Myths around the USSR
The Black Book of Communism which is the main source for this, written by Stephane Courtois has been called into question on multiple different grounds.Some critics have objected to the book's depiction of communism and nazism as being similar, others have criticized the approach the book takes to assigning blame of deaths, and still others, most notably J.Arch Getty, for its lack of distinction between famine deaths and intentional deaths. But in terms of factual accuracy, the book is, according to most experts, off the mark.
1: Death tolls in Maoist china: The death tolls associated with maoist China are considered by most sinologists to be inaccurate. The book lists Mao's China as being responsible for 65 million deaths, particularly in regards to the Great Chinese Famine. This number is considered by most sinologists to be not-accurate. According to Leslie Holmes, the number is closer to 15 million excess deaths, which is substantiated by Chinese statistics. Similarly, the deaths attributed to the cultural revolution is assumed to be overstated, as the cited figure of 5 million is most likely closer to 400,000
2:In regards to the soviet union, the pattern of inflation remains consistent. No better is this illustrated than the Holodomor. The Holodomor, or the soviet famine of 1932-1933 was, according to most experts, both much less devastating than Courtois makes it out to be. In the book he cites a figure of 7 million famine deaths, while modern analysis estimates the death toll to be ranging from 1.8-2.5 million deaths. This is supported by soviet archival evidence, which shows a death toll of 2.4 million deaths. Furthermore, academics ranging from Robert Conquest to J Arch Getty (very biased at that) would agree that the famine at the very least did not arise from malicious intent, but rather as a combination of environmental conditions and damage from Stalin's collectivisation of agriculture(although the importance of the two factors in regards to one-another is highly disputed) In regards to gulag deaths, which the book pins at about three million, an analysis by J Arch Getty, Gabor T Rittersporn and Viktor N Zemskov shows a death toll of slightly over a third of that amount. In regards to NKVD executions, Getty estimates slightly under 800,000 executions (however, this number also fails to account for commuted sentences and according to Austin Murphy, this number can be reduced even further to just above 100,000)
I am unqualified to comment on the death tolls given for latin america and africa, so I will refrain from doing so.
Lastly, there is some evidence to doubt the intentions of the author. Courtois defines any person who died unnaturally under communism as being "a victim of it", which most would consider disingenuous. Two of the book's contributors have renounced their association with the book, and a formal criticism was written about it by historian Peter Kenez. According to historian Peter Kenez,, the book should simply be considered an "anti-communist polemic", and on a separate occasion asserted it contains historical inaccuracies. Harvard university press even retracted its edition of the book, claiming it had remedial math errors. Werth and Margolin specifically felt that Courtois was obsessed at arriving at the 100 million death toll, and in the process drastically overestimated many figures. Overall, no matter your position on communism, most academics would agree that one would be better off avoiding the black book. If you absolutely insist on continuing its use as a source, it could only really be called an inflated count of people who died concurrently to communism, not because of it
You also need to remember that much of these deaths happened under stalin, in fact most. Stalin was a monster like most back then.
"Lenin killed millions"
No he didn't again a few thousand to around 100k at most mostly through the wars and arrests of rich people but again siege socialism. These actions were done in response to the aggression by foreign countries while western countries were committing evil for pure imperialist reasons.
Famines ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943?wprov=sfla1
https://youtu.be/plZkO3y9_hY?si=67paTMignE1iJ24j
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/learning_history/children_depression/depression_children_menu.cfm
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zy4wh4j
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0904491106
Genocide?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Nama_genocide?wprov=sfla1
Concentration camps ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War_concentration_camps?wprov=sfla1
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_Haiti#Human_rights_abuses
https://robbauerbooks.com/2022/06/13/american-concentration-camps-philippines/
Mass atrocities?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacification_of_Samar
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balangiga_massacre
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_BatFirst_Battle_of_Bud_lenin
lenin is seen as a monster for doing a fraction of this shit for a noble cause yet westoids will excuse all this shit done for pure imperialism.
Part 2: Authoritarianism and oppression
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
was a prominent Soviet dissident and outspoken critic of Communism. The Gulag Archipelago, one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author's personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, Nazi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth.
In 1945, during WWII, as a Captain in the Red Army, Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to an eight-year term in a labour camp for creating anti-Soviet propaganda and founding a hostile organization aimed at overthrowing the Soviet government.
[Solzhenitsyn] encounters his secondary school friend, Nikolai Vitkevich, and they recklessly share candid political discussions critical of Stalin's conduct of the war:
These two young officers, after days of discussion, astonishingly drew up a program for change, entitled "Resolution No. 1." They argued that the Soviet regime stifled economic development, literature, culture, and everyday life; a new organization was needed to fight to put things right."
These discussions were not cynical, but resonate with ideological ardour and zealous patriotism. Solzhenitsyn heedlessly stores "Resolution No. 1" in his map case. In nineteen months, it, along with copies of all correspondence between himself and Vitkevich from April 1944 to February 1945 will serve to convict Solzhenitsyn of anti-Soviet propaganda under Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code, paragraph 10 and of founding a hostile organization under paragraph 11.
- Dale Hardy. (2001). Solzhenitsyn in confession https://summit.sfu.ca/item/8379
And he wasn't merely some Left Oppositionist striving for "real" socialism, he was a hardcore Russian Nationalist who sympathized with the Nazis:
In his assessment of the Second World War, [Solzhenitsyn stated] ‘the German army could have liberated the Soviet Union from Communism but Hitler was stupid and did not use this weapon.’ It seems extraordinary that Solzhenitsyn saw the failure of Nazi Germany to annex the Soviet Union as some kind of missed opportunity...
- Simon Demissie. (2013). New files from 1983 –https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/new-files-from-1983/
This weapon" referring to the various counter-revolutionary, anti-Stalin groups that could be weaponized to dissolve the USSR from within.
The biggest problem with The Gulag Archipelago, though, is that it is billed as a work of non-fiction based on his personal experiences. There is good reason to believe this is not the case. His ideological background makes him biased against Communism and against the Soviet government. He also had material incentive to promote it this way; it was a major commercial success and quickly became an international bestseller, selling millions of copies in multiple languages. It has essentially become the Bible of anti-Soviet propaganda, with new editions containing forewards from anti-Communists like Jordan Peterson. It likely would not have performed so well or been such effective propaganda had it been advertised merely as a compilation of folk tales, which is exactly how Solzhenitsyn's ex-wife describes it:
She also told the newspaper's Moscow correspondent that she was still living with Mr. Soizhenitsyn when he wrote the book and that she had typed part of it. They parted in 1970 and were subsequently divorced.
