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Topic: Soviet Nostalgia Thread (Read 490 times)

Soviet Nostalgia Thread

This is a dead serious thread. I'm honestly arguing that in the country called USSR there lived actual humans, normal and ordinary people. They were not green like aliens and they did not eat children, definitely not on average or median. 

Much has been said about Soviet propaganda. I grew up to full age in Soviet Union and since early childhood I personally knew that propaganda was bad. And I don't mean that Soviet propaganda was saying that Western propaganda was bad.[1] I mean I learned early on that all propaganda was bad, and I personally always diversified my sources of information and knowledge. So imagine my shock when soon after the collapse of USSR I noticed how brainwashed Westerners can be. And Westerners have no excuse, because they are willingly brainwashed. In the West, propaganda is what people indulge in by choice. It is not imposed on them by an authoritarian government.

Anyway, here are some points of view.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qBwRA3fJKc

The main quibble I have is that in my opinion it is not enough to say "This/that is like Soviet Union." Soviet Union itself had a sufficiently long history so it went through very different phases and it was different things at different times. There were at least three different regimes that can be tentatively called:
- Stalin
- Brezhnev
- Gorbachev

Stalin era was the consolidation of the newly created USSR by dictatorial and highly oppressive genocidal means. Stalin knowingly built up a personality cult for himself as an official state religion. Stalin did not see it coming that Hitler could backstab him, so besides government-imposed hardships of every sort the people also had to go through war hardships. For Russians it's all basically fine, because they think suffering is a great glorious sacrifice, but there are many more peoples and nationalities in USSR who think differently, the more so the less affinity they feel with Russians.

Brezhnev era is called the time of economic stagnation, but in many ways it was the kind of economic and administrative stability that European Central Bank officially aspires to. Prices of things (of probably all things, as far as I remember) were not merely stable, but literally the same from the end of 60's to mid-80's. Prices of industrial products were not given by paper label, but were pressed into them, and the price applied for decades like this under Brezhnev. This is when I grew up and nobody can take my happy childhood and youth away from me.

Then we saw Gorbachev, who is worshipped in the West as a wonderful democratically-minded courageous reformer. He screwed up big time from the start. One of his very first reforms was to restrict access to vodka. Smarter people immediately foretold that either this man goes away or the country collapses. The man did not go away, so the country collapsed. The Chernobyl catastrophe was also very early on in Gorbachev's career, and demonstrated definitively that he was a chicken, nothing leader-like about him.

When I received my invitation to the Soviet Army, the country was economically and administratively in ruins. Everything about the government was so broken that I simply ignored the conscription. I refused to go to their army. And then the country died. So, if you want to know how USSR met its end — it was me.

A competent comparison of any other country or regime to USSR specifies which era or phase of the USSR is being meant. Only Brezhnev era was a relatively smooth ride. Stalin and Gorbachev eras were cataclysmic, without any laws in any sense, legal or administrative or economic, no historic justice or justice overall. Everything under Stalin and Gorbachev was done for some propagandistically stated purpose, some promised bright future, but everything failed, was a grotesque lie, or bore a disproportionate human cost. Brezhnev era, the supposed height of Cold War, was in contrast quite calm and peaceful, hardly any sense of urgency in any direction.
1 This was not on the news daily, by the way. Nor in school. And it makes sense: There was no easy access to Western propaganda, so what's the point of talking about something that's not there?↵

Re: Soviet Nostalgia Thread

Reply #1 –
I can vouch for the authenticity of this entire salad of references.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCI6es9G0oo

Russian propaganda was always of the gross and crude sort. Which is why it is all the more damning that Westerners fell for it via RT and the like.