were basically pinned to their colhozes. Their only option to see other places were a holiday trip if the managed to save up a little or to go into military and be stationed wherever.

This lack of agency resulted in mass depression and alcoholism.

Where do you think the grim and drunk russian stereotype comes from? It’s just the soviet reality.

kachurovskiy• 12 months ago

Just so that you understand, what that inevitably brings is alcoholism, domestic violence and other depressive deformities. My grandpa died from daily drinking with his factory pals and my grand-grandma has axe damage on her wooden furniture and it was normal.

cosmicgadget9• 12 months ago

We have more options for hobbies these days.

pavel_lishin9• 12 months ago

I'm sorry about your family history, but I have American friends who've grown up here for generations with identical family histories - alcoholism, domestic violence, depressive deformities and all.

LtWorf17• 12 months ago

And farmers under the tzar had it better in your opinion?

saubeidl6• 12 months ago

The descriptor "mollusk-like" for people that have different political or social preferences from the author is really dehumanizing and not okay.

logical_proof• 12 months ago

I think you missed the metaphors target. He was describing the lifestyle of just subsisting. Like a mollusk. This was objectively the majority of experiences under the Soviet system, not a comment on anyone’s political views.

pavel_lishin9• 12 months ago

really dehumanizing

Yes. That was the author's point.

SoftTalker3• 12 months ago

Not if that guarantee came with some miserable factory job that was mandatory.

cosmicgadget9• 12 months ago

Most parents would.

gambiting4• 12 months ago

My understanding is that most of these jobs you could just slack off at and nothing would happen. They couldn't really fire you anyway.

matheusmoreira10• 12 months ago

But I'm not going to chuckle at the hypothetical people we're supposed to pity for wanting this

We should.

What communists really want is to have their every need and desire magically provided for, as if they were fundamental rights. In other words, what they truly want is called post-scarcity: the absence of an economy.

Communism and socialism are economic models. There exists scarcity of goods and resources and therefore they must be economized. There's a system that chooses who gets access to said scarce resources.

Socialism is sold to people as though it was post-scarcity. People think they'd be living comfortable "secure" lives where everything is guaranteed and provided for. Ah yes, the fabled memetic fully automated luxury space communism.

People who buy into this will probably end up doing forced hard labor in a field somewhere should communists actually come to power. They will not get to do what they want, they will work wherever the state puts them to work under penalty of death by firing squad. The state has no choice, anything else means mass starvation and millions of deaths.

Pity is far too lenient a reaction towards such reality distorting naïveté. If left unchecked, they will win elections and actually install socialism in your country.

We have a better chance of achieving post scarcity by collapsing capitalism with relentless automation.

only-one1701• 12 months ago

Idk the Nordics seem to be doing ok

ponector10• 12 months ago

> This isn't an inaccurate description,

That is quite inaccurate. Or partially accurate. Accurate for white russian people.

For others it was quite easy to loose a job and get a forced psychiatric treatment or gulag trip (depends on the year).

riehwvfbk8• 12 months ago

The matters of race occupy a much smaller percentage of the brains of people outside of the USA. I say this completely without malice. It simply means that the trauma of segregation is still too raw in American society.

The rest of your statement doesn't make any sense. One went to a gulag for opposing the Soviet government, not for having a particular ethnicity. Stalin was ethnically Georgian. Many prominent members of the politburo were Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or Jews. In the later Soviet Union there were many politicians from the "ethnic" republics who had high-powered careers.

