this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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This seems right. Personally I'm not sure I could roll my eyes harder at the fact that so many people in 2026 are so ignorant as to be prepared to call themselves "communists" - after all the famines, the purges, the 40 years in which much of Europe was struggling to escape (literally) from communism... And then I saw that you, too, call yourself a communist! So I guess I'll stop there.
Except to recommend you the Ones and Tooze podcast, in which the brilliant host (an ex-communist) recently did a whole series, in great and illuminating detail, on the various communist thinkers. Which I listened to... dutifully.
Communists govern the largest economy in the world by PPP, and capitalism is falling apart at the seams as the spoils of imperialism are beginning to be cut off. The global south is escaping underdevelopment, and this is forcing austerity in the west, explaining the surge to the right. In the US Empire, communists are more and more common than ever before:
Famine was ended by communists in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc. These areas had woefully inefficient systems of agriculture, such as the kulak system, which served to enrich one group of people over the laborers they employed. Collectivization combined with industrialization is why food security was achieved after the introduction of socialism to these countries, and the famines commonly attributed by western historians to communism were the last of a long line of regular famines.
Similarly, purges in the largest majority of cases meant expulsion from the party or position, not execution, except in times of crisis, like the 1930s when fascism was on the rise. They were not done arbitrarily, but as a response to corruption, subterfuge, and sabotage.
It's also a bit silly to suggest that people spent "40 years trying to escape communism." Right up to the end, the majority of people in the USSR wished to retain both the USSR and the system of socialism. This is proven not just from eyewitness reports of support, but also vote totals:
Moreover, after the fall of socialism in Europe, the majority of people want it back or say they are worse off. This is compounded by the fact that over 90% of the Chinese population supports their government and system. Socialist countries run by communists have higher approval rates than capitalist states.
Looking at Adam Tooze, I don't see much indicating him as a former communist. He grew up in West Germany in the height of the Cold War, is trained in liberal economics such as Keynesian economics, though his grandfather was allegedly a soviet recruiter, which is cool. I'm not really convinced I could find much out of his mini-series on Luxemburg, Trotsky, Stalin, or Lenin, considering I've already read works both by them and about them in greater detail than a podcast is going to cover.
This isn't entirely true. The question posed essentially meant the USSR would reform into a more supranational organisation, granting more sovereignty and independence to the constituent republics. Voting "yes" was basically a vote for "'less' Soviet Union", as there was no option to vote to dissolve it entirely. It's also why after the yes-vote won, Soviet hardliners tried to coup the government.
When the New Union Treaty wasn't fully implemented, member republics took it upon themselves to run full independence referendums, which were passed with overwhelming numbers (see the results on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Referendums_in_the_Soviet_Union, 90%+ pro-independence in most countries. Remember, most happened in 1991 just like the Union referendum, and no large population swings to the complete opposite direction that fast). The massive disapproval of the communist party was also very visible, as the vast majority of republics started electing non-communist leaders.
And of course there were people still in favour of the Union, but they were largely outnumbered. Pro-union manifestations were met with large protests that often ended in police action to suppress them. Pro-Union sentiments started increasing again after the economic crises post-collapse, but it has never become so popular again to lead to a reformation.
I'm aware that after the votes, crisis in politics caused a dramatic swing in faith in the system. The question of viability of the socialist project wasn't unclear, however. The dissolution of the USSR was something that happened not due to some inevitable death clock in socialism. Contrary to what you believe, popular opinion can swing that fast, such as in the US Empire, where within a single month sentiment on Israel flipped from overwhelmingly positive to majority negative.
Further, as I already showed, the large majority of people in post-soviet countries feel worse off and/or regret its fall. Socialism was an effective system at meeting the needs of the people, and though liberalization and a harsh recovery process from World War II strained the system, it was not on the way to collapse.
It didn't go from +90% to -90%. That's what I mean with the huge 'swing' seen here. Negative attitudes on Israel went from 42% to 53% in 3 years time. Yet this supposed "total reversal of opinion" happened in months? Nonsense of course. Remember, the Soviet referendum did not have "dissolution" as an option. People picked the option closest to it.
This is irrelevant to the false notion that the Soviet Union dissolved against what the people wanted at the time, which that graphic is often used to misleadingly suggest.
