The "Evil" Soviet Union

[orihara]

It is often said that the Soviet Union was totalitarian, without freedom, murderous, and overall horrible to live in. How do you refute this?

[Fourth Internationalist]

By lying of course! :lol:

Because one-liners aren't appropriate, I will add that the nature of the Soviet Union changed throughout its history. So, these labels would not fit the early Soviet Union for example, whereas it could very easily be labelled as all of these at certain points under Stalinism.

[Bala Perdida]

As an Anarchist, I would agree. Although the same qualities can easily be found in some of the NATO members, and especially their puppet regimes.

[Pinto Morais]

It is often said that the Soviet Union was totalitarian, without freedom, murderous, and overall horrible to live in. How do you refute this?


A better way to go about it would be to admit that it may be true that the USSR was like that, and then add that it was not truly communist.

[FSL]

It is often said that the Soviet Union was totalitarian, without freedom, murderous, and overall horrible to live in. How do you refute this?

By reading history. People who say things like that have seen maybe a trailer of one documentary and nothing more. If you've read history, you can call them out when they say things like that.




A better way to go about it would be to admit that it may be true that the USSR was like that, and then add that it was not truly communist.
Actually an even better way to go about it is follow Dimitrov's example when he was being tried by nazi courts. He kept repeating how great the Soviet Union was, how it was the largest country in the world etc to annoy the nazis.


Of course the Soviet Union had freedoms. It is people that disliked that very fact, that didn't like the Soviet Union. One example is Solzhenitsyn, a supporter of the czar and of the spanish dictator Franco, who was imprisoned for a while for fascist propaganda and then became the darling of the free world.
You could say to these people that if it is the freedom of fascist propaganda they like, they should be very happy to live in a capitalist country.
But for people who want to be free from fascist propaganda, the Soviet Union was a much more hospitable place.

Etc etc. Just read history, along with whatever else you do.

[Dagoth Ur]

Or don't fall the above bullshit as it is patently absurd. But for some "communists' it is all about no-true-scotsman.

The USSR had flaws, certainly considering it doesn't exist anymore, but compared to basically all other countries it was a paragon of success for the working people of the world. Not counting the innumerable benefits of being a worker in the Soviet Union versus every capitalist countries, there was the beacon of Free Workers that the USSR represented to all oppressed peoples of the world. Some anarchists (who have never achieved anything) and some leftcoms (who have also never achieved anything) spend more time demonizing the USSR than even contemporary liberal academics.

EDIT: my first sentence was directed at Pinto Morais not FSL.

[Captain Ahab]

https://archive.org/details/HumanRightsInTheSovietUnion
This book should be handy in both defending the USSR and attacking the USA. In it you can see that there were "freedoms" to an extent. Both in emigration and criticizing the soviet government. You can also use various statistics and compare the USSR to the 90s period to attack the notion it was a horrible place to live in. If you don't want the baggage of having to defend the Soviet government you can instead opt to dismiss the USSR as an example of communism and say that the material factors at play after the revolution molded it into something else.

[Pinto Morais]

The USSR had flaws, certainly considering it doesn't exist anymore, but compared to basically all other countries it was a paragon of success for the working people of the world.

Oh yes, and it was also the best example of a revolution which degenerated and gave rise to a state-capitalist country.


Some anarchists (who have never achieved anything)

Spanish social revolution. Just saying...


spend more time demonizing the USSR than even contemporary liberal academics.

That is because we are ideologicaly closer to the people that defend the USSR than the liberals are.

[Dagoth Ur]

Oh yes, and it was also the best example of a revolution which degenerated and gave rise to a state-capitalist country.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/grant/1949/cliff.htm
Sorry try again. USSR still the only successful revolution that led to Dictatorship of the Proletariat.


Spanish social revolution. Just saying...
Franco won with CNT-FAI's help. Just saying...



That is because we are ideologicaly closer to the people that defend the USSR than the liberals are.
Liberals whole job is to demonize alternatives to liberalism. Anarchists whole job seems to be demonizing Communism. Doing the liberal's job for them it seems.

