this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
929 points (99.2% liked)
Privacy
31978 readers
308 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
USSR demonstrably did not have a ruling class. If you look at the background of all the leaders of USSR they come from regular working class families.
Stalin's father was a shoemaker and his mother was a house cleaner.
Malenkov's father was a farmer and his mother was a daughter of a blacksmith.
Khrushchev's parents were poor Russian peasants.
Brezhnev's father was metalworker.
Andropov's father was a railway worker and his mother was a school teacher.
Chernenko was born to a poor family of Ukrainian ethnicity in the Siberian village.
Gorbachev's parents were peasants.
This clearly illustrates that USSR was a system of meritocracy where anyone could rise to the top through skill and work. And the reason this was possible was because USSR provided equal opportunity to all. Everyone had access to education, healthcare, housing, and work.
USSR had no ruling class as I've explained above, and USSR did not make millions of people die for anything. Maybe try engaging with reality instead of regurgitating nonsense uncritically. The fact that you chose to argue about a subject you're woefully ignorant about says volumes.
You still didn't answer the question. You are spouting chatgpt non answers.
I didn't ask you about socio economic background of the first generation of the Communist elites.
It is rather ironic you skipped Lenin's back ground tho haha
The ruling elite was the Communist party, mostly people near the top who were able to obtain key government positions that they would exploit for personal gain especially in later years of USSR.
In later years, nepotism was also was wide spread where children of the connected enjoy privileged status for employment and career advances and small things like vacations subsidies.
Mentioning that some guy was Ukrainian with in the regime while not mentioning Holodomor is OG 🤡
Must he nice being a communist while enjoying benefits of western society lol
I did give you a very clear answer with examples. If you lack reading comprehension to understand it, that's entirely a you problem.
These aren't "first generation elites", these are literally all the leaders of the USSR throughout its existence. All the people in the party came from regular working class background. Having an elite or a ruling class means having a group of people who are wealthy and separate from the working majority the way politicians in the west are. You clearly don't even understand what basic terms like elites mean.
Sure, USSR had corruption just like every human society. That doesn't mean USSR had a ruling class which was your original attempt at an argument.
Sure, let's look at the whole holodomor narrative of yours from a perspective of an actual historian who studied it. During the 1932 famine, the USSR sent aid to affected regions in an attempt to alleviate the famine. According to Mark Tauger in his article, The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933:
Some bring up massive grain exports during the famine to show that the Soviet Union exported food while Ukraine starved. This is fallacious for a number of reasons, but most importantly of all the amount of aid that was sent to Ukraine alone actually exceeded the amount that was exported at the time.
According to Tauger, the reason why more aid was not provided was because of the low harvest
Tauger is not a communist, and ultimately this specific article takes the view that the low harvest was caused by collectivization (he factors in the natural causes of the famine in later articles, based on how he completely neglects to mention weather in this article at all its clear that his position shifted over the years). However, its interesting to see that the Soviets really did try to alleviate the famine as best as they could.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2500600
On top of that, the famine was exacerbated by the fact that kulaks slaughtered livestock rather letting it be collectivized https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak#Dekulakization
The reality is that famines were common in Tsarist times, and they were a major drive for the revolution in the first place. After the revolution, lives improved dramatically and famines stopped.
you are the living embodiment of the meme 🤡
Tell it to the kulak victims of nkvd. They were all peasants / worker class but still got murdered because they didn't want to get sovkhozes and kolhozes. And no famine wasn't because of kulaks, only because Soviets kept selling best grain to the west. Much more than they really could - all they central office data were falsified and nobody dared to admit that they couldn't sell that much grain to the west
You are completely misinformed.
First of all "kulaks" were not working peasants who lived self-sufficiently off farming their land and raising their livestock, you are thinking of "serednyaks", the class below kulaks in the 4-tier rural class system of Imperial Russia. Kulaks were rural loan sharks and land owners who did not work but rather lived off extortionate interest rates from loans to "serednyaks" and from exploiting the labour of "bednyaks" (literally "the poor") and, mainly, the seasonal labour of "batraks" who were the class below "the poor" - many of them homeless, traveling from village to village and working quite literally for a bit of food and a place to sleep in the barn.
If you intend to keep talking publically about kulaks, do look into those classes, look up who batraks were and what kind of life they lead before the revolution, the mortality, the diseases, how many they were compared to the number of kulaks. Find out what dekulakisation brought not only for kulaks, but also for that huge number of serednyaks, bednyaks, and batraks they exploited. Find out what dekulakisation did to overall child mortality, child hight, life expectancy, and so on.
Second, kulaks were not murdered, they were eliminated as an economic class by removing the relataionship of exploitation. Their lands were taken and given to the people, and the ones who resisted were deported with their families.
Kulaks got exactly what they deserved, and anybody who defends the kulaks can get fucked.
Do you know that you need grain for damn reseeding? Soviets and their central planning by uneducated central pianists ( the educated ones got murdered during great purges ) caused they kept selling too much grain and nobody dared to question. One bad year of crops exactly caused the famine. Soviets sold all the existing grain because of the contracts with the west and after that they have started to search "traitors" in the worker / peasants class. Add it to the fact that lots of grain come from the Ukraine and many central pianists were against Ukrainians and we have the recipe for the great hunger. Central planists send NKVD to recollect even this what left for reseeding for the next year. In the next decades planists got educated ( after the Stalin terror ) but still the central planning of Soviets caused USSR to be lagging to the west. These are the facts and I could give you charts with the soviet export. Simply central planists has incorrect data because of the fear, bad planning and many other factors
Meanwhile in the real world. Russia went from a backwards agrarian society where people travelled by horse and carriage to being the first in space in the span of 40 years. Russia showed incredible growth after the revolution that surpassed the rest of the world:
USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960's, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 period while having better nutrition:
Careful comrade, libs don't read sources
I don't think you really have to qualify that, they just don't read period. Their whole world view is based directly on Marvel movies.
weirdly enough, despite their uneducated central "planists" who all got murdered; they somehow with sticks, stones and "uneducated workers" that were all brought back to life via Leninist necromancy managed to make a famine not happen again. Weird. It's almost like the exploiters of that land were causing famines by their own mismanagement and that central planning actually contributed to the fact that the average soviet citizen ate better than the average American one.
Also, can I get some sources on the Soviets just selling all their grain? You know, when I set up a communist society; the first thing I'd do is satisfy all my trade agreements with the west instead of serving the people! That makes sense!
Oh and sources on the KNVD just brutally marauding across the land and murdering? I can only find deportations.
Start showing your sources, lib.
source: U.S Intelligence who did a study on Soviet citizens - https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP84B00274R000300150009-5.pdf
No ones yet to explain to me why we should apologise when the Kulaks literally went on record that they ordered grain be burned to increase the price, during a famine, directly killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Agreed.
Why say I could and not do it? If you have sources, give them. You haven't linked any source whatsoever in this entire thread to back up your wild claims.
Это белошиз порвался, or do you just have a "Russian" friend, my dear loan shark lover?
He did, you just lack reading comprehension.
The Latter years of the USSR are notorious for being fucked, but this does not address the middle or early years.
Ah yes, the famine which affected all of the Soviet Union (and Kazakhstan more in terms of deaths per capita) which even the inventors of the narrative of genocide (Robert conquest) no longer call genocide.
I love the benefits western society! I get to enjoy half my income go to some landleech and fund war crimes in the middle east! I can't wait to see which climate change fueled disaster kills me, or maybe the fascist death squads will be the ones to do me in!