Even then, opinion polling on the subject is highly unreliable. Even the same pollster slightly rephrasing the question nets wildly different results. In the Baltics opinion is pretty consistent that the fall of the USSR was a good thing. But Belarusians tend to disagree with that. But when Belarusians are asked if they prefer to follow a Soviet system or a western democratic system, they choose the latter. And when another pollster asks them again in the same year, opinions flip again.
There's certainly a strong sentimental nostalgia towards the Union, though not in all former member states. Yet it seems unlikely the population would be willing to vote it back into existence.
People did have a massive swing in opinion. I'm aware that dissolution was not an option, but your claim that people didn't change their opinion in light of the immense political turmoil between that vote and the second vote requires more evidence than "people don't change their minds that quickly." Rather, to the contrary, large shifts in opinion do happen more swiftly than gradually.
Further, the fact that the large majority regret the fall of the soviet union is relevant in showing that it clearly wasn't as simple as saying everyone hated living in the soviet union, but realized how good they had it afterwards. Polling is often inconsistent not because of bad polling, but political instability caused by the immense fuckery of capitalism and imperialism in these countries, and forces like NATO.
Protests were already widespread in the Union. Several member states had already declared nominal independence from Moscow. Gorbachev was doing damage control and trying his best to keep the Union from fracturing further. Elections in member republics saw huge rises in popularity for noncommunist parties.
The referendum was an attempt to gain the political momentum required for reform, in an ultimate effort to keep the Union together. It was essentially a kind of propaganda attempt to display large support for the reformed Union, made possible because dissolution was not on the ballot.
There was widespread civil discontent before the referendum. Elections saw noncommunists rise to power and several member states declared independence. Then I am somehow to believe that the population first swung all the way back to "actually the Soviet Union is great and we don't want to leave it" and back to "we should leave the Soviet Union" in a matter of mere months? That is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, which you don't have. The truth is far simpler: at every point once the civil unrest started, the population voted in favour of less Soviet Union and for more independence, and not the other way around.
My point regarding the phrasing of post-Soviet polling is that the wording drastically changes the outcome. Sure, people aren't happy about how the 90s turned out and they feel they're not part of a superpower anymore. They're not happy with being screwed over by western nations. They say those things were better under the Soviet Union. But ask them if they would go back to such a Union, and suddenly support evaporates. And in several former member states even the first few questions don't find much Soviet sympathies (eg the Baltics). They want to live in a stronger nation, akin to the Soviet Union, but they do not want to go back to what once was. It isn't a simple case of "boy we sure had it good", that does a huge disservice to the diverse and complicated opinions of the Union.
Gorbachev had also implemented Perestroika, and his policy of Glasnost had weakened the soviet system. The seeds for radical change for the worse and instability were already there. My point isn't that there was 0 discontent and it flipped to 100% discontent, but that people, despite the various nationalist movements in some of the member-states, overall did support the socialist project up to the end. After the vote, there was the hardliner coup, dramatic sharpening of contradictions, and the internal, anti-democratic dissolution by Yeltsin claiming legitimacy from the rising nationalist movements.
You have no evidence supporting your claims other than the idea that there was some discontent, which I never denied, and that people ultimately lost faith in the stabilty of the soviet union right at the end itself. Further, support for returning to socialism doesn't simply "evaporate," and again, it depends highly on the political fuckery in the region, the purging of communists by westerners, and the sheer devastation these countries went through. Trying to chalk it all up to simple pride in a stronger nation instead of the actual material benefits is an extraordinary claim.
Russia and Belarus, for example, are seeing rising waves of socialist sympathy among the populace. The CPRF is rising rapidly, and people fundamentally feel that capitalism should not last any longer. This represents the large majority of the post-soviet population.
CPRF support rising rapidly? You must live in a fantasy world. Their electoral results have rarely been worse, their 2024 presidential election candidate receiving a mere 4% of the vote (a record low for the party).
They recieved 63,000 new members over 4 years
The CPRF has restored ties with communist parties around the world
Stalin's popularity in Russia in general is rising dramatically, to the point of being reported in the west
And much more. At the end of the day, the Russian Federation is a bourgeois dictstorship, so it isn't going to just accept rising communist sympathies at a state level. The nationalists have a balancing act to play, trying to take advantage of rising soviet smpathies without legitimizing socialism.
