I’m gonna bet author of this post never lived anywhere near anywhere near actual USSR.
I get it, I hate capitalism too. But USSR was dictatorship that murdered milions and didn’t care about the little “you”. Stop glorifying authoritarian regimes.
One great thing was how safe it was. My parents just left me alone when they went to work, and I’d hang out with friends after school. Everything was really convenient as well cause all the things you needed were in walking distance. You didn’t even need public transit most of the time.
In summer, my family timeshared a coop dacha with a couple of other families and I’d hang out with their kids.
We only had a black and white TV though, even in the late 80s. And there weren’t a lot of shows to watch. But my parents got me reading at an early age, and I ended up loving sci-fi which is still my fav genre today.
There wasn’t any consumerism, and no ads blasted in your face. You didn’t buy stuff often, and things like clothing or gadgets all the time. Stuff was generally meant to last. There were no malls really either. There were a lot of parks though, and my parents really liked going for walks. So it’s another habit I’m glad I developed.
School was pretty intense. You had to juggle a bunch of subjects, and that was pretty tough.
This literally just reads like what I hope my retirement will look like. I’m done with this consumerist hell. I just want some peace and hopefully my friends in close vicinity so we can visit each other and cook/bake things that we share over a cup of tea
Indeed, capitalist society has a drive to monetize every human interaction, and that’s just fucked. We need places to just hang out and be ourselves without being expected to constantly buy shit.
First part of this is something I think the Soviets truly got right, city planning. Huge shame it was maligned after all the public run services were thrown to the dogs so the intertwined housing blocks then became increasingly shit.
It’s kind of funny how the whole 15 minute city idea that people keep talking about has been right there this whole time. Incidentally, China structures cities very much in a similar way as well. Everything is walkable there.
Likely yeah, my family moved around a lot after the collapse. And that’s the main thing I noticed, people aren’t that different wherever you go. We all have the same needs and drives. We hang out with friends, do stuff to pass the time, go to school, work, etc. But there are some important differences that come from having guarantees in life. For example, nobody in USSR worried about losing their job and ending up on the street or not being able to retire in dignity. These were a category of thoughts that simply didn’t exist because these were considered to be inalienable human rights. Today, living in Canada, I always have the thought of what will happen if I lose my job in the back of my mind. It’s an ever present worry hanging over you. You can be making good money, and like you work, and then the company you work for could go out of business, or you can get laid off because some a spreadsheet didn’t line up the way investors want. I’d give anything to have the guarantees my parents had back in the Soviet days.
It was literal labour benefit vacation in state owned or coop resorts for which most of workforce was legible, which you would know if you actually read that one line instead of fixating over the word “dacha” like the pavlov’s dog fed on anticommunist propaganda.
And if you knew how to read both comments and statistics, you’d be able to tell that in the 80’s access to coop dachas had… What, from 3 m in 1970’s to 8 million families by the end of 80s - So about 5-12% of population? (Source: T.G. Nefedova’s 2012 article “Gorozhane i dachi”)
But no, instead you focus on your imagination that I must’ve mean luxury villas like in the 50s?
You clearly do, since from my memory (granted, from Poland, not USSR) i never met any worker or worker children who was not going to vacations yearly before 1989. So either Poland was vastly better than USSR or your article is shit, or the definition of “dacha” and “vacations” vastly vary.
FWP peaked at 4m adults yearly (including partial refinancing) in the early 80s.
It is true to almost every kid during PRL was able to participate in some form of vacation. Please note that most were at the level lower than coop dachas, mostly tents, schools etc, and it was only partially refinanced.
Great, good for you. I grew up in one of USSR satellite states, and it sucked balls.
Poverty was widespread, and if you dared to complain you were disappeared.
Surprisingly, my life is not that bad now. If anything, I wish USSR had fallen sooner.
I’m sure there is some conflating going on with the fall of communism and the “shock therapy” after. Even if not, it’s not really like the 80s under Gorb were really what any left leaning person likes to recall when we think of the Soviet union.
Ah yes, the good old, fuck you I got mine. The fall of USSR meant that millions of people had their lives destroyed. But little scumbag here is doing fine.
Well, if it helps, sooner or later, all of the world will follow in the footsteps of the USSR. That part is inevitable. Only other alternative is complete ecological collapse and extinction.