[Pinto Morais]

Sorry try again. USSR still the only successful revolution that led to Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

If it was successful, then where is the classless society they promised? Even you must admit that it was unsuccessful as it was not able to accomplish it's own goals.


Franco won with CNT-FAI's help. Just saying...

Typical stalinist, blaming anarchists without evidence.


Liberals whole job is to demonize alternatives to liberalism. Anarchists whole job seems to be demonizing Communism. Doing the liberal's job for them it seems.

Right...

[AnaRchic]

Yeah, the USSR ended up being a society where a parasitic class of bureaucrats controlled everything with a iron fist and became the new exploiters. The Soviet government simply murdered anyone who dared to criticize it, including masses of working people who they claimed to represent. Then there was the Soviet oppression and mass deportation of certain nationalities, the forced collectivization of agriculture and the merciless requisitioning of grain even in the face of starvation, etc. Lets not forget the slaughter of anarchists, trotskyists, left-communists....basically anyone who didn't worship Stalin.

The fact that some people still try to defend the USSR as some kind of "workers state" is the reason why most working people now, and probably always will, cringe at the word communism.

Real workers power would involve the self-management and directly democratic control of society by the masses of working people themselves. This partially existed in Russia slightly before and maybe a couple weeks after the October Revolution. Lenin and Stalin are both to blame for eviscerating workers democracy, and socialism with it.

[La Guaneña]

The fact that some people still try to defend the USSR as some kind of "workers state" is the reason why most working people now, and probably always will, cringe at the word communism.



So if the reason for a huge self-managed revolution not happening and not even being close to happening is that some communist groups defend the SU, was all that anti-communist cold war propaganda and coup funding in the Eastern Bloc just a stupid waste of money?

Surprisingly dumb for a global power.

[Red Economist]

It is often said that the Soviet Union was totalitarian, without freedom, murderous, and overall horrible to live in. How do you refute this?

I've been a communist sympathizer for over ten years now, and this question still bugs me (and stops me saying outright "I'm a communist"). you have the easy route of saying 'it wasn't communist' or 'it wasn't a workers state' but I find this to be intellectually dishonest given the USSR and others were products of Marxist ideology and, as such, it is pretty dangerous to advocate communism if it 'goes wrong' as you could still end up with another Stalin (or worse). :crying:

you have to decide whether you actually want to refute this and really examine whether your commitment to communism is such that you think it is worth the amount of sh*t that is going to get thrown your way because of the history. The anti-communists have a point on this one and most people would not like to live in the Soviet Union say in 1936 during the purges etc. the argument is going to be less around whether the USSR was a sh*t place to live (as the evidence is overwhelming), but whether any future communist/socialist revolution will repeat the same mistakes.

So this won't be an nice clear answer, but I'll tell you how I approach it.

First, The assumption that communism leads to totalitarianism is based on the human nature argument that people are too selfish for communism to work and are so inherently evil that they cannot be trusted to exercise political power, so it ends up becoming a quest for absolute power, and is concentrated in the center.
There is a slightly more sophisticated version of this argument found amongst philosophers which is less moralistic but has the same implications. That is that humans are psychologically egotistical (i.e. they can only know something from their own experience and that knowledge of a person's needs is individual and not social or collective) and this makes them behave as if they are selfish. This argument is the basis of the "efficient Market hypothesis" as supposedly individualism is better as allocating resources as it deal with information more efficiently (because the knowledge of what people want is decentralized to consumers).
The major problem with this is that 'human nature' cannot be universal as liberals says their state is fine, but any other form of government is doomed to turn evil. So whilst insisting on "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely", the separation of economic and political life does not prevent corruption- it means that only the 'rich' have the right to be corrupt as they are 'morally virtuous' in accepting a liberal socioeconomic system and leave people alone. So in other words, you can turn the argument on it's head and ask the question- if people really are that evil, wouldn't that make totalitarianism the 'natural order of things'?

