you’re sticking your head in the sand

the average pole is glad we are no longer communist, it’s celebrated.

The five polish families in my hometown are all post soviet diaspora who despise capitalism so anecdotes could be flung anywhere

one thing to despise capitalism, another to feel nostalgic for the regime. two beliefs that aren’t necessarily linked and often are not mutually held

it’s more about the fact we didn’t get a say in becoming communist and became a soviet client state. when i say ‘glad we’re no longer communist’, i mean glad we get to choose our own way now

Which podcasts u listen to?

Facts tbh

Many of them are islamophobic f*** them

Maybe socialist in some sense but definitely not marxist

I'd say it started much earlier, even with Lenin, and he talked about it in his testament. The seeds that would lead to the USSRs demise were already planted and it wasn't because of any one leader's bad choices.

I'd also say that during Stalin's leadership, his reversal of the Soviet policy of indigenization is a more important benchmark if you would try to pinpoint it like that

i wouldn’t take the last testament with any salt tbh it was most likely fabricated by his wife who was also a political actor with her own goals and conflict with Stalin
this article goes over it’s mainly based of kotkin biography of Stalin and stays true to it (i read the biography) if u don’t wanna read a 1000 page book
open.substack.com/pub/stalinistcivilization/p/the-mythology-lenins-testament?r=1sxo0g&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

but with the overall point i’d agree it started with Lenin, Stalin did try to combat against but failed like Beucratizaton with the great purge (lol) it’s why i don’t take any serious criticism of Stalin being the reason of the beucratization of the CPSU. He did fail on fighting the problem tho

even Trotsky didn’t like using it.

Eh i went down that rabbithole before. I get that there could be ulterior motives but that's mostly based on inference and not anything concrete. And the authenticity of the document wasnt questioned at the time by party members, so I don't see why I would have any reason to

Kotkin also seems to be the only mainstream historian to make that claim as well.

And to add to that the content of the actual testament is not really in contradiction with his previous writings like that either

what other historians commented on the testament genuinely curious

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin%27s_Testament

Apparently Stalin even said the following addressing at a party congress

"Indeed I am rude, Comrades, to those who rudely and perfidiously destroy and split the party. I have not hidden this, and still do not”

yeah i know Stalin treated the testament as factual i don’t think he should have but i gotta read arguements from the other historians first before i finalize

Stalin and Krupskaya beefs were hilarious there as this bit from the biography

“Molotov, who knew Stalin extremely well, recalled late in life that “Stalin was irritated: ‘Why should I get up on my hind legs for her? To sleep with Lenin does not necessarily mean to understand Leninism!’ Stalin told me something like this: ‘Just because she uses the same bathroom as Lenin, do I have to appreciate and respect her as if she were Lenin?’ He was too coarse and rude”

Excerpt From
Stalin, Volume 1
Stephen Kotkin
itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.

hate this trope of the hidden homophobic gay but Stalin probably applies to it, finding his one true love with Lenin then afterwards with FDR. He thought FDR was poisoned by Truman and Churchill

I doubt he's a committed Marxist but I'll take what I can get in Europe 1993 onward lmao

stalin used to give a s*** but now he don’t even give a f***!

Need that gay stalin fanfic

Yeah for sure. It's my understanding though that the first backward step dude took was in terms of abortion and shortly after homosexuality, with ethnic deportations ramping up closer to/during WWII, which is why I started there

But I could be wrong about that timeline

Intersectionality is so damn important for socialism lol. If Stalin had an intersectional class perspective as a leader I think the USSR would not only still be here but would have been a lot stronger than it ended up being, which was already pretty damn strong at its best. That scar he left on the revolution in the 30s has never fully healed and set socialism back potentially irreparably. I honestly doubt that we'll ever have a world order of socialism

I also don't consider NEP to have been a potential undoing of socialism. Lenin had to make practical concessions to allow the socialist government to not entirely collapse. We've seen other socialist societies experiment with "second economies" before and still hold the ship together. But any regression that can't be justified by material conditions inhibiting further development, let alone a retreat, has to be where the breaking point is determined. And that to me decisively begins in 1934 in the Soviet Union. Prior to '34 I think the country could have gone any number of ways and I think if pre-war Stalin reversed his decisions to criminalize abortion and homosexuality, and didn't do the ethnic deportations, the Soviet Union coulda bounced back. But between the brutality of the war and Stalin's heartless repression the revolution had doomed itself by the end of WWII. It was just a matter of time until liberals seized the moment and restored capitalism, capitalizing on a demoralized and traumatized Soviet public.

this guy said his biggest influence is Milton Friedman

even cities like Vancouver are electing rightwing mayors and council members. its crazy that f***ing idiots are still believing in trickle down economics and the war on d****

I wouldn't trust polls like this, but yea I think we're f***ed. Go out and organize

When are yall gonna become sovereign

Not at all

Conservatism feeds on fear

What's sovereignty

Charles not being your king

They kinda don't gaf either way