USSR 100th Birthday

Not read the article as NYT is pay-walled but you could accuse Britain, and many others with an "Empire", of doing similar to that...

but you could accuse Britain, and many others with an “Empire”, of doing similar to that…

You could try…

@vlad_the_impaler
Show me a paywall and I'll show you a 12 foot ladder...

but you could accuse Britain, and many others with an “Empire”, of doing similar to that…

What's your point? The USSR was good because other empires did terrible things?

The point is ALL empires did terrible things at some stage of their existence, to at least some sub-set of their subjects...
(But I'm not an apologist for USSR either!)

You could try…

I'll give it a go.

31 famines in 120 years of British Raj. The last one the Bengal Famine, which Great Britain's "greatest" Prime Minister Winston Churchill was responsible for, killed 3 million people in 1943.

There has not been one single major famine in India since it gained its independence from Great Britain.

From the 1st century AD to the start of British colonisation in India in the 17th century, India’s GDP was between about 25 and 35% of the world’s total GDP, which dropped to 2% by Independence of India in 1947.

Before the arrival of the British, India, united by the Mughal Empire, had the largest economy in the world and was the global manufacturing powerhouse.

Britain systemically deindustrialised India leaving it in economic ruins and racked by reoccurring famines.

And that's just one country out of the whole of the British Empire. They called it the Jewel in the Crown because Great Britain valued it so highly.

Edit: Here's a bit of reading if the whole idea of Great Britain being responsible for the deaths of millions is new to you:

https://indiafacts.org/remembering-forgotten-holocaust-india/

31 famines in 120 years of British Raj

How is that related to the USSR being 100 years old?

It doesn't.

It relates to the challenge offered by CountZero. Admittedly is wasn't aimed at me but I took it anyway.

It doesn’t.

Exactly. So why post it in a thread about the USSR?

I thought I just explained.

I wouldn't have posted it if the challenge hadn't been made.

Some things being a hundred years old aren't worth celebrating, only deploring.

Some things being a hundred years old aren’t worth celebrating, only deploring.

Yep. The formation of the USSR was one of the most momentous events of the 20th century, along with its collapse and the rise of the Nazis. The thing with the USSR is that, at the time, it held huge promise as liberating oppressed people from a terrible imperial regime. Stalin's reign of terror quickly put an end to that among westerners who were honest enough to recognize Stalin for what he was, but 100 years ago, it was still possible to be optimistic about the future of Russia.

I have the feeling that most people today don't appreciate how profoundly the USSR shaped the modern world and how significant the events of 100 years ago were.

I have the feeling that most people today don’t appreciate how profoundly the USSR shaped the modern world and how significant the events of 100 years ago were.

You might be right about the general population but, I'd hazard a guess, most of the active posters in the chat section of STW are old duffers like me who remember Reagan poking the bear (indeed, it wouldn't surprise me if there's a couple of old codgers here who remember the Cuba crisis!)

I’d hazard a guess, most of the active posters in the chat section of STW are old duffers like me who remember Reagan poking the bear

I well remember the Reagan years but it's easy to forget how dangerous things were during the Cold War, and what a brutal tyranny the USSR was. Putin is a very nasty piece of work, but the USSR was much scarier than Putin's Russia.

One of the ironies to me is that both the left-wingers who see Reagan as the cause of the world's woes and the right-wingers who worship him like a god miss that he was to some degree irrelevant. He was to a large degree lucky to be in the right place at the right time. The USSR was already in dire shape and would have collapsed at some point anyway. Maybe Reagan hastened it a bit, he was more hawkish than the Democrat alternatives, but that was a matter of degree and the end result would have been the same.

Putin’s attempt at resurrecting it

You are aware that the Bolsheviks seized the means of production in the name of the proletariat and that Putin and his oligarch chums then seized them from the proletariat placing them in the hands of private capital?

You literally couldn’t get a more polar opposite to Communism than Putin. 🤷‍♂️

Politically yes but Putin is a product of the unaccountable totalitarian regime that placed little value on the individual.

You literally couldn’t get a more polar opposite to Communism than Putin.

Look up "horseshoe theory".

Yes, the communists justified their tyranny on the grounds of collectivizing the means of production, but that was just a sham. The Soviet leadership didn't give a rats arse about the proletariat, they were just out to seize as much power they could for themselves, stab their rivals in the back, and subjugate any other countries that they could.

Putin was a KGB officer when the USSR collapsed. He seems to be driven by nostalgia for the USSR and a desire to reconstitute it. The USSR collapsed because it wasn't a viable political or economic system, Putin's attempt at a do-over is failing for exactly the same reason.