Party membership is a bad indicator for national popularity, as evidenced by the historically bad election result that followed the first article you linked.
The second article does not have anything to do with the popularity of the party.
The third article contradicts the sentiment you express in your own paragraph; you suggest the Russian government is taking advantage of rising Soviet sympathies, as if it's "just happening". But as your article explains, those Soviet sympathies are being expressly fuelled and created by the Russian government, as part of their propaganda efforts to promote the great patriotic war (which Putin now claims they're in another one of course, fighting the west). It's artificial, not natural.
A rise in party membership in the CPRF does indeed suggest that they are growing, and further establishing legitimacy. National election results in war-time aren't a major indicator of popularity of the CPRF. Further, no, the nationalists are not creating soviet sympathies, but trying to take advantage of them. Capitalism has been devestating for Russia, and people yearn for the old days when their needs were better taken care of. The nationalists are appealing to that and trying to turn it into Russian pride.
The idea that the nationalists are just beaming sympathies to the heads of the citizenry, rather than the citizenry longing for a working system after the devastation of cspitalism and the nationalists are trying to take advantage of that, is absurd. That's not how propaganda works, you have to identify actually felt beliefs and leverage them.
If you look at just about any country anywhere, you'll find that party membership does not really correlate with election success, but rather with more radical beliefs or activism. The national election results of the CPRF had been on a downward trend well before the war broke out as well. Their membership may have increased, but electorally they lost about 70% support. Even in wartime that's hard to ignore.
I also don't think you've been paying attention to what the propaganda efforts of the Kremlin have been putting out. As a result, you have cause and effect reversed. They've been boosting national pride through the "great history of Russia", which inevitably means highlighting the Soviet Union and the great patriotic war. But the Soviet sympathies created through it are a side-effect of this.
This also explains why polling suggests that sympathies for the Soviet Union mostly (not fully) consist of cultural and military pride. Yet sympathies for the Soviet economic system is low in comparison. It's also heavily influenced by current geopolitics. Ukraine used to be the most pro-communist member state, but these days the majority no longer regrets its dissolution. In East-Germany, there's a significant chunk of people who believe life was better in the GDR, yet that effectively translates into nationalist support for parties like the AfD (who of course are fascist, not communist). In Hungary, a large majority believe they were better off under communism than they are now, yet a large majority of 70% supports the move to a market economy. Uzbeks believe the Soviet government better responded to their needs, yet only a tiny minority believe life was actually better in the USSR.
But this is all largely besides the original point, which is that the graphic showing the Soviet referendum results is used in a misleading narrative that suggests people did not want the Soviet Union to dissolve, as that wasn't on the ballot and subsequent referendum results showed overwhelming support for independence and dissolution. And as election results in former Soviet states prove, support for a return to communism or a more socialist system is fairly low, despite a complicated nostalgia for the Soviet Union in some member states.
Again, you are confusing how propaganda works. Propaganda doesn't "create" sentiment, it appeals to underlying sentiment. The working classes aren't morally just, nor gullible, nor intelligent, but instead rational, and therefore generally seek narratives that conform to their felt conditions.
It's not that I confuse cause for effect, it's that I go deeper, the cause is actually the devastation in capitalism compared to socialism resulting in rising socialist sentiment, the effect is that the nationalists take notice and are trying to twist it into Russian nationalism, causing a struggle between Russian nationalism and socialist nostalgia playing out in the Russian Federation, the effect of which is large increases in CPRF membership and restoration of soviet monuments and nomenclature. Cause and effect do not exist in a vacuum, but are instead the result of endless spirals. Dialectics at work.
Further, the CPRF supports Russia United against Kiev in the war, and has taken a stance of critical support. The fact that United Russia is doing better electorally right now doesn't mean communism is falling out of favor, but that communist analysis is rallying around the nationalists in Russia, and partisans aren't willing to advocate for overtaking the current system at the moment.
Polling does not suggest this, it suggests that the increase in poverty, austerity, sex work, drug abuse, homelessness, and overall devastation of capitalism wasn't worth it for the broad majority of society. You seek to explain sentiment derived from real, material economic conditions via culture and vibes, when the culture and vibes are a reflection of the economic base. You did it earlier with the idea that the nationalists are creating soviet pride in a vacuum, ignoring economic conditions, and you do it here again.
