Summary
China condemned JD Vance on Tuesday for calling Chinese people “peasants” in a Fox News interview, where he said, “To make it a little more crystal clear, we borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry labeled the remarks “ignorant and disrespectful.”
The backlash exploded on Chinese social media, garnering 140 million Weibo views.
Critics mocked Vance’s own “hillbilly” background and pointed to China’s advanced tech and infrastructure, highlighting rising tensions amid Trump’s trade war.
I’m not sure of this, Chinese system has quirks, like subway stations in the middle of nowhere or, say, USSR-like shortages in some places as opposed to abundance in others. In case of all-out mercantilism boogaloo we might see people’s well-being drop harder than expected in many places, and such a quirk might hit worse than “not being used to hardship and scarcity”.
After all, having enough to eat is not just matter of habit.
Those subway stations in the middle of nowhere that were being touted a while back now are surrounded by bustling cities. Planned infrastructure takes time to fill, but it works much better than suburban sprawl
It is also safer to do subway tunneling works without worrying about the buildings around you.
Examples please. Specific ones.
“Better” is always tied to a specific criterion, there’s nothing absolutely better than something else.
Sure, give me an example since you are the one who claimed it, and I’ll do the legwork for you on what it is today.
We have been sanctioning Russia for decades to no avail, similar situation.
This is not true. There have been plenty of surface, symbolic sanctions, some on those with no power to overcome them and some on those with power, but not enough for them to notice - even if they lose atrocious amounts of money, they have a country and feel themselves kinds.
That wasn’t a blockade or a siege, and if it were, then again those to suffer would not be anyone with decision-making power.
We cut them out of the SWIFT payment system. All our economists were saying they wouldn’t last more than a few months. That was four years ago.
SWIFT is not the only way to exchange money. The actual power doesn’t suffer from it being cut off. I do. And also from problems with card payments in the interwebs where MC or Visa is expected.
Also I don’t think you realize how much money the Russian gang had in the open and hidden, one can basically say their credit is infinite. Other than trading national resources, they can, unlike American governments, cut local businesses and entities like lifestock to get more. They can do drugs trade, with their size it doesn’t bear any consequences at all, Russian (and Azeri, and Israeli, and which not) embassies have been caught with smuggling industrial amounts of heroine all over the world, nothing followed after those cases. They can just catch people on the streets and sell them for organs and they do. They can extort. They can confiscate. They can enslave.
They are inefficient, for gangsters they are cowards, for mafia they are dishonorable, for cutthroats they are weak, for fanatics they are dirty, for thieves they are tainted. Nobody respects them. But that doesn’t matter when you have such a shitload of resources.
They’ve spent hundreds of thousands of people in the last few years just for fun, to come to the same idea of war that has been found in Syria and in Latin America and in African conflicts without such a process. No way they are this stupid, but they wanted to feel this kind of power because there are not many things for them to want anymore. And also to kill brave people.
Chima has sociaIism. Their people will be fine. The murican people will be left to fend for themselves/starve or become sIaves in the newly expanded guantanarno bay prison.
This word doesn’t mean anything. It was what they call “meme” today in the late XIX century, and then a political-religious term.
China has a bureaucratic, one can say imperial, system with laissez-faire economy, except for the moments when the empire has a project.
USA has an economy less free in fact due to oligopolies, monopolies and use of lobbying instead of competition, but a freer political system.
Not quite. China is far from being a socialist society.
Norway is more socialist than China
The governments of both the USA and China can fuck themselves.
China is far from perfect but they don’t leave their people to die in the streets.
“Inefficiencies of central planning”. It’s wasteful and kind of amusing but at least they got something done and may even have a city coming next
For new development, It is easier to build subway first and then build around it or build concurrently at the same time but the trains/busses and road need to work before people will occupy the buildings there. It is common practice for new development.
In some countries like Singapore that is how it is done for new development because most people don’t drive in Singapore, they don’t even own cars. Public transport like buses and subway/mrt need to start operating in those new areas before people move in. People need to be able to get to their home and offices by bus or train, if not no one will move in to their new homes except for the few with cars. Other countries with high car ownership they just need roads to be operational so they might not understand this.
