The more I learn about khrushchev the more I wonder about the competency of stalin for not purging the doofus.
Khrushchev: "What do you think was Stalin's biggest failure?"
Hoxha(?): "Not getting rid of you!"
It's called the great patriotic war. Over 27 million people were murdered. In the war to save the motherland, nobody was made an exception to not take to the battlefield, not even the Communist party.
Not even mentioning people can at different points of their life be positive figures for socialism and at other points detractors to socialism. We can point to W.E.B Du Bois whom spent the majority of his life as a FDR-esque progressive and imperialism appreciator waited until he was moments from his death bed for his material conditions to lead him into understanding Marxism-Leninism was the correct ideological path. The inverse of being a positive actor for socialism then the conditions that a person finds themselves in can change them into a bad actor, detractor, or worse against socialism.
He did good with Cuba and some other international stuff but otherwise he should've been corncobbed
He was literally the only socialist leader keeping Communism international, and he gets no fucking credit for that.
khruschev used the purge to get into his position, exactly the problem with a mass hysteria not tempered with procedural obstacles. talented opportunists have a field day.
I can get it
If you grew up dealing without computers, they would just seem like garbage cans with sparks coming out of them
IBM was working with the Nazis and using computers to tabulate their genocide so it's reasonable to not be terribly interested
Eh. Stealing shit that works from your enemies is good and you should do it. Unlike most Nazi crap technology the IBM machines actually worked afaik.
I highly doubt Khrushchev was thinking about IBM’s role in the holocaust during his visit. I mean, he was in the US, the country that invaded the USSR and wanted Germany to wipe it off the map.
I'm not saying he was right, but maybe Trotsky had a point that's all I'm saying.
The USSR did kind of lag behind in terms of computing. They had an internal network set up in 1982 called Akademset. It even connected to ARPANET. But it was mainly for academics to share papers. There was a Fidonet connection too. I guess geography was a problem because I'm reading that networking in the USSR was predominantly done over satellite rather than piggybacking on phone lines.
Like it would have been cool seeing Soviet people on Usenet.
In 82 I don’t think there was any computer network in the US or Europe that wasn’t an academic network to share papers…
Well I was thinking that other places had Usenet, which had slightly more widespread use. My grandparents had some kind of Usenet connection in 85 they used to send emails to their pharmacist, for instance.
Khrushchev’s biggest problem wasn’t about computers, man.
Khrushchev’s biggest problem was re-introducing liberal ideology into the Soviet Union, even though in the form of “we’re actually competing with them”, which led to all kinds of faulty understanding of economics/the world that could have been avoided with the Marxist-Leninist path that Stalin was already set on.
I’ve always said that the fall of the Soviet Union wasn’t a failure of socialism, but a failure of liberalism. It was the lack of self-confidence of the socialist leaders in their own system and started to re-introduce liberalism back into the socialist state, thinking it could solve the internal problems they faced, that killed the Soviet Union.
I’m starting to think Stalin’s big spoon might’ve been a death blow the USSR because it made subsequent leaders hungry and sell out the country for literal treats