She said: “The subject of ‘Gulag Archipelago,’ as I felt at the moment when he was writing it, is not in fact the life of the country and not even the life of the camps but the folklore of the camps.”
- New York Times. (1974). Solzhenitsyn's Ex‐Wife Says ‘Gulag’ Is ‘Folklore’ https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-exwife-says-gulag-is-folklore.html
Solzhenitsyn's casual relationship with the truth is evident in his later work as well, establishing a pattern that discredits The Gulag Archipelago as a serious historical account. Solzhenitsyn was an antisemite who indulged in the Judeo-Bolshevism conspiracy theory. In his 2003 book, Two Hundred Years Together, he wrote that "from 20 ministers in the first Soviet government one was Russian, one Georgian, one Armenian and 17 Jews". In reality, there were 15 Commissars in the first Soviet government, not 20: 11 Russians, 2 Ukranians, 1 Pole, and only 1 Jew. He stated: "I had to bury many comrades at the front, but not once did I have to bury a Jew". He also stated that according to his personal experience, Jews had a much easier life in the Gulag camps that he was interned in.
According to the Northwestern University historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern: Solzhenitsyn used unreliable and manipulated figures and ignored both evidence unfavorable to his own point of view and numerous publications of reputable authors in Jewish history. He claimed that Jews promoted alcoholism among the peasantry, flooded the retail trade with contraband, and "strangled" the Russian merchant class in Moscow. He called Jews non-producing people ("непроизводительный народ") who refused to engage in factory labor. He said they were averse to agriculture and unwilling to till the land either in Russia, in Argentina, or in Palestine, and he blamed the Jews' own behavior for pogroms. He also claimed that Jews used Kabbalah to tempt Russians into heresy, seduced Russians with rationalism and fashion, provoked sectarianism and weakened the financial system, committed murders on the orders of qahal authorities, and exerted undue influence on the prerevolutionary government. Petrovsky-Shtern concludes that, "200 Years Together is destined to take a place of honor in the canon of russophone antisemitica."
Fun Fact: After Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the USSR, Robert Conquest (British state anti communist) helped him translate his poetry into English.
Gulags
According to Anti-Communists and Russophobes, the Gulag was a brutal network of work camps established in the Soviet Union under Stalin's ruthless regime. They claim the Gulag system was primarily used to imprison and exploit political dissidents, suspected enemies of the state, and other people deemed "undesirable" by the Soviet government. They claim that prisoners were sent to the Gulag without trial or due process, and that they were subjected to harsh living conditions, forced labour, and starvation, among other things. According to them, the Gulags were emblematic of Stalinist repression and totalitarianism.
Origins of the Mythology
This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based on only a handful of unreliable sources.
Robert Conquest's The Great Terror (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fear mongering, and was based largely off of defector testimony.
Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponized information and disinformation and "fake news" to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements.
He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash.
The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, "a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism".
- Andrew Brown. (2003). https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview23
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author's personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, Nazi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth.
Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A history (published 2003) draws directly from The Gulag Archipelago and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world.
Counterpoints
A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:
Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas
From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon "economic accountability" such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.
For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.
Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners' food supplies.
Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.
A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.
In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the "ordinary criminals" of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.
Saed Teymuri. (2018) https://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/10/09/the-truth-about-the-soviet-gulag-surprisingly-revealed-by-the-cia/
Scale
Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that.
Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise.
In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. ...
Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the Nazis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” ...
Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states...
Michael Parenti. (1997). https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds
Death Rate
In peacetime, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality:
It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive...
Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hitler were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more.
- Timothy Snyder. (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
Side note: Timothy Snyder is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations
This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not death camps.
Nor was it slave labour, exactly. In the camps, although labour was forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (less expenses).
We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson....
The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled).
- L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/noticeboard/bergson/borodkin-ertz.pdf
Anti-Communists of all stripes enjoy referring to successful socialist revolutions as "authoritarian regimes".
Authoritarian implies these places are run by totalitarian tyrants.
Regime implies these places are undemocratic or lack legitimacy.
This perjorative label is simply meant to frighten people, to scare us back into the fold (Liberal Democracy).
There are three main reasons for the popularity of this label in Capitalist media:
Firstly, Marxists call for a Dictatorship of the Proletariat (DotP), and many people are automatically put off by the term "dictatorship". Of course, we do not mean that they want an undemocratic or totalitarian dictatorship. What they mean is that they want to replace the current Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie (in which the Capitalist ruling class dictates policy).
Secondly, democracy in Communist-led countries works differently than in Liberal Democracies. However, anti-Communists confuse form (pluralism / having multiple parties) with function (representing the actual interests of the people).
Finally, this framing of Communism as illegitimate and tyrannical serves to manufacture consent for an aggressive foreign policy in the form of interventions in the internal affairs of so-called "authoritarian regimes", which take the form of invasion (e.g., Vietnam, Korea, Syria, Grenada, Libya, etc.), assassinating their leaders (e.g., Thomas Sankara, Fred Hampton, Patrice Lumumba, etc.), sponsoring coups and colour revolutions (e.g., Pinochet's coup against Allende, the Iran-Contra Affair, the United Fruit Company's war against Arbenz, etc.), and enacting sanctions (e.g., North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, etc.).
Even the CIA, in their internal communications (which have been declassified), acknowledge that Stalin wasn't an absolute dictator:
Even in Stalin's time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by a lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist's power structure.
-http://web.archive.org/web/20230525044208/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf CIA (1953, declassified in 2008)
"Why do you think so many people fled socialist countries because its horrible"
Huh so what's this ?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico%E2%80%93United_States_border_crisis
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/07/mexico-border-explained-chart-immigration
Especially in Eastern Europe where glorious capitalism has made things so much better
https://www.statista.com/statistics/237529/price-to-income-ratio-of-housing-worldwide/
https://www.oecd.org/els/public-pensions/PAG2021-country-profile-Hungary.pdf
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-poland-pension-idUSKCN1C60Z6/
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-croatia-pensions-idUSKBN1W4123/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/05775132.2015.1012402?journalCode=mcha20
Or how much of the population is in decline
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-serbia-population-idUSKCN1B315O/
https://hypeandhyper.com/brain-drain-in-central-and-eastern-europe/
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?end=2021&locations=LV&start=1960
It's funny how when it's economic migration from capitalist countries its just "a bad country" but when it's people fleeing socialist one's its just "because socialism is bad"
"Think tanks back these ideas"
Think tanks are propaganda used to propagate capitalism or western interests.
