Source: émigré gusanos living in Madrid, Spain. Life expectancy is higher in Cuba than in the USA, and that’s despite the island country suffering the most comprehensive and long lasting economic blockade in human history. The blockade itself, according to the Office of the Historian of the USA, was put in place, and I quote: “to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”. Seeing you’re so concerned with poverty caused by economic blockades, you may be interested to know that according to recent medical research US and EU sanctions murder above half a million humans per year since 1971.
USSR […] its internal economy was so shit…
…so shit that it took backwards feudal Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, etc. where 85% of the population were destitute peasants with a life expectancy of 27 years in 1929, and by 1970 turned into the second world power, rose life expectancy to close to 70, and did all this without exploiting the global south.
Totally terrible economy, much worse than anything before or after, right?
Also they supported the Nazis during Poland’s invasion
Wrong, wrong and more wrong. I’ve answered to that in a separate comment because of how wrong that is, feel free to read it and give me a well-informed opinión afterwards on my comment. “Le evil Soviets invaded poor wittle Poland” is pure historic revisionism that you’re regurgitating from some other Lemmy comment you’ve seen.
As for the rest of your comment I won’t bother because it’s just more “hooman greed” nonsense.
Praising few successes shouldn’t mean ignoring the other side i.e repression, shortages, lack of political freedom, stagnation, mass emigration and the fact that the USSR collapsed under its own economic structure.
We don’t have to choose between “uncritical communism” and “unchecked capitalism.” I’m centre left. I believe in a regulated market, social safety nets, labour rights, universal healthcare/education and checks on corporate power without abolishing private enterprise, scientific development or democracy. Capitalism with strong regulation has lifted millions from poverty too.
I’d rather live in a system that mixes market efficiency with social protection not one that sacrifices freedom and innovation for state control.
That’s my final comment and I won’t be reading anything further. Thanks.
Few successes like the lack of exploitation of the Global South? You’re just a racist who doesn’t give a shit about the billions suffering under capitalism.
What political freedom do we have in capitalism? I’m a European, and for the past 20 years we’ve been able to choose between either austerity policy (socialdemocrats) and harsh austerity policy (conservative/neoliberals). This applies to every country in the EU without exception, to the point that Greece tried something different with Syriza during the 2010s and elected a party more akin to your ideas and their political power got essentially couped by the EU’s Troika and central bank when they threatened that if Greece were to revise its sovereign debt, the central bank would stop working for Greece. Now in France a majority of people voted for something akin to your ideals with La France Insumise and Macron is preventing them from reaching government, furthering the advance of fascism. I’m Spanish and we had a left party called Podemos in the 2010s which got demolished in the elections after accusations of funding by Venezuela and Iran. Turns out the ministry of interior had fabricated false evidence and given it to the media to circulate it. In the USA, they can choose between orange fascist supporting genocide in Gaza, or female state prosecutor supporting genocide in Gaza. What an array of Democratic options we have in capitalism, mate. Meanwhile, China, with its single party government, enjoys the highest rates of satisfaction with the central government in the world.
You just spew and repeat bullshit anticommunist propaganda. I showed you the insane and continuous GDP growth of the USSR and you keep falsely talking of stagnation (I’m Spanish and under capitalism the living standards of 2025 are worse than those of 2005, in Germany, quality of life just dropped to the lowest level in 40 years). You aren’t even making coherent arguments because I can literally show you numeric evidence that you’re wrong, but your cognitive dissonance is too strong to listen and you keep repeating the same shit despite being literally proven wrong two comments above.
As for Molotov-Ribbentrop and the invasion of “Poland”: I’m gonna please ask you to actually read my comment and to be open to the historical evidence I bring (using Wikipedia as a source, hopefully not suspect of being tankie-biased), because I believe there is a great mistake in the way contemporary western nations interpret history of WW2 and the interwar period. Thank you for actually making the effort, I know it’s a long comment, but please engage with the points I’m making:
The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR. From that Wikipedia article: “The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia’s assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.” Poland could have literally been saved from Nazi invasion if France and itself had agreed to start a war together against Nazi Germany, but they didn’t want to. By the logic of “invading Poland” being akin to Nazi collaboration, Poland was as imperialist as the Nazis.