In fact, look at the list of Russian politicians who are currently under international sanctions and tell me with a straight face that they are all white and Russian. Well, they are Russian of course, but not in the way you meant.

throwaway306021• 12 months ago

I assume by "white Russian" you really mean someone of Russian ethnicity and not Belarus - which is what that phrase means to a Russian speaker - but you might want to clarify.

justsomejew14• 12 months ago

I dont know how your life is, but my own impression is that life of many americans is worse than the life which was in the Soviet Union at least until the 80s (after Stalin). Maybe not in the sense of the capacity to buy junkfood and other junk, but as to sense of living and human relations. "Mollusk" sounds as the usual american antirussian propaganda.

throwaway306021• 12 months ago

Unless you are limiting your comparison to just the homeless in America, this is just not true. Most people don't know much about life in the Soviet Union in the first place, but even what people do know is typically limited only to life in Moscow and Leningrad. Dismissing the conditions as "capacity to buy junkfood" is uncalled for.

mensetmanusman3• 12 months ago

Have to compare extremes in that case. Probably everyone in the gulag had a worse life than every American complaining.

search_facility• 12 months ago

They definitely does not aware of soviet reality that “roof over head” usually is not in the place where human want to live, same with job. if student after university decided (not by student, by state distributing workforce) to go work at city on polar circle - that means that student will go live and work here, without sunlight for the rest of his life! not joking, personal story with soviet collapse as happy ending (moved to normal place after that)

vntok• 11 months ago

Relevant nickname then? ;)

martindbp2• 12 months ago

I think that lifestyle is easily achieved by basically anyone, you don't need much money to live that kind of life. The problem is that life is only enjoyable if everyone lives the same life. You could save a ton of money and not have to work much if you lived a 70s lifestyle. Many even long for that lifestyle, but it only works if everyone lives it. If you're the only one living in the 70s and everyone else lives in the 2020s, most people would not be happy. Somehow, enduring things is much easier as a group. I remember talking to a Chinese person who said for most of their youth they spent their days studying until 11pm with breaks for lunch and dinner. That would be hell for most western kids, but apparently they didn't suffer too much because they were studying together with their friends who all had to endure the same schedule.

tliltocatl• 12 months ago

This is averaging across ~40 years of history (none of this applied until mid-50s and certainly not before WWII) and comparing "middle class" with low income. The "guaranteed, if low-paying, job and roof over head" was the norm, but it certainly didn't apply to everyone, the modern Russian word for a homeless person is of soviet origin. I. e. a criminal convict would lose their home automatically.

nikanj2• 12 months ago

Nazi Germany never put up fences to stop their people from leaving. The Soviet Union did. That’s my metric for the standard of living in them

seiferteric2• 12 months ago

Except for the ones around the concentration camps.

chihuahua2• 12 months ago

I'm virulently opposed to communism and the Soviet Union, as well as Nazism, and it is tempting to say that the Soviet Union was worse than Nazi Germany.

In some ways that's true if you look at the number of their own citizens that were killed by Stalin vs Hitler. On the other hand, Stalin had a longer period of time for his mass murder than Hitler did. But Hitler caused the almost complete destruction of Germany with the war he started.

In terms of living conditions, you are probably correct; although again, Hitler's starting point in terms of economy, civilization, and living conditions was much better than Stalin's, and we didn't see Nazism play out over decades.

Nazi Germany's soldiers on the advance engaged in systematic killing and regarded most of the population of the conquered territories as vermin; Soviet soldiers merely raped most of the women and did not engage in systematic killing campaigns, with some exceptions (e.g. Katyn massacre)

I'd say it's difficult to say which is more deplorable: Hitler killing millions just because of their ancestry, or Stalin killing millions in the Gulag because of paranoia and because it was a convenient source of labor.

If we're just looking at the success of the economic systems, leaving aside the mass murder and the devastating war, then what you're saying is correct.

throwaway306021• 12 months ago

IMO, when thinking about this question it's useful to look at the full scope of their objectives. We don't know much about what else Stalin planned, but given the time he had it probably would not fundamentally change the order of magnitude. On the other hand, we do know some of what the Nazis planned to do if they had won, and it was on a scale far beyond even the millions they did murder.

LtWorf17• 12 months ago

Millions did not die in gulags. Gulags were not death camps and while deaths did happen, it was not the goal and if you go and check the numbers, USRR's numbers are very very different than nazi death camps.

justsomejew14• 12 months ago

"raped most of the women.."