https://youtu.be/k12GGnTxyhI?si=KmP3orVtWHK1398E
https://youtu.be/3n3Hq7XSBjA?si=9xFjphSow4cGpD9I
https://www.fairobserver.com/devils-dictionary/no-thanks-to-think-tanks/
"Socialism is by definition authoritarian"
Socialism has nothing to do with authoritarianism, socialism in its core is just the state owning and operating industries, that's it there is absolutely nothing in its doctrine about oppressing people, do you blame capitalism for the barbaric actions of the United States? Do you blame capitalism for the barbaric atrocities committed by Pinochet in Chile ? If not then you're a hypocrite, you'll blame the barbaric atrocities committed by countries that had socialist systems on their economic system but not capitalist ones, hypocrisy at its finest
"But why were so many socialist countries brutal regimes" good question, so many socialist countries end up having strict governments because what has happened to every socialist country (that wasn't big enough to challenge the US, Europe or UK) ? Oh that's right they got invaded, bombed had coups supported by US like Vietnam, Korea, Chile, Uganda, Argentina, Guatemala, Grenada, Cuba, Indonesia, Congo, Ethiopia, East Timor and Bolivia or it's just gets sanction into economic oblivion like Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea. USSR and China however whilst sanctioned where and were and are too powerful to take down,
"But how does that excuse the atrocities committed by brutal socialist regimes" it doesn't but it gives an insight into why they become like this, in warfare and politics it's a called a siege mentality, let's go back to late 18th century, USA is a scrawny colony, Britain is the dominant global military power whilst France, Spain, Holy Roman Empire, Russia and Dutch Kingdom are all major players, suddenly the monarchy is removed in France and the people start rising up against the nobility and start questioning things like "why is society this way" you see everyone thought that if you were a serf that's your role, your class and that that's just how society worked but then when the revolution came ideas of liberty and freedom and ability to choose who would lead came about, the powers that be were very scared so scared in fact that over the next two decades they launched over 8 military campaigns, the wars of the coalition they were called
Now You're probably thinking "what's this got to do with anything you stupid commie" well the reason they did not give up until they defeated France was because if their own people started to see others rising up and changing the system (that their leaders and elites benefit from) then they might get ideas themselves, back to now, the reason why practically every socialist country to ever exist has been bombed, invaded, had coups supported, been sanctioned into oblivion or just been the victim of rampant propoganda campaigns like modern day China and Cuba, is because the capitalist elites who control the west can't allow these countries to succeed because if they do then it shows people you don't need this type of capitalism, which comes around again many if these countries even if they started with good intentions like NVA fighting their french colonisers and puppet dictatorship regime in south, you need to keep a strong military presence and strict order because at all times the United States is trying to destroy you, I mean look at Cuba over 800 times they tried to kill Castro, have paid for many attempted coups and tried invading and got wrecked
It's the same with the USSR people call them bullies yet from their inception of winning their fight against capitalists and monarchy, the great powers of the day like Britain and France sanctioned the USSR immediately then following WWII after the end of the European Superpowers and the rise of the USSR and US as the two main players, tensions rose partly due to Stalin's idiocy and tyranny and partly because of the west's historical action against USSR such as sanctions, refusing to enter pact against Nazi Germany and Britain planning on invading the USSR, so sanctions came, Warsaw pact came, NATO came then the imperialist brutality of the US was revealed during cold war
But regardless of all this again socialism has nothing to do with oppression, it's just at its core an economic system where the state owns and operates the means of production, it can be a planned economy like USSR and DPRK or a market economy like China, the point I made was that the market isn't what defines capitalism it's who is making profit from that market.
Part 3: The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
Anti-Communists and horseshoe-theorists love to tell anyone who will listen that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939) was a military alliance between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. They frame it as a cynical and opportunistic agreement between two totalitarian powers that paved the way for the outbreak of World War II in order to equate Communism with Fascism. They are, of course, missing key context in their effort to uniquely place blame on the USSR.
German Background
The loss of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles had a profound effect on the German economy. Signed in 1919, the treaty imposed harsh reparations on the newly formed Weimar Republic (1919-1933), forcing the country to pay billions of dollars in damages to the Allied powers. The Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war, required Germany to cede all of its colonial possessions to the Allied powers. This included territories in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, including German East Africa, German Southwest Africa, Togoland, Cameroon, and German New Guinea.
With an understanding of Historical Materialism and the role that Imperialism plays in maintaining a liberal democracy, it is clear that the National Bourgeoisie would embrace Fascism under these conditions. (Ask: "What is Imperialism?" and "What is Fascism?" for details)
Judeo-Bolshevism (a conspiracy theory which claimed that Jews were responsible for the Russian Revolution of 1917, and that they have used Communism as a cover to further their own interests) gained significant traction in Nazi Germany, where it became a central part of Nazi propaganda and ideology. Adolf Hitler and other leading members of the Nazi Party frequently used the term to vilify Jews and justify their persecution.
The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was repressed by the Nazi regime soon after they came to power in 1933. In the weeks following the Reichstag Fire, the Nazis arrested and imprisoned thousands of Communists and other political dissidents. This played a significant role in the passage of the Enabling Act of 1933, which granted Hitler and the Nazi Party dictatorial powers and effectively dismantled the Weimar Republic.
Soviet Background
Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, Great Britain and other Western powers placed strict trade restrictions on the Soviet Union. These restrictions were aimed at isolating the Soviet Union and weakening its economy in an attempt to force the new Communist government to collapse.
In the 1920s, the Soviet Union under Lenin's leadership was sympathetic towards Germany because the two countries shared a common enemy in the form of the Western capitalist powers, particularly France and Great Britain. The Soviet Union and Germany established diplomatic relations and engaged in economic cooperation with each other. The Soviet Union provided technical and economic assistance to Germany and in return, it received access to German industrial and technological expertise, as well as trade opportunities.
However, this cooperation was short-lived, and by the late 1920s, relations between the two countries had deteriorated. The Soviet Union's efforts to export its socialist ideology to Germany were met with resistance from the German government and the rising Nazi Party, which viewed Communism as a threat to its own ideology and ambitions.
Collective Security (1933-1939)
The appointment of Hitler as Germany's chancellor general, as well as the rising threat from Japan, led to important changes in Soviet foreign policy. Oriented toward Germany since the treaty of Locarno (1925) and the treaty of Special Relations with Berlin (1926), the Kremlin now moved in the opposite direction by trying to establish closer ties with France and Britain to isolate the growing Nazi threat. This policy became known as "collective security" and was associated with Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet foreign minister at the time. The pursuit of collective security lasted approximately as long as he held that position. Japan's war with China took some pressure off of Russia by allowing it to focus its diplomatic efforts on relations with Europe.
