Defending The Soviet Union

[barbos]

Thanks for the history lesson, barbos. I was reading Pravda and Izvestiya before you were born, and I've probably read a great deal more than you have from uncensored libraries.

You honestly believe that Pravda, Izvestiya or even soviet history books were writing all that? I have read no soviet papers and hated history in school, so I learned nothing there. You should read wikipedia more.

So forgive me, if I seem less than enamored of your take on the history of Poland and Russia, but I've been exposed to different perspectives on those subjects.

Again, I don't have a habit of inventing shit. What I told you is an accepted by historians view.

I admit that I did not learn history in a Soviet school system,

You are crazy if you think what I wrote were taught in Soviet schools. Again, read wikipedia.

and I concede that there might have been yet another perspective that I've missed. But I do believe that there is some reason why history books in the Soviet Union were subject to extreme censorship and why Russian scholars rushed to learn about their history from Western materials after the collapse of the SU. It isn't because the West was subject to the same kind of censorship that existed in the Soviet Union.

Again as someone who has a PhD in physics I can assure you that the only thing I learned in ordinary soviet school was that I hated it, especially history and other russian literature kind of crap. But I do remember that most of that shit was incredibly boring.
Not only that, I was formally "expelled" from University for failing History of Communist Party. I literally said on the test - I don't know the answer to your question and have no interest in this nonsense anyway. OK, i did not say the last part because "professor" knew that already. Good thing Perestroyka was in progress and I suspected I would be reinstated after mandatory service in the Army without problem, so I had. Most of what I learned about history I learned much later in life after internet became a thing.

The fact is that I could subscribe to Pravda and Izvestiya when I was a high school student learning Russian back in the 1960s.

Good for you. Wait, I feel sorry for you . I never had any interest in reading soviet papers.

The CIA actually stopped my subscriptions and sent me a postcard asking whether I wished them to continue receiving "propaganda" from the Soviet Union. I replied that I did, but other US citizens complained about this practice and took the CIA to court. The Supreme Court ruled against the CIA, and my subscriptions continued. I know that high school students studying English in the Soviet Union had no such opportunity to subscribe to US newspapers,

This is not true, at least for 80s. You could get some papers for the purpose of language learning. Not any paper but you could get some. I remember some British papers.

let alone take the KGB to court for blocking access to Western "propaganda".

Well, it's better now. They even air CNN, of course it's in english, so pretty much useless as far as propaganda concerned.

 

[barbos]

In any case, I don't remember 60s and can't say how people thought but in the 80s not many people took propaganda seriously. People would give lip service to it and then go back to telling jokes about Brezhnev.

 

[Copernicus]

Well, that does explain a lot, barbos. You never learned anything about history in school and had no interest in it. Everything you know, you learned later and got it from the internet. You rely almost exclusively on Wikipedia. Oh yeah, and you believe that Soviet schools were superior to US schools, except for all of the shit subjects that you had no interest in. Got it.

 

[barbos]

Well, that does explain a lot, barbos. You never learned anything about history in school and had no interest in it.

That's correct. It was boring propaganda. I mean modern history. Ancient history in early grades was less boring, but we are talking about modern one.

Everything you know, you learned later and got it from the internet. You rely almost exclusively on Wikipedia.

As opposed to you who learned modern history reading soviet papers from the 60s?

Oh yeah, and you believe that Soviet schools were superior to US schools, except for all of the shit subjects that you had no interest in. Got it.

I see what you are saying here. But I really meant science education when I said soviet schools were better. There seems to be consensus about that. And again, the fact that I had little interest in most subjects does not mean I would have been less bored in US school.
But yeah, history (modern) and russian literature in my own experience was boring and simply wrong. I was more interested in science. So it is only natural that I have not learned much of propaganda you claim I learned in soviet school.

In any case, you need to educate yourself a little about history, and no, watching US TV heads does not count as education.

 

[steve_bank]

In any case, I don't remember 60s and can't say how people thought but in the 80s not many people took propaganda seriously. People would give lip service to it and then go back to telling jokes about Brezhnev.

Did you grow up under the Soviet Union?

About 10 years ago I worked with a Russian immigrant engineer. He was always complaining about the oppressive USA and about delays in getting a green card.