More economic forms of this argument will characterize the USSR (probably correctly) as governed by a 'bureaucracy' ruling the society. This does not automatically mean communism will always turn bureaucratic for two reason;

a) the state is a class in it's own right (which is problematic in Marxism proper, though not impossible) and ignores the 'class character of the state' and the fact the state is a product of economic relations and cannot be a force on it's own right independent of economics (as even bureaucrats get hungry). the trotskyists have had a go at classifying the USSR several times but it continues to be a issue with such classification as "degenerated worker's state/deformed workers state", "state capitalist", "bureaucratic collectivist" (the latter is the one most similar to 'totalitarianism').

b) the proletariat is incapable of self-governance and can only ever produce a new ruling class. This is where the 'moral' nature of the argument is most obvious as it is about how selfish and irrational the workers are, whilst the bourgeoisie is morally virtuous and rational in controlling the extent of their selfishness. To be a communist proper, this is the argument you have to over-come and think about most. (and I'm still thinking...)

The concept of 'human nature' is essentially a liberal and secular concept of the 'soul' which is abstracted from real people. But the truth is, is that for society to work, people have to work together to produce the things they need to survive and this cannot be done if, as Hobbes says a free society will make life "nasty, brutish and short". So the selfishness of human nature cannot be the whole story.

Second, the description of the Soviet Union as 'totalitarian' gives the impression that communism was an entirely top-down system of political rule. this isn't true.
During the 1920's there was not simply a 'political' revolution, but a 'social' revolution as well reflected in the number of utopian experiments, the attempted sexual revolution, and radical art movements- even in the midst of the civil war, which is saying something. There was also alot of genuine enthusasim at the time of the First five year plan which meant it had greater mass participation and spontaneity than later plans. these are often missed out from western histories of the USSR as they focus on the 'leaders' and the 'politics' at the top.
Additionally, even if you accept it was a 'totalitarian' system, you have to take in account that people actively participated in the system. The purges relied heavily on people denoucing and informing on one another. The cultural revolution in China was driven- not simply by the people at the top- but the massive (and destructive) enthusiasm of young people in the red guards. it is nowhere near as simple as an 'all-powerful' god-like state telling everyone what to do. A lot of people went along with it, you at this point you can start arguing against the idea that it was 'unnatural'. communism/totalitarianism was a mass movement that did reflect what people wanted; they just didn't get what they wants.

On this one, I'd recommend looking up the Stanford University Prison experiment and The Milgram experiment, which demonstrate that people have a much higher deference to authority than is commonly perceived.
There are ways of explaining how this happens more rationally, but psychology is still in it's infancy, so we can't know for sure.
At a guess, I think- though the idea is somewhat crude- Wilhelm Reich in his Mass psychology of fascism may have a point when he said that sexual repression (and the fear that results) make people more susceptible to Fascism (or authoritarianism in this case). we have been trained literally from birth to go along with what the authority says rather than do what we want- whether it is our parents, 'god', a man in a uniform, etc. So on a psychological level, any attempt at a 'free' society is going to struggle. This leads to a confusion of pleasure and pain that produces sadistic and masochistic behaviours that self-evidently do not help a revolution.

[reb]

The USSR was, as with any capitalist state, a counter revolutionary force and the working class experienced a degree of oppression and complete alienation just like any other place and the worst thing about this was it calling itself "socialist" and turning Marxism completely into a capitalist ideology. And in some points throughout it's history, it was a pretty terrible to place to live in, especially during the process of capitalist accumulation and counter revolution that took place under Stalin. Living standards dropped to lowest levels in history in peace time. But to call it evil would be to provide a shallow critique of it.

[The Intransigent Faction]

the easy route of saying 'it wasn't communist' or 'it wasn't a workers state' but I find this to be intellectually dishonest

Nah, the intellectual dishonesty is to be found in any propaganda machine, particularly in the 20th century, that distorted the meaning of socialism beyond recognition and claims the Leninist model as *the* definition of "communism".

For all of the things, good or bad, that the Soviet Union was, it was not "evil", however. No matter which leftist tendency you identify with, the idealist moral conception of the Cold War as a classic "good versus evil" Manichaean narrative is just bullshit.