- Andrei P. Tsygankov, (2012). https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/russia-and-the-west-from-alexander-to-putin/collective-security-19331939/BD3704C65ABDC2A849B360759B8E9D5C
However, the memories of the Russian Revolution and the fear of Communism were still fresh in the minds of many Western leaders, and there was a reluctance to enter into an alliance with the Soviet Union. They believed that Hitler was a bulwark against Communism and that a strong Germany could act as a buffer against Soviet expansion.
Instead of joining the USSR in a collective security alliance against Nazi Germany, the Western leaders decided to try appeasing Nazi Germany. As part of the policy of appeasement, several territories were ceded to Nazi Germany in the late 1930s:
Rhineland: In March 1936, Nazi Germany remilitarized the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone along the border between Germany and France. This move violated the Treaty of Versailles and marked the beginning of Nazi Germany's aggressive territorial expansion.
Austria: In March 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in what is known as the Anschluss. This move violated the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Saint-Germain, which had established Austria as a separate state following World War I.
Sudetenland: In September 1938, the leaders of Great Britain, France, and Italy signed the Munich Agreement, which allowed Nazi Germany to annex the Sudetenland, a region in western Czechoslovakia with a large ethnic German population.
Memel: In March 1939, Nazi Germany annexed the Memel region of Lithuania, which had been under French administration since World War I.
Bohemia and Moravia: In March 1939, Nazi Germany annexed Bohemia and Moravia, the remaining parts of Czechoslovakia that had not been annexed following the Munich Agreement.
However, instead of appeasing Nazi Germany by giving in to their territorial demands, these concessions only emboldened them and ultimately led to the outbreak of World War II.
Other Pacts involving Nazi Germany
The Four-Power Pact (1933): An agreement between Britain, France, Italy, and Germany.
The Pilsudski Pact (1934): The German–Polish declaration of non-aggression normalised relations and the parties agreed to forgo armed conflict for a period of 10 years. Germany invaded Poland in 1939. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-Power_Pact
Juliabkommen (1936): A gentleman's agreement between Austria and Germany, in which Germany recognized Austria's "full sovereignty". Germany annexed Austria in 1938 in the Anschluss.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliabkommen
Anglo-German Naval Agreement (1935): This agreement with the British allowed Germany the right to build a navy beyond the limits set by the Treaty of Versailles.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-German_Naval_Agreement
Munich Agreement (September 1938): The British, French, and Italy agreed to concede the Sudetenland to Germany in exchange for a pledge of peace. WWII began one year later, when Germany invaded Poland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement
German-French Non-Aggression Pact (December 1938): A treaty between Germany and France, ensuring mutual non-aggression and peaceful relations. Germany invaded France in 1940.https://www.nytimes.com/1938/12/07/archives/the-french-german-pact.html
German-Romanian Economic Treaty (March 1939): This agreement established German control over most aspects of Romanian economy. Romania became an Axis power in 1943 and was liberated by the Soviets in 1945.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Romanian_Treaty_for_the_Development_of_Economic_Relations_between_the_Two_Countries
German-Lithuanian Non-Aggression Pact (March 1939): This ultimatum issued by Germany demanded Lithuania return the Klaipėda Region (Memel) which it lost in WWI in exchange for a non-aggression pact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_German_ultimatum_to_Lithuania
Denmark Non-Aggression Pact (May 1939): An agreement between Germany and Denmark, ensuring non-aggression and peaceful coexistence. Germany invaded Denmark in 1940.https://www.nytimes.com/1939/06/01/archives/danes-and-reich-sign-nonaggression-pact-berlin-hints-provision-is.html
German-Estonian Non-Aggression Pact (June 1939): Germany occupied Estonia in 1941.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Estonian_Non-Aggression_Pact
German-Latvian Non-Aggression Pact (June 1939): Germany occupied Latvia in 1941.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Latvian_Non-Aggression_Pact
And this, of course, ignores all the pacts and treaties that Germany made with its Axis allies: Italy, Japan, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Finland, and Thailand.
Papers which were kept secret for almost 70 years show that the Soviet Union proposed sending a powerful military force in an effort to entice Britain and France into an anti-Nazi alliance.
Such an agreement could have changed the course of 20th century history...
The offer of a military force to help contain Hitler was made by a senior Soviet military delegation at a Kremlin meeting with senior British and French officers, two weeks before war broke out in 1939.
The new documents... show the vast numbers of infantry, artillery and airborne forces which Stalin's generals said could be dispatched, if Polish objections to the Red Army crossing its territory could first be overcome.
But the British and French side - briefed by their governments to talk, but not authorised to commit to binding deals - did not respond to the Soviet offer...
- Nick Holdsworth. (2008).https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/3223834/Stalin-planned-to-send-a-million-troops-to-stop-Hitler-if-Britain-and-France-agreed-pact.html
After trying and failing to get the Western capitalist powers to join the Soviet Union in a collective security alliance against Nazi Germany, and witnessing country after country being ceded, it became clear to Soviet leadership that war was inevitable-- and Poland was next.
Unfortunately, there was a widespread belief in Poland that Jews were overrepresented in the Soviet government and that the Soviet Union was being controlled by Jewish Communists. This conspiracy theory (Judeo-Bolshevism) was fueled by anti-Semitic propaganda that was prevalent in Poland at the time. The Polish government was strongly anti-Communist and had been actively involved in suppressing Communist movements in Poland and other parts of Europe. Furthermore, the Polish government believed that it could rely on the support of Britain and France in the event of a conflict with Nazi Germany. The Polish government had signed a mutual defense pact with Britain in March 1939, and believed that this would deter Germany from attacking Poland.
Seeing the writing on the wall, the Soviet Union made the difficult decision to do what it felt it needed to do to survive the coming conflict. At the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact's signing (August 1939), the Soviet Union was facing significant military pressure from the West, particularly from Britain and France, which were seeking to isolate the Soviet Union and undermine its influence in Europe. The Soviet Union saw the Pact as a way to counterbalance this pressure and to gain more time to build up its military strength and prepare for the inevitable conflict with Nazi Germany, which began less than two years later in June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa).
