this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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The USSR was bad but it wasn't communist. For that it would have had to have been stateless and classless, definitionally.
There is such thing as an Authoritarian Left.
I thought the political compass was itself just a popular perspective? It's is a gross oversimplification of the ideas involved. Find me two leftists who even agree on what's the farthest left.
I'm not sure it is. Like, yes, it does exist in the Left/Right, Auth/Lib political compass, but that's just a model. The stance has some inherent contradictions.
And so does Right/Lib, for that matter. "Fiscally conservative/socially liberal" is a nonsense position, and those taking it tend to just be conservative in practice.
Is it was so great, why did most of the conquered nations run west as fast as they could as soon as they could? Must have been because the USSR was so 'progressive'.
The referendum (the only one they ever had) with it being in 1991 it was already a much different Soviet Union than we usually think and very late in its life as an effort to somehow keep it together, even though in a pretty different form. The wording makes it so that there was very little reason to oppose it unless you were a hardline independence advocate (so you might not respect their authority anyway or don't want to give them credibility etc) since independence or no, it was promising more independence, human rights, freedom and so on. And in some countries that was tied to "let's become independent at the same time but also keep in this new federation or what have you". So it wasn't even a "should we keep Soviet Union or not" but rather "should we make the union different, better", which again, not much reason to oppose it no matter what you thought. Keeping it as it had been was the hardliner approach of keeping the older style Soviet Union and that wasn't very popular.
And the new treaty was never signed because communist hardliners tried a coup to reverse the course. The attempt backfired horribly and just lead to even swifter dissolution. But I'd say it was already heading towards that anyway with people seeking to break away from Moscow and the whole system in a turmoil over reforms (to some too radical and to some not radical enough). In hindsight it feels like they would've needed a miracle to keep it together in any recognizable form.
Not to mention that the vote was boycotted by Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldova.
They were sooooo keen to return to the Russian embrace (/s).
Kirghizia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan also added in the referendum a question about them being independent and only joining the new union as independent members. After the coup attempt Ukraine moved not to sign the treaty and held a referendum on just becoming independent.
Progressive at first, but then sorta forgot about it.
At the start, women were given rights that suffragists in the UK or USA could only dream of. Then it stopped. By the 1960s, women in the USSR found that they were still expected to do all the same old household chores while also holding a job outside the home. Meanwhile, western feminism had developed a strong second wave, and later a third (arguably more since, but that gets complicated). Those waves dealt with increasingly abstract issues in the patriarchy, including the problem of household chores.
This simply didn't happen in the USSR. Developing one would have required greater freedom of speech than anyone had in that country.
Ah, right, the old "communism has never been tried"
Tried a bunch, but tried wrong.
The Lenin model of communism is inherently flawed for one simple reason. An Authoritarian Communism is an Impossibility. It cannot exist by pure definition.
The true ideal communism is a stateless utopia.
So yeah, the Lenin model is flawed to the point of uselessness. Or worse because any authoritarian government is going to kill its own citizens, while also being a low grade threat to neighboring countries.
No. The only path to true communism is via democracy. And there are countries that are moving in that direction.
The party was meant to just be the organizer of the workers, not the ruler. The degeneration took off only after Lenin's death and the 4th Congress of the Comintern, which was dominated by Troika. that's why Mayakovsky was a devout Bolshevik until Stalinzation advanced and started scrapping several progressive conquests of October, leading to his suicide at the refusal to prop up the Stalinist degeneracy.
Also Lenin was, for instance, not a big fan of the many experimental artistic movements that flourished after the Revolution, but did not suppress them, unlike Stalin.
He also regretted banning other parties (but which was necessitated by every single one of them taking up arms against Sovnarkom) and before his death wanted to offer Trotsky a post of Commisar of Internal Affairs in a desperate bid to curtail the bureaucracy, but Trotsky, unfortunately, refused.
Lenin betrayed the revolution. You mention the banning of the political parties. While it's true that they "took up arms against Sovnarkom", you're leaving out the part where Lenin used Sovnarkom to coup the newly elected government because his party didn't win.
Again, Lenin was flat out wrong. But I don't think he ever actually cared about Russia ever reaching the true Marxist communist utopia. Lenin cared about power first and foremost.
He built up that dictatorship, and then handed it over to a monster.