Even though I reject the notion of the USSR as "socialist", I'm not going to go so far as to say that it was some cartoonishly-evil-for-the-fun-of-it cesspool. In fact, at various points throughout Soviet history I would have been even more confident in the prospects for socialism through democratic resistance than if I were a worker in the U.S. or one of its tinpot crony states.

[Lensky]

It is often said that the Soviet Union was totalitarian, without freedom, murderous, and overall horrible to live in. How do you refute this?

Unfortunately Revleft is worthless for finding an appropriate rebuttal because most posters who have never lived in the USSR believe the lies western academia has published about it. This is to be expected, as the United States and the UK (the majority of English speakers on this website) gained absolute ideological hegemony following the destruction of the USSR, and completely rewrote history. I was raised in Poland post collapse and my family members have told me that life was better not only for material reasons (actual availability of jobs, good pensions, 8 hour working days) but also cultural one (massive amounts of money were spent on community projects, parks, daycares, concerts, etc. All of which have been privatized or removed since).

Watch this talk by Michael Parenti, he has done the research and proven how living standards rose dramatically within the USSR for the majority of the working class.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYVes44hcJg

[The Intransigent Faction]

Unfortunately Revleft is worthless for finding an appropriate rebuttal because most posters who have never lived in the USSR believe the lies western academia has published about it.

The beauty of internationalism and materialism is you don't have to have lived in a place to be able to sort some lies from truths. If we can't know anything about the class nature of a society because we haven't lived there personally, well, shit, we might as well give up now.

There's a difference between saying that Western academia has lied about the USSR (it's more complicated, of course, "lie" implies they don't believe their own propaganda, which they do more often than not) and saying that there's no truth to anything said by anyone except the USSR's staunchest supporters. You can reject lies from Western media without inferring that Eastern-Bloc propaganda is the only valid source.

As for the standard of living:

eWcsFIxOUKE

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

I think my usual rebuttal to this sort of thing is to ask the person in question if they can point to a state that was any less murderous and repressive. Like, literally, the US puts more people in prison than any government in the history of the world both per capita and in terms of raw numbers. Like, literally, there's a million more people in US prisons than in Chinese prisons - the next highest prison population in the world, and a country with more than triple the US population.

So, you know, drop that bomb next time someone is being a fool. Or, like, if you have a good memory, rattle off the 27 countries bombed by the US since World War II ended. That's a fuck of a lot of murder, amirite?

It's like, y'know, why even engage on their terms?

[Alexios]

I think my usual rebuttal to this sort of thing is to ask the person in question if they can point to a state that was any less murderous and repressive. Like, literally, the US puts more people in prison than any government in the history of the world both per capita and in terms of raw numbers. Like, literally, there's a million more people in US prisons than in Chinese prisons - the next highest prison population in the world, and a country with more than triple the US population.

So, you know, drop that bomb next time someone is being a fool. Or, like, if you have a good memory, rattle off the 27 countries bombed by the US since World War II ended. That's a fuck of a lot of murder, amirite?

It's like, y'know, why even engage on their terms?

This is a discussion on the Soviet Union, though. Not the US. Please try to stay on topic.

[reb]

I think my usual rebuttal to this sort of thing is to ask the person in question if they can point to a state that was any less murderous and repressive. Like, literally, the US puts more people in prison than any government in the history of the world both per capita and in terms of raw numbers. Like, literally, there's a million more people in US prisons than in Chinese prisons - the next highest prison population in the world, and a country with more than triple the US population.

So, you know, drop that bomb next time someone is being a fool. Or, like, if you have a good memory, rattle off the 27 countries bombed by the US since World War II ended. That's a fuck of a lot of murder, amirite?

It's like, y'know, why even engage on their terms?

That's a really lazy and shallow argument. It pretty much ignores the whole topic of what the Soviet Union was or what China is. The implication also is that these "socialist" countries were the exact same as the US, just that they were slightly nicer to their populations so your argument just boils down to pointless semantics and number crunching.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

That's a really lazy and shallow argument. It pretty much ignores the whole topic of what the Soviet Union was or what China is. The implication also is that these "socialist" countries were the exact same as the US, just that they were slightly nicer to their populations so your argument just boils down to pointless semantics and number crunching.