As a Spaniard leftist it’s so infuriating when the Soviet Union, the ONLY country in 1936 which actively fought fascism in Europe by sending weapons, tanks and aviation to my homeland in the other side of the continent in the Spanish civil war against fascism, is accused of appeasing the fascists. The Soviets weren’t dumb, they knew the danger and threat of Nazism and worked for the entire decade of the 1930s under the Litvinov Doctrine of Collective Security to enter mutual defense agreements with England, France and Poland, which all refused because they were convinced that the Nazis would honor their own stated purpose of invading the communists in the East. The Soviets went as far as to offer ONE MILLION troops to France (Archive link against paywall) together with tanks, artillery and aviation in 1939 in exchange for a mutual defense agreement, which the French didn’t agree to because of the stated reason. Just from THIS evidence, the Soviets were by far the most antifascist country in Europe throughout the 1930s, you literally won’t find any other country doing any remotely similar efforts to fight Nazism. If you do, please provide evidence.
The invasion of “Poland” is also severely misconstrued. The Soviets didn’t invade what we think of when we say Poland. They invaded overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands that Poland had previously invaded in 1919. Poland in 1938, a year before the invasion:
“Polish” territories invaded by the USSR in 1939:
The Soviets invaded famously Polish cities such as Lviv (sixth most populous city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (important city in western Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of freaking modern Lithuania). They only invaded a small chunk of what you’d consider Poland nowadays, and the rest of lands were actually liberated from Polish occupation and returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian socialist republics. Hopefully you understand the importance of giving Ukrainians back their lands and sovereignty?
Additionally, the Soviets didn’t invade Poland together with the Nazis, they invaded a bit more than two weeks after the Nazi invasion, at a time when the Polish government had already exiled itself and there was no Polish administration. The meaning of this, is that all lands not occupied by Soviet troops, would have been occupied by Nazis. There was no alternative. Polish troops did not resist Soviet occupation but they did resist Nazi invasion. The Soviet occupation effectively protected millions of Slavic peoples like Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians from the stated aim of Nazis of genociding the Slavic peoples all the way to the Urals.
All in all, my conclusion is: the Soviets were fully aware of the dangers of Nazism and fought against it earlier than anyone (Spanish civil war), spent the entire 30s pushing for an anti-Nazi mutual defence agreement which was refused by France, England and Poland, tried to honour the existing mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia which France rejected and Poland didn’t allow (Romania neither but they were fascists so that’s a given), and offered to send a million troops to France’s border with Germany to destroy Nazism but weren’t allowed to do so. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a tool of postponing the war in a period in which the USSR, a very young country with only 10 years of industrialization behind it since the first 5-year plan in 1929, was growing at a 10% GDP per year rate and needed every moment it could get. I can and do criticise decisions such as the invasion of Finland, but ultimately even the western leaders at the time seem to generally agree with my interpretation:
“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)
“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.
"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact’s signing)
Ok the USSR did pursue collective security through Litvinov, helped the Spanish Republic when most democracies stayed neutral, and tried several times to form an anti Nazi front before the West shut the door.
But at the same time, it’s hard to overlook that Molotov-Ribbentrop included a secret protocol dividing Eastern Europe and the Red Army did enter Poland in 1939 and annex those territories, followed by mass arrests and deportations. Even if those regions had large non Polish populations, the incorporation wasn’t a liberation but a was state occupation under Moscow.
So I think both things can be true:
the USSR was strongly anti fascist in the 30s and tried to prevent war, and also, once diplomacy failed, it chose realpolitik by cutting a deal with Hitler, partitioning Poland, and expanding westward until 1941. The switch to the Allied side happened only after Barbarossa, not out of ideological unity but because Germany attacked.
If it was an annexation in the same quality as what the Nazis did, then why did Poland not resist the invasion (which they did against Nazis) and why did the Allies not declare war against the USSR?
followed by mass arrests and deportations
There were arrests and deportations, true. And not just that, there were also summary executions of some thousands of Polish members of the army, of the police forces, of the previous government and many landlords and capitalists. If you ask a Pole they’ll invariably bring up Katyn massacre (which is generally attributed to the Soviets but AFAIK there’s room for doubting that, given some key pieces of evidence such as examination of munitions used in the executions revealing that they were German munitions). The thing is: the Soviets weren’t “annexing land” for the sake of annexion, they were propagating socialism, and to have socialism, you need to make sure you won’t suffer a capitalist counterrevolution organized by the formerly powerful ones who were benefiting from the exploitation of the workers and peasants.
Overall, I do believe that the expansion of the Soviet socialist model was a good thing in and out of itself, and therefore I generally defend the actions taken to expand this model to countries that resisted because I believe that the ones resisting this weren’t primarily the workers or peasants, but the ruling classes and the wealthy.
