I’ve spent the last few years devouring Soviet history. Books, papers, blog posts, podcasts, all of it. I can’t get enough. Not to brag, but I do feel as though I’ve achieved a certain level of understanding about the USSR, its history, and eventual collapse. But I’ve also put the work in.
And yet, whenever I engage people I know IRL or online, I’m amazed by how doggedly people will defend what they just inherently “know”: that the Soviet Union was an evil totalitarian authority dictatorship that killed 100 million of its own people and eventually collapsed because communism never works. None of these people (at least the people I know IRL) have learned anything about Soviet history beyond maybe a couple days of lectures and a textbook chapter in high school history classes. Like, I get that this is the narrative that nearly every American holds in their heads. The fact that people believe this isn’t surprising. But what is a little surprising to me is that, when confronted with a challenge to that narrative from someone they know has always loved history and has bothered to learn more, they dig their heels in and insist they are right and I am wrong.
This isn’t about me, I’m just sharing my experience with this. I’m just amazed at how Americans will be completely ignorant about a topic (not just the USSR) but will be utterly convinced their views on that topic are correct, despite their own lack of investigation into that topic. This is the same country where tens of millions of people think dinosaurs and humans walked around together and will not listen to what any “scientist” has to say about it, after all.
Thanks, was scrolling to see if someone had posted this yet or if it was my job
usians are the most propagandized people on earth
objectively the most propagandized population in human history
America delenda est
Someone already posted the brainwashing vs moral licensing essay so I just wanna add that if an American takes an anti-imperialist stance on their history, then they are grievously implicating themselves and everyone they know.
Because if the US hasn’t been fighting for freedom all this time, then what does that say about Americans? What does that say about you?
Most Americans prefer to avoid the question and the associated introspection because their lives are distant enough and comfortable enough that they can. Also, everyone understands what resisting the US entails, whether they’ll admit it or not, and know to keep their head down or else.
Literally going through this right now and having an existential crisis about it
I don’t know how to reconcile all this
It’s tough to disassociate ourselves from our country. I’m not sure how to do it. Even now I get this gag reflex when people from countries ravaged by the USA announce that they’d gladly commit unlimited genocide on the first world, no matter how much they deserve it.
Actually, no one deserves genocide, hope this helps.
(cw: a reference to animal cruelty)
The kitten-burners seem to fulfill some urgent need. They give us someone we can clearly and correctly say we’re better than. Their extravagant cruelty makes us feel better about ourselves because we know that we would never do what they have done. They thus function as signposts of depravity, reassuring the rest of us that we’re Not As Bad As them, and thus letting us tell ourselves that this is the same thing as us being good.
americans are some of the only people in the world who genuinely believe their country’s founding myths
Lol, what? Have you talked to anyone from… literally anywhere else? Most people believe the founding stories of their country that they’re taught in high school.
That’s obviously untrue.
energy. He “studied communism” for 20 years by being really mad at the USSR, collecting memorabilia of the USSR, naming his daughter after Gorbachev, and reading nothing about communism except maybe the manifesto.Jordan Peepeeson scim-read the manifesto before the Zizek debate, and I say scim-read (mind you, this is a pamphlet) because JP here tried to be picky about Marx not taking into consideration certain things as if the manifesto is the only work of Marx where all communist thought is summed up. JP also wrote “A Conservative Manifesto” thinking he’s the Anti-Marx or some shit, which… he probably is to be honest because Marx was incredibly well read compared to this grifter.
The fact that people believe this isn’t surprising. But what is a little surprising to me is that, when confronted with a challenge to that narrative from someone they know has always loved history and has bothered to learn more, they dig their heels in and insist they are right and I am wrong.
Nationalism. Their nationalist mindset forces them to have an automatic negative reaction to anything that challenges it. Because they believe that their nation are the good guys and anything else that their nation labels “the enemy” is the bad guys. When you challenge the state’s narrative on the bad guys, which they have accepted as correct and good, you are also challenging their decades of nationalism and by extension their support for their nation makes it feel like a challenge against them as a good or bad person (for supporting the good or bad guys).
The method to successfully make people question these things is to first create massive negative feelings about the state, this opens them up to questioning their nationalism and leads them to a crossroads between two choices. One is the reactionary RETVRN ideology in which a person doubles down on the idea that nationalism is good but not for the current state, it must be removed and replaced with a state that will RETVRN it to greatness. The other is internationalist ideology, in which people reject nationalism and start viewing states from a larger distance as citizens of the world instead of citizens of their nation.
