the USSR was actually progressive on most of the things most of us care about
Remind me, please: what do we care about again? Human rights? Free expression? Cultural pluralism? Equality of opportunity? The rule of law?
Furry hats. The Soviets were great at those.
There was that Cossack dance too.
Gymnastics. The gulags were totally worth it if the goal was to produce Olympic medalists in gymnastics.
(Also: No. Just no to the idea that the Soviet Union ever served as some sort of exemplar of progressive politics.)
I agree with 4.2. That said, the linked TLS article is pretty chilling. Makes you wonder what's in store for the US. Can we rule out a descent into de-facto-police-death-squads territory? Please?
Can we rule out a descent into de-facto-police-death-squads territory?.
I predict a venal and corrupt kleptocracy without any real plan (beyond enriching themselves at the expense of the public, of course). But with a high degree of tolerance for acts of violence and brutality, if those acts are seen to advance the interests of our new insect overlords.
1: Good point! Progressive on most some of the things most of us care about.
The question being, would the world be better or worse off with a reformed USSR? As in, perestroika without the implosion.
My worry is that the line between 5 and 6 isn't a bright one. Trump has already gotten at least half-way to: I'm not sayin' that the police should take out these punks Dirty-Harry-style, like they do in the Philippines, but these things are hard to prove, aren't they... I'm hoping there are obvious reasons why state-level institutions can't easily come to conform themselves to talk like that.
9 Assuming a truly reformed USSR* I'd say clearly better. It would have been good to have a workable alternative to capitalism in the world to point to and to put fear into the hearts of the masters. We might not have seen the triumph of neoliberalism and the hollowing out of the very notion of the public welfare and the privatizing of everything in sight.
*work with me here, comrade.
Agree with 4.2. The USSR oppressed ethnic minorities. The Soviets voluntarily chose to team up with the fucking Nazis and plunder the sovereign nations between them, running roughshod over the innocent bodies of women, men and children. Soviet apologists, especially Stalin apologists, are ethically-bankrupt useful idiots with a reprehensible "might makes right" mentality.
But wouldn't a truly reformed USSR have been, well, a liberal capitalist state? Don't confuse glasnost and perestroika. Perestroika involved ending central planning in favour of a market economy, opening up foreign trade, permitting private ownership of businesses in all areas, and encouraging foreign investment in and ownership of Soviet business. Had it continued, it would also have to have involved the end of state support for a lot of state owned businesses and the end of price controls, because these had become pretty much unaffordable. That all sounds pretty capitalist. If somehow the CPSU had remained in charge, you'd be left with something that looked a lot like modern China - which is not exactly a shining example for the rest of the world.
Can we talk next about how great Germany would have been if not for the war? I mean, totalitarian stuff aside, they built some terrific motorways. And they were progressive on some of the things that most of us care about, like proper antenatal care and full employment and supporting classical music. Also there's no denying that having a robust National Socialist alternative to liberalism would have helped us all stay loyal and patriotic.
Crossed with 12. Also, would this "reformed USSR" have been democratic? If so, then it implodes as the subject states of the Empire vote for independence. If not, then are we also envisaging the continuation of the Brezhnev Doctrine? The Warsaw Pact? The Wall? In which case our healthy visible alternative to capitalism is kept alive by impoverishing and imprisoning half of Europe. And that is too high a price to pay simply to give American progressives a nice warm glow. Any truly progressive analysis of the question would start from the bottom up - with the citizens of the occupied territories.
And, sorry for multiple posts, but the argument about how having the USSR around made the West nicer in social policy terms needs to be balanced with how it made the West nastier in foreign policy terms. Yes, maybe (and i am not conceding this) fear of the USSR gets you the Great Society, but it also definitely gets you the Vietnam War.
15 I think is the decisive objection. It also gives you lots of coups and military dictatorships in South and Central America, Africa, etc.,
Soviet foreign policy was also consistently nasty throughout the USSR'S existence. Much worse than current Russian policy. Really, Aleppo is minor in comparison.
Also, it would have been hard(er) for right-wingers to red-bait mid-century liberals if there had been no reds in power anywhere.
