it's kind of weird that when Stalin and Lenin went on huge murderous rampages we just shove all of that in the forget box.
@icedquinn we did? i suspect this is more a US thing, where communism was hyped up as a constant threat yet never really existed domestically. over the pond it's very common to use "stalinist" as a slur against leftists, just as "nazi" is used against the right. One reason it doesn't have the same punch is that at least here the general opinion of the cruelty of Soviet communism is that it was just Russians doing Russian things, that they did before that and never stopped doing up until the present time. Idealist leftists from here left for Russia and in many cases never came back alive.
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@whiteline
> just Russians doing Russian things
Were we not though? I am Russian and this is an honest question. I'm not going to argue about how communism's never been tried, I'm talking about Stalin in particular, what makes him Left? All the communist experiments were wrapped up in the 30s, then he just brought all the worst tsarist practices back. Abolishing private property? It was never Russia's forte and according to Richard Pipes it is one of the core problems of Russia.
@icedquinn
@m0xee @icedquinn yeah, the state Russia was in at the time was medieval. The whole of Russia always looked like a giant colonialism project to me, with a small core ruling vast impoverished lands from far away
@whiteline There was no universal access to social benefits: high school education was paid-for, there were no pensions for everyone. He brought the serfdom back as propiska — peasants didn't have passports and couldn't travel the country freely. He even revived the Orthodox Church to incite patriotism during WW2. The slogans were socialist alright, but everything else? The name Red Monarch is very accurate — the only difference was that he didn't pass his title down the bloodline.
@icedquinn