I’m a stuck record on this but time and time again it comes down to this.
it’s even worse with the descendants of euro-immigrants. I know a polish guy, gay, super liberal, who is absolutely convinced of the most bloodthirsty and reactionary narratives about the USSR because he’s from a polish family, and his polish grandma would never lie. If I’m talking about any kind of effort to improve society somewhat
he will go full 
and say “socialism is a good idea in theory, but never in practice, I should know, I’m polish, and both hitler and stalin genocided my people.” He’s generally a kind and friendly person who has been helpful on numerous occasions in the decade I’ve known him, but the second we start talking politics the gloves come off. He has a STEM background and gets paid fairly good, so I especially don’t care for the way he talks about working class people like they’re all ignorant trumpers who just need to learn to code.The Soviet’s doing Katyn narrative is a religious part of Polish anti-communism.
Did they not do it? I was under the impression that Katyn massacre was carried out by the Soviets and could be considered a war crime but that doesn’t merit any comparison with what the Germans did and that drawing a false equivalence between them is basically Nazi apologia.
Eye witnesses report that the Germans did it. The rope used to bind their hands was not a type made or used in the USSR. And the bullets in the bodies were of a German caliber.
Germany reportedly captured a labor camp holding Polish officer POWs near Smolensk and executed these prisoners captured from the Soviets at Katyn in 1941.
Then in 1943 just as Germany was about to lose control of the area, none other than Goebbels reported they had discovered a mass grave of soviet victims at Katyn.
The polish government in exile chooses to believe Goebbels without evidence.
So what do we make then of the Soviets and Russians admitting later on that it was the NKVD? This is a blind spot for me but just scanning Wikipedia (I know) it seems like Gorbachev era USSR admitted to the killings being ordered by NKVD. What would their motivation be for saying that if it weren’t true?
Because Gorby was all about ‘admitting Soviet mistakes’ which mostly meant accepting Western narratives (which were not accepted by mainstream Soviet Russian historians, and were incredibly controversial) with the idea of ‘bridging the gap’ between East and West. Like when you read Gorbachev, you get the idea that he was a liberal western-style communist, who saw inefficient parts of a system that did have aspects of Russian chauvinism and said, ‘Well we can do better, look at those Nordic social democracies, let’s transition to be more like them.’ And then proceeded to unintentionally set the stage for the entire thing to get blown up by the vastly empowered criminal class.
Also, his entire legitimacy kinda rested on being reactionarily anti-Stalin.
Thanks. I’ll have to look deeper into the whole thing but yall have given me some good points of consideration.
I mean, it’s been awhile since I read his biography, so I don’t think he was stupid, it was a symptom of both forced errors on Stalin’s part, his whole ‘man of steel’ imagery is very powerful in Russia still. But it’s really reflective of where Russian ideology around communism was at, one of constant struggle against alien forces not by.your own design, unrecognizable and strange. A never-coming promise. Communication or lack of it is a huge theme in late Soviet early Federation artwork. Idk, I should really get back into reading this stuff myself. Post about what you find!
Gorbachev “admitted” to it but this admission wasn’t based on archival records. Rather the evidence the admission was based on was of an “indirect” nature.
Gorbachev might have believed it to be true or maybe it was a political decision to demonstrate a clear break with the former USSR and a politically opportune gesture of goodwill to a neighboring country that was going through a nationalist moment of anti-soviet sentiment.
Whatever his motivation, he wasn’t speaking from personal knowledge or even archival records but from “indirect” evidence that he professed to believe.
Here is a chapter dealing with the Katyn massacre from the book Blood Lies by Grover Furr.
The book itself is a point by point takedown of Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder (an anticommunist rewrite of history that tries to equivocate between Stalin and Hitler) mainly just by following the book’s own sources and finding none of them substantiate any of the claims made. I do recommend reading the whole of Blood Lies, but it is pretty long and the Katyn chapter should give you some idea of just how falsified the anticommunist orthodox narrative on the USSR is.
Coincidentally I was looking into this book just yesterday to decide if I should read it. I probably will. What are your thoughts on its quality? From what I read it sounds like the jury is still out its accuracy, even though it is effective at negating the western consensus anti-Stalin narratives, since he draws from primary sources.
I personally haven’t come across a specific reason to doubt Grover Furr’s truthfulness, but I have seen people express pretty strong opinions on it (but then again, that’s exactly what the anticommunist orthodoxy would demand). Of his works I’ve only read Blood Lies, but it’s kind of a special case because it’s debunking a specific book from the book’s own sources. So, even if you completely ignore every point Furr elaborates on with ‘outside’ sources, it still tears the communism=fascism narrative to shreds, and makes the point while doing so that Bloodlands is basically the pinnacle of anticommunist historiography.