Told that way, this is libel, one which the german revanchism very fond of. Not that people like you would care.

clausecker• 12 months ago

Not entirely true. Jews willing to leave had to pay an exit tax so high that it basically meant leaving all your wealth behind. Later, they weren't permitted to emigrate at all.

LtWorf17• 12 months ago

So you're saying people in death camps could have just walked away but didn't because being in a death camp in germany was better than the alternative?

I find that really hard to believe. Do you have a source?

nikanj2• 11 months ago

Every country has some version of a prison system. That does not equal the general population being hold hostage the way the soviet union did

kibwen• 12 months ago

While nazism and its crimes were condemned after World War II, making the return of this form of totalitarianism impossible

Even written in 2021 rather than today, it's difficult to take the OP seriously after this. Both Hitler's nazism and Stalin's communism are manifestations of the deeper authoritarian sympathies that infect the human psyche and to which the modern world is quickly succumbing.

sublimefire2• 12 months ago

deeper authoritarian sympathies

It is not that but systematic destruction of any institution standing in the way. Once that is done it is easier to wield power and suppress people to do stuff. Just look at Russia today, where dissent is extremely risky to you and people around you, where shitnews television is pumping people with weird narratives, etc. Similarly T.Snyder argues that a precursor to the atrocities (not the war per se) in WWII were the destruction of the institutions.

justsomejew14• 12 months ago

Communism was quite different from nazism, whatever they tell and told you in the west. You just did not live there, and some people rewrote the history for you. Equating communism and nazism is one of the most abominable aspects of western propaganda

nec4b15• 12 months ago

They are both the same. One wants one true race society and the the other one true class society. The only way tho achieve one or the other state is by eliminating those who don't conform (Holocaust and Holodomor). It's despicable some pretend one is better then the other.

xyzelement• 12 months ago

I was about 10 when the USSR has collapsed and have lived in the use for over 30 years yet I still see in my parents and even myself the remnants of dehumanizing ridiculousness that existed there. Eg my dad is instinctively terrified of dealing with anyone from the government even like the mailman because that person can wield their position against you even though that's not the case here at all.

Or for example I had to point out to my dad that his neighbor open carries. Like my dad is intellectually aware of the 2nd amendment but it didn't fit in his brain that people could actually exercise a freedom so his eyes were literally blind to it (obviously I drove him to the gun shop that evening)

pavel_lishin9• 12 months ago

(obviously I drove him to the gun shop that evening)

Why would that be obvious?

simlevesque5• 12 months ago

Yeah to non-americans this sentence sounds so weird.

divan2• 12 months ago

Important to understand that these are "absurdities" only when viewed from the angle of market economy and democratic society. For people living in Soviet Union this was just a "state of the world".

Communist values (or lack of values) shaped the political and social systems in which people were born and raised.

First we shape systems, then systems shape us.

bevr1337• 12 months ago

This was written and edited by folks who lived in the USSR, so we know that these people held complexity. More than "just..."

Just is a great word. It alerts the author and reader that there's little substance in the claim. Just trust me!

AnimalMuppet• 12 months ago

People were shaped by the rules they lived under. That doesn't make the rules any less insane.

divan2• 12 months ago

Yes. What I was trying to say that people who live within those rules (and keep propagating/making them!) can't just live in the constant congitive dissonance state. They rationalize this state of the world, they tell stories (to themselves and to each other) to make sense of these rules, so it doesn't feel insane.

justsomejew14• 12 months ago

Well, the very real absurdities and nightmare of your "way of life", you don't see them as well. What happens now in Gaza? Do you "see" it?

throwaway306021• 12 months ago

Many were aware of the absurdities. The issue is that when one is inundated with absurdities around them, identifying what is true is impossible.

hagendaasalpine• 12 months ago

historians have described the USSR as an 'affirmitive action empire', a contradictory one

jostylr• 12 months ago

This might be a good article for such a perspective: https://reason.com/2021/11/01/yes-it-was-an-evil-empire/

csours• 12 months ago

I feel like some people are trying for the sequel right now.

