Small channel telling stories from living in the USSR. His lived experience isn't negative enough for me to worry about him being a chud. He seems positive, although critical of the USSR. I haven't watched enough to know if his whole channel. is great There are just so many specific details he provides in his videos that feels like it would be really hard to fake.
He did complain about getting banned from communist subreddits. I don't know the exact details, but he did bring this up in at least one video.
Yeah, I'm posting this guy not knowing a whole ton about him. I will say straight up that this dude could be a massive shithead. That's suspicious, but also Reddit communists are annoying. Comunissm101 is a particularly bad sub that's way too big on people being infinitely well read instead of allowing for synthesis from communists that don't fit their model. There's a reason I always stuck to Chapo. So not necessarily something I'd hold against him without more details
I think it was specifically communism101 he was banned from, now that you mention it.
Yeah, like I said, not a defense or attack on this youtuber, he COULD be a shithead and I just don't know. But Communism101 has an overly utopic view of the USSR, where materialism takes a backseat to rhetoric. The USSR and China have both had massive missteps in the past century and it's undebatable, and many of them are worth discussing. The Four Pest campaign was objectively bad, but reasonable with context of the knowledge those people had. If it makes an AES sound bad, they won't allow it. The comment threads about the Four Pest Campaign are empty and only filled with actual communist propaganda. That's how I feel about this channel so far. He's not necessarily a communist, especially because he grew up in Ukraine later in the USSR's history. He has a perspective that's going to make him more negative, but it doesn't seem like he's trying to inject any ideology in his accounts.
It's crazy too because one of the best ways to bring libish people into the fold is to make actual valid critiques of AES & the USSR. It lets people see you're not a utopian shill who thinks that everything was just singing kumbaya in Soviet life. People won't dismiss the "quadrillion" dead bullshit until they have a satisfactory answer to "ok so what were/are the social problems within <INSERT_AES_COUNTRY>?”
yeah it seems like he's mostly "telling it like it is", or at least that's how he sees it, but his perspective as someone who is Ukrainian, born in the 70s, and moved to the US, probably colors that perspective significantly. He seems to mostly stick to talking about the late soviet union from his own experience, not other eras or other regions, etc.
I haven't heard anything that jumps out to me as egregious, but he doesn't have an especially rosy view of the USSR, and doesn't really contrast it with modern capitalist states that much in the videos I've seen,
Being Ukrainian, I presume they had some bad takes about Stalin or something.
Yeah, he probably has some bad takes. I'm okay with it because he seems to be more neutral in his videos, focusing on the actual facts of Russian living at that point. We can't expect these online accounts to be perfect, but as long as they're accurate to the teller's experience, they can't say that much bad.
