this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2026
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Before or after the dissolution of socialism? People became far more impoverished after the dissolution, and the destruction of safety nets meant to help people.
Things getting worse doesn't mean they were good before lol
The USSR had steady and consistent economic growth, and provided free, high quality education and healthcare, full employment, cheap or free housing, and fantastic infrastructure and city planning that still lasts to this day despite capitalism neglecting it. This rapid development resulted in dramatic democratization of society, reduced disparity, doubling of life expectancy, tripling of functional literacy rates to 99.9%, and much more. Living in the 1930s famine would not have been good, but it was the last major famine outside of wartime because the soviets ended famine in their countries.
Literacy rates, societal guarantees in the 1936 constitution, reports on the healthcare system over time, and more are good sources for these claims.
The USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.
When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski's Human Rights in the Soviet Union.
The truth, when judged based on historical evidence and contextualization, is that socialism was the best thing to happen to Russia in the last few centuries, and its absence has been devastating.
Death rates spiked:
And wealth disparity skyrocketed alongside the newly impoverished majority:
Capitalism brought with it skyrocketing poverty rates, drug abuse, prostitution, homelessness, crime rates, and lowered life expectancy. An estimated 7 million people died due to the dissolution of socialism and reintroduction of capitalism, and the large majority of post-soviet citizens regret its fall. A return to socialism is the only path forward for the post-soviet countries.
When you look at the US Empire and western Europe as having higher quality of life than the USSR, you are looking at the benefits of imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism and wishing the USSR also practiced this, instead of helping liberate colonies and the global south. Russia in particular was a semi-feudal backwater in 1917, and made it to space 5 decades later. The USSR was not the picture of wealth, but was for its time the picture of development and rapid progress.
Do you have charts that include all the soviets combined or just Russia? Russia practiced its own version of imperialism over Siberia, Ukraine, etc so showing charts titled "Russia" is telling. Would love to see life expectancy in Ukraine following the holodomor
It's difficult to find compiled data going over each member state of the USSR. The earliest I can find for Ukraine only goes back to 1950, but reflects the same trends in life expectancy as Russia: a doubling of life expectancy following the completion of collectivizing agriculture in the 1930s and coming out of World War II.
The USSR was not imperialist, the RSFSR was also not imperialist towards other SSRs and SFSRs. This highlights a terrible misunderstanding of socialist economics. Across the board, Russia was in general more developed due to having started off earlier, but this was not at the expense of other socialist states in the soviet bloc.
Finally, the 1930s famine was neither intentional nor did it only impact Ukraine. Surrounding areas were met with the same weather disasters and problems with kulaks, bourgeois farmers, resisting collectivization by killing livestock, burning crops, and taking up arms. The combination of struggles over collectivization with weather disasters caused agricultural output to plummet, even though collectivization increased agricultural output once it was completed, ending famine in areas where it was historically common.
Why don't you take all this misplaced energy defending an authoritarian state with really excellent propaganda and use it to support a group actually doing some good like the Zapatistas or something
Why don't you take all this misplaced energy attacking past socialist projects and instead so something good like organizing or reading theory
You can organize and read theory without supporting Stalinism et al. A boot by any other name still tastes like leather
It's a good thing for the working classes to use the boot against capitalists, landlords, and fascists, actually, and this is precisely what the Zapatistas have done with their state, something they have in common with the USSR. "Stalinism" isn't a thing beyond specific policies of Stalin, the ideology of the USSR is Marxism-Leninism, which was a key inflence guiding Zapatismo.
I really loved with the Zapatistas were authoritarian and took all the land from the plantation owners at gun point, it was very cool of them
The Zapatistas don't have enough tanks for .ml to support them I guess
Jabril is being honest, not sarcastic.
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They have a state with a military that enforces their political power via weapons. They are just as authoritarian as every other leftist state
Yes, I think they should have more tanks. Don't you?
I'm defending the world's first federation of socialist states from undue slander, because I'm a Marxist-Leninist, and support socialist states like the PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. that carry over its legacy. The Zapatistas are cool, but small, and their own movement that isn't really Marxist nor anarchist but is their own. They aren't relevant to the current conversation.
Secondly, I already addressed this elsewhere, but the categorization of the USSR as "authoritarian" is meaningless without class analysis. Rather than being the tyranny of capitalists and landlords over the working classes, the USSR used state power against those former ruling classes, as well as fascists that sought to overthrow the socialist system. Any effective, lasting socialist state needs to have the mechanisms to defend itself both internally and externally, something the Zapatistas have in common with the USSR.
The reason socialists need to defend the USSR from Red Scare narratives is because the Red Scare is used as a cudgel against anyone trying to improve the world. The horrifying version that exists purely in imagination is something relentlessly thrown at us. Rather than distancing ourselves from former socialism, we should dispel the slander, because of 2 main reasons:
It is entirely unconvincing to paint a purer and purer pucture of a hypothetical socialism free from all of the imagined USSR's sins for those who have not studied it. Why should this time be so far removed from the USSR? Obviously conditions are different, but many struggles faced by the USSR and its real problems are common for any socialist state.
Even if we play along with the Red Scare, it will still be used as a cudgel.
That's why it's best to take an honest approach and cede no ground to liberalism and bourgeois historiography. As socialists, we need to tell history from a proletarian perspective, advancing the cause of socialism.
Quibbling over the definition of "authoritarian" is kind of a red flag for a country that invented the term "gulag"
Defending the Soviet Union in this way has the same energy as someone claiming that the Nazis actually did some really good scientific research
Marxists have been discussing the class nature of authority since Marx and Engels themselves, see Marx's Conspectus of Bakunin's Statism and Anarchy and Engels' On Authority. On the whole, soviet prisons and the justice system itself were more progressive than their peers, Mary Stevenson Callcott documented it quite well in Russian Justice. The term "gulag" came from the GULAG administration, and doesn't mean "torture/execution camp" or anything of the sort.
Defending the USSR from undue slander is the only correct path for a socialist to take. We defend the USSR because we defend the achievements of real, existing socialism, and we want to criticize the USSR's shortcomings from an accurate point of view. Any comparisons equating communists to Nazis contributes to Double Genocide Theory, a form of Holocaust trivialization. I'll leave you with a quote:
If you consider yourself a socialist, you owe it to our predecessors to wipe away the sludge cast onto their graves, and carry the mission for socialism forward.
You're like a parody of an anarchist lmao
"Pointing out that my epithet is categorically meaningless is a real red flag for a country that had -checks notes- prisons."
Are you just doing spooky Slavic word association at this point?
did you somehow miss subcommandante marcos explaining that the use of force to compel local antogonists to comply was helpful?
Cowbee: brings receipts
You: But they were the Bad Evil Bad Guys, my government and 30,000 movies (not propaganda) told me so!
Doesn't mean they were bad before either. In fact, what you said doesn't mean anything at all.