18 Yeah, we can see where they go when they don't have the commies to kick around anymore.
Really, if you want a foreign rival to invigorate progressive politics in the West, you really want Nazi Germany, not the USSR. The US and the UK became extremely socialist as a result of the economics of the war effort, not to mention the whole common cause anti fascism thing. A continuing Cold War against a surviving Reich would have had the same effect.
19: I'm not saying that the difficulty of red-baiting would necessarily have coincided with anything better than the actual mid-century dispensation in the US, but it does it seem impossible that it could have gone together with a non-marginal Labour Party?
I really feel this could benefit from, say, some Polish input, since - unlike in Mossy's fantasy world - they are currently allowed to give their honest opinion of the USSR.
I.e. maybe welfarist policies like national health could have successfully been spun in the US as the refinements on market economics that they are (and which everywhere else in the First World they are accepted as being) instead of being saddled with the 'socialism' label.
(re 21)
OK, OK, 'socialism' wouldn't have been a pejorative in that world - substitute 'scary foreign revolutionary thing'.
Counterfactualism always devolves into a kinda moralistic preening, this I would have done otherwise, they could have done otherwise, or exploring the possibilities, there is no way I or anyone else coulda done otherwise, so there is only credit and no blame.
DeLong and Vollrath ...really like them some counterfactuals; Eric Foner appears deeply suspicious of them.
Me, I am deeply suspicious of morally judging history, which usually is not seeking about knowledge or compassion but about determining that I was right all along, and this new thought or knowledge confirms it.
Theses on Feuerbach does not say we have made the world in circumstances not of our choosing. The world is just there, insoluble lump of nonsense, and we go forward. History just determines where we are.
PS: I will be watching the ways the Trump era permits liberals to go further right. A strong enemy can do that. And "well, yeah we handed the world to fascists, but at least we are not fucking commies" was old 90 years ago.
re 24: Or maybe not, because race.
The 'comment-storm' is nothing but the self-activity of the eternal, infinite idea ... for it is precisely according to the particular determinations of the idea that enter successively into a human consciousness that we differentiate the various comments of the thread.
One thing I have noticed recently is people on twitter dot com saying things like "But you know the Soviet constitution said this!"
You know, like the Soviet Union gave a shit about its constitution.
Part of neoliberalism is the redefinition of rights/human rights as personal property not subject to group claims and then the limiting of recognizable rights to those that do not infringe other peoples property. So the differences between a "right to vote" and a "right to healthcare."
But this is also the history of liberal capitalism, there is no individual right to the commons, but the owner has a right to enclose, and the worker has a right to sell his labor.
The United States is probably responsible for the deaths of minmally between 50 and 100 million people since 1945, usually by outsourcing mass murder to client states while providing the means and incentives to do so. Genocide occurring in Sudan as we speak.
This is an excellent chance to discuss one of the key debates of Soviet policy from the 80s- is it pronounced doo-sham-BAY or doo-SHAM-bee? The expert portrayed in the movie went with the latter, but the heros/regular guys (including the one who did know a lot under the goofy exterior) used the former.
I guess that should also be SHAN/shan not sham, but that's how I remember it, and don't tell me Sinbad didn't have a key role either.
Do-Shan-Bay
Do as in doe not Doo.
Damn, shoulda said: Do as in doe, a female deer....
Everybody knows the war is over, but a lot of people are still denying the good guys lost.
They will learn soon enough. Those few that survive.
11 is right, 'reformed' has to do a lot of work. So, narrower. The USSR abandons the Warsaw Pact and foreign adventures in the late 1980s, but manages not to implode in 1991. Gradual Chinese-style reforms keep them going, if not prospering. No, they aren't democratic, and yes, they're still a nasty empire. Could the world still be better? Could Soviet citizens still be better off (considering that, right now, the vast majority of them don't have freedom or democracy anyway).
Also, thanks to neb for the excellent post title.
The broader point is what people have been talking about: not the USSR, but its effect on the West. Something I only realized when it was spelled out for me in the Cambridge history of the Cold War: the CW wasn't just a war, it was a world order, including almost all of the developed world*. Outside the order, in the Third World (in the original sense of the term) , it did make things worse . But inside, unprecedented stability and progress**. I ask since the Western half of that order is now in serious trouble, and it is worth wondering if an enemy is actually necessary to make it work. And if so, how far could it ever expand?