Moral relativism is like digging a latrine. Almost nobody wants to do it for somebody else, it's a chore to do it for one's self, but pretty much everyone appreciates when it's already done for them.

Anyway, I feel like 'liberalism' is under broad attack by both conservatives and progressives, largely because it is very unsatisfying right now.

Speaking for myself, liberalism is a way to understand the world. Liberalism in this sense does not especially imply progressivism or conservatism, and can be practiced by anyone. To re-phrase the Robustness Principle: "be opinionated in what you do, be open minded in what you accept from others".

I feel like the stronger you push your opinions into your understanding of the world, the harder it gets to actually understand what is going on in the world. As Colbert said: "reality has a well-known liberal bias". This statement makes more sense if run in reverse: "An open-minded understanding of the world is more likely to be durably and broadly true than a strongly opinionated understanding".

Unfortunately, it has become VERY difficult to talk about what is going on in the world right now, largely because a lot of disparate groups are pushing their opinions into their understanding very very hard. There are many people who currently disagree with their own in-group, but are restricted in what they can say because of social loyalty constraints. If you can't be the first person to speak up, consider being the second.

The absolute strongest superpower that humans have is the the ability to tell another story. Don't get stuck in the first satisfying story you hear.

----

If you are satisfied with blame, try examining the situation closer. If you are satisfied that a whole political party is evil, try examining the situation closer.

Here are some questions:

What is the person or organization doing

    socially
    economically
    emotionally
    political as in policy objectives
    political as in electoral strategy
    political as in internal power structure - is the internal power structure sound or fragmented?

When a person or organization says something, is it

    complete
    accurate
    satisfying (to anyone? to someone? to me?)

Sometimes, it is a trap to fight the obvious fight. Perhaps the other side is fine with losing the obvious fight for some reason.

People don't believe crazy things because of correct facts, they believe them because of satisfying stories.

---

May I humbly ask 2 things of you:

1. Please don't assume I'm saying or implying something beyond what I've said here. You may feel free to go beyond what I've said, just don't put it on me.

2. Please don't join a death cult. You can look up the characteristics of a high control group; a death cult is all that plus their definition of morality narrows over time, excluding more and more people. Death cults ramp up anger over time. It's very easy to fall into one right now, and they are not exclusive to either side of the political spectrum. It's better to endure a little moral dissatisfaction than to join a high control group.

CommenterPerson• 12 months ago

Thank you. When the head of the labor stats department is fired for reporting labor stats (she has a PhD), when the head of the public health agency is a vaccine skeptic lawyer .. I know where we in the US are headed.

binary132• 12 months ago

I’m the farthest thing imaginable from a Bolshevik sympathizer but I often wonder whether big-C Communism could have survived and how it would have fared if the United States hadn’t engaged in sustained economic warfare against it. I imagine it might look something a bit like Chinese Communism does today, although perhaps those days came and went in the later eras of the Party system.

nradov7• 12 months ago

What economic warfare? Even after WWII the USA literally sold food to the USSR. Without that their food shortages would have been even worse.

unnamed76ri2• 12 months ago

Chinese communism survives because the US spends an insane amount of money on their goods each year. It would have collapsed by now if not for the US demand for stuff.

flyinghamster• 12 months ago

People who got too serious about communism tended to get eliminated by Stalin, and then the people in charge of the elimination (Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria) were in turn eliminated in later purges.

sublimefire2• 12 months ago

The premise of its “success” was based on half the population working for free in the camps for the other half. Many major projects were executed with little thought for the slaves/workers that perished, all for the goals of socialism. Then oligarchy followed, without the way to increase worker productivity. The only well funded programmes were in the defence sector which bankrupted the country eventually

qcnguy3• 12 months ago

Communism depended on the west and was sustained by it. Obviously they exported raw materials to purchase the many things they failed to produce themselves including food. But also particularly, the Soviets had no way to set prices in their centrally planned economy that actually worked, so they kept the show on the road by copying prices from western free market economies.

