What people who lived in the Soviet union and other socialist states have to say:
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Adult mortality increased enormously in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union when the Soviet system collapsed 30 years ago. https://archive.ph/9Z12u
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Former Soviet Countries See More Harm From Breakup https://news.gallup.com/poll/166538/former-soviet-countries-harm-breakup.aspx
This study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe.
- https://academic.oup.com/cje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cje/beac072/7081084?guestAccessKey=01c8dd9f-af1c-48b3-b271-eb5d3a45017c&login=false
From 1989-1998, Hungary was a failing democracy. Since 1998 it gradually became Viktor Orban's private kingdom.
It doesn't mean that communism is wrong (as you've provided multiple examples here that I haven't checked), but in the case of Hungary I'd say it is complicated.
The trajectory Hungary took after transition to capitalism mirrors what happened in most post USSR states. This just further supports the point that the communist system was better.
That is just the classic "Communism failed and the proof is the USSR!" Turned on it's head.
This more of a Hungary problem then a capitalism problem, although I'm sure it does it's fair share of damage.
Should they go back to communism? Maybe. I'm sure liberals, socialists and communists would all agree that kicking Orban out is a good first step.
What happened in countries like Hungary and Poland is a direct result of the transition to capitalism however. What's more this transition happened under the best possible conditions. The transition happened largely democratically without any violent revolutions, and these countries got support from the west to soften economic impact of the transition. Yet, despite all that we see that majority of post Soviet countries end up going in a similar direction under capitalism. Again, Hungary isn't an outlier here.
Ok, so it is not nostalgia, bad management, corruption, disillusionment "of how great capitalism is"... it is only that post Soviet nations had it better during the communist era and thus are better managed as Communist nations.
Whelp, I'll just remain a skeptic.
I wish the post Soviet nations, completely unsarcastically, good luck in the next elections or revolution. I would be happy to see the communist ideology continue to thrive in the face of capitalist debt slavery, and the contemptuous bourgeoisie.
Thing is that bad management, corruption, and so on, have happened in every human society that has ever existed. A political system isn't magically going to change that. What a political system can do however is create different selection pressures for behavior. Capitalist system selects for different kinds of behaviors than a communist one. As we see with the case of transition from communism to capitalism in eastern Europe, the selection pressures of capitalism result in far worse things happening than under communism.
Idealistically? Yes. I wholeheartedly agree. Capitalism will always encourage unfair competition, whereas socialism will strive to end it by its very definition.
I'm just still unconvinced that the post Soviet nations, as a whole, suffer the same "communism withdrawal symptom". The systematic pressures might be so that switching to Communism now will simply fail again (and let's not forget the dear old CIA... eh?).
Again, hope I'm wrong, but I don't see the point you're making as clearly as you do. I think it is a more complicated situation, but I sure do think that being more socialist wouldn't hurt them.
And I can't repeat this enough, remove Orban the dictator from power.
Unfortunately, I expect that things are going to get worse before they get better. I don't think people who are in power now will simply let it go the way communists did.
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14 year old white girl
Bravo they managed to also cram ageism and misogyny in the old "champagne socialism" meme. All in the single sentence.
Some small business tyrant, who left the USSR when they were four and who doesn't pay his staff, telling me how bad the Soviet Union was.
This is more accurate: Online discussion about capitalism
People living in a third world capitalist country
14-year-old white boy living in a Western country: I know more than you
Spot on.
These are the kids (OP included) calling you a tankie online:
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This meme feels like projection.
Online discussions about capitalism:
People who have to pay rent
30 year old comfortable software developer:
"I know more than you"
This is a stupid meme. Most people alive today that lived there before its collapse wish it had not.
Furthermore its dissolution was literally illegal and undemocratic.
Not just quality of life, but average life expectancy. The deliberate destruction of the Soviet Union was cause for one of the single largest drops in life expectancy in recorded history.
The
collapsedestruction of the Soviet Union also ushered in an era of unrestrained capitalist exploitation without a rival power to incentivize better social programs.Literally the entire world felt the blow of this tragedy.
Why is it that people living in former Soviet states overwhelmingly wish that the USSR was still around?
Have you considered there are other reasons besides nostalgia? Like the massive life expectancy and qol collapse under capitalism?
https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/32fb41e8-a5d4-41c0-9001-b3103bb43898.png
Life expectancy https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41294-021-00169-w
Oh yea, like if you are religious you are a threat to the state and therefore you are unfit for basically any leading role, or your property might be confiscated and you might be sent of to Siberia ?
Anti religion is needlessly antagonistic but also wasn't enforced like you are suggesting: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1920/11/13.htm
Lines for food namely bread and if the stars aligned meat.
According to the anti-communist cia their nutrition was in many ways better
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP85M00363R000601440024-5.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwijl7ChsciBAxXug4kEHS2ZCCAQFnoECBgQAQ&usg=AOvVaw06QRMVGCOurHDUtg96SRq0
Also breadlines are common under capitalism.
Big amount of corruption ?
Yes, theft from the public has definitely decreased since the the collapse. /s
Mandatory conscription to the military (and the corruption there too) ?