*Was this always obvious to everyone else? I felt pretty dumb not having noticed that.
**All manner of horrible shit still happening, on both sides, but still dramatically less bad than the historical norm.
38 I'm going on the Persian/Tajik pronunciation of دوشنبه. It's a short "و"
I am really uncomfortable with this line of reasoning, not least because I think it ignores the millions of deaths on which the Soviet system was built in favour of focusing on some supposed salutary effect on Western health care policy.
I'm also uncomfortable with it, because it implies a lot of grimness if it's right. And like you say yourself, and we talked about in the Deluge threads, the world wars produced great benefits in social policy. Those benefits also cost millions of lives. Which, again is not my preferred road for getting anything done, but was the road that was actually taken.
There are piles of corpses in the background of other societies besides the USSR. I think the question is whether or not the Soviet pile of corpses was enough in the past by the early 1990s that it was no longer a pile of corpses essential to the Soviet self-conception.
46 Yes, and to make it obvious, namely our own.
the CW wasn't just a war, it was a world order, including almost all of the developed world
I hadn't thought it in exactly those terms, but its make sense as a framework. And after the Cold War, we had the New World Order, in which the US was dominant, if challenged from a number of different angles. Right now it looks as if we are going into a post-New World Order, multi-polar situation, which I'm concerned is going to be wicked unstable.
So 40 boils down to, basically: suppose the Soviet Union changed to become very different (and very much better) from the way it had been for its entire history and somehow managed to still be the Soviet Union - would that have been better? Well yes it would. And if my granny had tracks and a turret, she'd be a T-34.
46: the pile of 1.5 million corpses created by the Soviet Army in Afghanistan was not very far in the past at all in the early 90s.
52: too flammable, and not good enough over snow or mud.
51.last: But was she already a lactation consultant?
No, but that was hardly the only time a super power killed a bunch of people to maintain a friendly government.
51: The Soviet Union did in fact change to become very different (and very much better) in 1953-56 and did so again under Gorbachev. The second time it ceased to be the Soviet Union, but I don't see that that was necessarily unavoidable.
the pile of 1.5 million corpses created by the Soviet Army in Afghanistan was not very far in the past at all in the early 90s.
The US's role in triggering that event seems like it is under-examined, probably because Republicans don't care and Democrats don't want to make Jimmy Carter look bad.
This sort of discussion always starts to give me the uncomfortable feeling that all of us are in some way willing to excuse mountains of corpses if we feel it was necessary in order to produce a society with a way of life we believe in. In our case, mistakes were made; in their case, the deaths are the inevitable consequence of an evil essence.
58: And then in 1956 it invaded Hungary and killed a load of people and tortured a load more. So, improvement is relative.
But now I'm no longer typing on a phone I'd like to lay things out clearly.
If the USSR had not collapsed in 1991 but had instead evolved into something a bit more market-based, withdrawn from eastern Europe and stopped waging and supporting wars elsewhere, while still being highly repressive of its own population, would that have been better for the world or for the people of the USSR than what actually happened?
I think my first response is to deny the premise. I don't think that is a coherent scenario: the market-based reforms weren't sustainable. They were undermining the tax base and fiscal policy of the USSR.
Nor can you assume that these reforms, even if successful, would have persisted. Look at what's happened now. Look at what happened after Khrushchev was toppled. Continued CPSU rule would have been a constant threat to the market economy and whatever glasnost reforms had occurred - the government would always have been tempted to reverse them (perhaps by military coup, as almost happened in 1991).
And even if we grant that, you're also assuming that the no-foreign-interference policy would also have endured. Governments change their policies. Why wouldn't the USSR have reverted to the mean?
And, remember, the mean, for the whole of the Cold War, was a consistently far higher rate of violent death than we have now. Yes, ISIS and Syria and Iraq and so on, but it can't be emphasised enough that these are small-scale compared to the kind of thing that happened during the Cold War.