I mean, I feel like that's not entirely inaccurate. Is it a mad simplification? For sure.

But, on the other hand, do I want to explain state capitalism, or the histories of the Russian or Chinese revolutions to some dumb asshole who's just like "COMMUNISM = MURDER! IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT HERE, MOVE TO CUBA!"?

No, I probably don't.


This is a discussion on the Soviet Union, though. Not the US. Please try to stay on topic.

My feeling, though, is that the topic isn't really a discussion of the Soviet Union at all when it's framed with words like "evil". The Soviet Union wasn't "evil", or not in any particularly unique way - it was just, y'know, a capitalist nation state with its particular set of quirks. I think, to have a real discussion about the Soviet Union, it seems to make sense to problematize a starting point like I mentioned above.

[RedMaterialist]

If it was successful, then where is the classless society they promised? Even you must admit that it was unsuccessful as it was not able to accomplish it's own goals.

Interesting you should ask. When Lenin, et al., established the dictatorship of the proletariat, there were essentially six classes in the Soviet Union: the leftover Tsarists and their hangers on, the big bourgeois, petit-bourgeois (including the Kulaks,) and workers and peasants. The Tsarists and big bourgeois classes left immediately (and symbolized by the murder of the Tsar's family.) The peasants were organized into the collectives and became workers themselves. The Kulaks were starved to death. The petit-bourgeois class went underground: nobody was willing to admit to being a former lawyer, small business owner, etc., for good reason.

After WWII everybody was a worker, or pretended to be, or was a bureaucrat. Over the next 40 yrs the Soviet bureaucracy slowly became irrelevant, finally ending with the bureaucrat who typified the end of the Soviet state: Gorbachev. In explicitly Marxist terms the Soviet Union had destroyed all classes except the working class, and, consequently, the Soviet state withered away and died.

The Soviet Union represented two historical firsts: the first successful workers' revolution and the first example of a world super power simply collapsing.

Any other explanation of the collapse of the Soviet Union is bourgeois neo-liberalism: bankruptcy, spent too much on the military, couldn't produce enough dishwashers or TVs; or is reactionary lunacy: the evil empire was scared out of existence by Reagan.

It is true that Russia is now a more or less capitalist state, but that is because the Soviet Union collapsed in a world in which it was surrounded by expansionary capital. The west immediately poured in trillions of dollars into the new Russia.

The Soviet Union was totalitarian, not free, bloody? That is what dictatorships are all about. The reactionary, oppressing classes in the Soviet Union and the West did not give up without a fight. They sent in Hitler to kill the Bolsheviks.

By the way, Hannah Arendt apparently came up with the word "totalitarian" to describe Hitler and Stalin. She argued that modern anti-semitism (not the old-fashioned kind) and bourgeois world expansion (i.e., the tendency of capital to dominate the entire world, the total world) led to the totalitarian state.

She also believed that after Stalin's death the Soviet Union had ceased to be totalitarian. Stalin's death began "...an authentic, though never unequivocal, process of detotalitarization" (p. xxv, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1979, Harcourt.) If the expert (she also did not think China was totalitarian) could conclude that the Soviet Union after Stalin was no longer totalitarian, then one must conclude that socialism, at least in name, is not fundamentally a totalitarian concept. She would have to agree that Stalin was the problem, not socialism.


I recall I once told someone I was a communist, and the response was the usual "Stalin was a monster," etc. I said that I was a communist, not a Stalinist. Although I have changed my mind about Stalin, I think my response then was unknowingly a repetition of the Arendt theme.

[Lensky]

There was no theory or practice Lenin and the Bolsheviks could have enacted to counteract the historic failure of the German revolution in 1919, followed by the loss of Poland. To practice full worker democracy leading to decentralization would mean annihilation by imperialist powers. This is a conclusion easily reached by the most elementary historic analysis.