Propaganda vs history of the USSR

[RedKobra]

How do you guys go about filtering out the anti-soviet propoganda that inevitably underpins "western capitalist" history of the USSR?

and for the pedants...yes I do know all history is biased.

[tuwix]

I lived a dozen years in state capitalist country and I know more or less what can be true or not.

However, there is not only western propaganda but soviet propaganda too. There are many idiots in this forum who believe in soviet propaganda and think that the Soviet Union was paradise and everyone who says otherwise is under western propaganda. And they want to repeat all idiocies of soviet economy again. Because they're victims of the soviet propaganda...

[Blake's Baby]

I think, more or less whatever each bloc said about the other was basically true.

I remember hearing Soviet bloc propaganda in the 1980s that said western countries were violent racist countries where the unemployed would riot because they had no hope and old people had to queue for stale bread. Yeah, it's not exactly how it was presented in the west, but fair enough. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, when western news-crews were travelling around East Germany, Poland and Hungary taking to people, I remember people saying 'political freedom will be good, but we don't want unemployment and race-riots'. Again, a reasonable assessment of some of the problems of western capitalism. The media in the Eastern Bloc was obviously doing a good job of exposing some of the problems of the western democracies.

At the same time we'd hear about the bureaucratic incompetence of production and distribution in the east, the persecution of dissent, the lack of consumer goods, the fact that huge numbers of people were either being spied on or doing the spying or sometimes both. When the offices of the Stasi were trashed in 1989, it was revealed that 1-in-6 of the population of the DDR were passing information to the government, often because they were being blackmailed.

Both systems, I think, were shit; they kept their own populations in line by playing up the worst aspects of the other, while playing down their own worst aspects.