In his annual state of the nation address on Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the collapse of the Soviet empire “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

Politically yes but Putin is a product of the unaccountable totalitarian regime that placed little value on the individual.

So you’re claiming now that he’s not trying to resurrect it, he’s just a victim of its conditioning?

Poor Vlad. Nasty commies.

Look up “horseshoe theory”.

I don’t need to look up anything. Stating that the Soviets didn’t care for the people or that Putin was in the KGB doesn’t mean a thing.

The fact remains that the USSR placed the means of production in the hands of the people and Putin placed them back in the hands of private capital.

So, the assertion that Putin wants to resurrect the USSR, is plainly a bit daft.

If you want to claim that he wants to reassert Russian hegemony over that hemisphere of the globe, then there might be in argument. But then you’d be drawing comparisons with any Russian leader over the last 1000 years.

And that wouldn’t serve as a sly bit of lefty bashing.

And yet another potentially interesting thread descends into bickering between the usual suspects 🙄

which Great Britain’s “greatest” Prime Minister Winston Churchill was responsible for

I'm no fan of Winnie, and he was pretty much an avowed racist especially when it came to the Indian subcontinent, but to say that he was "responsible" for the Bengal famine is wildly a-historical I'm afraid. To make him responsible for it, you have to ignore; The Japanese Invasion of Bengal, the local destruction of small fishing boats (to prevent their use by the Japanese) a typhoon weather event, a woeful response from local government that ignored the plight of the very poor for both regional and caste reasons, hoarding by local wheat and rice dealers, and pre-war Inflationary pressure, which drove up the price of rice and wheat to unaffordable levels that again, local government did little to nothing to relive.  Winnie was largely unmoved to be sure, until the regional Army started to make noise about it, and then ships were diverted.

The British Empire was largely a terrible thing, there's enough evidence for it, that we don't have to make shit up about it.

Why is it that any mention of the USSR's catastrophic failings brings out the whatabouts? What about the British Empire? What about Ronald Reagan? What about Churchill?

FFS, it's quite possible to criticize both the British Empire and the USSR without any contradiction. Churchill was a deeply flawed figure. You can believe that and still believe that Stalin and the other Soviet leaders were far worse. Yes, it started out with the ideal of freeing the proletariat and giving them control of the means of production. That's not what happened in reality. In reality, it was a brutal, murderous totalitarian regime that was worse than the capitalist systems it hoped to replace.

Why is it that any mention of the USSR’s catastrophic failings

I think, because ultimately the plight of the USSR is a unique calamity amongst "empires" It did after all; set off with such a unique promise, the idea that the "average man" rather then the elites were in power made the hijacking and destruction of it by another form of elites all the more like some awful Greek Tragedy. You can look at say; the Nazi domination of Europe and that at it's heart was the destruction of vast groups of folk, whereas the USSR was meant to be the exact opposite of that.

. In reality, it was a brutal, murderous totalitarian regime that was worse than the capitalist systems it hoped to replace.

This is a reflection on the people that ran the USSR, not on communism itself.

There is (or was) a position that the USSR offered an alternative to the western, capitalist, free enterprise system, and in doing so created some compulsion (realised or not) for the competing systems to "be better, do better" than the other. Or, at least, have more capable propaganda machine.

There are no other significantly sized challengers now existing - China is capitalist dictatorship and communist in name only (COMINO ?) and smaller "theocracies" (ISIS 'caliphate') rise and fall and are almost exclusively found at the wrong end of the "nice place to be" list.

I think, because ultimately the plight of the USSR is a unique calamity amongst “empires” It did after all; set off with such a unique promise, the idea that the “average man” rather then the elites were in power made the hijacking and destruction of it by another form of elites all the more like some awful Greek Tragedy.

I agree, in general. I think that's the big difference between Nazis and socialists.

I think one of the problems was that the Marxist side of things was always an elite, academic ideology. The instability of the old Russian empire was, I think, much more grass-roots - most people were desperately poor and the regime had no interest in improving their lot. To the poor, the promises that the Marxists made would have sounded far preferable, but the Marxists were intrinsically elitist - the party leadership were versed in Marxist theory was and that made them the arbiters of what was best for the common people. Anyone who disagreed was an enemy of the workers, by definition, so imprisoning them was necessary to protect the workers' revolution. When ideologies have purity tests like that, you're well on the road to authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

There is (or was) a position that the USSR offered an alternative to the western, capitalist, free enterprise system, and in doing so created some compulsion (realised or not) for the competing systems to “be better, do better” than the other. Or, at least, have more capable propaganda machine.