Part 4: The Holodomor
Leftists do not deny that a famine happened in the Soviet Union in 1932. In fact, even the Soviet archive confirms this. What we do contest is the idea that this famine was man-made or that there was a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This idea of the subjugation of the Soviet Union’s own people was developed by Nazi Germany, in order to show the world the terror of the “Jewish communists.”
https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/stop-spreading-nazi-propaganda/
There have been efforts by anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists to frame the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as "The Holodomor" (lit. "to kill by starvation" in Ukrainian). Framing it this way serves two purposes:
It implies the famine targeted Ukraine.
It implies the famine was intentional.
The argument goes that because it was intentional and because it mainly targeted Ukraine that it was, therefore, an act of genocide. This framing was originally used by Nazis to drive a wedge between the Ukrainian SSR (UkSSR) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution, this narrative has regained popularity and serves the nationalistic goal of strengthening Ukrainian identity and asserting the country's split from Russia.
First Issue
The first issue is that the famine affected the majority of the USSR, not just the UkSSR. Kazakhstan was hit harder (per capita per person) than Ukraine. Russia itself was also severely affected.
The emergence of the Holodomor in the 1980s as a historical narrative was bound-up with post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-making that cannot be neatly separated from the legacy of Eastern European antisemitism, or what Historian Peter Novick calls "Holocaust Envy", the desire for victimized groups to enshrine their "own" Holocaust or Holocaust-like event in the historical record. For many Nationalists, this has entailed minimizing the Holocaust to elevate their own experiences of historical victimization as the supreme atrocity. The Ukrainian scholar Lubomyr Luciuk exemplified this view in his notorious remark that the Holodomor was "a crime against humanity arguably without parallel in European history."
Second Issue
Calling it "man-made" implies that it was a deliberate famine, which was not the case. Although human factors set the stage (rapid industrialization), the main causes of the famine was bad weather and crop disease, resulting in a poor harvest, which pushed the USSR over the edge.
Kulaks ("tight-fisted person") were a class of wealthy peasants who owned land, livestock, and tools. The kulaks had been a thorn in the side of the peasantry long before the revolution. Alexey Sergeyevich Yermolov, Minister of Agriculture and State Properties of the Russian Empire, in his 1892 book, Poor harvest and national suffering, characterized them as usurers, sucking the blood of Russian peasants.
Book https://books.google.ca/books?id=exMEAAAAYAAJ
Poor communication between different levels of government and between urban and rural areas, also contributed to the severity of the crisis.
Quota Reduction
What really contradicts the genocide argument is that the Soviets did take action to mitigate the effects of the famine once they became aware of the situation:
The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933.
The official 1932 figures do not unambiguously support the genocide interpretation... The 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree... [which] actually reduced the procurement plan 30 percent. Subsequent decrees also reduced the procurement quotas for most other agricultural products...
Proponents of the genocide argument, however, have minimized or even misconstrued this decree. Mace, for example, describes it as "largely bogus" and ignores not only the extent to which it lowered the procurement quotas but also the fact that even the lowered plan was not fulfilled. Conquest does not mention the decree's reduction of procurement quotas and asserts Ukrainian officials' appeals led to the reduction of the Ukrainian grain procurement quota at the Third All-Ukraine Party Conference in July 1932. In fact that conference confirmed the quota set in the 6 May Decree.
-Mark Tauger. (1992). The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274856099_The_1932_Harvest_and_the_Famine_of_1933
The famine was exacerbated directly and indirectly by collectivization and rapid industrialization. However, if these policies had not been enacted, there could have been even more devastating consequences later.
In 1931, during a speech delivered at the first All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry, Stalin said, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under.”
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/02/04.htm
In 1941, exactly ten years later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
By this time, the Soviet Union's industrialization program had led to the development of a large and powerful industrial base, which was essential to the Soviet war effort. This allowed the USSR to produce large quantities of armaments, vehicles, and other military equipment, which was crucial in the fight against Nazi Germany.
In Hitler's own words, in 1942:
All in all, one has to say: They built factories here where two years ago there were unknown farming villages, factories the size of the Hermann-Göring-Werke. They have railroads that aren't even marked on the map.
- Werner Jochmann. (1980). Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944.
Collectivization also created critical resiliency among the civilian population:
The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment. Great tank battles were reported; it was noted that the Russians had sturdy tanks which often smashed or overturned German tanks in head-on collisions. “How does it happen,” a New York editor asked me, “that those Russian peasants, who couldn’t run a tractor if you gave them one, but left them rusting in the field, now appear with thousands of tanks efficiently handled?” I told him it was the Five-Year Plan. But the world was startled when Moscow admitted its losses after nine weeks of war, including 7,500 guns, 4,500 planes and 5,000 tanks. An army that could still fight after such losses must have had the biggest or second biggest supply in the world.
As the war progressed, military observers declared that the Russians had “solved the blitzkrieg,” the tactic on which Hitler relied. This German method involved penetrating the opposing line by an overwhelming blow of tanks and planes, followed by the fanning out of armored columns in the “soft” civilian rear, thus depriving the front of its hinterland support. This had quickly conquered every country against which it had been tried. “Human flesh cannot withstand it,” an American correspondent told me in Berlin. Russians met it by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry formed again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry. This created a chaotic front, where both Germans and Russians were fighting in all directions. The Russians could count on the help of the population. The Germans found no “soft, civilian rear.” They found collective farmers, organized as guerrillas, coordinated with the regular Russian army.
- Anna Louise Strong. (1956). The Stalin Era
Conclusion
While there may have been more that the Soviets could have done to reduce the impact of the famine, there is no evidence of intent-- ethnic, or otherwise. Therefore, one must conclude that the famine was a tragedy, not a genocide.
Some counter arguments or bad sources.
Bloodlands by Timothy snyder, just a re telling of older work using older sources that have since been debunked since soviet archives opened combined with the fact that snyders sourcing is very disingenuous an example being sourcing actual scholars like wheatcroft yet cherry picking statements and ignoring their overall thesis that it wasn't genocide and doesn't address any of the counter arguments against it being a genocide.
Red Famine by Anne Applebaum. She is not a historian and is very obviously biassed and her primary sources are again using older sources.
"The Soviets enforced black lists which pushed grain quotas for starving farmers that failed to meet grain quotas"
Yep they did, it was brutal and more proof of stalin's brutality. Yet this was enforced across the soviet union not just Ukraine and that only ~1-10% of ukrainian farms were targeted. (Source the archives)
Part 5: Capitalism is just better
No, they are rich because of exploitation.
