Comment on Chinese propaganda is rampant on the fediverse
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 1 week agoProtests were already widespread in the Union. Several member states had already declared nominal independence from Moscow. Gorbachev was doing damage control and trying his best to keep the Union from fracturing further. Elections in member republics saw huge rises in popularity for noncommunist parties.
The referendum was an attempt to gain the political momentum required for reform, in an ultimate effort to keep the Union together. It was essentially a kind of propaganda attempt to display large support for the reformed Union, made possible because dissolution was not on the ballot.
There was widespread civil discontent before the referendum. Elections saw noncommunists rise to power and several member states declared independence. Then I am somehow to believe that the population first swung all the way back to “actually the Soviet Union is great and we don’t want to leave it” and back to “we should leave the Soviet Union” in a matter of mere months? That is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, which you don’t have. The truth is far simpler: at every point once the civil unrest started, the population voted in favour of less Soviet Union and for more independence, and not the other way around.
My point regarding the phrasing of post-Soviet polling is that the wording drastically changes the outcome. Sure, people aren’t happy about how the 90s turned out and they feel they’re not part of a superpower anymore. They’re not happy with being screwed over by western nations. They say those things were better under the Soviet Union. But ask them if they would go back to such a Union, and suddenly support evaporates. And in several former member states even the first few questions don’t find much Soviet sympathies (eg the Baltics). They want to live in a stronger nation, akin to the Soviet Union, but they do not want to go back to what once was. It isn’t a simple case of “boy we sure had it good”, that does a huge disservice to the diverse and complicated opinions of the Union.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Gorbachev had also implemented Perestroika, and his policy of Glasnost had weakened the soviet system. The seeds for radical change for the worse and instability were already there. My point isn’t that there was 0 discontent and it flipped to 100% discontent, but that people, despite the various nationalist movements in some of the member-states, overall did support the socialist project up to the end. After the vote, there was the hardliner coup, dramatic sharpening of contradictions, and the internal, anti-democratic dissolution by Yeltsin claiming legitimacy from the rising nationalist movements.
You have no evidence supporting your claims other than the idea that there was some discontent, which I never denied, and that people ultimately lost faith in the stabilty of the soviet union right at the end itself. Further, support for returning to socialism doesn’t simply “evaporate,” and again, it depends highly on the political fuckery in the region, the purging of communists by westerners, and the sheer devastation these countries went through. Trying to chalk it all up to simple pride in a stronger nation instead of the actual material benefits is an extraordinary claim.
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 1 week ago
CPRF support rising rapidly? You must live in a fantasy world. Their electoral results have rarely been worse, their 2024 presidential election candidate receiving a mere 4% of the vote (a record low for the party).
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
They recieved 63,000 new members over 4 years
The CPRF has restored ties with communist parties around the world
Stalin’s popularity in Russia in general is rising dramatically, to the point of being reported in the west
And much more. At the end of the day, the Russian Federation is a bourgeois dictstorship, so it isn’t going to just accept rising communist sympathies at a state level. The nationalists have a balancing act to play, trying to take advantage of rising soviet smpathies without legitimizing socialism.
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 1 week ago
Party membership is a bad indicator for national popularity, as evidenced by the historically bad election result that followed the first article you linked.
The second article does not have anything to do with the popularity of the party.
The third article contradicts the sentiment you express in your own paragraph; you suggest the Russian government is taking advantage of rising Soviet sympathies, as if it’s “just happening”. But as your article explains, those Soviet sympathies are being expressly fuelled and created by the Russian government, as part of their propaganda efforts to promote the great patriotic war (which Putin now claims they’re in another one of course, fighting the west). It’s artificial, not natural.