I had lunch with him. He had absolutely no understanding of our political system. An insular education.

Over here we were well versed in Soviet politics/ in the 50s-70s there was an above ground communist party that published and may have even gotten a local official elected somewhere/

We were too aware, there was nothing for communism to grow in.

 

[steve_bank]

I think the Poles and others are deeply fearful of Russia. They look at Georgia, Crimea, and Ukraine.

I know you think that, media told you to think that, but you have been lied to.

I had a philosophy professor who was a teen in Lithuania post war. A Russian political officer had a town meeting. A person stood up and said 'If god does not exist why must you prove it'. The Russian drew his side arm and shot him.
People renumber the Russians.

Both sides have excellent anecdotes. They may even all be true.

The old standby, false moral equivalency. There was a Polish massacre by Russians in the war that is still a sore point for Poles.

 

[barbos]

In any case, I don't remember 60s and can't say how people thought but in the 80s not many people took propaganda seriously. People would give lip service to it and then go back to telling jokes about Brezhnev.

Did you grow up under the Soviet Union?

About 10 years ago I worked with a Russian immigrant engineer. He was always complaining about the oppressive USA and about delays in getting a green card.

Your point? It's much harder to get american citizenship than russian one.

I had lunch with him. He had absolutely no understanding of our political system. An insular education.

Again, point of this anecdote? I can complain about americans all day long, starting with Trump

Over here we were well versed in Soviet politics

We who?

in the 50s-70s there was an above ground communist party that published and may have even gotten a local official elected somewhere/

We were too aware, there was nothing for communism to grow in.

Well, US intelligence and experts in everything about Russia failed to predict USSR collapse.

 

[barbos]

I know you think that, media told you to think that, but you have been lied to.

Both sides have excellent anecdotes. They may even all be true.

The old standby, false moral equivalency. There was a Polish massacre by Russians in the war that is still a sore point for Poles.

Poles? I think anecdote was about litvinians? You paint a picture where everybody have a sore against russians and that's it, no other sores.
The fact is, Poland had sores against everybody (Russia, Ukraine, germans ,Czech) and all these has sores against Poland and each other, and jews have a giant sore against everybody except soviets which is a bit weird.
But you keep singling out Russia for some reasons.

 

[Sarpedon]

Katyn forest, yes it was poles.

I suspect there might have also been a massacre of Lithuanians. In practice, any soviet citizens who helped the Germans were heavily punished afterwards. (Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians were forcibly made USSR citizens.)

People single out Russia, because the fact that the USSR dominated by Russia is obvious to everyone.

I too would question someone who relies solely on the internet for information on Russia. While Wiki is a good tool, in these days when Russia is aggressively using the internet to spread disinformation, I'd be a little more skeptical.

 

[steve_bank]

From the reports Russia has a general health problem and a shrinking population. It has been reported there are around 40,000 NK workers in Russia,

When Putin went to Israel he said he considered the Russian Jews to be Russian and urged them to go back.

Few want to go to Russia.

The string of post Soviet leaders have continued the underlying system If they adopted European economics and politics Russia would grow.

The worse thing we can do to Snowden is leave him in Russia,

 

[barbos]

Katyn forest, yes it was poles.

I suspect there might have also been a massacre of Lithuanians. In practice, any soviet citizens who helped the Germans were heavily punished afterwards. (Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians were forcibly made USSR citizens.)

People single out Russia, because the fact that the USSR dominated by Russia is obvious to everyone.

I too would question someone who relies solely on the internet for information on Russia. While Wiki is a good tool, in these days when Russia is aggressively using the internet to spread disinformation, I'd be a little more skeptical.

Wikipedia is pretty unbiased when it comes to history, it's certainly better than relying on American TV heads and Hollywood movies from the 80s which is what seems most here do.

 

[barbos]

From the reports Russia has a general health problem and a shrinking population. It has been reported there are around 40,000 NK workers in Russia,

When Putin went to Israel he said he considered the Russian Jews to be Russian and urged them to go back.

Few want to go to Russia.

Well. compare that to poles in GB. They were asked to return to Poland too, Few want to return back to Poland.

