this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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What is complicated about it?
The reforms you refer to allowed for political dissent. If the Soviet Union was some worker's paradise, then allowing people complain wouldn't change anything.
The simple reality is that the Soviet Union was a dictatorship that only survived as long as it did because it was a dictatorship. Once people had the option of opposing Communist rule, they did. And that is what killed the Soviet Union. Not some conspiracy by the United States or the kulaks.
The reforms didn't just allow for "political dissent," they worked against the Socialist system, that was based on central planning. Rather than running in a more efficient manner, it ran against itself.
Further, nobody says the Soviet Union was a "worker's paradise." It had tremendous strides for workers, but it wasn't perfect by any means.
The Soviet Union wasn't a dictatorship. Read Soviet Democracy. It lasted as long as it did because it had tremendous GDP growth while lowering wealth disparity, free and high quality education and healthcare, doubled health expectancies, full employment, and over tripled literacy rates to 99.9%.
Read Blackshirts and Reds.
Stalin:
Exactly, and this didn't last for 14 years, but nearly the entire 20th century, and is succeeded by other AES countries like the PRC.
Not at all, plus they are succeeded, like I said, by other AES states like the PRC.
The PRC is Socialist, and is continuing the application of Marxism-Leninism as they overtake everyone else. As for the Soviet Union, it lasted long enough to prove Socialism works, ans managed to assist with national liberation movements worldwide.
In a way, yes, the US Empire is the current world hegemon, but it really succeeds the UK. Either way, the length of a system doesn't determine its effectiveness, moreover the PRC is showing no signs of collapse.
Bit of a non-sequitor, I could bring up Kent State and use that to say the US isn't a democracy. The US has a far worse track record than the Soviets.
Numerous mass killings and/or genocides in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guatemala, East Timor, Cambodia, and much, much more.
Can't really call a civil war against Tsarists and fascists "killing their own civilians." Moreover, the US bombed Cambodia more than any other country on the planet. Pol Pot wasn't a Communist, but he was stopped by the Vietnamese Communists.
The Soviet Union was, if not a traditional dictatorship, absolutely a totalitarian autocracy. Stalin was a brutal dictator and his successors were chosen by the communist party. Elections in the USSR were for show.
Life was miserable almost from the start of the Bolshevik revolution for most people. The USSR's implementation of communism was so bad, it's become cliche.
People like you should be forced to live under conditions like Tsarist Russia.
"Life was miserable almost from the start of the Bolshevik revolution for most people", said the romanovs.
So bad that after the fall of the Soviet Union, its former republics all had an immediate, sustained downturn in their quality of life, and a corresponding uptick in mortality.
Allow me to repeat myself:
Yep. Democracy doesn't mean "choose between parties," it's about the actual impact you can have on policy. More people in China feel that they have a voice in politics than people in the US, despite the US having 2 parties.
Choosing between parties is arguably less democratic because in many countries with such a system, like the USA, you basically just have corporations/corporate media choosing the candidates, so your "choice" is between corporate candidates, so corporations always win. There is no option to reject the nominee entirely, while in China's system you can reject the nominee. you can just straight up veto candidates.
Westerners often also look at the very end of the process and ignore everything leading up to it. They will say "there's only one candidate on the ballot!" as proof it's undemocratic (even though this happens all the time in the US too...). But this ignores the entire democratic process leading up to how the candidate gets on the ballot in the first place. In Cuba for example, candidates getting on the ballot is a two-year long process resulting from local elections and meetings with mass organizations, but they ignore this entire process and just focus on the final election at the very end.
100% agreed, excellent comment.
You can feel free to read the sources I listed, rather than posting unsourced anecdotes as "gotchas." Further, the ability of the party to purge Nazis ended up being important.
That's what dissent is.
Nothing you said disputes it being a dictatorship. The people could not choose their leaders, there were no limits on the power of their leaders, er go it was a dictatorship. None of your "pros" matter. And that's before we get into the lack of freedom of speech and press and total absence of transparency, meaning that I have no reason to trust those supposed accomplishments.
You are being presented with sources for the claims disproving you, but your anticommunism is clearly more important to you than engaging with actual rvidence.
No investigation, no right to speak.
No, that isn't what dissent is, it was a fundamental liberalization of the economy that favored private property over public.
Secondly, they absolutely chose their leaders.
Finally, you say life expectancy, literacy rates, and worker rights "don't matter?" That strong, sustained economic growth doesn't matter? You must be trolling.