If something can be unintentionally wasteful, there are fewer steps to make it intentionally wasteful, and it’s not just theft and loss of efficiency, but way to build up power to do more of the same. Which eventually corrupts a society fully. Which is what has happened to the USSR.
Well, this is happening to all of the world now, so nothing specific for planned economies.
Maybe USSR actually did the heroic sacrifice of detecting the minefield ahead.
Like with writing programs, some people prefer exceptions somehow handled with try-catch, and some prefer logically complete processes. If a language supports exceptions, you’ll use them if you want to work with other people, but there are benefits to being strict to yourself too. Same with the USSR - it failed encountering a problem, but that other big powers didn’t fail right then doesn’t mean they didn’t encounter the same problem or did process it correctly.
This has been endlessly debunked… The “ghost cities” of China are majorly inhabited now, it’s just a centrally planned way of building cities rather than laissez-faire house construction… which leads to available public transit, mixed use areas, parks and amenities, opposed to the suburban sprawl of the US.
You really don’t know what you’re talking about, are you? The USSR rarely had “shortages”, believe it or not. People having to go on waiting lists to acquire luxury products was a feature, not a bug, that guaranteed better distribution of scarce goods in a limited system. In capitalism, the consumption capabilities of people are limited by their income primarily. In the Soviet Union, because the basic necessities were extremely cheap (housing costing on average 3% of the monthly family income, transit ride prices being maintained from 1930 to the 70s without change, and inflation being on average 0% between the end of WW2 and the late 70s), people generally had money to spare.
When you live in a self-sufficient economy where you can’t extract more resources than you do or put more people in factories because employment rate is 100%, producing more of one thing implies producing less of another. The distribution of some luxury goods like cars, was handled through waiting lists, because the idea wasn’t that a wealthy class would be able to appropriate all the goods and leave the rest without anything (as it happens in capitalism). It’s not a shortage, it’s just another more equitable form of distribution of goods than “poors can go fuck themselves”.
Removed by mod
“Anyone who doesn’t uncritically swallow US State Department propaganda against China is a “CCP” troll”. Why the need for the homophobia though?
MWAHAHAHA, I live in fucking Russia
Were it a feature it would match the social adverts and state propaganda, where you have ads, USSR had centrally determined propaganda posters. They didn’t say it was a feature.
Oh yes, better distribution via acquaintances and relations and via ministry hierarchies and to employees at work, LOL.
Say, in parts of USSR far from anything with a sea port people would see something like oranges or bananas extremely rarely and mostly given at work.
While someplace south there would be shitloads of those oranges, no shortage at all.
That’s a clear result of bad logistics.
Housing wasn’t bought, it was assigned and sometimes given, so talking about cost is useless. There were people still living in communal apartments (a few families living each in their room, with one kitchen and bathroom and shower for all) all across the USSR in 1991.
Still, housing is one thing I won’t blame USSR for, despite the picture of “a young family having their own apartment” was impossible there, young families would live stacked in a small place with grandparents.
You clearly don’t know anything about USSR, what you needed wasn’t money (of course it was necessary too and no, many people didn’t), but knowledge, connections, relations and wits to “get” something, by “getting” it means that having money to buy the thing wasn’t enough, having the opportunity to spend it required work.
It was a miserable society requiring more bootlicking than you can possibly imagine to do something you consider a given in your land. Better goods required a permission to buy, you couldn’t just walk in with the money, you also needed a paper that you can buy those boots. And there were stores where you could buy something only via “special rubles” only ministry workers, party workers, foreign communists (like Linus Torvalds’ dad, just so you knew, he was something of a god in that status), such kind of people possessed, but yeah, no other permission required. And there were stores where only military people could buy something, or only workers of some specific area, etc.
And groceries you’d mostly buy on markets or from familiar people growing something etc, not something official likely. Technically breaking the law, LOL.
Building so many tanks that most of them just slowly turned into rust after 1991 is a useless direction of resources in your book?
USSR’s economy since early 70s was built on selling oil and gas for everything it needed. All other areas of its economy had negative margin, one can say, and were intended to keep production of strategic goods, like weapons, in place, and the whole system of society.