This is one reason the USSR was always lagging behind western economies despite being scientifically advanced. They had to wait for the west to develop products and do price discovery, because GOSPLAN didn't have any way to price things properly themselves.

gampleman• 12 months ago

Reminds me a bit of the “Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel.

wormius• 12 months ago

1. Black Book of Communism

2. "Unborn"

Yeah, no.

I'm not saying USSR was a panacea or that Stalin did nothing wrong (Tankies are the fucking worst. I hung out on /r/communism for a while, and, as the kids used to say "gross").

I take writing like the OP with a HUGE grain of salt.

There are plenty of crimes and problems with what happened in the Soviet Union. Some of these were intentional by the leadership both before, during, and after Stalin. Some of these were self-owns (War Communism much?) some of these were forced errors (when doing battle one makes tough choices, and this includes in ideological/economic/actual war). Some of these were straight up evil policies (gulags, great purges, Katyn, etc...)

If someone can do real analysis I'm down, but once you start quoting Black Book of Communism, I know you're coming with an agenda and it's hard for me to take you in good faith. Especially if you're counting "The Unborn" - go on, just call the US a "Nazi Nation with the unborn holocaust" (I grew up in that shit, so saw the propaganda first hand).

nec4b15• 12 months ago

>1. Black Book of Communism

Are you contending existence of mass murders under almost any communist regime? What agenda are you talking about? You are making it sound communism is a noble idea, which someone is trying to discredit undeservingly.

>2. "Unborn" It was about an estimation of how much more people would Soviet Union have in time if it hadn't murdered so many of its citizens. Imagine children of children of missing 20 million people.

davejagoda• 12 months ago

In their subconscious hopes that a societal formula is as simple and as universal as the famous E=mc², people are prepared to believe nonsense if it only sounds good.

This is an interesting insight on human nature.

robotnikman• 12 months ago

Somewhat related, one of my favorite 'absurdities' to come from the USSR was the hydraulic computer https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/12/vladimir-lukyanovs-wat...

inglor_cz7• 12 months ago

One thing that only the "survivors" realize is just how materialistic the Soviet Bloc societies were.

And I don't mean philosophically materialistic, like "there is no soul". That too, but I mainly mean that in the shortage of everything (and there usually was a shortage of everything) people would become fixated on owning relatively banal objects.

Girls would prostitute themselves for a nice pair of Western jeans, people would snitch and steal, break the law, run illegal smuggling rings while bribing the police, take bribes themselves etc., over things such as stockings, tires or calculators.

I was not able to persuade one young American that not paying a fat bribe to a doctor could have fatal consequences back then. "But in socialism, there must be a common free healthcare for everybody!" - Yeah, lad, on paper. Paper tolerates everything. The one thing that was never in shortage were slogans, propaganda, red flags and red stars.

m4rtink11• 12 months ago

Giving "presents" to doctors is still very much ingrained in the older generation up to this day. :P

inglor_cz7• 12 months ago

True. I visited a doctor friend in a fairly good institution (IKEM) and he showed me a comode. When he opened it, it was full of alcohol. Hard liquor and wine.

He said: "This is what the patients brought us last week. How are we supposed not to become alcoholics?"

He was seriously worried, btw. No light joking. In every work collective, healthcare included, there are some people prone to alcoholism and this is just a dangerous temptation to them.

decimalenough• 12 months ago

The book tells a story of how bananas were nearly unobtainable and thus became an almost totemic status symbol.

An Estonian actress pilfers a banana from a high-level Party function, risking grave consequences, just so her daughter could taste one at least once in her life. Alas, the daughter is too young to appreciate this and declares that it tastes like "poopoo".

sexyman48• 12 months ago

Wtf is it with Russians (or their Estonian clients) needing 500 pages before getting to the point?

blks• 12 months ago

What a load of politicised rubbish.

A brief history of the absurdities of the Soviet Union

Related Stories