There are plenty of countries that do that after they lose around 20 percent of their population in a brutal war. Like Vietnam, for example.
Iron curtain ?
You mean the one the west put up? https://news.stanford.edu/2019/12/26/stalin-not-want-iron-curtain-descend/
Free speech and freedom of expression ?
Western countries have more sophisticated censorship and media apparatuses I give you that. Speak out in a real way though and look what happens to people like Fred Hampton.
Lines for food
yeah i stood in one of these a few days ago, the fucky thing is that i had to pay for the food after i reached the end of the line
concerning life expectancy and quality of life and corruption, funnily enough
But behind the self destructive behaviour, the authors say, are economic factors, including rising poverty rates, unemployment, financial insecurity, and corruption. Whereas only 4%of the population of the region had incomes equivalent to $4 (£2.50) a day or less in 1988, that figure had climbed to 32%by 1994. In addition, the transition to a market economy has been accompanied by lower living standards (including poorer diets), a deterioration in social services, and major cutbacks in health spending.
“What we are arguing,” said Omar Noman, an economist for the development fund and one of the report’s contributors, “is that the transition to market economies [in the region] is the biggest … killer we have seen in the 20th century, if you take out famines and wars. The sudden shock and what it did to the system … has effectively meant that five million [Russian men’s] lives have been lost in the 1990s.” Using Britain and Japan with their ratio of 96 men to every 100 women as the base population, the report’s authors have calculated that there are now some 9.6 million “missing men” in the former communist bloc. “The typical patterns are that a man loses his job and develops a drinking problem,” said Mr Noman. “The women then leave and the men die, first emotionally and then physically.”
Overall, the Russian death rate from accidents most of them involving alcohol has risen 83% since 1991. source
In order to have been a worker for at least 5 years in both systems and therefore have an informed opinion of the difference, you'd need to have been at least 25 by the collapse.
Tack 30 years into that and yeah, at youngest the people with the most informed opinion on which system they preferred are going to be old.
And if you think you had a better system that in the past and it got destroyed, feeling nostalgic isn't weird it's the most normal emotion possible.
This you? https://hexbear.net/comment/3889149
Typical Russian bullshit. I hope the dwindling, future generations of Russian scum know why they're pariahs, unable to travel outside of their smoldering wreck of a never-great, failed state
Cause honestly this comes off as incredibly racist and nationalist.
Who would have thunk the anticommunist was racist.
Yeah this is fairly common opinion of russian occupants in post-soviet countries outside russia. Wonder why.
Because they're racist bloodthirsty tyrants that get their funding and debts from NATO countries.
I wonder why communist leaders are some of the most popular leaders in their former socialist republics 🧐🧐
Because they are not. Stalin for example was a mass murderer just like Hitler. So why would anybody like him?
https://jewishcurrents.org/the-double-genocide-theory
Here is a mainstream Jewish holocaust survivor saying equating the communists and fascists is holocaust trivialization.
The difference is that Hitler was after one specific group of people and wanted to eradicate them. Nobody says that Stalin was as bad as Hitler, bit his death count was just as high. He killed millions of political enemies or people in the regions he conquered.
Hey, whoever told you those numbers is lying to you. The nazis killed 11 million people in the holocaust and 26-27 million soviet citizens. High estimates for people killed by the USSR outside of defeating nazism, failures, and sabotage is in the 100,000s, which is noticeably lower than capitalist oligarchies like the US and Britain. Also killing people based on them wanting to bring back old caste systems through violence is morally distinct from racism based mass killings.
The difference is that Hitler was after one specific group of people and wanted to eradicate them.
Also this isnt true, Jewish people, Roma, nuerodivergent people, disabled people, trade unionists socialists, communists, gay people, trans people, the list goes on.
Also you're still equating the two after being told doing so is holocaust denial. You're saying "well they killed equivalent amounts of people!"
How is saying Stalin wasn't a great guy either denying the holocaust?
You aren't saying that though, you are saying that they killed an equivalent amount of people. You're morally equating them. Also even the CIA didn't consider stalin a dictator in their since declassified internal documents, treating him as one is another way you were taught to equate the USSR with nazi Germany.
Yes ofc, but a big percentage of the deportated people were Jewish. They killed two thirds of the European Jewish population.
I know, that isn't the only group they targeted though. I was simply correcting an inaccuracy in what you said.
No:
Sorry, I thought it was high hundreds of thousands but it was actually a million. My mistake. Still, that is in no way similar to killing upwards of 35 million people in the name of bigotry.
The difference is that Hitler was after one specific group of people and wanted to eradicate them.
Either you have no idea what you're talking about, or you're just a straight up nazi apologist.
Which one are you?
Can you point us to the exact page of the Black Book you get your numbers from? I want to read along at home
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin
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Wild that using a source like this with a straight face doesn't cause you to pause and wonder if maybe there's anything to question about the US academy and their hegemonic representation of history.
They literally say that the intentional killing was around 1 million. Wikipedia is a notably right wing anticommunist source, and they say a million intentional deaths.
So you were lying?
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2019-05-09/stalin-is-more-popular-than-ever-in-russia-survey-shows