Of course it was more intelligent than today’s Russia, but praising it is bullshit. The older it gets, the more numerous are its fanboys.
Cars in the 70s were less of a luxury good than today. You live in a post-industrial society where cars are really something one can live without.
You are fucking joking. You really don’t know how it was in the USSR, yes, LOL?
You should have met some of those people whose parents were Soviet hereditary elite and who are now Russian hereditary elite, how their parents and grandparents lived, and how they live. You’d learn to appreciate Elon Musk.
It’s “serfs can go fuck themselves” instead of “poors can go fuck themselves”. Poors can stop being poor and sometimes do. Serfs are forbidden from becoming something else, unless they are permitted.
Yes, you live in Russia, not in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately for you I’m afraid.
You surely don’t expect the material limitations of an industrializing, isolated and besieged economy to appear in propaganda? It was a feature in the sense that it was a known effect of “socialism in one country”, not in the sense that it’s the desired goal. You surely understand that, no matter how good the policy, there are limitations to material reality?
Corruption DID happen, unsurprisingly, it’s something that happens in all systems. It’s just that, when it happens under socialism, it’s a scandal, but when it happens in capitalism it’s normalized. In my country there’s a 6 month waiting list for going to a specialist doctor many times in public healthcare, and I could skip that by paying a sum of money to a private physician and getting examined in their private clinic legally. It’s essentially the same concept, except that for some reason it’s normalized and even praised under capitalism (which leads to it being much more prevalent than in socialism), whereas socialism fought against it. Speaking of corruption and propaganda:
Surely the state with active anti-corruption propaganda and regular purges of its party and social systems was less corrupt than the capitalist states that normalize corruption in economic activity under the guise of “free contracts between individuals”?
Wait, you’re telling me that an economically isolated country focusing on a self-reliant economy which is located in one of the northernmost regions of the planet, had difficulties with the availability of certain fruits? (bananas are tropical and can’t be grown in the USSR for the most part). This just proves how to you, the default-normal is the availability of produce with origin in exploited regions of the world. Please, go check where the bananas at your supermarket are coming from, and how the workers in the plantation are treated. That’s the problem with Russian libs: you guys don’t understand that NOW your country engages in exploitation of the global south, just like any other developed capitalist country. THAT’s why you have fucking bananas.
“People had universal, guaranteed access to free or affordable housing, so talking about housing is useless”. Truly a big-brain take. You probably are lucky enough that you don’t have to spend half of your salary in housing as most people are forced to do, otherwise you wouldn’t be making that point.
Yes, a few people after the 70s still were living in such communal apartments, but it was a minority. Most housing by the time the USSR was industrialized were Khruschyovki and Brezhnevki, famously non-communal. I’d love it if you brought me a source telling me how many people lived in communal housing by the 80s, I’ll respond to you with data of 2024 Spain (my homeland) of how many people have to share a flat with one kitchen and one bathroom (and pay 1/3rd of their income in the process instead of 3% of their income).
Poor Soviets, having the highest unionization rates in the world and being able to actually bargain through their union at work instead of having to bootlick their corporate overlord 8h a day 5 days a week. Wait, we don’t count that right? Being a wage-slave in a capitalist company isn’t bootlicking, we call it “networking” and “corporate culture” it’s actually cool. Fucking hell give me a break.
Are you really Russian? Don’t you understand the absolute fear of another invasion that the Great Patriotic War (after WW1 and after the civil war) installed in Soviet people and leadership? There’s a reason why even many opposition supporters in the modern Russian Federation go to parades in the Victory Day, it’s not because they support Russian Nationalism and the status-quo. It’s because they understand the immense sacrifice of 20+mn lives that the Soviet Union undertook to SAVE EUROPE FROM NAZISM AND FASCISM. If you don’t understand that the USSR was under constant attack by the USA in the cold war, you don’t understand Soviet history. It fucking sucks spending 10-15% of your GDP in military, but siege socialism is what it is, the USSR tried to de-escalate and was met with nuclear weapons in Turkey. You’ve listened to too much “Radio Svoboda” I think.
