What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[Josquius]

But I would slightly push back on the idea that the later USSR was not as bad as the propaganda. It was not Leninist or Stalinist Russia, but I think if anything there's maybe too soft a view of the USSR Khrushchev to Gorby - which perhaps reflects Western policy and attitude. That was the era when there were peaks and troughs but relationships normalised a bit with the USSR. My understanding is that Brezhnev era is now viewed with a bit of nostalgia by Russians and I think it's the era we look to in Ostalgie or common representations of communism. I think to some extent that possibly goes too far the other way in overstating the normality, the banality, the day-to-day existence of queues and not enough that it was still underpinned by a regime of terror - albeit a more bureacratic and restrained terror than under Stalin.

Maybe amongst those who know who Brezhnev is (past maybe a vague name recognition).
But that isn't the majority. I get the impression most people, Americans especially,'s knowledge of the Soviet Union goes from Stalin to Gorbachev with business continuing pretty much as usual until Reagen shouted bring down this wall.
There's a huge dearth of knowledge of the Soviet Union with people either just defaulting to it was comic book evil or a handful being communists themselves so insisting absolutely every bad word is propeganda.

Jos, why are you taking a position that trivializes death?

I don't agree with Josq on many things, but I think that his correct observation that the later USSR was not the horror show that was the Stalin years is hardly trivializing death.  Brutal, yes, but not nearly as brutal as before.

If one is only concerned about death and death camps if they reach the level of Stalin or the Nazis, then yes, indeed, you are in fact trivializing death.

What is the point of making the argument that well It wasn't as bad as Auschwitz.

Your response to my pointing out the later gulags weren't the same as the infamous Stalin era system was that a guy died in one.
Pointing out he killed himself and the actual tiny death numbers that are surprisingly basically comparable to a regular prison (not even one for political prisoners. Just a normal run of the mill prison) is very relevant.
It wasn't Auschwitz was a sarcastic under-statement. It wasn't remotely comparable in anything but the broadest sense.

[DGuller]

USSR was obviously far less murderous after Stalin, but as far as exerting control over people, it's a lot more muddy.  To a large extent Stalin was just breaking way more eggs than were needed for the omelette, post-Stalin rulers of the USSR realized that people can be denied rights or agency with far less deadly methods.  Ostracism may not be as quick or powerful as a bullet in the back of the head, but it's still a pretty scary implicit threat to fuck with.

[Zoupa]

Still not sure what your point is Josq. We all know that in terms of degrees, 1988 USSR was not Holodomor, Katyn or Stalinist purges.

"My diarrhea today is not as runny as yesterday". Ok, sure, but you're still shitting yourself.

[Grey Fox]

You all forgot that he was saying that all of this is perception.

[viper37]

.
Generally left you in peace- it did. It depends on the specific era being talked about, crackdowns and 'free' periods ebbed and flowed, but stay clear of a few well known lines and generally as authoritarian dictatorships go people did have a fair bit of freedom to live their lives.

Well, the same could be said about the Pinochet regime.

Back to the USSR:

Antisemitism in the Soviet Union once again peaked during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev, following Israeli victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. "Anti-Zionist" propaganda, including the film Secret and Explicit, was often antisemitic in nature.[35] Many of Brezhnev's close advisors, most principally Mikhail Suslov, were also fervent antisemites.[36] Jewish emigration to Israel and the United States, which had been allowed in limited amounts under the rule of Khrushchev, once more became heavily restricted, primarily due to concerns that Jews were a security liability or treasonous.[37] Would-be emigrants, or refuseniks, often required a vyzov, or special invitation from a relative living abroad, for their application to be even considered by the Soviet authorities. In addition, in order to emigrate, one needed written permission from all immediate family members. The rules were often stretched in order to prevent Jews from leaving, and ability for appeal was rarely permitted. Substantial fees were also required to be paid, both to emigrate and as "reimbursement".[38]

Institutional racism against Jews was widespread in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, with many sectors of the government being off-limits.[39] Following the failure of the Dymshits–Kuznetsov hijacking affair, in which 12 refuseniks unsuccessfully attempted to hijack a plane and flee west, crackdowns on Jews and the refusenik movement followed. Informal centres for studying the Hebrew language, the Torah and Jewish culture were closed.[40]

Immediately following the Six-Day War in 1967, the antisemitic conditions started causing desire to emigrate to Israel for many Soviet Jews. A Jewish Ukrainian radio engineer, Boris Kochubievsky, sought to move to Israel. In a letter to Brezhnev, Kochubievsky stated:

    I am a Jew. I want to live in the Jewish state. That is my right, just as it is the rights of a Ukrainian to live in the Ukraine, the right of a Russian to live in Russia, the right of a Georgian to live in Georgia. I want to live in Israel. That is my dream, that is the goal not only of my life but also of the lives of hundreds of generation that preceded me, of my ancestors who were expelled from their land. I want to my children to study in the Hebrew language. I want to read Jewish papers, I want to attend a Jewish theatre. What is wrong with that? What is my crime ...?[41]

Within the week he was called in to the KGB bureau and without questioning, was taken to a mental institution in his hometown of Kiev (for more information, see: Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union).[42] While this may seem as an isolated incident, the aftermath of the Six-Day War affected almost every Jew within the Soviet Union.[42] Jews who had been subject to assimilation under previous regimes were now confronted with a new sense in vigour and revival in their Jewish faith and heritage. On February 23, 1979, a six-page article was distributed throughout the cities of Moscow and Leningrad, which criticized Brezhnev and seven other individuals for being "Zionist".[43] The article contained traces of deep-rooted antisemitism in which the anonymous author, a member of the Russian Liberation Organization, set out ways to identify Zionists; these included "hairy chest and arms", "shifty eyes", and a "hook-like nose".[44]

I'm sorry, Jos, I still disagree with your assertion.

[Sheilbh]

Maybe amongst those who know who Brezhnev is (past maybe a vague name recognition).
But that isn't the majority. I get the impression most people, Americans especially,'s knowledge of the Soviet Union goes from Stalin to Gorbachev with business continuing pretty much as usual until Reagen shouted bring down this wall.
There's a huge dearth of knowledge of the Soviet Union with people either just defaulting to it was comic book evil or a handful being communists themselves so insisting absolutely every bad word is propeganda.

This is fair. But I think there is a fair amount of cultural representation of the late Soviet Union/bloc - the Americans, Deutschland 83, Goodbye Lenin, For All Mankind. So I wonder if perhaps it somewhere in between that there isn't an understanding of what Soviet oppression looked like at any point - it is a generalised, formless sense that bad things happened there. I think that's a different type of understanding and perception than we have about the Nazis which is I think more precise and because of that more meaningful.

Again this is purely a Western Europe and North America thing.

[Admiral Yi]

You all forgot that he was saying that all of this is perception.

It's a strawman.  I don't remember any propaganda from the 80s like Squeeze is talking about.  And I watched fucking US military TV growing up.

[Josquius]

Still not sure what your point is Josq. We all know that in terms of degrees, 1988 USSR was not Holodomor, Katyn or Stalinist purges.

"My diarrhea today is not as runny as yesterday". Ok, sure, but you're still shitting yourself.

Shitting yourself and being a messy embarrassment is quite different to being at risk of dying of dehydration.

My point was in reply to the Soviets not being seen with enough horror, I think they're actually seen with too much horror post stalin. The cold war propeganda persists strongly.

If you are to make a ranking of the worst regimes of history then though stalin and Hitler would be 2 of the key competitors for the medals, the later Soviet union would struggle to crack the top 20 in most regards.

.
Generally left you in peace- it did. It depends on the specific era being talked about, crackdowns and 'free' periods ebbed and flowed, but stay clear of a few well known lines and generally as authoritarian dictatorships go people did have a fair bit of freedom to live their lives.

Well, the same could be said about the Pinochet regime.

Back to the USSR:
[]

I'm sorry, Jos, I still disagree with your assertion.

I don't get the point of this lengthy quote. Nobody here has said the Soviet union was overall good. Nobody has said anything about Jewish people.

[Razgovory]

Could you give us an example of this propaganda?  

[OttoVonBismarck]

I think the mistake is to associate too much of the negatives of the USSR with the "Soviet" part. The bad part of the USSR is Russia, because Russia is bad, and Russians are also bad. We can argue the context of that "bad", but most of the worst things of the USSR were born right out of a half millennium of Russian culture of autocracy and mass abuse of the population. The worst of the Soviet leaders, whether ethnically Russian or not, were bathed in that culture in their swaddling clothes.

In fact it may not be a coincidence that as time passed and the Soviet leadership became people born in post-Tsarist USSR vs those raised under the Russian Tsardom, that the USSR became less autocratic and less extreme in its abuses of its own people.