Personally, I can’t wait for the socialist world to follow. I hope all the Western countries that refuse to embrace socialism stay in their capitalist hellscape and not start shit with the rest of the world
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.
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:
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.
I don’t really know what you mean by saying you aren’t opposed to socialism when you’re clearly following the Red Scare playbook.
“All those things the Nazis did are bad, but what does that have to do with the crimes of the Judeo-Bolsheviks?”
The same people who pinky swore that all the things I said are true are the same people who held a flashlight under their chin and told you about the scary USSR when you were a child. All these fairytales come from the same source, and believing any one of them is just as stupid as believing any other.
Stop letting the Epstein Empire tell you what to think about it’s enemies
Great, I however grew up in post-communist country and seen with my own eyes the fallout of it’s existence.
Exchanging one propaganda for another is just as bad. Fuck USA, but also fuck USSR. Both of those can be true.
And wealth disparity skyrocketed alongside the newly impoverished majority:
Just because two statements can be true does not mean any two statements must be true. The facts have shown that capitalism has been a disaster, and that a return to socialism is necessary for post-soviet states.
I however grew up in post-communist country and seen with my own eyes the fallout of it’s existence.
“I grew up during the feeding frenzy of capitalist pillaging that immediately followed the death of the Soviet Union and it sucked, so fuck communism for that.”
Bro what are you even saying. “I grew up in Hiroshima after the US nuked it and it sucked, so fuck Japan.” You grew up under capitalism, take up your issues with the rich western pedophiles who actually engineered them.
Ask an anticommunist to describe the horrors of communism, and every time…
Edit: I cannot wrap my head around this level of dumb bullshit.
"I grew up during the Spanish occupation with morion-clad assholes raping and pillaging everywhere, so I know how bad life was in Aztec Tenochitlan "
“I grew up with US bombs and napalm raining down of my family, so I know how horrible Communist Vietnam is”
“Psh, you think Indonesian society was acceptable? You should have seen how fucked up it was under Dutch colonial rule. Fuck the natives for that.”
Let’s hope children of this generation all over the world currently growing up with high oil prices are not as stupid as Liome and understand that it’s capitalist Usonia doing all of this.
Liome didn’t even talk bad of a socialist government.
Liome talked bad of a capitalist regime being sucked dry by another capitalist regime and likely moved to the capitalist regime that exploited her motherland, which she praises, and is about to fall apart from exploiting its own population.
“murdered millions” intentional? targeted? What millions are you talking about?
Some policies were not that effective or maybe even wrong but the deaths were in most cases not intentional.
Get some sources or at least hints to what you are talking about…
bro dont comment on these communities. it’s no use. nobody here listend to reason. i also agree that capitalism is bad, but is capitalism under a red flag and dictatorship really better?
Here’s the problem, you think “reason” is “whatever the Epstein empire told you about the people it’s afraid of”, and you’re talking to a bunch of people who have actually fact checked their bullshit.
I’m gonna bet author of this post never lived anywhere near anywhere near actual USSR.
I get it, I hate capitalism too. But USSR was dictatorship that murdered milions and didn’t care about the little “you”. Stop glorifying authoritarian regimes.
I grew up in USSR, but do tell me more how terrible my life was.
100% serious and sincere question: could you say more about what growing up in the USSR was like?
One great thing was how safe it was. My parents just left me alone when they went to work, and I’d hang out with friends after school. Everything was really convenient as well cause all the things you needed were in walking distance. You didn’t even need public transit most of the time.
In summer, my family timeshared a coop dacha with a couple of other families and I’d hang out with their kids.
We only had a black and white TV though, even in the late 80s. And there weren’t a lot of shows to watch. But my parents got me reading at an early age, and I ended up loving sci-fi which is still my fav genre today.
There wasn’t any consumerism, and no ads blasted in your face. You didn’t buy stuff often, and things like clothing or gadgets all the time. Stuff was generally meant to last. There were no malls really either. There were a lot of parks though, and my parents really liked going for walks. So it’s another habit I’m glad I developed.
School was pretty intense. You had to juggle a bunch of subjects, and that was pretty tough.
Otherwise, life is just life.
This literally just reads like what I hope my retirement will look like. I’m done with this consumerist hell. I just want some peace and hopefully my friends in close vicinity so we can visit each other and cook/bake things that we share over a cup of tea
Indeed, capitalist society has a drive to monetize every human interaction, and that’s just fucked. We need places to just hang out and be ourselves without being expected to constantly buy shit.