Uh… If you check the trade balances of the USSR with other countries, you’ll find out that that wasn’t the case. The USSR traded mostly with COMECON countries, and yes, it exported natural resources like fossil fuels or minerals at international prices to COMECON countries and bought manufactured products. Again, it’s a consequence of siege socialism and of not engaging in imperialism. The USSR could have profited massively from exporting manufactured goods and importing raw materials with the global south, engaging in unequal exchange. But it didn’t do so because it understood that that’s immoral, and the exploitation of the global south goes against the very nature of socialism. I’m sorry that your ancestors didn’t pillage and loot the rest of the world as mine did. For a detailed discussion on this, you may wanna check Robert C Allen’s book “Farm to Factory”, or “Is the Red Flag Flying” by Albert Szymanski. I would bet my ass though, that you haven’t read a single book on soviet economic history, otherwise you wouldn’t be saying the nonsense you’re claiming.
Wow, an economy oriented towards the necessities of the people and the state rather than the profit of a few capitalist overlords? Disgusting, isn’t it? There’s a fucking reason the entire rural Russia is being depopulated: the state stopped investing in rural areas and people are suffering the consequences. Enjoy your free market.
The Russian Federation, famous for building more public transit than the USSR? I really don’t get your point. If there’s a part of the world that excelled in building public transit, that’s the Eastern Bloc, out of socialist ideals, of intelligent central planning, and of economic necessity (public transit being more efficient than private combustion engine vehicles).
Ugh… really, you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. Hereditary wealth was incredibly less important in the USSR than in essentially any other country on Earth at the time, possibly with the exception of Sweden during some years. I’ll show you a Russian lib source you’ll love claiming as much, hopefully you won’t accuse them of being biased towards communism:
As you can see, wealth distribution has never been more equitative in Russia than it was during Soviet times. Please, PLEASE, read a book before repeating anticommunist mantra.
The Soviet Union lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty without engaging in economic imperialism or unequal exchange. Life expectancy was below 30 years-old in the 1910s, most people couldn’t read, and most people were essentially feudal serfs under the rule of Kulak and noble landowners. Education became free for everyone to the highest level, medicine was universal and free, men retired at 60 years old and women at 55 with guaranteed pensions, the 45h working week was standardized and people got holidays every year, economic standards rose massively, access to housing became universal, unemployment was eliminated legally and in practice, life expectancy rose above the 60 years of age and kept growing progressively, there were at some point more female engineers in the USSR than in the rest of the world combined… Really, that’s not “serfs can go fuck themselves”, that’s one of the most successful emancipatory experiences in the history of mankind. And the fact that you’re here on Lemmy, instead of breaking your back for your local exploitative English/French/German company that didn’t allow your country to industrialize and develop (or, worse, your bloodline exterminated by Nazis as they openly intended to do), is all thanks to the Bolsheviks.
I told you I was not exaggerating when describing things, you didn’t understand that apparently. About “corruption” - it wasn’t corruption, it was pretty formalized and normal what I describe.
Any stats about USSR and shares of income, inequality and such are bullshit from the start. I’ve described how it worked for individuals, it also worked the same for organizations, there was such a thing as “funds”, a permission to purchase from another organizations something in a certain quantity.
You don’t seem to get it worked like in some adult scout camp or whatever with some coupons - collecting coupons wouldn’t help you buy more or less soda, because you were permitted to buy soda only in a specific place at specific time and with specific frequency.
Or in the military, or in prison.
Soviet ruble wasn’t real money. That’s why they jokingly called coupons for “special distributors” (a kind of stores, something available only to the elites) the “real rubles”.
The elites didn’t formally own anything - well, neither they do in Russia today, but they do control that property and use it freely.
My bloodline on the Volga German side did undergo an attempt, it’s rather chilling to look at digitized documents of half a village’s male population executed for something like “hiding grain” or “being a Japanese spy”.
My bloodline’s male part on the Jewish side mostly vanished on the frontlines.
This word is a propaganda marker. Such a thing never existed. It was invented to justify mass repressions.
There were no noble landowners in 1914 anymore, it was approaching something like US south at the same time.
Anyway, no, it wasn’t feudal by 1914. It wasn’t feudal even by the turn of century. Again, similar to US south.