So murderous totalitarian regimes are good because they make capitalist democracies look good by comparison? Sorry, you lost me there. (If I've misunderstood the point, I apologize, but if you substituted "Nazi Germany" for "USSR", would your argument still work?)

I think his point was that capitalist governments may have tried harder to spread the benefits of capitalism around a little bit, because they were scared of the alternative. Whereas now without that political alternative to fear they have given up any pretense of working for anyone but the 1%ers.

I think it may have contributed, but probably not significantly. The damaging form of capitalism we now suffer started before the collapse of the USSR, largely by Reagan and Thatcher, and was foisted upon south America by the US even before then.

So murderous totalitarian regimes are good because they make capitalist democracies look good by comparison? Sorry, you lost me there.

...

It's just not worth it.

It’s just not worth it.

Did I misunderstand what you are saying?

My reading is that the expansion of the welfare state post WW2 came primarily because (in the UK) the population demanded it, which of course they can do in a democracy, but they could not in the USSR. The existence of the USSR had nothing to do with it. The 1942 Beveridge Report which recommended welfare reform was actually sent to troops serving overseas, ironically laying the foundations for Churchills 1945 election defeat. Returning troops and the general population were determined that the sacrifices made should be worth something.

Of course the capitalist nations WERE scared of the spread of communism (many still are) but their response seems to me to have been primarily military (arms race, Cold War, Vietnam war etc etc)

What is the point of this thread? Other than blind pro-western propaganda of course. 😀

We get it, socialsim BAAAAD! Capitalism GOOOD!

Or of course you could argue that the state socialist economic model in the USSR and other 'communist' states resulted in western governments containing their uber-capitalist instincts in the postwar period for fear of a similar revolution in the west. The result was 40 years of sustained economic growth and progress with humane welfare systems, socialised healthcare (not in the US of course), universal education and social mobility on a scale that has not been seen either before or since that period.

Yes, Stalin was a brutal dictator as worthy of disgust and opprobrium as Hitler. But you can't label socialist economic policies a failure just because there was a deranged psychopath at the head of the USSR.

But you can’t label socialist economic policies a failure just because there was a deranged psychopath at the head of the USSR.

Absolutely true.

You can't apply apply this logic without concluding that our own ( neoliberal) system of economics is an equal failure as it was adopted by General Pinochet and other brutal dictators in the southern cone.

Come on Dazh, you missed a chance to big up the anarchists... they enabled the creation of the USSR, and then, for their troubles, and because they tried to keep it to its socialist principles, were brutally suppressed by the regime they helped put in place. A lesson from history.

you missed a chance to big up the anarchists…

True. Many people don't really know about the role of anarchism in the 1917 revolution and just how prevalent it was as a political ideology. Kropotkin was hailed as a hero on his return from exile to St Petersburg by a crowd of 100,000. Then we was whisked off to house arrest in a dacha by Lenin's cronies never to be seen again. TBH this is why I get annoyed at the western misuse of the term 'communism'. Communism and anarchism are different only in the means of how they are achieved, and the USSR practiced neither. Even so, the USSR did implement many of Marx's economic ideas and millions of people benefitted from them, Stalin or not.

This is a reflection on the people that ran the USSR, not on communism itself.

I thought that was the point being made.

What is the point of this thread? Other than blind pro-western propaganda of course.

That this is the 100th anniversary of one of the most momentous events in world history. The USSR could have been a huge benefit to the world. It ended up being the opposite. That's not because of socialism, it's because it was a totalitarian communist system. The democratic countries that implemented socialist policies did much, much better economically and didn't need to murder and imprison millions of dissidents.

Good article here about how the Russian Federation could go the same way, collapse.

https://www.ft.com/content/d66c61e8-8511-459a-9116-70703ff2471f

The thing with the USSR is that, at the time, it held huge promise as liberating oppressed people from a terrible imperial regime

Its the eternal problem of overthrowing a violent regime.
The people who end up at the top of the new government are those who have managed to survive several years of a police state trying to imprison, torture or kill them.
As such you generally end up with ultra paranoid people who arent adverse to violence and generally work only with a small inner circle.
Good for the overthrow but not great for leading the country afterwards.

Now there ^^ IS a good and valid point

he was “responsible” for the Bengal famine is wildly a-historical

He was the Prime Minister in 1943 and responsible for dispensing the emperor's/monarch's perogative. He was in charge and the buck stopped with him.