First part of this is something I think the Soviets truly got right, city planning. Huge shame it was maligned after all the public run services were thrown to the dogs so the intertwined housing blocks then became increasingly shit.
It’s kind of funny how the whole 15 minute city idea that people keep talking about has been right there this whole time. Incidentally, China structures cities very much in a similar way as well. Everything is walkable there.
Sounds more like the time you grew up in and less about where you grew up.
You could be describing my childhood in canada
Likely yeah, my family moved around a lot after the collapse. And that’s the main thing I noticed, people aren’t that different wherever you go. We all have the same needs and drives. We hang out with friends, do stuff to pass the time, go to school, work, etc. But there are some important differences that come from having guarantees in life. For example, nobody in USSR worried about losing their job and ending up on the street or not being able to retire in dignity. These were a category of thoughts that simply didn’t exist because these were considered to be inalienable human rights. Today, living in Canada, I always have the thought of what will happen if I lose my job in the back of my mind. It’s an ever present worry hanging over you. You can be making good money, and like you work, and then the company you work for could go out of business, or you can get laid off because some a spreadsheet didn’t line up the way investors want. I’d give anything to have the guarantees my parents had back in the Soviet days.
That gives me a much more meaningful idea of what you experienced. Thanks for doing that
Of course an affluent Russian family would remember USSR childhood foundly lol.
(Oh, sorry, no, it was called “lucky”, not “affluent”).
It was literal labour benefit vacation in state owned or coop resorts for which most of workforce was legible, which you would know if you actually read that one line instead of fixating over the word “dacha” like the pavlov’s dog fed on anticommunist propaganda.
And if you knew how to read both comments and statistics, you’d be able to tell that in the 80’s access to coop dachas had… What, from 3 m in 1970’s to 8 million families by the end of 80s - So about 5-12% of population? (Source: T.G. Nefedova’s 2012 article “Gorozhane i dachi”)
But no, instead you focus on your imagination that I must’ve mean luxury villas like in the 50s?
You clearly do, since from my memory (granted, from Poland, not USSR) i never met any worker or worker children who was not going to vacations yearly before 1989. So either Poland was vastly better than USSR or your article is shit, or the definition of “dacha” and “vacations” vastly vary.
Coop dachas for the whole family
=/=
Kolonie za PRL only for children
FWP peaked at 4m adults yearly (including partial refinancing) in the early 80s.
It is true to almost every kid during PRL was able to participate in some form of vacation. Please note that most were at the level lower than coop dachas, mostly tents, schools etc, and it was only partially refinanced.
Lmao. I didnt see it so it didnt happen. The essence of every ml defender here
Great, good for you. I grew up in one of USSR satellite states, and it sucked balls.
Poverty was widespread, and if you dared to complain you were disappeared.
Surprisingly, my life is not that bad now. If anything, I wish USSR had fallen sooner.
Lol. You weren’t even born when the USSR fell
You said in other post that you grew up in post-communist country. Stop lying.
Tbf, pretty much all Soviet satellite states were/are post communist states.
But if they grew up in a post communist state their experience about USSR doesn’t hold, they didn’t live during USSR, they lived after it.
I’m sure there is some conflating going on with the fall of communism and the “shock therapy” after. Even if not, it’s not really like the 80s under Gorb were really what any left leaning person likes to recall when we think of the Soviet union.
Ah yes, the good old, fuck you I got mine. The fall of USSR meant that millions of people had their lives destroyed. But little scumbag here is doing fine.
Well, if it helps, sooner or later, all of the world will follow in the footsteps of the USSR. That part is inevitable. Only other alternative is complete ecological collapse and extinction.
Personally, I can’t wait for the socialist world to follow. I hope all the Western countries that refuse to embrace socialism stay in their capitalist hellscape and not start shit with the rest of the world
Uh huh, and Hamas beheaded 40 babies and Saddam Hussein was building nukes and Iran invisibly killed 40,000 protestors
Sure, and how does this relate to the topic? All of those are horrific, but that doesn’t make USSR’s abuses any better.
This mf thinks Hamas actually beheaded babies and Sadam was actually building nukes.
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The USSR wasn’t a utopia, but it was a better, more advanced form of society than capitalism. It was real.
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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.
I don’t really know what you mean by saying you aren’t opposed to socialism when you’re clearly following the Red Scare playbook.