The string of post Soviet leaders have continued the underlying system If they adopted European economics and politics Russia would grow.

You repeat this without any thinking at all. Yes, they made a lot of mistakes, but it was not as if Russian economy could have been turned into European one easily. Look at Ukraine now, their current "government" could not be more pro-europian and anti everything russian. At one point they were literally recruiting foreigners into their government.
Yet they are in deep shit economically.

The worse thing we can do to Snowden is leave him in Russia,

You can leave him in China, it would definitely be worse. Don't know why are you bringing him up here.

 

[Sarpedon]

Fundamentally changing an economy is much easier said than done.

One of the reasons that russia became so instantly corrupt is because all the state enterprises were all auctioned off when communism ended, and the only people who had money to buy them with were criminals.

 

[Copernicus]

Fundamentally changing an economy is much easier said than done.

One of the reasons that russia became so instantly corrupt is because all the state enterprises were all auctioned off when communism ended, and the only people who had money to buy them with were criminals.

Russia did not become instantly corrupt. The black market was a dominant force during the Soviet period, and the KGB had intimate connections with them. Almost everyone who was able to travel abroad was either employed by the KGB or required to write regular reports to them on contacts and activities. (My knowledge of this is based on conversations with visiting acquaintances, not just secondary sources.) The KGB itself would import many of the goods that ended up on the black market back home. Smuggling was a very large, lucrative industry. The people now in control are largely the same people who were in control back then--Party apparatchiks in the old days. The only way to get ahead was to become a member of the CPSU.

When our university Russian language study tour visited in 1965, we were constantly pestered by black marketeers, some of whom shadowed us from city to city. It could not have been possible that the KGB was unaware of them, since we were always under constant surveillance. Every single one of us had our luggage "lost" in transit between cities, but later "found" again after the contents had been repacked. It's not like there were a lot of Western visitors to look after back in those days, so they would have noticed the same black marketeers showing up in different cities.

 

[Sarpedon]

Ah, yes, of course it wasn't an instantaneous process.

I was merely referring to the great speed at which we proceeded from "Yay! No More Communism!" to "Shit, this place is corrupt!"

A rapid and almost instantaneous disappointment.

 

[Copernicus]

The 90s were pretty chaotic, given the power struggle between Gorbachev's liberal glasnost policies and the old guard conservative hardliners. Yeltsin was an old-style Communist Party boss who helped bring down an unpopular attempted coup, but he was never an able administrator. He was corrupt and unable to control his alcoholism. So chaos was rampant.

Just to give another anecdote from a 1997 visit: my wife and I visited a rail office at the last minute to buy a first class ticket on a train from Moscow to St Petersburg. We were told that no such tickets existed, but we didn't take the hint. My wife started to panic, not realizing that they just wanted a bribe. (There is a whole song-and-dance routine in Russia in such situations, but we just weren't up to working out how things were done.) Other Russians in line behind us quickly realized exactly what was happening and started berating the ticket clerk, who suddenly found two first class tickets that she had not "seen" earlier. Luckily, I spoke enough Russian that people in the office felt some sympathy for our plight. However, what was played out there was fairly common, and we had heard much worse stories.

The fact is that conditions improved dramatically for Russians after Putin took over, so he is still very popular, despite the decline and widely publicized (in the West) protests against his crackdown on civil liberties. Had Putin been a more enlightened leader and not engaged in ham-fisted meddling in Ukrainian politics, the Russian economy would probably be booming today. I have not been back since 1997, but my impression from afar is that things are still better there for ordinary Russians than they ever were under Yeltsin's chaotic rule.

 

[barbos]

Russia has always had corruption. I blame monarchy and Russia's general largeness and mongols too. their whole thing was based on corruption. 1990s attempt at western style decentralized democracy has failed the same way Peter the Great largely failed in his time. Now Putin is effectively elected monarch and people are sorta OK with it. He is getting old and will eventually lose it.

Yeah, and I would not call black market corruption.

 

[Copernicus]

Russia has always had corruption. I blame monarchy and Russia's general largeness and mongols too. their whole thing was based on corruption. 1990s attempt at western style decentralized democracy has failed the same way Peter the Great largely failed in his time. Now Putin is effectively elected monarch and people are sorta OK with it. He is getting old and will eventually lose it.