But one good thing about the Cold War was that the USSR's existence scared the West into being more welfare-state-ish
I am not convinced by this either. The welfare state dates back to the 19th century, well before the USSR existed. People like Bismarck supported pension schemes. The basics of the British welfare state - National Insurance, free health care, free education, old age pensions - were all in place under the Lloyd George Liberals, before the First World War. Welfarisation - driven by liberals and socialists across the world - was a trend that existed before Soviet Communism, and the easiest assumption is that it would have continued in the absence of Soviet Communism. And, as noted above, you could as easily argue that the USSR's existence served to retard the growth of the welfare state, because the USSR from 1917 to 1953 was a horrific slaughterhouse, and every time someone suggested more rights for trade unions or better healthcare provision, their opponents could always sneer "oh, just like in the Soviet Union, right?"
I'd also challenge this as a description of the situation during the Cold War:
All manner of horrible shit still happening, on both sides, but still dramatically less bad than the historical norm.
Really? The Great Purge? The Holodomor? The Great Leap Forward? Less bad than the norm?
Count me in the "Giant pile of corpses is bad" camp. There was something fundamentally broken about the USSR from its inception. It was always going to be nasty and brutal. There isn't a way to rip people from their established way of life and force them into a new mold without violence and the threat of violence. Throw in the fact that their economic model required people to behave in ways at odds with human nature and disaster was baked into the pie from the get-go. I'm willing to bet that without an external existential threat to bond the people to their leaders the whole enterprise would have collapsed within a generation due to its own internal contradictions. Communism works just fine in small groups where people are free to leave, but it just doesn't scale.
The welfare state dates back to the 19th century, well before the USSR existed. People like Bismarck supported pension schemes. The basics of the British welfare state - National Insurance, free health care, free education, old age pensions - were all in place under the Lloyd George Liberals, before the First World War.
All based and founded on Imperialism, ie, the mountains of corpses in South Asia, China, and Africa and the Somme. Bismarck specifically had the pacification and patriotism of his people in mind so they would be "strong and willing" enough for genocide and slavery outside the borders.
In the late 19th the Japanese understood the model, and a certain degree of liberalism and welfare state was required for advanced military and Empire building.
Is the mountain of corpses, or the slavery, misery, and exploitation of others, preferably outside your borders, necessary for liberal capitalism?
Yes. We are remembering something Hobson, Hilferding, Lenin, Luxemburg and Mao understood 100 years ago.
Once you have killed them, or driven them off the farms to the cities to be wage slaves, and have accumulated enough for the oligarchy to wield unchallenged power, then maybe you can take a break from war. Maybe.
Socialism or barbarism, Rosa said.
Enjoy your ultimate triumph with Trump. His successors will be less fun.
Fuck this. Like talking to fucking Nazis with bad consciences.
Taiping Rebellion, Iran-Iraq war, Libya not our fault! Those people are primitive and fucking crazy by nature. We just wanted to make a little money and give them science.
This discussion is turning into Theseus's dictatorship.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was a huge hit to the standard of living of most of its residents and this seems strange if capitalism is such a better system. Obviously Americans bitching about the crimes of Russia is ridiculous. You better really drill down into that post WW1 pre WW2 period because those 20 years are the only time we're going to look good.
61: Not one of those falls in the Cold War. The Great Leap Forward occurs following de-Stalinization and contemporary with the Sino-Soviet split.
I think that a consistent pessimist could argue both that Stalinism was terrible, communism unstable, and that the the nineties were in many respects worse. Susan Richards' book "Epics of everyday life" is very good on the sheer horror of that period when everything broke up and, let's not forget, male life expectancy dropped by ten years.
I was and am a hereditary cold warrior, in that both my parents were actively engaged as diplomats and (I think on occasion) quasi spooks. I think the crimes of Stalin were at least as terrible as those of any other monster in history, and that they arose from a perfectly plausible reading of commmunist doctrine (among other things).
But what we forget is that the whole machine of terror and compliance was also kept going by moralism on a large scale, and people believed the sentiment behind the slogans. For the most part they took for granted that they lived in a society with a moral purpose and that is how societies ought to be. Discovering that this was an illusion was one of the most dreadful things about becoming a dissident. Fairly ordinary people also took real consolation in high culture. The picture of cattle trucks rattling off into Siberia with the prisoners inside reciting Pushkin from memory is for me one of the great images of the 20th century. It's also true that the state looked after music, chess, theatre and ballet, literature if authors safely dead (and of course, where necessary, rendering them safe) in ways that were objectively admirable.