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They’re all horrific fantasies, that was the point. None of them are true, yet you’re parroting them just like you’re parroting Red Scare mythos.
“All those things the Nazis did are bad, but what does that have to do with the crimes of the Judeo-Bolsheviks?”
The same people who pinky swore that all the things I said are true are the same people who held a flashlight under their chin and told you about the scary USSR when you were a child. All these fairytales come from the same source, and believing any one of them is just as stupid as believing any other.
Stop letting the Epstein Empire tell you what to think about it’s enemies
Great, I however grew up in post-communist country and seen with my own eyes the fallout of it’s existence.
Exchanging one propaganda for another is just as bad. Fuck USA, but also fuck USSR. Both of those can be true.
Why do you attribute to communism what you remember from growing up in a capitalist system?
The dissolution of socialism and the reintroduction of capitalism was an economic disaster. What you’re blaming on socialism was in fact capitalism doing what capitalism does. 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.
Death rates spiked:
And wealth disparity skyrocketed alongside the newly impoverished majority:
Just because two statements can be true does not mean any two statements must be true. The facts have shown that capitalism has been a disaster, and that a return to socialism is necessary for post-soviet states.
So you saw how bad the fallout of it’s collapse was.
What other propaganda! The USSR doesn’t exist to put out propaganda, all you are getting is pro US propaganda.
They can be but they aren’t
Oh so you were just lying when you replied to me earlier. Can’t even keep your own bullshit straight in the same thread loser?
“I grew up during the feeding frenzy of capitalist pillaging that immediately followed the death of the Soviet Union and it sucked, so fuck communism for that.”
Bro what are you even saying. “I grew up in Hiroshima after the US nuked it and it sucked, so fuck Japan.” You grew up under capitalism, take up your issues with the rich western pedophiles who actually engineered them.
Ask an anticommunist to describe the horrors of communism, and every time…
Edit: I cannot wrap my head around this level of dumb bullshit.
"I grew up during the Spanish occupation with morion-clad assholes raping and pillaging everywhere, so I know how bad life was in Aztec Tenochitlan "
“I grew up with US bombs and napalm raining down of my family, so I know how horrible Communist Vietnam is”
“Psh, you think Indonesian society was acceptable? You should have seen how fucked up it was under Dutch colonial rule. Fuck the natives for that.”
Let’s hope children of this generation all over the world currently growing up with high oil prices are not as stupid as Liome and understand that it’s capitalist Usonia doing all of this.
But you didn’t see the fallout of the USSR’s existence. You saw the fallout of its ceasing to exist.
A footprint doesn’t describe the boot.
Nah, fuck the US. Not the USSR. Every American who has any level of worker protection should get on their knees and thank the USSR
“Anyone who loves freedom owes such a debt to the Red Army as can never be repaid”
-Hemingway
They are strawmannig you because u dared to talk bad about %200 socialist regime and our glorious leader Stalin.
No one mentioned Stalin, so clearly you’re lying
Oooooh eglin seems to be leaking in. No one mentioned Stalin, yet you immediately started the capitalist propaganda
Liome didn’t even talk bad of a socialist government.
Liome talked bad of a capitalist regime being sucked dry by another capitalist regime and likely moved to the capitalist regime that exploited her motherland, which she praises, and is about to fall apart from exploiting its own population.
I know. I wouldn’t expect anything else from here. Just disappointing.
Mate. That’s not what happened and you know it
we’ve got the least dishonest liberal on our hands here
You’re such a brave truth teller
Then leave buddy?
I lived in Soviet Union. Kyrgyz Socialist Soviet Republic to be precise. And you?
“murdered millions” intentional? targeted? What millions are you talking about? Some policies were not that effective or maybe even wrong but the deaths were in most cases not intentional. Get some sources or at least hints to what you are talking about…
How many millions, what is your source for that figure, and how did you verify it?
bro dont comment on these communities. it’s no use. nobody here listend to reason. i also agree that capitalism is bad, but is capitalism under a red flag and dictatorship really better?
We aren’t talking about Japan or Denmark, but the USSR, which was socialist and democratic.
when you definitely know what capitalism is
Here’s the problem, you think “reason” is “whatever the Epstein empire told you about the people it’s afraid of”, and you’re talking to a bunch of people who have actually fact checked their bullshit.
You literally don’t even know the meaning of the words you’re using