Peter the Great had problems that had nothing whatsoever to do with corruption or decentralized democracy. Nor were Mongols especially corrupt. They actually established fairly organized regimes. But I don't think that it is worth arguing these points with you, given your disdain for the social sciences.

Putin no longer allows fair elections, and public opinion polls in Russia are no longer reliable. So it is difficult to assess his popularity, although the consensus seems to be that he could win the popular vote in a fair election. The problem is that Russia never really established a decentralized democracy. Kerensky's government was very short-lived and got cut off at the knees by a Bolshevik coup. Yeltsin was an incompetent buffoon, and Putin's focus seemed to be on trying to reestablish the status quo ante. He will likely remain in power for the foreseeable future, as he has managed to eliminate almost every credible challenge to his authority. There is no independent press or judiciary. The legislature is a rubber stamp. When Putin passes, there is likely to be a period of instability again, because he is making sure that there can be no rivalry to his centralized grip on power.

The United States was very lucky in having a leader like George Washington to steer it away from the tendency to consolidate power in a ruling elite. Other popular revolutions, like the French and Russian revolutions, went through disastrous periods that ended up in tyrannical governments.

Yeah, and I would not call black market corruption.

That attitude is not a uniquely Russian perspective, but it is an attitude that allows corruption to flourish. Regulation is important in order to keep wealth distribution generalized across a population. Otherwise, you end up with a plutocracy, and that is just what seems to be happening in both Russia and the United States lately.

 

[barbos]

Russia has always had corruption. I blame monarchy and Russia's general largeness and mongols too. their whole thing was based on corruption. 1990s attempt at western style decentralized democracy has failed the same way Peter the Great largely failed in his time. Now Putin is effectively elected monarch and people are sorta OK with it. He is getting old and will eventually lose it.

Peter the Great had problems that had nothing whatsoever to do with corruption or decentralized democracy.

I did not say had. I merely pointed out that he tried to copy European system of that time and largely failed. But corruption was a factor for him.

Nor were Mongols especially corrupt.
They actually established fairly organized regimes.

Oh, they were fairly corrupt. And all regimes which can be traced to them (Central Asia) are extremely corrupt now.

But I don't think that it is worth arguing these points with you, given your disdain for the social sciences.

OK

Putin no longer allows fair elections, and public opinion polls in Russia are no longer reliable. So it is difficult to assess his popularity, although the consensus seems to be that he could win the popular vote in a fair election. The problem is that Russia never really established a decentralized democracy. Kerensky's government was very short-lived and got cut off at the knees by a Bolshevik coup. Yeltsin was an incompetent buffoon, and Putin's focus seemed to be on trying to reestablish the status quo ante. He will likely remain in power for the foreseeable future, as he has managed to eliminate almost every credible challenge to his authority. There is no independent press or judiciary. The legislature is a rubber stamp. When Putin passes, there is likely to be a period of instability again, because he is making sure that there can be no rivalry to his centralized grip on power.

Yes, Putin is essentially a monarch.

The United States was very lucky in having a leader like George Washington to steer it away from the tendency to consolidate power in a ruling elite. Other popular revolutions, like the French and Russian revolutions, went through disastrous periods that ended up in tyrannical governments.

Yes, so why US administrations are so simplistic in their attempts to change these regimes?
Ukraine - disastrous results
Iraq - disastrous results
Libya - disastrous results.
China - (US were not able to interfere) remarkable results.

Yeah, and I would not call black market corruption.

That attitude is not a uniquely Russian perspective, but it is an attitude that allows corruption to flourish. Regulation is important in order to keep wealth distribution generalized across a population. Otherwise, you end up with a plutocracy, and that is just what seems to be happening in both Russia and the United States lately.

I don't see how it's related to black market thing. Soviet Union had black market for stuff which government was not able to provide.

 

[steve_bank]

in the news. For the first time SA is allowing women to drive. To provide cars for women a dealership is opening for women only. Apparently they can not shop at existing dealers.

Talk about a bizarre culture. Add to that the Saudi propaganda commercials trying to paint SA as good for women.