As for Ukraine, it's very convenient that you skip over the Banderite coup in 2014 where the nationalists took political power. Ukraine did used to be more pro-communist, especially in the Donbass region, but after the western-backed Euromaidan coup the nationalists took political supremacy and started punishing communists. Same for East Germany, after reunification the communists were punished in show trials and purged, leaving the right-wing West German political force with supremacy. This purge of leftists created a vacuum for far-right populists and nationalists, as capitalist devastation combined with a lack of leftist organizing results in the faf-right having free-reign.
Overall, when we take your convenient framing of trends and insistence on explaining demographic shifts not by real, material conditions but instead by a battle of vibes and ideas alone, we have to question your entire thought process. It's clear that you view history not as a long process that progresses in spirals, but as static snapshots, and the ideas held by the people not as coming from their real conditions economically but instead as beamed from above, and these failures in analysis are why you come to incorrect conclusions.
He talked about it - some variety of Trotskyism IIRC. A bit of a surprise but shouldn't have been. Tons of former Maoists have been in high positions. Even a neoliberal head of the European Commission (Barroso).
On the supposed virtues of communism, you won't convince me but I suppose you know that already. IMO the world would have done very well to listen to George Orwell, someone who saw through it all on the basis of up-front experience 90 years ago. That might have saved an awful lot of needless suffering. Or Orlando Figes, who wrote a book whose title says it all: "The USSR: A People's Tragedy".
Just straight up admitting your anti-communism is an unshakable article of faith that no argument or evidence can change.
To be fair, I don't think many communists globally are fans of Trotskyism, considering it's predominantly western and liberal-compatible. The vast majority of communists globally are Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyism is seen as more fringe. Trotskyists tend to already begin with anti-AES stances (for a variety of reasons, usually a combination of Red Scare propaganda mixed with alienation from capitalism), so going from "socialism is a good idea but never existed" to "socialism is a bad idea because what's existed hasn't worked" is a common jump. A former Trotskyist making loads of money off of denouncing communism is both entirely predictable and hardly compelling for those who've studied communism in theory and practice.
As for the rapist Eric Blair, also known as George Orwell, the western world listened to him too well. He didn't see through anything, rather, his position as a British fed (known for keeping a journal of people he knew and suspected of being Jewish and/or communists) and propagandist was extremely useful to western intelligence agencies. On Orwell is a good essay going over his dreadfall past and role in propagandizing. Orwell has been taught in countless schools not because of any truth, but because of his utility.
As for Figes, another that earns an enourmous sum of money from preaching the bible of anti-communism to serve capitalist interests, better historians exist. Syzmanski's Is the Red Flag Flying? The Political Economy of the Soviet Union today, Pat Sloan's Soviet Democracy, Human Rights in the Soviet Union, Anna Louise Strong's This Soviet World, Mary Stevenson Callcott's Russian Justice, the recently deceased Dr. Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds, all the way up to Professor Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance, there's tons of academic resources to get a much better view of socialism in practice.
I don't expect you to read these, of course, my point is that just like you don't expect to change your mind by me sharing evidence counter to your views, I'm unlikely to be swayed by professionals repeating standard anti-communist dogma. It takes a much greater amount of study and reflection to go against the dominant, hegemonic culture, nearly every common anti-communist talking point has been wielded against me at some point simply by me stating that I support socialism.
Is there anything specific you'd like to discuss, regarding the effectiveness of socialism/communism? We can have a constructive conversation surrounding specifics.
Their idol Mao killed approx 160 million humans.
Do you have a source on that? Even if you include landlords killed by the peasantry during land reform, all of the deaths by unintentional famine, and the excesses of the cultural revolution as deliberately killed by Mao, the numbers accepted by Historians are nowhere close to 160 million. This is such a fantastical number that even the famously debunked Black Book of Communism doesn't go over 100 million, and that was including the entire history of the soviet union as well as PRC. The Black Book of Communism famously included both non-births as deaths, and Nazis killed by the Red Army as "victims of communism."
Damn, out jerking the black book of communism by an order of magnitude. You're really going for it