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Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com 2 days agoSaving Eastern Europe from Nazi extermination is as bad as universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, the elimination of unemployment, universal right to housing and abolition of homelessness, and the doubling of life expectancy from the Tsarist Empire to 1960.
mr_satan@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Listen, I get that you’re just trolling, so this is more directed to anyone that can be convinced by your comment.
USSR saved no one. They took over other nations and killed a lot of people in the process. They ripped families apart and took them to their own concentration camps in Siberia. Most of these people were worked to death and died starving.
Before WWII Soviet regime decided that Ukrainians don’t deserve to exist and killed millions in Holodomor (Ukrainian famine).
In history they we’re never saviors, they were just another occupant and an unfortunate ally in WWII. What they brought to my country was repressions and deficits. I guess planned economy doesn’t really work.
The life my parents lived under Soviets was shit and it only improved after we regained independence.
Hero washing USSR only serves as propaganda. They were not heroes, they were winners. It doesn’t make them any better than the other side.
Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com 1 day ago
Not trolling at all. The USSR saved TENS OF MILLIONS of lives from Nazi genocide in Eastern Europe alone. Nazis wanted to carry out Generalplan Ost and eliminate or enslave all population between Germany and the Urals. The only reason why they were stopped was thanks to the massive efforts of the Soviet Industrial Revolution which was kickstarted in 1929, when the country’s economy recovered from the devastation of the Russian Civil War, in which the “allies” (UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, USA, France, Poland…) Invaded the country unprovoked and unilaterally for the sin of being communist.
Life expectancy in Soviet Russia was 27 years of age by the 1929 economic recovery. Thirty years later, life expectancy had risen to 67 years of age. For comparison, Brazil, which didn’t go through an all-destroying civil war and an even more all-destroying world war 2 (25 million Soviet deaths by Nazism), had a life expectancy of 36 in 1930, and by 1960 it was merely 53. The revolution in agriculture, industry and medicine in the USSR saved, by any reasonable metric, tens of millions lives more than any comparable capitalist country at the time, and that’s not counting that they would have become a Nazi colony and either slaves or exterminated.
“Holodomor” is a new term, propagandized recently to create the false narrative that Ukrainians were targeted in a famine in the Soviet Union during the land collectivization. There was a big famine in the entire USSR, affecting especially hard in Ukraine, Southern Russia and Kazakhstan, I’m not denying the famine, I’m denying the idea that it was enforced in Ukrainians for some racist reasons. There is no precedent and no followup of mistreatment of Ukrainians in the USSR, there are no documents proving any intent to hurt Ukraine specifically, and there was no motive to do so, it’s used as a propaganda element to radicalize people against Communism now that sentiments towards Ukraine are reasonably high.
If you care about Ukrainian lives, which you seem to do, you’d be better off doing anti-capitalist propaganda. Capitalism brought hunger, drugs, unemployment, violence, crime, suicide and alcoholism to unprecedented levels in Ukraine. Massive emigrations, low birthrates, high mortality and finally war, have brought on Ukraine a horrifying [demographic crisis]. Between the dissolution of the USSR in 1990 and the war in Ukraine, Ukraine had already lost 7 million people to the causes cited above. As it stands now, there are an estimated 28 million citizens in Ukraine, from the peak of 52 million in 1990. I agree that Ukraine is a land that has been fucked over in the ass repeatedly in history, first during Tsarism and the Russian Empire, then during Nazi invasion, and finally during capitalist restoration. I hope we can both condemn the three processes above in their scope of murdering millions of innocent Ukrainians.
All of the achievements of the USSR, including the saving of tens of millions of people from genocide, starvation and disease, were carried out in a unique way in history: without participating in colonialism. The USSR had no colonies in Africa, in South America or in Asia, in the same way that UK, France or USA did during their industrial development. The modern western countries enjoy a high (albeit constantly worsening) standard of living because they stand on the backs of billions in the global south. For every French with free healthcare and education, there are 10 Indians, Ethiopians and Pakistanis starving. I’m glad your life is materially better in some ways now than it was 50 years ago, but this is entirely on the backs of the global south.