Once again, this is an actual question; and I’m hoping to broaden my horizons and have a good conversation or two. I’m relatively new to commie subs, still trying to read political theory to figure out which one I like the most, so this might come off as uneducated. But why am I seeing so many positive posts about Stalin, followed by some comments that boil down to “Stalin was good, if you think he wasn’t, that’s just western propaganda” I’m thinking of the post that mentioned the 1921 Soviet Famine as a specific example. I know that Stalin didn’t create the famine, it was a byproduct of almost a decade of war, unrest, and a ton of other factors. But Stalin did do some bad shit. Things like sending 14 million people to gulags to work as slave labor, and killing millions more in his purges. I would argue that he used communism to become an authoritarian. Similar to how Putin is ruling now, stuffing ballot boxes, starting wars, and pushing propaganda. (I realize that we get pushed propaganda, too in the form of faux news, MSNBC, and most media outlets. I don’t wish to have a discussion that boils down to “we do it too, you just don’t see it”)
Regarding the USSR:
- Where did you read that 14 million people were sent to prisons as slave labour in the USSR?
- Where did you read that millions of people were killed in purges in the USSR?
- Where did you read that the USSR didn’t have collective leadership, and that Stalin had ultimate authority?
Regarding modern Russia:- Saying “Putin is ruling” is a very liberal standpoint. He is a president, not a monarch.
- Where did you read that Putin’s party is interfering with elections? It’s entirely possible considering it’s a capitalist country and they don’t want to lose to the KPRF, but it’s still important to be skeptical of sources, particularly those with a bad track record.
- Russia has not started any war. In Ukraine, they intervened in and escalated a nearly decade-long civil war ignited by the NATO coup in 2014. The war with Georgia was initiated by Georgia. The war in Syria was started by imperialists, and Russia joined by the Syrian government’s invitation.
Communists are materialists. If capitalist countries make claims about socialist countries without evidence, the default assumption should be that those claims are either entirely untrue or massively inflated. That doesn’t mean they’re always false, but you wouldn’t trust a habitual liar to suddenly tell the truth. There is no way to “prove” if or how a historical event happened, and Amerikan propaganda is extremely effective despite a severe lack of convincing evidence.This is a link to a BBC article about potential election tampering in Russia. There is a video of people stuffing ballot boxes with papers, but I ran out of time to find it. Can you explain and maybe share a source on the coup and following civil war in Ukraine?
Firstly, the BBC is a UK state-controlled media outlet that routinely spreads imperialist propaganda (and even lies about left-wing movements within the country, as shown by their defamation of Corbyn); it has absolutely no credibility. With that said, the the only citation I could find that wasn’t the BBC itself (and I checked recursively at a depth of 3 before stopping) was this, which is an article by an organization called “Golos” alleging forced voting; I’ve never heard of it before, so I can’t say whether they’re trustworthy. Aside from that citation, it seems to be nothing but anecdotal “evidence”, the credibility of which is proportional to that of the media outlet.
I can’t speak to the video as I’ve never seen it.
Here’s a summary of the coup in Ukraine. As for post-coup Ukraine, you could start by looking at a few of the sources here (I recommend that entire document for learning more about Marxism and imperialism, even if it’s a bit messy). We’ve had several people asking about the conflict, the most recent being this one; you can use the search function on Lemmygrad, just check “Local” and search by posts using a keyword like “Donbas”. Alternatively, you could make another post asking specifically about this (I’m not particularly good at saving my sources, but crowdsourcing would give better results)
Thanks! I’ll look into that. I apologize for using BBC as a source. As a recovering liberal, it was one of the few news sources I had access to that wasn’t Fox News and I’m finding it hard to find better sources in the US. I’m finding Ground News is helpful, but even that app doesn’t really include any communist sources, just a bunch of US news sources
It’s understandable to cling to some mainstream Western media sources in the beginning. It took a few months for me to realize that they all have a history of warmongering and telling blatant lies in the service of imperialism, and when you actually try to fact check them you’ll find that they either just reference themselves or reference other bourgeois outlets (and so on). That’s not to say that they’re always wrong (there’s usually an element of truth if you read between the lines and exclude the writer’s commentary) or that all journalists working there are deliberately lying, but when there are no solid sources all you can use to judge an article’s truthfulness is the outlet’s and writer’s track records (contrast this with a journalist like Seymour Hersh – his article on the Nord Stream bombing uses anonymous sources, but he has a history of telling the truth about US imperialism, so while it’s not proof, he’s a significantly more reliable source than more or less anyone working for bourgeois media). Bourgeois media articles can be useful to expose inconsistencies in other bourgeois media (sometimes from the same outlet), and some journalists focus mainly on doing this; I would recommend the YouTube channel The New Atlas for this type of content, particularly on Xinjiang as well as historical context for the war in Ukraine, even if he has some political views that don’t align with Marxism-Leninism.
It was also initially shocking to learn that the history taught in schools in the imperial core is largely either manufactured or manipulated to reinforce anticommunism, but if you look at your old history books I’m sure you’ll find a lot of missing citations, a lot of dubious sources, and/or a lot of extremely important omissions
14 million gulags 💀 was there anyone left in the USSR after Stalin imprisoned them all???
Do you know how absurd the logistics would be for the imprisonment of 14 million people???
It’s funny how these people can’t realize how absurd their myths about communism are. The myth about Stalin arresting people who were first to stop applauding him after a speech is one of my favorites.
To put this into context, the United States imprisons about 4.3% of it’s population and represents 20% of the global prison population… It’s like 2ish million people in American prisons.
Well I’m gonna hold on to this statistic for later use. The absurdity of 14 million being imprisoned is enough that is should stand on it’s own but maybe the direct comparison to the US prison system might drill it home a bit more.
It’s also worth noting that we don’t support everything Stalin and the soviets did, necessarily.
To my understanding, the point is to acknowledge the reasoning behind the actions and understand the errors.
This is a video from yesterday about this very topic: https://youtu.be/pDSZRkhynXU
I’m also not the most knowledgeable person here, so take my understanding with a few grains of salt.
It’s also worth noting that we don’t support everything Stalin and the soviets did, necessarily.
There’s two fronts. I’ll happily talk about Stalin’s mistakes with comrades, but if I get a whiff of liberal I’ll shut down and fully support the USSR.
Stalin wasn’t perfect, but he was better than any U$ political figure by several orders of magnitude.