And it was all that art, seriousness, and care for the truth (within of course tight political constraints) which went to shit under Yeltsin and then Putin. Another recent book - the peter pomerantsev one -- makes this clear.
But it wasn't the cold war which drove the European welfare states. Ajay is right. It was war, orthe threat of war, with other european states which produced the model and the social discipline.
69: the Great Leap Forward certainly falls during the Cold War! The Cold War was, what, late 1940s to 1991?
"The collapse of the Soviet Union was a huge hit to the standard of living of most of its residents and this seems strange if capitalism is such a better system".
The transition was amazingly badly handled. In large part because, contra NW, seventy years of Soviet rule had not produced a people with a particular "care for the truth"; it had produced a people whose only way to survive was to be prepared to go outside official channels. System D, as depicted in Red Plenty. The rite of passage of bribing a doctor to have yourself declared unfit for military service. When the system fell apart, that is what replaced it.
Now, of course, standard of living is way higher than in 1990. Yay capitalism.
Not making any assertions about what the USSR could have achieved in differing circumstances, or whether it was a force for good even in a limited way, but taken on its own, the Soviet system didn't leave people homeless/desperate in the random, uncaring way US-style capitalism did and does. Your living standards might suck, and you were subject to all sorts of repression, but you got education and employment, and it was a real shock to most to see that guarantee gone and millions on the scrap heap. Probably closely related to all the alcoholism and suicide.
I was,I think, talking about the intelligentsia. But will try to argue properly off the phone
taken on its own, the Soviet system didn't leave people homeless/desperate in the random, uncaring way US-style capitalism did and does.
A pleasant thought, but sadly erroneous. Even if you ignore the millions - literally millions - left homeless by famine and war in the first three decades of its history - because I'm sure one could charitably attribute all of that misery to external events rather than to the Soviet system's casual disinterest in the welfare of its own people, which I mean, seriously, you're accusing the US of being less caring about the welfare of its citizens than the country that built the White Sea Canal and the Baikal-Amur Mainline - there were still hundreds of thousands of homeless people in the USSR in the late 80s.
Officially, of course, they did not exist.
http://www.csmonitor.com/1988/0519/ehome.html
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1989-01-30/news/8903010453_1_soviet-officials-rubles-poverty
I'm pretty sure that the United States had universal public education throughout the life of the Soviet Union. Not university, of course, but that's a small subset during that time period.
68: "... ridiculous." Eat shit, you sexist asshole. The Soviets trampled the bodies of ethnic minorities. All decent people, regardless of their place of birth, must condemn that. You are not a decent person. Are you on the clock right now?
75: "you" in this context would exclude almost all of us, because we ask too many questions. It further excludes many ethnic minorities. If you do not experience oppression based on your ethnicity, please check your privilege. You sound like the white Marxist dude-bros who try to redirect every discussion of racial oppression to the topic of class.
For certain values of "universal" and "public".
The logic of 68 -- due to unclean hands, no living American can criticize any Soviet policy -- is imo pernicious.
79: please, stop helping me. /bialystock
84: yes, of course it is, it's asinine.
If more Americans would just wash their goddamn hands before discussing foreign policy, we would haven't the problems. Or even just use sanitary wipes. Jesus.
It's not that no American can criticize der commisars, but going back to the 20s and 30s for only one side seems unfair to me.
To the question 'was the Soviet Union redeemable?' answers mentioning the Spanish Inquisition, the Black Hole of Calcutta, or Wounded Knee aren't particularly useful.
Avowed Communists can criticize the USSR and communism in practice.
Those who criticize communism from some other political position are in intention and fact allying themselves with Jesse Helms, Hitler, Chiang, Joe McCarthy, Curtis Lemay, Idi Amin, godknowswho...and in fact and practice always have done so, usually intentionally with a worse than foolish policy of abandoning the fascists after that sick twisted abortion of a united front has won.
Why do we know those names today? Because liberals and social democrats did in fact support and ally with fascists, genocidal dictators, and authoritarians of all sorts during the Cold war and before, and allowed them into positions of power.