Source: émigré gusanos living in Madrid, Spain. Life expectancy is higher in Cuba than in the USA, and that’s despite the island country suffering the most comprehensive and long lasting economic blockade in human history. The blockade itself, according to the Office of the Historian of the USA, was put in place, and I quote: “to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”. Seeing you’re so concerned with poverty caused by economic blockades, you may be interested to know that according to recent medical research US and EU sanctions murder above half a million humans per year since 1971.
…so shit that it took backwards feudal Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, etc. where 85% of the population were destitute peasants with a life expectancy of 27 years in 1929, and by 1970 turned into the second world power, rose life expectancy to close to 70, and did all this without exploiting the global south.
Totally terrible economy, much worse than anything before or after, right?
Wrong, wrong and more wrong. I’ve answered to that in a separate comment because of how wrong that is, feel free to read it and give me a well-informed opinión afterwards on my comment. “Le evil Soviets invaded poor wittle Poland” is pure historic revisionism that you’re regurgitating from some other Lemmy comment you’ve seen.
As for the rest of your comment I won’t bother because it’s just more “hooman greed” nonsense.
Praising few successes shouldn’t mean ignoring the other side i.e repression, shortages, lack of political freedom, stagnation, mass emigration and the fact that the USSR collapsed under its own economic structure.
We don’t have to choose between “uncritical communism” and “unchecked capitalism.” I’m centre left. I believe in a regulated market, social safety nets, labour rights, universal healthcare/education and checks on corporate power without abolishing private enterprise, scientific development or democracy. Capitalism with strong regulation has lifted millions from poverty too.
I’d rather live in a system that mixes market efficiency with social protection not one that sacrifices freedom and innovation for state control.
That’s my final comment and I won’t be reading anything further. Thanks.
Few successes like the lack of exploitation of the Global South? You’re just a racist who doesn’t give a shit about the billions suffering under capitalism.
What political freedom do we have in capitalism? I’m a European, and for the past 20 years we’ve been able to choose between either austerity policy (socialdemocrats) and harsh austerity policy (conservative/neoliberals). This applies to every country in the EU without exception, to the point that Greece tried something different with Syriza during the 2010s and elected a party more akin to your ideas and their political power got essentially couped by the EU’s Troika and central bank when they threatened that if Greece were to revise its sovereign debt, the central bank would stop working for Greece. Now in France a majority of people voted for something akin to your ideals with La France Insumise and Macron is preventing them from reaching government, furthering the advance of fascism. I’m Spanish and we had a left party called Podemos in the 2010s which got demolished in the elections after accusations of funding by Venezuela and Iran. Turns out the ministry of interior had fabricated false evidence and given it to the media to circulate it. In the USA, they can choose between orange fascist supporting genocide in Gaza, or female state prosecutor supporting genocide in Gaza. What an array of Democratic options we have in capitalism, mate. Meanwhile, China, with its single party government, enjoys the highest rates of satisfaction with the central government in the world.
You just spew and repeat bullshit anticommunist propaganda. I showed you the insane and continuous GDP growth of the USSR and you keep falsely talking of stagnation (I’m Spanish and under capitalism the living standards of 2025 are worse than those of 2005, in Germany, quality of life just dropped to the lowest level in 40 years). You aren’t even making coherent arguments because I can literally show you numeric evidence that you’re wrong, but your cognitive dissonance is too strong to listen and you keep repeating the same shit despite being literally proven wrong two comments above.
As for Molotov-Ribbentrop and the invasion of “Poland”: I’m gonna please ask you to actually read my comment and to be open to the historical evidence I bring (using Wikipedia as a source, hopefully not suspect of being tankie-biased), because I believe there is a great mistake in the way contemporary western nations interpret history of WW2 and the interwar period. Thank you for actually making the effort, I know it’s a long comment, but please engage with the points I’m making:
The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR. From that Wikipedia article: “The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia’s assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.” Poland could have literally been saved from Nazi invasion if France and itself had agreed to start a war together against Nazi Germany, but they didn’t want to. By the logic of “invading Poland” being akin to Nazi collaboration, Poland was as imperialist as the Nazis.