Have you met people who received that education? There are two kinds - those who were taught in universities basically by those nobles you seem to vilify, and those like my grandma on my paternal side and the majority of those “female engineers” you’ve read about. The latter is not all that impressive.
Soviet LikBez program was more or less about training technicians to work as bad engineers. Training as in “training dogs”. Because the industrialization required some kind of engineers.
Why didn’t this happen in Finland?
Essentially half of your rebuttal is unsourced “no bro, that’s not true”, when I’ve given you my sources for the information. You’re just showing cognitive dissonance. I was too considerate in my original comments assuming that you’d listen to actual evidence and data. Income inequality figures are bullshit, elites didn’t own and they dont own today either (false, oligarchs in modern Russia do own their companies), kulaks didn’t exist (Do you think peasants in 1917 majorly owned the lands they were working??), university studies weren’t real (I guess the first satellite and human in space and the pioneering research and military industry were just false too)… You’re just desperately denying and holding on to your propagandised version of the reality of the Soviet Union, with your greatest issue being that you couldn’t buy the soda you wanted, and discarding things like guaranteed housing, while ignoring most of my previous comment.
My utmost respect to your ancestors who gave their lives in the fight against Nazism. I hope you’ll show more respect to them and to the emancipatory project they defended with their lives.
Lmao, so essentially slavery, just without the racial component of the US. Please, tell me again: what percentage of the farmers owned in 1917 the lands that they were farming. Oh wait, I forgot you don’t care about data.
I already explained but here we go again: the USSR was a shining example of what socialism could achieve, right in Europe. If Finland had been colonised, they would have risked a socialist revolution there.
As I said, conversation over. You’re not willing to listen.
It’s both information and argumentation - the statements you can discard, maybe I’m lying, but the fact that it’s possible for a bureaucratic elite to not formally own anything yet factually own a country by itself should be something easy to agree with, no? And I’m bringing your attention to it.
Really hard to find sources for something as obvious.
Yes, because the stated value of Soviet ruble was irrelevant in a planned economy in a bureaucratic state. Should be easy to grasp the causation.
Yes, Putin doesn’t own his palaces, and any high-ranking official in Russia most likely has much more than they own. What they show is a drop in the sea of what they really control and use.
Oligarchs are a bit like publicity figures, they are one order of magnitude less significant that anybody in the actual ruling group. Sort of ambassadors.
Think of it like of mafia properties. It was similar in the USSR, the elites used and controlled a lot of state properties which nobody else used and controlled. Why would you need to formally own that if you own the state machine?
Peasants who owned the land they were working were called “kulaks” in propaganda and repressed, because they were a bit less of a herd of ignorant illiterate animals who’d just obey orders.
And Stolypin’s reforms were aimed exactly at changing the ratio. And they were succeeding, except WWI happened.
Military industry is the main thing all this was intended for until Stalin’s death.
You do realize USSR didn’t change that part, just rearranged it, right? At least until Khruschev.
Even in the 30s people were starting to doubt its shine. In 20s - oh yes, when you read things from that time, you feel amazed at how real it feels, people really believing into that steel monster.
I’m gonna stop engaging with your “I know better than empirical evidence approach based on my vibes of who controlled what”. Enjoy bootlicking the corporate overlords that plunge your country in imperialist war, at least now you have bananas and soda, even if people can’t afford housing.
They are not corporate, they are children of people who ran your beloved USSR. Putin’s grandpa was a cook in Kremlin and fed Lenin, did you know that? Yeltsin is somehow treated as if him being first president of Russia were his main role in history, but he’s been in CC CPSU for much longer. Ilham Aliyev, president of Azerbaijan, lectured in MGIMO in USSR’s late years, while his father was the head of Azerbaijani SSR almost since Stalin.