The history is clear. Those who attacked communism were much worse than those who supported it, and entire races only still exist because communists fought fascism. It is still true today. It will be proved tomorrow.
If Hitler had only gone East and not West, and Uncle Joe not found a way to win, his descendants would be having dinner with the Clintons.
Hitler didn't have descendants because he only had one ball. Also, I'm more make a coughing most that sounds like "Molotov-Ribbentorp" or something.
Let me see, any Communist Party members vote for AUMF in 2002? Nope
Did any Democrats ally themselves with scum, fascists, and charlatans to authorize a War of Aggression in 2002? That has killed millions?
Did any grassroots Democrats ally themselves with the opportunistic monsters who voted with Republicans in hundreds of cases?
Woah, here we are in 2016.
Am I the only one here who couldn't vote for Clinton?
"Realistic pragmatic rationally idealistic" very serious people have to come down out of the clouds and make deals with the devil?
Only if you are demons vying for a nice chair in Hell.
"Molotov-Ribbentorp" or something
Munich proved that the West wanted Hitler to win. And yes, they understood a lot of Hitler's program toward minorities by then, and were mostly on board. Just be discreet, Adolf.
Neville should have asked for half of Czechoslovakia, like a committed protector of the weak.
82, 83: tone policing is just another way to protect privilege [0]. Soviet oppression of ethnic minorities indicated a "troubled" mentality held by the powerful with regard to the weak. Using the b-word is "inappropriate" and "unwarranted." This is your chance to choose where you stand. And if you're more troubled by the word "shit" than by sexism and by apologizing for the oppressor, you are not a good person.
[0] http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/12/tone-policing-and-privilege/
I meant accusing somebody who isn't bob if being paid by the Russians. I don't give a fuck if you say "shit."
89: the Black Hole of Calcutta was an atrocity committed by Indian soldiers against British civilians , btw. Sorry if you knew that.
Using the b-word is "inappropriate" and "unwarranted"
"Bialystock".
Nothing good can ever come from defending the Soviet Union, this thread being no exception.
Moderator please unpost my last comment I have no desire to engage on this.
You could also ask them to fix the typo.
Say what you will about the tenants of Soviet Communism, at least they could build a bad-ass ekranoplan.
At least this stupid argument about Russia, unlike many others lately, acknowledges that it's very different now from how it was in the Soviet era.
Oops, I guess I did know that back when I used to know shit.
Don't fix the typo I don't want people to think I can write worth shit.
84: substantively isn't this exactly what's happening here. The OP is about potentially positive things about the Soviet Union, but we're not allowed to discuss that, instead it's endless tedious posturing about 90 year old crimes that everyone here knows about, and no one supports, or is defending. Heaven forbid a discussion of the Soviet Union be about anything except Joesph Stalin.
The nice thing about Unfogged is that if you aren't at a shitty Christmas Eve family argument, Unfogged brings it to you.
Have not read the thread. Merry Christmas, hoping this is an ironic tongue-in-cheek troll. Kleptocratic single-party security state that murdered anyone guilty-ish of political opposition, and there were generous incentives for informers (millions of those) to provide names, any names. Inquiring about the local factory's poison spew was suicidal. Uranium mines were an actual sentence for selling your own farm equipment after collectivization was announced in CZ.
People have written about this. Kapuszynski's Imperium is OK for a post-1989 assessment. You could try google street view in Magadan.
You could try google street view in Magadan.
Meanwhile the Alexandrov (Red Army) Choir has been wiped out in an air crash.
And like fifty more singers rushed in to pick up the sheet music from their bodies.
Mineshaft, this was a mistake; I didn't think there would be this much anger. Apologies to all. But we'll always have 115.
You ruined Christmas, Mossy. We can't come back from that. Every December 25th will collapse into recriminations because of what you did here today.
Send him to a re-education camp.
No ill-will from me, Merry Christmas genuinely.
But suggesting to consider positive outcomes and ask how to get those with a better single-party state superposed on Russion history is a deep error IMO. Kolmogorov or the excellent stations of the Moscow metro are great, but the metro is not isolatable from the environment that produced it. Not sure how to say that without sounding shouty or boring.