I’ve been reading on the history of the Soviet Union, on how some of its main objectives were to improve literacy, Soviet ‘Electrication’ Secular policies, now I know repression of Religion and Nationality are a good counterweight to any good the Soviets did, but I’ve just been reading about the former U.S.S.R, and it had just got me wondering.
I’ll concede that The Soviet Union brought much of the old Russian stuff into the 20th century in record time, but the means to do so were abominable.
good? Of course. Noting is <i>all</i> bad (…well except Bush apparently). Nazi Germany was good in some aspects. Iranian theocracy is good in some aspects. North Korea is good in some aspects. Now the communists killed an ungodly number of million of people. It’s gotta take a great deal of electrification to balance that one out.
Without the Soviet Union we never would have had Yakov Smirnoff.
Marc
Some would say suppression of Religion is a brilliant thing. Some would say it’s most harmfull part of human society so removing it the most obvious and sensible thing for an ideal that seeks to improve existence for every human being. (I’m talking about Marxism here)
Some would say suppression of Religion is a brilliant thing. Some would say it’s most harmfull part of human society so removing it the most obvious and sensible thing for an ideal that seeks to improve existence for every human being. (I’m talking about Marxism here)
Some would say it twice.
The Soviet Union DID generally improve the economic lot of the citizenry as opposed to what they’d likely have gotten under the Tsar. Abject poverty was mostly avoided. There’s something to be said for those things.
Well sure, but executing staggering numbers of your own people is a great way to shrink your denominator.
They ushered the human race into the Space Age by launching the Sputnik and making the first successful manned space flights.
They were crucial in defeating Hitler. They bore the brunt of Hitler’s might, and took far more casualties, both military and civilian, than any other nation fighting against the Nazis. I would even go so far as to say that the Second World War in Europe was primarily about the war between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and some folks around here would call that the understatement of the year.
THey were also crucial in letting Hitler get started on his war agenda as well (Nazi/Sovient non-aggresstion pact). Basically what happened is one brutal dictatorship eventually ran up against another brutal dictatorship. Had the Nazis defeated the USSR, and were then later defeated by the West, we’d probably be debating today in a thread about how the Nazis did some “good” by getting ridding of the USSR.
Both regimes were despicable. Both regimes killed millions of their own citizens. The Nazis weren’t around as long as the communists in the USSR, so the comparison isn’t quite fair.
Well, I was just at a lecture by Dr. Geoff Roberts at George Washington University, and he argues that from 1953-1955 the Soviets were genuinely, seriously trying to establish a collective security arrangement for Europe that would have included the USSR (essentially, this would have been an alternative to the European Defense Community), and wanted to reunify Germany as a neutral, democratic state embedded in this collective security system. Dr. Roberts argues that if they’d pulled this off, the Soviets would have been able to essentially avoid the Cold War, establishing a lasting detente twenty years before Nixon/Kissinger’s failed attempt.
Of course, the Soviets didn’t pull it off - and there were several other professors at this lecture who were, to put it mildly, “skeptical” that the Soviets weren’t just doing this for propaganda value. I’m skeptical myself - as one prof pointed out, this is around the time that Soviet public statements were full of the rhetoric of “crises of capitalism”. You know, “The capitalists are losing their colonies, their economies are doomed to collapse, communism is the future within ten years”, stuff like that.
But still - there’s an argument to be made that the Soviets at least tried to do something that, arguably, could have been “good”. I qualify that pretty heavily because some writers - for example, former Soviet dissident and Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Natan Sharansky - argue that detente was a horrible idea. The reason being that it would have allowed the Soviets to gain the benefits of trade without the costs that come from oppressing their own people - and Sharansky argues that those costs are critical to toppling “fear societies” like the USSR. So, if Sharansky’d been at this Roberts lecture, he’d probably say something like, “No! This European collective security arrangement would have damned Soviet citizens to an even longer period of totalitarian oppression.” Only he’d have said it better than that - this guy can write.
Ahem. I digress. Going back to the OP - maybe, maybe maybe the Soviets tried to do something that you maybe, maybe, maybe could call “good”. But as the other posters pointed out, the Soviets did so many completely bad things - like killing lots and lots of people - that it’s hard to make a compelling argument that the USSR was anything less than the “Evil Empire” Reagan described it as.
I would dispute that. In strenuous terms. The Bolsheviks destroyed the Russian economy. Economic output in Russia collapsed to 1/10 of its previous levels in the first ten years of Communist rule. That’s why Lenin had to plunder the churches, wage war on the Kulaks for their wealth, and eventually starve millions of people to ship food to the cities. The Ukraine used to be known as the breadbasket of Europe, and by the time the Commies were done with it the people were starving in years of good agricultural weather.
Yes, the Soviet Union eventually became an industrial power, but there’s no evidence that it became an industrial power because of Communism. Perhaps it would have become twice as strong under any other form of government. When you look at the massive scale of mismanagement, corruption, and poor decision-making, it’s hard to claim that Communism was good for their economy.
Had the Nazis defeated the Soviets, I’m skeptical that the British and Americans would later have been able to defeat the Nazis. Of course, there is no way of knowing that for sure.
Without the defeat of Hitler, fascism would have been the chief form of government throughout continental Europe.
Lets be honest though, the Soviet Union was just an extension of former Tsarist/Russian culture. Alot of the aspects of the former USSR were derivative from the Imperial era. Anyway, I’m not saying that we should of let the USSR live, and have all the smaller nationalities aspirations ignored, but I asked the question because alot of people seem to be nostalgic for the era, and seemingly want it back because of the security it provided.
Put yourself in this situation, you’re a poor Russian who’s life has been turned upside down, not only do you have no job, you don’t have any security on your street, anything to fall back on, you remember the times when you could just hop on the plane and have a holiday at least once a year in the caucaus, and now you can’t even afford the essentials. Can you see what I’m getting at?
What I want to know is when theres an upheaval from totalitarian society to democracy (of some sorts in Russia) is always so bad?
Did Russia and the former territories it ruled really have to privatize and sell off most state assets? Why not follow the French example, of industries being owned by the state, yet with democracy for the people? A much slower way but however it provides stability and rules out some abject poverty for their civilians.
I presume you mean “is it always so bad”…and the answer is an emphatic no. Look at many former Warsaw Bloc states, from those that went through peaceful change (such as the Czech Republic) through to those which saw significant violence (such as Romania). These have found a successful route away from Soviet totalitarianism. Albania is an example of a country which has not found a way out, and (IMHO) Russia is a long way from being established as a securely-democratic state.
Why sell off state assets? (1) It’s what western economists told them to do, and (2) where else could the government get money from?
Errrr, make that Eastern Bloc…
Erm, tax?
What would they tax? If no free market exists, there’s no source of tax. A free-market economy has to be created before any tax income exists. Either this is done over many decades (with much unrest and instability), or with fairy-dust, or by a massive sell-off of state assets.
Of course it’s hard to say. But the Nazis could have been bogged down trying to supress a HUGE insurgency in the USSR. Trying to “rule” that empire might just as easily have made the Nazis more vulnerable to attack from the West.
I’m just saying that net/net the world might have been better of fif the Nazis HAD defeated the Soviets. But it’s a grizzly calculation trying to determine which scenario would have resulted in fewer innocent deaths. As I said, both regimes were despicable.