Assuming an unregulated market, in a developed country
People need jobs to survive; businesses need jobs filled to maintain profitable operations
Businesses can increase profitability by paying workers less, and cutting other labor-related costs like workplace safety standards. There will always be workers desperate enough to put up with low wages and long hours. Workers have no real choice, after all they need a job to survive.
It is against a company's best interest to pay workers any more than the minimum for their continued participation in the work force. Workers with significant savings have more power to leave an abusive employer or negotiate for better conditions, since they aren't as desperate as someone living paycheck to paycheck.
Socialist countries also outperform capitalist countries in metrics that matter
https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/pdf/10.1521/siso.2013.77.1.10?download=true
"Why do socialist countries do worse ?"
We already went over this earlier with about international coups and trade sanctions -- absolutely a huge part of the economic and political struggles of socialist countries -- but I'd also like to posit that socialism would, in fact, lower consumption and some metrics of standards of living for the wealthiest of countries...and that's probably a good thing. We would need the resources of an entire solar system's worth of Earths to sustain the average American's level of consumption.
People in capitalist countries lived better because they lived off exploitation.
When you look at metrics other than GDP per capita and consumption (which are also highly skewed by the purchasing power of the currency the state uses, which is essentially reflects the amount that the global market believes it should be valued at, much like the value of stocks, and as such are subject to scares, propaganda, and intentional inflationary/deflationary measures by global economic superpowers) the results of socialist countries become much less clearly "failures". Cuba is the most environmentally sustainable country in the world, has educated so many doctors they export teams worldwide, and has achieved shocking gains in literacy. China is obviously a global and economic superpower that has lifted the highest number of people out of poverty in history.
The market has a high future discount rate. Essentially, it doesn't value long-term sustainability and investment measures nearly as much as I personally believe they should -- profits and losses gained the next quarter are worth so, so much more than potential profits and losses in 30 years. As such, I would posit that investment in long-term QOL index measures such as education, sustainability and healthcare are not accurately reflected in traditional economic tools of measurement.
Capitalism is useful to spur innovation and development in the early to middle stages of a developing economy. But the tools we have in our capitalist system sorely undervalue investments in human and environmental capital and, as such, lead to market forces that push for unsustainable consumption and constantly pressures a decrease in investment into the current and future labor force.
The only places where capitalism is 'successful' is the imperial core, in the nations extracting superprofits from the third world. Socialist revolutions only ever happened in nations with very little industry or jn the global south, meaning their starting point is already much worse than those of the imperial core, yet some of them still outperform those capitalist nations in some essential quality of life measures. And there's other benefits to socialism that are harder to measure, for example, guaranteed employment will decrease the stress you have at your job. There's also the change in societal attitude towards each other, people feel like equals and have a greater sense of community, at least that is what has been reported from past socialist experiments.
"Comparative" in these sorts of questions does a lot of work. How do we compare a country with 200+ years of history that, on day one, had an economy developed by one of the most economically powerful countries at the time with slave labor to a country that, on day one, was one of the most backwater countries on earth with a feudal economy and an immediate civil war spurred on by outside geopolitical enemies? This is the tip of the iceberg when trying to compare the US and the USSR. Going more generally, how do you compare an economic system that had been in the process of emerging for hundreds of years (capitalism) to one that was freshly emerging (socialism). Yet, with all that and more going against it, the USSR caught up to the US in something like 50 years, with comparable or better metrics in things like literacy, calories, highly skilled workers like doctors and scientists, etc. Hell they went to space before us! You can find similar examples like this from many other socialist experiments, though of course not all of them.
We also need to keep in mind that the measures of "success" and "failure" are always going to benefit capitalist countries because they are the dominant political system currently. Everything is setup to make sure they "succeed" in the narrow metrics capitalists judge themselves by. Yet the system, for all its claims of free competition, is set up to actively sabotage socialist economies at every step. Yet even with that, check out a sample of African or Eastern European capitalist economies and you'll see a vast majority of failures by any rational metric. Capitalist core countries will hold them up as successes or make excuses for why they are failing ranging from not being capitalist enough to straight racist assumptions about the people's character.
I recommend checking out Hakim's video on the "Socialism Always Fails" argument here: https://youtu.be/nFUC0UWgdGY?si=QNEoKkAvJOSjpqHR
"Global South is just underdeveloped"
So one one of the laws of capitalist motion and development is this inexorable expansion. And that means expansion into and expropriation of the third world, a process that's been going on for about 400 years. Perpetrated by the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch, the Belgians, the French, the English, and most recently, most successfully, most impressively by the Americans.
The perpetrators are the ruling classes of these countries, not the ordinary people. The ordinary people simply paid the costs of the empire. The ordinary people simply sent their sons off to die on the plains of India and the jungles of the Congo or in Latin America wherever else.
That expropriation of the third world has been going on for 400 years brings us to another revelation, namely, that the third world is not poor. You don't go to poor countries to make money. There are very few poor countries in this world. Most countries are rich. The Philippines are rich. Brazil is rich. Mexico is rich. Chile is rich. Only the people are poor.
But there's billions to be made there to be carved out and be taken. There's been billions for 400 years, capitalist European and North American powers have carved out and taken the timber, the flax, the hemp, the cocoa, the rum, the copper, the iron, the rubber, the bauxite, the slaves, and the cheap labor they have taken out of these countries.
These countries are not underdeveloped, they're over-exploited.
"Social democracy like Scandinavian countries is how it should be"
No.
Here's a few links and sources.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36vYRkVYeVw
Gravel talking about French Neo-Colonials in Africa.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/2/5/norways-must-stop-violating-indigenous-rights
"In 2008, Norwegian communications multinational, Telenor — partly owned by the state — was exposed in a documentary as partnering with a Bangladeshi supplier that employed child labor in horrendous conditions. The report also uncovered that the children were made to handle chemical substances without any protection and one of the workers even died after falling into a pool of acid. Not only was the treatment of workers unacceptable, they also ruined the crops of farmers in the surrounding areas with the waste from the plant. Like other Western multinationals that deliberately go to the developing world looking to save money on labor and operations costs, the company washed its hands of the accusations, denying knowledge about their partner's inhumane practices.
Similarly, Norwegian oil and gas company Statoil, also partly owned by the state, has been involved in multiple corruption cases around the world — especially in underdeveloped countries — where they have bribed state companies and government officials in order to obtain licenses for extraction. Their involvement is not only limited to these aggressive economic practices, they are also deeply involved in the West’s military exploits. Norway dropped 588 bombs on Libya but scarcely is mentioned as being part of these imperialist operations. Statoil has since started joint extractions operations worth millions in the ruined country.
