Lots of moments of people looking into the camera and going "how could communism do this?" which is cringe, but otherwise it's a fantastic story of human drama and how bad shit can get. Funny, I read this morning that Gorby is now dead, weird timing.
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I had a similar feeling. To me, much of the show felt less about blaming communism for the disaster and more about blaming these people who were more concerned with their position and their appearance than with actual human lives. Personally I didn't think it was that unfair to the Soviet Union.
I may well be misremembering it (it's been a while) but I remember it as kind of blaming communism for that mindset. Yeah, it was because selfish people did selfish things, but that's what you get with communism.... that that kind of person will rise to the top (when of course that's actually capitalism). I'm thinking specifically of all the pushback the main protagonists got from everyone above them who just didn't want to hear the hard truths as well as a specific scene near the end I won't spoil except to say it involves thinly veiled threats from a very nefarious high ranking character and the ultimate fate of the main character.
We did see it happen a bit with the ORC COVID response, where there was a couple of instances of cover-up and misreported data because regional officials didn't want to look bad to their national counterparts. Of course, once that facts of the matter were finally out in the open, they were able to demonstrate a superior response to the crisis. I think it can be an issue with ML-style communist governments that beuracracy can snag things up. Obvíously nothing about that is meant to simply that liberalism is a viable alternative in any way.
I hear you yeah. I think that in any system (esp hierarchical ones of course) you will have plenty of ambitious people trying to rise within it and unfortunately that will include a lot of selfish people. (A person can be ambitious without being a selfish sociopath obviously but selfishness can be very conducive to ambition). It's partly why I'll never completely shed my anarchist roots.
But we now have a pretty good set of examples as to which systems are more able to recognize and correct these problems as they arise. And the example you use is a perfect one as to show why China's is superior in that sense. That's absolutely not to say it's anywhere near perfect.
Yaaaaaaaaaa
If I recall from the time i came out, I remember it was less directed towards the Soviets and more using the soviet backdrop to critique bad shit
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I think in the director's commentary they do mention of how interesting it was that people would sacrifice a lot for the common good and it wouldn't happen in US. Also though, I wouldn't give too much credit to the show, due to showrunners literally breaking the fourth wall every 30 minutes to say "Did you know that Soviet Union is baaaaaaaad?"
That's a good catch, didn't notice that. I did see so far lots of selflessness, but my cynical side wants to believe it's framed as the soviet people being unthinking automatons. I dunno, either way it's good so far, real good.
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Maybe I'm overly cynical but to me that was just the common lie regarding AES states: "the people of X nation are great! So, sad they are oppressed by brutal regime Y"; priming the public to accept efforts of intervention/warfare.
I quite liked Shcherbina and his little arc over the course of the show that was pretty emblematic of those themes, I really liked how he used the little tidbits on radioactivity he learned from Legasov on the way there to catch the two rat facility directors in their lies, and generally turns out to be a more standup guy than his initial introduction serves to show.