Lot of folks from Eastern Europe will agree on that.
I believe current social issues need fixing - maybe even adopting some radical changes. E.g. I still can’t get over the fact that capitalism allows for existence of something as ridiculous as billionaires - real life wealth ‘black holes’. And that’s just the start. On the other hand, there are some things that capitalism does extremely well, e.g. competitive markets are very good at producing cheap goods and can drive innovation (when disallowing monopolies). So maybe the right path for us is somewhere between the two extremes?
Anyways, while I understand the distaste for capitalism for some folks and the feeling that it failed them and working people below CEO level in general, I still can’t get over the fact that lots of neo-communists use USSR as a role model. The only people in that country who benefited from that system were the people at the top and those with connections to them (sounds somewhat familiar, doesn’t it?). IMO anybody trying to base their political views on communist ideology should cut off entirely from the USSR and simply deem it as a failed state (that was only communist by name) with too much blood on their hands. Definitely not something that we want to go back to.
You’re probably baiting me, but let’s go.
You’re indeed right that Imperial Russia wasn’t better for average lower-class folk. And certainly Bolshevik revolution didn’t came from nothing. For those people it was indeed an improvement. Maybe even substantial. Won’t argue, don’t know that much about that time. The thing that I know, being born in USSR satellite state is how much it sent us back into the middle ages after WWII. Huge lines for food, shit currency, no free speech, not being able to leave the country, political cleansing, gulags, exiles to Syberia, man-made famine. The list goes on and on. It definitely wasn’t as good here as it was in Western Europe for the ordinary people. And we are still seen as ‘worse’ compared to the West. You make it sound like it was some utopian state destroyed by filthy capitalists, while for some of us it was a living hell. And any attempt to change that was bloodily thwarted (e.g. Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia)
Yes, especially in creating genocides (e.g. Katyn massacre), artificial famines (e.g. Holodomor) and causing large shortages of basic necessities even though their 5 year plans were so perfect. While most people in the West see Hitler as the personification of evil, I often hear that Stalin was much much worse.
Even not counting those issues, if it worked so well then we are not living in a glorious World SSR? USSR had almost twice natural resources the US has and they still didn’t make it work.
Yep, it definitely didn’t have anything to do with people living in poverty, working for money worth shit, being prosecuted (or even executed) for just mentioning something bad about the ruling party. Those people were just corrupted by the free media to fight the state which gave them everything they needed. Also it didn’t collapse economically at all. (Hope at this point I don’t need to add /s)
I’ll just say that Berlin wall wasn’t created to keep Germans from the West from running away to East Germany.
This system was simply not sustainable in the long run. With world’s second military they could prolong the inevitable. The fact that they didn’t roll out those tanks says that even people ruling that country knew it wasn’t working. They simply couldn’t keep up the race with the West. You can even see it in terms of GDP:
Sorry, got a bit angry. Idk, as much as I like to keep an open mind, USSR and it’s proxies created so much pain and suffering for me, my parents and grandparents, that it makes my blood boiling when I see somebody defending that monster of a country. Hope I wasn’t offensive much.