The reason to invade Finland wasn’t sue to Nazi collaborationism, Finland still wasn’t allied with the Nazis. The reason was the need for the USSR to put additional territory between themselves and the Nazis due to the geography of the region, i.e. the Great European Plain, a vast flatland without natural defenses that is very hard to protect from Nazi blitzkrieg. USSR attempted negotiations with Finland to gain terrains to have control over lands further from Moscow, Leningrad and the oil fields at the south of Russia, and only when those negotiations failed did the Soviets invade. This isn’t just explicitly what the Soviets were saying at the time of negotiations, it was openly said so by all western leaders at the time of the Molotov Ribbentrop truce:

“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)

“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.

"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement

Read it yet?

You explained it perfectly well: you have as an axiom based on no sources provided yet (I.e. hearsay) that the “owning class” of the USSR owned the state property de facto, and so inequalily was perpetuated. Not through income, conveniently, as I already provided data contradicting that, so you shift to saying money was worthless.

I have explained and given you numbers and evidence on how access to many goods and services was subsidized to the working class and stopped being so after the transition to capitalism, which again contradicts your initial assertion that it was also capitalism and a class society with an owning class and a working class. Now, answer my proposition: given how universal access was I such things and how it stopped being the case, why did the “owning class” previously grant the working class access to such healthcare, education, housing, foodstuffs, energy, public transit, infrastructure, sports facilities, and even holiday resorts?

The Soviet Union wasn’t communist

How so? I already dispelled your erroneous, CIA-manufactured understanding of ownership of the means of production in the USSR and gave you my sources, to which you haven’t replied other than by making up stuff on the spot. Would you care to argue otherwise from data?

Here is the graph with your methodical errors corrected

Thanks, I wasn’t aware of the caps-sensitivity of the Ngram viewer, good point. Regardless, you do notice that your graph proves further my point, right? That “Holodomor” is a word essentially unused from 1930 to 2000, and now it grows in usage each year as a consecuence of unaware pro-capitalist propagandists like you. I repeat: do you use such scary words for capitalist-inflicted famines, or is it something you reserve for punching to your left?

Dude, 3.5 million deaths (That’s the low estimate, by the way) through famine does not qualify as “successful nation-wide land collectivization”.

Depends. Famines were commonplace in the Russian Empire, and it’s to be expected that in a country in preindustrial agricultural production famines would happen. Ultimately there were mistakes during the land collectivization that led to unnecessary degrees of famine, true, but remember, it was the only successful attempt in the sense that it did collectivize land in a long-lasting and widespread manner, which had been attempted countless times over the past 5 millenia with no success until that point and many deaths in every attempt, e.g. the Gracchi brothers already attempted land collectivization in ancient Rome.

The collectivization of agriculture in the USSR enabled the first ever case of a state-owned industrial revolution, which managed to make the country grow by 10-15% YEARLY in economic output. The former Russian Empire went from being a pre-capitalist agrarian society to becoming an industrializing nation in 10 years, and that wasn’t out of desire, it was out of necessity. The 1929 collectivization coincides in time (not by coincidence) with the first 5-year plan, which set in motion the industrialization of the USSR that would lead to an increase of life expectancy from 30 years of age to 60 in 30 years, even with the most devastating war in history inbetween those years. Not only did it solve hunger forever and allow for widespread healthcare, it also enabled the industrial revolution that ended up DEFEATING NAZISM. Nazis had plans to murder and forcibly reallocate all Slavic and many other peoples between Germany and Urals, which amounts to hundreds of millions of people. By defeating Nazism, the industrial revolution of the USSR, kicked off in 1929, effectively saved TENS OF MILLIONS of lives from genocide, and then gave those very people healthcare and guaranteed food that DOUBLED life expectancy in a formerly feudal backwards empire. For reference, a comparable country in economic situation in 1930 would be Brazil, which by 1965 had a life expectancy of 55 years, where at that point USSR had raised it to 68. Multiply by 200 million lives, how many tens of millions of lives saved is that?

Now tell me: knowing how many tens if not hundreds of millions of lives were saved by the 1929 collectivization and industrial plans, do you still deny its success?

Ohhh, so now we bounce from your misunderstanding and conflation of wealth and income which now you conveniently forget about, and jump to “actually, money didn’t mean anything, so it doesn’t matter that income inequality was low”. Good to see you keep making up stuff on the spot.

If you had bothered to read my first comment, you’d have seen that highest wages were given not to party members but to highly trained professionals of the intelligentsia such as university professors or researchers (many of the latter in military projects). If wages were used as an incentive for these people, then how come money wasn’t real and didn’t mean anything? Then they would have paid those professionals the same!

Your point of “access to goods and services in the USSR through non-monetary means” has a bit of merit though, but it actually backfires to your agenda. Food basics, energy, heating, housing, basic clothing items, public transit and even housing were astonishingly low-priced, with housing costing about 3% of monthly family unit income, and with metro tickets in Moscow not changing price between 1940s and 1980. Healthcare was free to everyone, education was completely free to the highest level for everyone, and there was universal access to such important services. Those things actually work in the opposite direction that you mean: the poorer people were heavily subsidized in comparison to capitalist states. It’s especially relevant to rural areas, with tens of millions of formerly rural people being forced to abandon their hometowns after the deterioration or outright closure of formerly state-subsidized services (e.g. Moscow metropolitan area has grown by 6mn people over the past 30 years whereas the total population of Russia has shrunk by a few million).