As a Spaniard leftist it’s so infuriating when the Soviet Union, the ONLY country in 1936 which actively fought fascism in Europe by sending weapons, tanks and aviation to my homeland in the other side of the continent in the Spanish civil war against fascism, is accused of appeasing the fascists. The Soviets weren’t dumb, they knew the danger and threat of Nazism and worked for the entire decade of the 1930s under the Litvinov Doctrine of Collective Security to enter mutual defense agreements with England, France and Poland, which all refused because they were convinced that the Nazis would honor their own stated purpose of invading the communists in the East. The Soviets went as far as to offer ONE MILLION troops to France (Archive link against paywall) together with tanks, artillery and aviation in 1939 in exchange for a mutual defense agreement, which the French didn’t agree to because of the stated reason. Just from THIS evidence, the Soviets were by far the most antifascist country in Europe throughout the 1930s, you literally won’t find any other country doing any remotely similar efforts to fight Nazism. If you do, please provide evidence.
The invasion of “Poland” is also severely misconstrued. The Soviets didn’t invade what we think of when we say Poland. They invaded overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands that Poland had previously invaded in 1919. Poland in 1938, a year before the invasion:
“Polish” territories invaded by the USSR in 1939:
The Soviets invaded famously Polish cities such as Lviv (sixth most populous city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (important city in western Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of freaking modern Lithuania). They only invaded a small chunk of what you’d consider Poland nowadays, and the rest of lands were actually liberated from Polish occupation and returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian socialist republics. Hopefully you understand the importance of giving Ukrainians back their lands and sovereignty?
Additionally, the Soviets didn’t invade Poland together with the Nazis, they invaded a bit more than two weeks after the Nazi invasion, at a time when the Polish government had already exiled itself and there was no Polish administration. The meaning of this, is that all lands not occupied by Soviet troops, would have been occupied by Nazis. There was no alternative. Polish troops did not resist Soviet occupation but they did resist Nazi invasion. The Soviet occupation effectively protected millions of Slavic peoples like Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians from the stated aim of Nazis of genociding the Slavic peoples all the way to the Urals.
All in all, my conclusion is: the Soviets were fully aware of the dangers of Nazism and fought against it earlier than anyone (Spanish civil war), spent the entire 30s pushing for an anti-Nazi mutual defence agreement which was refused by France, England and Poland, tried to honour the existing mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia which France rejected and Poland didn’t allow (Romania neither but they were fascists so that’s a given), and offered to send a million troops to France’s border with Germany to destroy Nazism but weren’t allowed to do so. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a tool of postponing the war in a period in which the USSR, a very young country with only 10 years of industrialization behind it since the first 5-year plan in 1929, was growing at a 10% GDP per year rate and needed every moment it could get. I can and do criticise decisions such as the invasion of Finland, but ultimately even the western leaders at the time seem to generally agree with my interpretation:
“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)
“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.
"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact’s signing)
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this
Ok the USSR did pursue collective security through Litvinov, helped the Spanish Republic when most democracies stayed neutral, and tried several times to form an anti Nazi front before the West shut the door.
But at the same time, it’s hard to overlook that Molotov-Ribbentrop included a secret protocol dividing Eastern Europe and the Red Army did enter Poland in 1939 and annex those territories, followed by mass arrests and deportations. Even if those regions had large non Polish populations, the incorporation wasn’t a liberation but a was state occupation under Moscow.
So I think both things can be true: the USSR was strongly anti fascist in the 30s and tried to prevent war, and also, once diplomacy failed, it chose realpolitik by cutting a deal with Hitler, partitioning Poland, and expanding westward until 1941. The switch to the Allied side happened only after Barbarossa, not out of ideological unity but because Germany attacked.
If it was an annexation in the same quality as what the Nazis did, then why did Poland not resist the invasion (which they did against Nazis) and why did the Allies not declare war against the USSR?
There were arrests and deportations, true. And not just that, there were also summary executions of some thousands of Polish members of the army, of the police forces, of the previous government and many landlords and capitalists. If you ask a Pole they’ll invariably bring up Katyn massacre (which is generally attributed to the Soviets but AFAIK there’s room for doubting that, given some key pieces of evidence such as examination of munitions used in the executions revealing that they were German munitions). The thing is: the Soviets weren’t “annexing land” for the sake of annexion, they were propagating socialism, and to have socialism, you need to make sure you won’t suffer a capitalist counterrevolution organized by the formerly powerful ones who were benefiting from the exploitation of the workers and peasants.
Overall, I do believe that the expansion of the Soviet socialist model was a good thing in and out of itself, and therefore I generally defend the actions taken to expand this model to countries that resisted because I believe that the ones resisting this weren’t primarily the workers or peasants, but the ruling classes and the wealthy.