Ah yes it was the CIA that did the Holodomor
Ah, communism is like unicorns. Many people like them but nobody have seen them alive. Because every communist state is not communist but authoritarian.
Actually yeah, I think just about every so called communist state is what would be called a failed workers state by the non authoritarian socialists.
When does a Communist country become authoritarian? This line is always repeated by sympathetic liberals that haven’t read theory yet think they know enough to judge Leftist movements.
It’s a problem of psychology and scale. The communist system becomes susceptible to bad actors the larger the group becomes.
In point of fact: I fully agree that many Latin countries, absent US bullshittery, intervention, and fomenting of coups in the first Cold War, would probably mostly have wound up being successful.
But I absolutely do not agree that the USSR or the PRC should be held up as paragons of virtue of what a Communist system should be. They were very quickly corrupted by authoritarian leaders and cliques from the get go, which is genuinely antithetical to true communism.
Famines were common occurrence before the revolution, and were in fact a major driver behind it. 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:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Soviet_Union
- https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB5054/index1.html
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 peroid while having better nutrition:
During the 1932 Holodomor 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:
While the leadership did not stop exports, they did try to alleviate the famine. A 25 February 1933 Central Committee decree allotted seed loans of 320,000 tons to Ukraine and 240,000 tons to the northern Caucasus. Seed loans were also made to the Lower Volga and may have been made to other regions as well. Kul’chyts’kyy cites Ukrainian party archives showing that total aid to Ukraine by April 1933 actually exceeded 560,000 tons, including more than 80,000 tons of food
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.
Aid to Ukraine alone was 60 percent greater than the amount exported during the same period. Total aid to famine regions was more than double exports for the first half of 1933.
According to Tauger, the reason why more aid was not provided was because of the low harvest
It appears to have been another consequence of the low 1932 harvest that more aid was not provided: After the low 1931, 1934, and 1936 harvests procured grain was transferred back to peasants at the expense of exports.
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.
Downvote spam report: 1/4th of the downvotes on this one (so far) are from zero-content accounts.
communism always fails because it’s authoritarian, that’s the same reason the west, the east and everything else will fall
Communism works and has worked for thousands of years. People thrive when their needs are met. It’s authoritarianism that doesn’t work
Tell this to the people from the former USSR/Eastern Block. I’m not saying communism can’t work in any way, but I am saying that, at least historically, it has not worked.
The vast majority of Eastern Europeans wished the USSR never dissolved. Furthermore, the vast majority of people voted to retain the USSR, then it was dissolved anyways.
Why do you say “historically it has not worked,” then vaguely gesture towards people who believe it very much did work better than their current Capitalism?
You mean the vote that was boycotted by 6 of the 15 soviet occupied countries due to how it was phrased among other things? There was no independence option in the referendum, just how should the USSR be preserved.
Also most of the Easter European countries voted to declare independence shortly after.
I was around 20 at the time and in one of the boycotting countries. We later had a vote for independence, I think the support was around 80% or 90%.
Furthermore, the vast majority of people voted to retain the USSR
Wow, you’re telling me the people who were brainwashed into believing their country is the best (not saying it doesn’t happen nowadays (cough cough USA), voted to retain it?
In my country (Romania) the only point I hear people praising the communist regime about is infrastructure. Why? Because, as it turns out, it’s much easier to build infrastructure when you have slaves prisoners which you don’t have to pay. Of course, the corruption in our post-communist government doesn’t help either.
I agree, capitalism is VERY far from ideal, but, please, stop glazing the USSR regime just because it was “communist”.