Sweden’s foreign policy record is no better. Technology firms like Saab, BAE Systems, and Bofors compete with the U.S. and Israel in their development of a large variety of weapons that are sold to 55 countries around the world in deals worth billions. It seems that Sweden, like their Norwegian neighbor, actively participates in denying human rights to millions across the globe and especially in underdeveloped nations.
The Swedish clothing giant H&M can retail affordable products in rich nations and make huge profits only because they exploit and underpay workers in impoverished nations such as Bangladesh. As John Smith points out in his book "Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century," only 0.95 euros of the final sale price of an H&M T-shirt remains in Bangladesh to cover the cost of the factory, the workers, the suppliers, and the government. The remaining 3.54 euros goes for taxes and transportation in the market country, with the bulk going to the retailer. In other words, Western nations capture most of the profit although it is the poor workers and nations that have put most of the input.
They are just as bad.
Had nights in.
Went to eat out.
Shopping
Enjoying summer.
Soviet magazines
Nights out
soviet consumer Electronics
Boom box
CD Prototype
Story
portable Cassette player
Late models
VHS players
Video game consoles
Soviet Union in 50s
Soviet Union in 30s
We Yugoslavia
Cuba
Now it's true for consumer electronics the soviets were behind but its not an equal comparison.
Again this is not sa fair comparison because of three fold.
CoCom legislation that barred trade with socialist countries, much of the mineral rich countries in Africa and South America were allied with the USA and wouldn't (more couldn't through threat of sanctions or coup) trade with them, this combined with the fact that China was against the USSR for most of its existence post WWII and you can see the problem.
USA and European countries had open trade with countries like Japan and South Korea which practically dominiated the technology innovation especially in consumer products during late 70s and 80s
As discussed before. People in western countries had cheap access to such electronics because poor people in 3rd world countries were (still are) paid pennies to mine the raw materials, soviet allied socialist regime were actively against such things.
I should note that whilst life for the regular person in USSR, Yugoslavia and Cuba was as good as any developed country, countries like Poland, Romania and East Germany were very oppressive dictatorships where the average person had to survive off rations, it was awful that the USSR allowed these countries to exist in the way that they did, seige mentality is a valid reason but no excuse.
Before you think this is a gotcha, these conditions literally apply to countless US backed capitalist countries, off top of head, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Guatemala, Taiwan, South Korea, Israel, South Vietnam, Indonesia, Pakistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru, Paraguay and Equatorial Guinea.
Part 7: USSR struggled to build solid state electronics
This is just nonsense. The Soviets had digital electronics in use since the 60s and had microprocessors in use since the mid 70s and were fully transistorised by late 70s.
The first Soviet digital computer was the Plamya VT developed in the late 1950s.
For fighters, their first compact digital flight management computer was the Orbita-1 for use on Tu-28P, Yak-28P, Su-15 and MiG-21S in early 60s.
Their first digital system with a microprocessor was the Orbita-10 made in 1972 for MiG-25RB, Su-15TM, Su-17M3, Su-24, MiG-23M, MiG-23ML, MiG-23MLA and MiG-27
Their first 8x bit system was the Ts-100 made in 1973, followed on with Orbita-20-2 in 1974 which was 8x bit, followed on with the 16x bit Argon-15 in 1975 and MVK upgrades in 70s then the 16x bit Ts-101 in 1980 for use with the MiG-27K, MiG-29A, MiG-31, Su-17M3, Su-24M, Su-25 and Su-27.
Their first 32x bit system was the TsSVM-90 and the Ts-200 FMC made in 1985 for the MiG-31M and Su-27M
Their first 64x bit system was the SOLO series system and Baget-55-06 made in 2004 for use with the MiG-31BM and future Su-35, this was followed in 2006 with the BagrOS-4000 series for the Su-35S then the IMA-BK in 2007 for the Su-57. These were all developed from the 64x bit Elbus 2000 series of chips in the early 00s.
Here are some of the major public use microprocessors and when they were developed.
Early solid state electronics developed in mid 60s.
4x bit / early 1970s
K155 series
8x bit / mid 1970s
U880 series
16x bit / late 1970s
K1801 series
32x bit / early 1980s
K1839 series
Below are ballistic computers used in military vehicles. 1V series are digital whilst BV series are mechanical.
BV-54 mechanical ballistic computer / 1983
BV-55 mechanical ballistic computer / 1983
BV-62 mechanical ballistic computer / 1983
BV-64 mechanical ballistic computer / 1966
BV-72 mechanical ballistic computer / 1968
1V514 4x bit digital ballistic computer / 1972
1V517 8x bit digital ballistic computer / 1974
1V519 8x bit digital ballistic computer / 1975
1V520 8x bit digital ballistic computer / 1978
1V528 16x bit digital ballistic computer / 1980
1V539 16x bit digital ballistic computer / 1982
1V539M 32x bit digital ballistic computer / 1997
1V528-1 32x bit digital ballistic computer / 1993
1V558 32x bit digital ballistic computer / 1990
Personal computers built since the 70s
DVK-3M2
DVK-4
DVK-2
BK0010-01
MS-0511
soviet Equipment that utilised solid state electronics or microprocessors.
Tanks: T-64B, T-72B, T-80B, T-80U, T-90.
IFVs: BMP-2, BMP-3, BMD-2, BMD-3, BTR-80,
SAMs: S-300, Buk, Tor, Igla.
AA Guns: Tunguska, ZSU-23-4M3, RPK-1 S-60.
Artillery: 2S3M1, 2S19, 2S7M, A-222, 2A29R.
MLRS: Prima, BM-27, BM-30
Rockets: R-27K, OTR-21, OTR-23, Scud-D.
Missiles: R-23, R-24, R-40, R-60, R-27, R-33, R-73, R-37, R-77, P-120, P-270, P-500, P-700, P-1000, Kh-29, Kh-31, Kh-35, Kh-58, Kh-55, Kh-80, Kh-90,
Bombs: KAB-500, KAB-1500,
ICBMs: R-36M, R-39, RT-2PM, RS-18A.
Fighter Jets: MiG-23, MiG-25, MiG-27, MiG-29, MiG-31, Su-15TM, Su-17M3, Su-17M4, Su-24, Su-25, Su-27, Su-30,
Helicopters: Mi-17, Mi-24V, Mi-24P, Mi-26, Mi-28, Ka-27, Ka-29, Ka-50.
Bombers: T-4, Tu-22M3, Tu-95MS, Tu-160.
