Some rabid anti-communist told be to read this book as proof of a Soviet genocide in Ukraine.
I did a quick search and saw it being passed around and referenced in anti-communists circles like /r/ENOUGHCOMMIESPAM, but I haven't seen any leftist evaluations of this book or this author. So is anyone familiar with this, and how seriously should I take it?
It's a dope way to die, I guess. Suicide by poem.
For what it’s worth, I don’t actually think he deserved to be imprisoned or killed. There’s plenty of valid criticism to be made of the Soviets’ repression of artistic expression. At the same time, I understand why they felt the need to handle it in the way that they did.
Thank you for being sincere. To be honest, I find talking to Westerners/Americans about the USSR really exhausting. It all feels like either one big meme or a purely theoretical argument, not people's lives. When I look at my family, and at their other Soviet friends, and how the culture there is now more generally, I just feel like... it left so much indirect trauma and fucked with their way of thinking. I don't think of free speech as the most important right blablabla. But it also makes me uncomfortable when my parents watch some random short film about a girl getting arrested for reading a book on a tram and their first reaction is "ahahahhaha serves you right, idiot, you have to read it by candlelight in the dead of night, duhh." I don't know if, in hind sight, repression was worth it.
My feeling is that it is important to uphold the legacy of the first worker state ever attempted on this scale. Of course mistakes were made, many of them horrendous, but the more I try to understand this period of history the more I come away with the impression that the people fighting for the liberation of mankind from the shackles of capitalism, and the brutality of imperialism and colonialism were people who were honestly fighting for a better world and were responsible for trying to craft completely new organizations and relations of production, with very little in the way of blueprints on how to do so, all while facing some of the most fierce repression from an alliance of liberal capitalist military super powers that history has to offer.
Of course mistakes are going to be made in those conditions, and we should do our best to learn from those mistakes so that we don't repeat them. But millions of lives were improved tremendously as a result of these efforts. Both inside and outside of the Soviet Union. Average life expectancies increased by decades because of these new kinds of organization, and for the first time in history workers were guaranteed rights like healthcare, sick leave, vacations, a 40 hour work week, workplace safety standards, disability benefits, retirement benefits, and so on. This was an incredibly powerful precedent, and showed the world that you could have an economy organized around advancing the interests of the working class, and also become an economic super power while doing so.
My dad is alive because of this precedent. Before the Soviet Union was established, workers rights were abysmal. At the turn of the century it was common to have 12-14 hour work days, 6-7 days a week. Child labor was common, and often necessary to provide for a family. People were worked to the bone until their bodies were crippled, and once they could no longer work they simply lost their job and was thrown out on the street to die. Or if they were lucky they had a family that could take care of them who end up falling deeper and deeper in debt in the process due to the burden of caretaking combined with the loss in income.
It was only because of the precedent that the Soviet Union set that labor rights organizers were ever able to win concessions from the capitalist ruling class. A ruling class who was suddenly terrified that their workers could see what was possible and attempt to emulate the Soviet Union and revolt against the exploiters. This terror finally made them willing to concede to establishing all of the workers rights we take for granted today, and without programs that came out of this like social security disability benefits, when my dad got crippled on the job he would've just been left to die.
There's so much casual cruelty and brutality that is just inherent to how capitalism is structured, and it's difficult to overstate just how monumentally important the Soviet Union was at the time in fighting for the rights of workers around the globe. It's hard to look back on this history and see a timeline littered with mistakes and horrible crimes, the ever present capitalist encirclement, threat of bombing and destruction and invasion by the capitalist powers, relentless propaganda and subterfuge and sabotage and sanction and embargo and blockade, and on top of the unrelenting pressure of these external contradictions you have the pressure of internal contradictions, institutions of military power and coercion, secret police, bureaucracies that were plagued with opportunists and careerism, and so on. And it difficult to synthesize all of this history and understand which parts were mistakes on their part, which parts were victories on behalf of their enemies, which parts were "necessary evils" to combat both the casual and active cruelty of capitalism and Czarism, what failures or victories may have resulted from doing things differently, and so on. In other words, to separate which things are mistakes that we need to learn from, and which things are slander from a capitalist class who desperately wants us to believe that "the cure is worse than the disease," so that no one ever attempts to emulate the soviet union and establish a world that has no need for them.
But I can't help but conclude that the project that the Soviet Union set out on was an important step forward in advancing humanity past the predatory stage of development. And that there is still value in upholding the victories they were able to achieve, on both a national and international scale, and regarding them as the beacons of hope of a future without capitalism that they rightfully deserve, even though it is plagued by a complicated history. The terror that the idea of the Soviet Union still inspires in our enemies to this day is proof of that value, and it feels difficult to let go of that.
I'm not against the Soviet Union as a whole. Many people's lives were materially improved, including most of my family's. I am less sure that suppression of the arts (and free speech more generally) was worth it. We don't have a second timeline where Osip Mandelstam lived, maybe the USSR would have fallen sooner after hearing that Stalin had fat fingers, sure. But I think if so many people went through the camps that you have people joking that they were the best writing schools or that the main people who use mat (= swear) are criminals and intellectuals, it warps the culture of a people. If we're talking about it purely practically, I think the way USians handle it is way better. Critiquing America is absolutely fine, it even wins you awards, but even the harshest critiques have an overall message of 'but we can be better' or 'this is just a fringe example, the American Dream exists overall'. That's really smart.
Yeah, it's hard not to have mixed feelings about a project that was so hopeful and so inspirational, that set so many important precedents, but was also so tumultuous.
Yeah I definitely get what you’re saying. I think the best thing we can do now is learn from the past and try not to make the same mistakes in the future. Also, as an American, I definitely find myself sometimes treating the USSR more like a meme or theoretical exercise than a real place that had a real effect on peoples’ lives, and I’m sorry if my original response came off as being insensitive (I just think the emoji is funny lol).
great poem