They dug up the site a few years ago and only found German shell casings.
IPN love doing failed exhumations, like the one when they dug up polish PM (London govt) and general Sikorski, who died in plane crash in Gibraltar in 1943. I don’t know what they expected to find, a bullet with Stalin autograph in his head? All they found is that he died because his plane crashed. USSR didn’t even had any motive of killing him, it happened after he and his government started cooperation with USSR, his death hindered that since the rest of his govt were filled with indolent anticommunist. Funnily enough the only ones who did had motive to off him were his govt pals and Brits, and Brits still don’t want to reveal their archive about the case.
Poles are obsessed with Russia, every Pole that has ever died must have been the victim of a secret Russian plot
Funniest excercise ever is observing polish TV mentioning Russian Empire. On one hand it’s Russian, and the tsars really opressed Poles quite hard, but on the other hand they were deposed by the ultimate commie evil! So the one tsar which do get lauded is the worst one of them all, Bloody Nicky, and the social structure and 'reforms" of late empire gets romanticized as hell.
it’s literally central dogma. You cannot find, nowhere, absolutely nowhere in polish media and publication, any doubt about that or even information that such doubts exist elswhere. Expressing such will probably meant civil death of a person, though nobody dared yet.
Shouldn’t a techbro know that personal anecdotes are not evidence?
We need to write a doctoral thesis and even then it’s not enough.
But when they’re talking about how USSR bad it’s all “my grandma told me her dentist told her his ex girlfriend told him her husband told her a cab driver told him another passenger told them that they once saw Stalin strangle a Polish child to death with his bare hands”
In 1981, Americans thought the Soviet Union was an Evil Empire that would battle the US for eternity.
In 1991, Americans thought the USSR’s collapse was inevitable and obvious while questioning only why it didn’t happen sooner.
“Before a revolution happens, it is perceived as impossible; after it happens, it is seen as having been inevitable.”
well, counterrevolution in this case
Want to hear something embarrassing? I never even knew who Lenin was until I was 17…and I had to Google it myself. And I was actually well above average in school. The American education system is a fuck and there’s so much I had to learn on my own.
It’s funny, the education system was engineered to make us workers, but employers don’t even want to hire us anymore and would rather stick to piling on more work to the people already hired, leaving a generation stuck with dead end minimum wage jobs at best even if they have master’s degrees.
Was always told Lenin was an evil man and that’s where it ended lol
Which is kind of changing as more millennials and gen-z are getting more okay with not just simply hating basically all forms of anti-capitalism. Even taking time to get some random information while on their phones/social media from folks that are pro-leftist. I now find it easier to point to Lenin without dealing with all the “he was evil and killed people” lines. Stalin and Mao are still hard given that they seem to be more directly brought up in media/classes as being at Hitler levels. While they both went with some bad options (some of which was based on being given those options by advisers with bad understanding of a topic at the time), they did see how important it was to get caught up to western industrial nations quick as fuck.
It is hard to get to real critiques of which things didn’t work or were correct but maybe could have been done better based on what we know now. Because lots of people don’t want to hear anything as it (to them) is like Holocaust denial based on the very very black and white way they are treated in history classes and media. Though even both of them are getting a bit more critical support by those millennials and gen-z folks that go deeper. Also helps that more formerly classified documents from the US intelligence agencies from those times are finally getting old enough to declassify and release them.
Even Cuba is becoming less of a automatic trigger for being seen as some “purely evil nation”. Though it being so close geographically to the US means the hawks will keep trying to find ways to paint them as such. The anti-communist people that fled are the real thing allowing the US to keep up the blockade and sanctions that are literally only in place to torture the people of Cuba into overthrowing their government. Those anti-communist Cubans here are enough of a bloc to be able to scare most candidates for state and federal elections from saying anything positive. We saw how Bernie saying a simple truth about how literacy under communism went way up was treated like he said we should just let Cuba take over the US or something. His point was that education should matter more here beyond the very bad policies that claim to push education but actually make it about numbers and not about real learning.
Mass media has huge influence on people, it is unbelievable in what they can convince ordinary citizens.
It is not only US or it’s stance on USSR, it is still happening all over the world. You can study this effect in real time right now.
My own parents don’t believe me anything until they hear it on TV. And will never believe me if TV is claiming opposite.
I just dropped idea of truth, there are just some (probably corporate) interests and easy to manipulate sheeple.
easy to manipulate sheeple.