Communism is obviously a shitty and bad ideology, but it is far too simplistic and frankly dumb to ascribe all of the things to the ideology that are commonly ascribed to it. During the Cold War, Communism largely took power in countries that had long been autocratic hellholes, ascribing the state of those countries as autocratic hellholes to Communism is majorly putting the cart before the horse.

[The Brain]

As has been mentioned, cuddly-wuddly champion of Soviet-style non-oppression Gorbachev was murdering civilians in the streets as late as 1991.

[DGuller]

I think the mistake is to associate too much of the negatives of the USSR with the "Soviet" part. The bad part of the USSR is Russia, because Russia is bad, and Russians are also bad. We can argue the context of that "bad", but most of the worst things of the USSR were born right out of a half millennium of Russian culture of autocracy and mass abuse of the population. The worst of the Soviet leaders, whether ethnically Russian or not, were bathed in that culture in their swaddling clothes.

In fact it may not be a coincidence that as time passed and the Soviet leadership became people born in post-Tsarist USSR vs those raised under the Russian Tsardom, that the USSR became less autocratic and less extreme in its abuses of its own people.

Communism is obviously a shitty and bad ideology, but it is far too simplistic and frankly dumb to ascribe all of the things to the ideology that are commonly ascribed to it. During the Cold War, Communism largely took power in countries that had long been autocratic hellholes, ascribing the state of those countries as autocratic hellholes to Communism is majorly putting the cart before the horse.

Communism may not be the spark of the oppression, but it's certainly an oxygen to it.  Communism by definition takes the economic power from the individual and hands it to the state, giving more leverage to the state over the individual.  Whatever inclination was there for the haves to lord over the have-nots is now supplemented with greater capacity to exercise that power.  It's also an economic system so inefficient that in the long run only force and repression can keep it together.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Sure if you're talking applying Communism to a country with a liberal, free market economy.

I'm not 100% sure if that has ever occurred. All the countries I can think of that became Communist largely had state controlled economies anyway. It is just that instead of some sort of "State planning committee" of Marxists, economic power was held by a very small group of elites--in some cases hereditary elites like Boyars--and this is seen outside of Russia a well. It isn't a free economy when a small cabal who are tightly connected to the leader receive all government benefits, preferences, contracts etc. Just because the guy in charge doesn't have a copy of Das Kapital, and may have even received backing from Western powers, doesn't mean he was presiding over a free market economy or anything even close to it.

Additionally I can think of few societies that Communists took over that had any semblance of belief in individual rights and freedoms of a Western sort.

The only real exceptions to this are countries that did not become Communist due to a domestic Communist movement, but rather being conquered by a neighboring and larger Communist power (i.e. much of the Warsaw Pact, although most of those countries had largely been autocratic prior to WW2, with a few notable exceptions.)

[DGuller]

Sure if you're talking applying Communism to a country with a liberal, free market economy.

I'm not 100% sure if that has ever occurred. All the countries I can think of that became Communist largely had state controlled economies anyway. It is just that instead of some sort of "State planning committee" of Marxists, economic power was held by a very small group of elites--in some cases hereditary elites like Boyars--and this is seen outside of Russia a well. It isn't a free economy when a small cabal who are tightly connected to the leader receive all government benefits, preferences, contracts etc. Just because the guy in charge doesn't have a copy of Das Kapital, and may have even received backing from Western powers, doesn't mean he was presiding over a free market economy or anything even close to it.

Additionally I can think of few societies that Communists took over that had any semblance of belief in individual rights and freedoms of a Western sort.

The only real exceptions to this are countries that did not become Communist due to a domestic Communist movement, but rather being conquered by a neighboring and larger Communist power (i.e. much of the Warsaw Pact, although most of those countries had largely been autocratic prior to WW2, with a few notable exceptions.)

Just because Russia wasn't a perfect free market before USSR doesn't mean that there weren't freedoms lost during the transition.  One of the reason so many peasants had to die is because a lot of them really, really didn't want to hand over all their cows and land to kolkhozes.

[Josquius]

Mandatory notice that the USSR was economically state capitalist and not communist.
Communism was it's ideology of aiming to achieve communism, soon, honestly, I promise, by this time in 10 years, this time definitely honestly.

But yes. Agreed on the problem being autocracy and not Marxism. It's always interesting I find that most of the hate thrown the Soviet unions way is over it being socialist.
So.... The state sponsored murder, the lack of democracy, the restrictions on freedom of speech, the imperialism, all of that was totally fine. Conservatives have no problem with that.
Oh no. Its the central economic planning and women's rights and racial equality and all that shit which really gets their goat.

Could you give us an example of this propaganda? 

Seriously?