Could I, could we all imagine then that that year (1991) would bring such changes in two of my homelands, that here Dubrovnik, Rovinj, Sarajevo, and in Russia - Kiev, Crimea, Odesa, would become "abroad"... Bosnia, Herzegovina and Krajina... Nagorno-Karabakh and Chechnya... Thousands, millions of refugees, orphans, ruined lives, destroyed cities and villages, dead, maimed...
What is left of what we believed so much five decades ago and even during the war? What else am I destined to experience? Let me stop there...
This was from the memoir of Đorđe Lobačev a Serbian/Russian comic creator and essentially the only Soviet comic book creator until the 80s. He joined the partisans, survived WW2, got citizenship in the USSR, was deported by Tito to Romania, wasn't allowed to move to Leningrad because of fears over those who had worked in capitalist countries (least that's what bios say, I assume it was more specifically entertainment and artistic fields) until after the Thaw, only allowed back to Serbia decades later, only to watch all of it destroyed.
I was trying to find some communist comic history that wasn't defectors or dissenters driven, but came across this tragic fucking quote from an obituary of him. Sums up the helplessness of being an elderly person watching the collapse of both motherlands.
the fucking soviets man. Achieved multiple centuries within decades, and crashed just about as fast. Lenin’s quote about decades and weeks go both ways I suppose.This reminds me of an elderly woman in Ukraine who came out with a Soviet flag to welcome who she thought were the Russian soldiers. Turns out they were Ukrainian soldiers, and they snatched the flag from her and taunted her. I believe she lived a normal life up until 1991, that’s when she saw most, if not, all of her children and grandchildren die due to alcoholism, crime, and/or suicide.
I feel anger and disgust whenever I see westerners gush over the drunkard Yeltsin. Of course, he’s just a blip, but he’s the catalyst to everything we see now and the fuckers who got him to that position won’t even acknowledge it. They’ve won, they’ve caused endless suffering and misery to every side and they still get angry at the results.
"What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost."
we're living in barbarismI agree, and – though I recognize it could always get worse – if the choice is Socialism or Barbarism, and we've already got Barbarism, and the tone of the conversation around anti-capitalism has noticeably changed in the last few years.... Maybe there's hope for us?
This is untrue, we are not living in barbarism. The quote that you are referencing to reach your conclusion that we are living in barbarism was spoken by Rosa Luxemburg. The barbarism that Rosa Luxemburg was referring to in her quote, “As thing stand today capitalist civilization cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism” is defined by Engels in his work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State as when, the “natural endowments of the two hemispheres come into play” in this definition, barbarism is dominated by “the domestication and breeding of animals and the cultivation of plants”. Now if we compare this state to our current state it becomes clear that we are, in fact, not living in barbarism, not at all. We are, however, living through capitalism, which is certainly brutal, and barbaric, that much is true, but to say that we are living in barbarism is a gross misinterpretation of the severity of our current situation.
