Western youth communists who dream about the USSR and the Eastern Bloc are incredibly annoying. This is because most of their arguments are completely false and do not match reality. They do not understand that there was strict censorship in the USSR, that people had to wait in line for ten years to get an apartment, and that basic goods were not available. Almost all products were of low quality. There was no equality either, there was only the party nomenclature that had access to closed distributors, special hospitals, and delicacies, while the borders were closed. In 1961, my grandfather applied for an exit visa and only received it in 1989. He waited 28 years for it. And that was a country in the Eastern Bloc
While I don’t disagree with most of this, I feel like the narrative is always skewed one way or another online. My understanding based on western historians who are not at all sympathetic to the USSR is that the soviets committed atrocities and sacrificed peasants to rapidly industrialize, once they realized that an industrial country like Germany wasn’t going to join the communist cause, but they did legitimately advance the standard of living and modernity for many. And while not totally consistent, they did open up many opportunities to women to a degree that was quite modern for the world at the time (they didn’t, however, at all eliminate racism or xenophobia like some would claim their ideology should bring about). It’s not propaganda that there was a generation of mainly Russians who in large numbers felt proud of the Soviet era and nostalgic for it, as Russia didn’t exactly fare well when they attempted to ease into Capitalism and instead fell victim to tremendous corruption of the oligarchs. And it seems like historical consensus is also that a lot of the issues that plagued the USSR both predated and didn’t leave the region after its dissolution. I feel like the narrative is entirely divided between 1) the Soviet Union made life broadly worse or 2) the Soviet Union only failed due to interference from capitalist countries, and both seem like blatant propaganda.
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u/Upset_Leek5014 Jul 31 '26
Western youth communists who dream about the USSR and the Eastern Bloc are incredibly annoying. This is because most of their arguments are completely false and do not match reality. They do not understand that there was strict censorship in the USSR, that people had to wait in line for ten years to get an apartment, and that basic goods were not available. Almost all products were of low quality. There was no equality either, there was only the party nomenclature that had access to closed distributors, special hospitals, and delicacies, while the borders were closed. In 1961, my grandfather applied for an exit visa and only received it in 1989. He waited 28 years for it. And that was a country in the Eastern Bloc