Do you not understand your words just don’t match anything real? They don’t produce a response because there’s nothing in the place they hit. That’s what I’m trying to explain to you, Russia is not oppressed by some imaginary evil businessmen who hoarded everything in the 90s and then took power. Russia is oppressed by children and grandchildren of the same people who formed CPSU’s core. They didn’t get that through some business projects. They were the state and they are the state. They were the CPSU and ruled the big country, then they wanted better conditions for themselves and feared democratic movements, so they coerced those movements to help them survive. Then in Russia they created a few fake parties in the 90s, which changed names and appearances a few times, till ending up the current set of controlled CPRF, LDPR, the ruling party and some other I forgot, that was their popular effort direction, and the so called “administration of the president of Russia”, which is a parallel government free from constitutional limitations and oversight even when oversight existed in Russia, as their hidden front. Well, that’s all in the past, they won, no fronts anymore. They are killing people in this war just to distract their and Ukraine’s population from themselves.
I’m not going to give you any sources, since what I’m saying is on the surface for someone who tries to learn something about Russia and the USSR. Western socialists do have quite a few myths contradicting that, but if you believe those, then you didn’t try.
Not to say there are no problems with the “corporate overlord” types, but they lost. Khodorkovsky or Berezovsky or Ukrainian oligarchs are of that kind. They lost even in Ukraine. And that’s really unfortunate, had they won there’d be no war.
Oh wow, a Russian lib in Lemmy, that’s a rare sight. I’ll answer your comment later, but know this: it is thanks to the USSR that you LIVE. If it wasn’t for the Bolsheviks, your country would either be a colony of France, England and Japan and wouldn’t have been allowed to industrialise. That is, if it would have survived Nazism in the 40s. Nazis had the express objective of eliminating the “Asiatic hordes” and the “Slavic Untermenschen”. You can thank your sorry ass that Lenin existed and set in motion what allowed your life to be that of a developed country and not a western colony or a genocided barren German slave field.
Kerensky’s provisional government would either have been ousted by the whites (there were attempts already), or would have become colonised by western powers. Seeing as the whites received half a million troops from western countries to destroy bolshevism, most likely a combination of the two, Allende style minus the socialism. There is no alternative timeline where Russia was allowed to develop along with Western Europe in peace and to exploit the profits of imperialism in the rest of the world.
I didn’t express any political positions, just informed you of history.
No. The possible alternative to USSR is some other development, not no development at all. By mostly the same people, just without professional revolutionaries ignorant in anything else on top.
Russia was industrializing and even politically reforming (that’s how Bolsheviks were a legitimate party) while being an ally of France and England. Unfortunately WWI happened, and then the revolution. By the way, you mentioned whites - the revolution I blame on both these sides, Bolsheviks and proto-fascists. Neither is better than the other.
You simply don’t know what you are talking about, I’d bet you don’t read Russian.
Finland wasn’t. About whites again. Why?
Those troops were there to defend their economic interests, like Odessa port, Far East ports. Not to turn the tide fighting in a war. They basically left when asked.
Except the one that happened, where USSR did just that, only its colonies were called Central Asian republics and its own Siberia.
“My vision of history isn’t attached to a political ideology” is a telltale of libs. Tell me, are you a russian oppositionist or not?
That’s the problem with libs: you truly don’t understand the nature of imperialism. Ask Iran under Mosaddeq how much they were allowed to develop. Ask Chile under Allende. Ask Guatemala, or Argentina, or Haiti how much they were allowed to develop. Ask Vietnam whether US interference did anything to their country. Go ask Korea how many people died in the struggle against imperialism. For fuck’s sake, I’m Spanish, my own country had a US-adjacent fascist coup in the 1930s under a liberal government and while Nazis and Italian Fascists bombed the antifascists, the rest of the world stood to the side because a fascist regime is better than the possibility of socialism. Well, the rest of the world except your brave ancestors of the USSR, the ONLY country in the world that supplied weapons, tanks and planes to the anti-fascists. Sadly it wasn’t enough, and instead of enjoying a socialist state, my country fell into fascism. Seriously, Russia was under-industrialised (on par with Argentina at the time of 1917). There’s no country of such characteristics that industrialized under a capitalist liberal-democratic government, with only a few exceptions such as Japan (US-subsidized colony). There is NO POSSIBILITY of an alternate history in which Russia miraculously rid itself of French/English capitalists and industrialised by itself instead of becoming a source of cheap labour and natural resources for western Europe.