As for distrusting the sources, you can look into them yourselves, they are well-respected.
So, you're denying that glasnost allowed for political dissent?
Second, no they didn't.
Finally, it does not matter because we were debating whether or not the Soviet Union was a dictatorship, which the literacy rate has nothing to do with.
Well-respected by Tankies, not by actual historians.
Glasnost allowed for liberalism to expand as an ideology, sure, alongside other reforms that weakened the economy and erased its foundations. You can't cherry-pick the reforms to make it seem like the system worked poorly and only was dissolved because the "people had a choice." In fact, most post-Soviet citizens regret the fall of Socialism and prefer it over Capitalism.
Read Soviet Democracy.
We were debating a great many things, one of which being the economy and the well-being of the people, because that helps explain why it was democratic.
Soviet Democracy by Pat Sloan is quite literally used as a reference on the Wikipedia article for Soviet Democracy. You are incapable of being honest or looking at facts that disprove you because you care more about appearing morally righteous than being correct.
"Expand as an ideology" is a strange way to say, "they weren't shot for disagreeing with the Party."
The reforms didn't weaken the economy. The economy was weak, therefore there were reforms. And it's not cherrypicking, the Soviet system worked poorly, objectively.
Nostalgia doesn't prove anything. What they feel now has nothing to do with what the people felt at the time.
Read Robert Conquest.
No, you denied that the Soviet Union was a dictatorship. The GDP does not effect that.
And books describing the Soviet Union as a totalitarian dictatorship are used as reference. Wikipedia is providing a variety of opinions of the Soviet government. It's not declaring Pat Sloan the sole source of truth on the question of human rights in the Soviet Union.
You clearly don't care about being righteous or correct.
Liberals usually weren't shot even pre-Glasnost unless they were terrorist cells, like the White Army or Nazi sympathizers.
The reforms did weaken the economy. This is factual. The Soviet Union was one of the fastest growing and most impressive economies of the 20th century, this slowed with reforms.
Read Robert Conquest? Seriously? The crank that made wild estimates before the opening of the Soviet Archives disproved him, whose coworkers denounced their own work with him on the Black Book of Communism, which included Nazis killed by the Soviets in the "death toll of Communism?* That's your trump card, a long-debunked anticommunist myth from the Red Scare no historian, even anticommunist historians, supports these days? The Black Book has long been debunked as false.
It didn't declare Pat Sloan the only source of truth, but included it as a respected resource. It isn't only Communists that reference Pat Sloans works, but liberals as well.
Considering you unironically recommend propagandist Robert Conquest as a source that even liberals disagree with, you're only proving me right.
Right. Beria was well known for his trigger discipline.
It wasn't that impressive for the people living there. Otherwise they wouldn't have rejected it.
Debunked, according to a genocide denying Russian propaganda asset.
To portray the opinion of Stalinists. Which they contrast with actual data and the opinions of actual historians.
How about you cite some of those liberals, instead of a tankie rag?
You have no data, lmao. You just make assertions.
The people of the USSR voted to dissolve it after liberal reforms had slowed the economy, and political instability in the government had eroded faith in the system. Most people regret that choice and wish it retained.
Here's yet another debunk of the Black Book. Every time you repeat this conspiracy theory nonsense that was debunked without a shadow of a doubt after the anticommunists opened the Soviet Archives and revealed the real figures that were far below the numbers Conquest pulled out of his ass, you prove me correct.
Seriously, you have nothing other than a propagandist and you double down.
Glasnost occured for a reason, yes. It also hurt the economy. Democracy doesn't mean "everything is perfect, actually, and what people vote for is perfect too."
Widespread and consistent polling data showing that most people believed Socialism was a better system than Capitalism proves quite a lot.
The famine in the 1930s was real, the racial motivations were likely not. Calling me "scum" for calling out your acceptance of debunked propagandists like Robert Conquest when you can't actually contest the facts doesn't make you correct.
Healthcare? Doesn't matter.
Education? Literacy? Reading is how the communist get you, remain illiterate.
Full employment? You don't need to feed your family.
Life expectancy? Why prolong the suffering?
We weren't debating the quality of the Soviet Union. We were debating whether or not it was a dictatorship.
Declassified CIA report:
A lot of the cold war propaganda about the USSR turned out to be bullshit, now that US & Soviet archives have been released, as contemporary Western academic historians will tell you, like Domenico Losurdo and Grover Furr.