Planes: An-32, An-72, An-74, An-124, An-225, Il-76, Il-86, Tu-154, Yak-42
Special Type Aircraft: Tu-142MR, Il-82, Il-80, A-50, An-71, Il-20RT, Su-24MR, Su-24MP, Tu-22MR,
Vessels: Kara, Krivak, Slava, Kirov Sovremenny, Kilo, Oscar, Typhoon, Delta.
Radios: R-173, R-158, R-163, R-169
Here's a few looks
2S3M1 digitised
https://youtube.com/shorts/lq5p-RUMoPE?si=MeDvsN3AtNPUlCiJ
2S9 and 2S23 digitised
https://youtube.com/shorts/uw31DX2tO0w?si=-rkEbm1aJQHmFOBY
https://youtube.com/shorts/EQlhGSue-lA?si=F9BxJ3b45qYidFN4
2S19 digitised
https://youtube.com/shorts/-iQQ3Iv0yPs?si=6MttR47YBFOPmbhV
You Also need to remember the fact that the USSR was cut off from much of the global economy, the west had access to much of the resource rich Africa and South America which was kept in place either through direct colonialism or through neo colonialism by keeping western backed dictators in power. You also need to remember that post early 60s the two biggest socialist powers of the USSR and PRC were at odds fighting and competing against each other whilst Europe and the USA post 50s were always united, same for Japan and South Korea with the west.
You also need to remember that the west got it's technology through exploitation, an 8x bit system in the 70s and 80s for people in the USSR would costs a years wages for a well paid person but that's, whereas in the west stuff was cheap because poor people in the third world were (and still are) paid pennies a week to mine the raw materials.
So when you combine
High defence budget needed to safeguard other socialist countries and to protect against invasion.this limited the amount that could be spent on leisure and recreation.
Cut off from much of the global economy, the USSR was material rich but certain minerals like coltan and other scarce minerals which are essential for electronics were (and still are) found mostly in western backed countries.
Everyone was given equal opportunity. Today an Xbox costs £400 because poor workers are paid pennies a day to mine the raw materials required. Under socialism everyone gets a fair pay and when you combine the two above factors this led to little attention being paid towards making recreation luxuries cheaper.
Part 9: Various sources
USSR Myths
War time deportations
https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/deportations_GT1110_eng.pdf
Solzhenitsyn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Hundred_Years_Together#Yohanan_Petrovsky-Shtern_critique
https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2017/05/08/the-gulag-archipelago-shouldnt-be-taken-seriously/
https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/blog/new-files-from-1983/
Gulags
https://youtu.be/N7AD4OrH568?t=15
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2166597
Authoritarianism
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/
https://directory.libsyn.com/episode/index/id/27495591
Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism. Michael Parenti
Soviet nazi alliance
https://www.jstor.org/stable/152863
https://politsturm.com/truth-about-molotov-ribbentrop-pact/
Holodomor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMBJ_nQ4sT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMOdDQQVZ6U
https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/the-holodomor-explained/
https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/22207/file.pdf
Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, Stephen Kotkin
Natural Disaster and Human Action in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933, Mark B. Tauger.
Turn away from economic explanations for soviet famines: Stephen wheatcroft.
Bad Cuba debunked
https://youtu.be/nkBXFXwGuJE?si=cJF2enzYeXKUQieq
https://youtu.be/DXBYlC4-0bQ?si=HtWk8G6advsz-CI8
Socialism doesn't fail
https://youtu.be/nFUC0UWgdGY?si=sgeod7PRngu-X9qg
https://youtu.be/NhPOrkGbpxk?si=Vgzig6uA-3tQMr-5
How ussr works
https://youtu.be/nGm0u3UHDZM?si=qDJPkvhUtiUtxzqp
https://youtu.be/6N9dgX5Ivxo?si=aAlKzRnuMIIA_UKM
https://youtu.be/nGm0u3UHDZM?si=R2YnvrAUTfZ5m35L
https://youtu.be/Hcl3R-yARX8?si=Qca3aomGTt-B1E4e
https://youtu.be/pDSZRkhynXU?si=IoCleywC3KzrXNPI
Death toll from capitalism
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ClLKm8Q8Pns
https://youtu.be/QnIsdVaCnUE?si=enpnPuPoz0Apx2El
https://youtu.be/Q5LMxXC8qWg?si=G97OOUsAAyltDDwE
100 million deaths debunked
https://youtu.be/U67gOVT2gDM?si=iL9S5bE3Zcv-f-IW
https://youtu.be/o_TQXSeSKnc?si=g8GJ_Hq3jieJjwg4
https://youtu.be/EyCGVhbfLDc?si=gmEd_EUWnaofXZdA
Why the USSR collapsed
https://youtu.be/OUig0Qwnc4I?si=gp9uhepoOGaZs2Jz
https://youtu.be/sjksTQuswmw?si=DarnJr2QzLtDw0LB
https://youtu.be/w72mLI_FaR0?si=5FINWA_EQm3az2pR
How western capitalism exploits the world
https://youtu.be/oWOH9iJhZXo?si=e5M_K0FGUDiO9EJ-
https://youtu.be/HSWnHlNwdyA?si=7JuLAp2all9w3t4i
https://youtu.be/35Ax-psPZ1g?si=v7oeicpHCGABnkDf
West is rich because of capitalism
The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, p11, p78, p83-84, p87, p90-91 and p1050-1051,
Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. p-22-23.
Sources for soviet POWs and nazi war crimes.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, Volume IV: Camps and Other Detention Facilities under the German Armed Forces (Indiana UP, 2022)
Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941-1945 (JHW Dietz, 1997)
Rolf Keller and Reinhard Otto, Sowjetische Kriegsgefangene im System der Konzentrationslager (NAP, 2019)
Reinhard Otto, Wehrmacht, Gestapo und sowjetische Kriegsgefangene im deutschen Reichsgebiet 1941/42 (Oldenbourg, 1998)
Jürgen Förster, "The Wehrmacht and the War of Extermination Against the Soviet Union," in The Nazi Holocaust Part 3: The "Final Solution": The Implementation of Mass Murder, Volume 2, ed. Michael Marrus (Meckler, 1989), pp. 494-520
Alex J. Kay, Jeff Rutherford, and David Stahel, eds., Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization (U of Rochester Press, 2012)
Gianfranco Mattiello and Wolfgang Vogt, Deutsche Kriegsgefangenen- und Internierteneinrichtungen 1939-1945: Lagergeschichte und Lagerzensurstempel, 2 vols. (Koblenz, 1986-1987).
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