That’s an insane thing to say. The fact that the February revolution even happened is due to the decades of agitation, propaganda, unionization and struggle for the rights of the workers that the Bolsheviks carried out. Without that, there wouldn’t have been a possibility of mutiny against the Tsar. It’s not a few smartasses like Kerensky who did nothing in their entire lives for the people except somehow enter a liberal-bourgeois government representing the interests of the rich and the russian nationalists who wanted to continue WW1. It’s the decades of agitation, of death sentences, of exile in Siberia, and of deportation, that Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries suffered out in Russia.
“The fascists who kept people enslaved under the Kulaks and the nobles were just as bad as the people that freed the people from them”. Truly one hell of a take. Your country is now starting to suffer the consequences of actual fascism, how’s your healthcare going? How’s education? How are the rights of women and of minorities? How’s inflation? How’s the price of housing? How are salaries going? Wonderfully aren’t they?
Surely you know better, Mr. “I believe that through the power of love, Russia would have been allowed to industrialize unlike any other underdeveloped country in the world. After all, we’re white, not like those browns in the global south, we’d have done better”.
Finland was precisely allowed to be a western developed and industrialized country BECAUSE of the existence of the Soviet Union. It was this beacon of worker rights, of antifascism and anti-imperialism, and of improving living conditions, that forced the rest of Europe to give their citizens the rights that the USSR pioneered: 40h week, universal healthcare and education, state-subsidized pensions, and the entire welfare-state apparatus. All of that is historically developed by the Soviet Union, and then mimicked by the West in order to prevent possibilities of socialist revolutions in those countries. The USA being not in Europe and relatively far away from the reach of socialism is exactly the reason why they have extremely shitty welfare state, healthcare, education, pensions and worker rights. It’s the red scare that repressed workers and unions against the possibility of carrying out such improvements. Europe was FORCED by the USSR to have such good quality of life to prevent internal stress and revolution.
That’s EXACTLY what I meant. You see? The economic interests of the “allied western countries” in Russia were AGAINST the industrial development of the region. That’s why they wanted to control the ports: for exports of cheap raw materials and grain, at misery wages for Russians. The whites were willing to defend those interests of the west. Thank you for acknowledging it.
That’s insultingly ignorant, not gonna lie. The Central Asian republics were republics of their own right: people got to study in their own language (unseen before and still unbelievable in many modern colonies and post-colonies, I have Moroccan and Tunisian coworkers and they studied in French), the number of hospital beds per capita was the same all over the Union, as was the number of teachers per capita; these regions were industrialized to a degree never seen before, and the Soviet Union liberated them from the yoke of Russian Imperialism under Tsarism. There’s a reason why these Central-Asian regions were overwhelmingly in support of the Union, as seen for example in the 1991 referendum to maintain the Soviet Union:
: these regions were LIBERATED by the Soviet Union, and developed to levels not seen anywhere else in Central Asia. For reference, compare the Human Development Index of Central-Asian Soviet Republics such as Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan to those of non-Soviet countries like Afghanistan or Pakistan: 
. If it wasn’t for the Soviet Union, people like Alexandra Elbakyan, the Kazakh scholar behind the SciHub project (and proud communist), simply wouldn’t have had access to an education AT ALL, let alone in their own language. Again, proving once more that you have not the slightest idea of what you’re talking about.
I’ve roasted you enough with actual knowledge, rather than your vibes-based analysis whose entire premise is “we could have been an exploitative capitalist imperialist country like those of western Europe, trust me bro, somehow without the centralized industrialization drive and the redistribution of wealth that made the country the most egalitarian of history up to that point, we would have defeated western imperialism and Nazism”. You made no mention to my point on Nazism because you simply can’t: the USSR saved you, your ancestors, and the rest of Europe from Nazism; and liberals will never forgive it for that. I’ll now extract myself away from the conversation. I’ll save these two comments to respond similarly to other Russian libs (that I may encounter) in the future.
I’ve looked diagonally through this wave of bullshit, I repeat again - do you speak or at least read Russian?
If not, then there’s nothing more to say.
Would be weird if someone able to wrote this.
I’m learning the language, I’m not proficient yet. Anyway, feel free to respond to the actual contents of my comment instead of ad-homineming your way
Watch Chukhray’s movies, will be both good for this endeavor and show you USSR.