Every single measurement of inequality has grown since the dismantling of the soviet state: reduction in life expectancy over the 90s and 2000s leading to above ten million premature deaths, lower childbirth rates, destruction of the public pension system, dismantling of public healthcare and education, removal of basic services in rural areas that have forced migrations of millions to cities, crime rates skyrocketed… What argument will you make up on-the-spot now?

No comment on the millions of Ukrainian deaths and lives ruined in the transition away from communism?

So everything bad that happens during communism is communism’s fault, and everything bad that happens after communism is also communism’s fault, gotcha.

Btw, keep in mind that you’re being a CIA pawn when you make such political use of “Holodomor”:

It’s a western-promoted propaganda word to refer to the Soviet Famine of the collectivization effort, and it’s used to blow over the Russian and Central-Asian deaths from the famine as if only Ukrainians had suffered it. It attempts to turn an unfortunate hunger during the first successful nation-wide land collectivization in human history into some sort of manufactured genocide of Ukrainians now that they can be used as a token to promote hate on communism and Russians. Do you also have a special scary word to refer to, e.g., the Bengal Famine in India, or is it something reserved to the enemies of capitalism?

Ok, so why if they already de-facto controlled everything, did they have comparably much lower INCOME. What stopped them from having higher INCOME? Why do you refuse to answer to that?

…and local businesses constantly close in favour of big companies, as countries develop the amount of self-employed people goes down:

Source

Local businesses simply cannot outcompete ever-growing big businesses, and because big businesses are in a need to ever-grow to satisfy the raising stock value imperative, they inevitably intrude the market share of local businesses. This is well-known since the mid-1800s.

And when the Crimean annexation by Russia took place, where was the referendum to allow NATO troops? Or does the government suddenly get the unilateral decision-making power when it comes to NATO?

Because there’s nothing to say about it other than that it was bad

Yes, there is plenty to say, actually. You could, for example, stop pretending that you actually do care about the well-being of Ukrainian people, since you apparently have no mention of the millions of deaths from destruction of public healthcare, alcoholism, drug abuse, violence, suicide, shitty diet and outright hunger that took place after 1991 and kept happening as Ukraine became the poorest country in Europe. You could admit that you only care about Ukrainians suffering now because the war happens to be against the geopolitical enemy of your country.

If you gave one flying fuck about the well-being of Ukrainians, you’d be supporting communism and the Soviet Union right now, since its disintegration led to the worst humanitarian crisis the country has seen since the Nazis invaded it, and to an ever-ongoing disintegration of public services which led to millions more premature deaths than the illegal Russian invasion. You would be complaining about Russian capitalism which is the one that invaded Ukraine, and you’d understand that there was no such war during Soviet times. It is precisely capitalism that brought all of this to Ukraine, and if you cared genuinely about Ukrainians and wished the best for them instead of using them as a pawn for your media-induced hatred of Russia, you’d wish for the USSR never to have fallen.

You’ve shown us in other comments that you’ve done no reading on the topic to the point that you don’t even bother to understand the difference between income and wealth, and you make up on-the-spot assumptions from your ill-informed, poorly-read, west-propagandized version of the topic. The problem isn’t that you do this, the problem is that you do this while claiming to be a leftist/anarchist. I’ll tell you something: if you, as a leftist/anarchist, share 90% of your opinion about a geopolitical enemy of the USA with the CIA, you’re doing something wrong.

They gave a response which you can check out. It boils down to “I don’t understand the difference between income and wealth, and I’m choosing to make up an on-the-spot interpretation based on my preconceived views”.

If you took care to actually read the graph, you would see it says “income inequality”. How income (i.e. regular earnings, NOT amount of property owned) relates to formal ownership of something is beyond me. Additionally:

What happened was that the Communist party went from controlling the means of production without accountability (de facto owning them), to being the recognized owner of the means of production (de jure owning them)

I don’t even know what to say. Are you not aware that in 1991 the USSR was dissolved? How exactly would the communist party achieve formal ownership of means of production in 1991 if the system was discarded in favour of capitalism? What happened is kinda exactly the opposite: means of production went from formal ownership by the state, to formal and de-facto ownership by private owners over the following 5-10 years (the “vertical” line you talk about).

I’m under the impression that you have done 0 reading on the topic of actual worker representation, which you haven’t rebuked and haven’t given any sources too, and you’re pulling stuff out of your ass from hearsay, because your comment literally makes no sense whatsoever

Reminder that “you can’t make the system better by voting” applies even when you win the actual votes. Chile found out when democratically-elected socialist leader Salvador Allende was murdered in cold blood by a fascist CIA-backed coup and replaced by a fascist dictator, and Spain (my homeland) found out when we democratically elected a leftist coalition during the Spanish Second Republic, only to have a failed coup which turned into a civil war in which Fascists backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy fought against the legitimate democratically elected government (supported only by the USSR while the USA, England and France looked the other way during Nazi bombings such as that of Gernika), ultimately with Fascists winning the war and creating a 40-year fascist dictatorship of which we still sadly live the consequences.

hexbear is arguably the most trans-inclusive place in Lemmy. Most people there are either Marxist-Leninist or Anarchist, and there is very little liberalism tolerance. People are also fun and make jokes about beanis :)

Such as the Soviet Union. In fact, the term “tankie” was first coined to describe people who supported the Soviet Union sending tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution

Not to be pedantic or anything, but wasn’t the etymology of the word “tankie” vindicated recently when it was released by Trump that the leader of the Hungarian Freedom Fighters ended up being funded by CIA?

Regarding your point of Stalin controlling the Soviet Union and dictating whatever happened with the means of production, I actually have stuff to add: union membership was highest in the USSR than it’s ever been anywhere to that point of history, with unions taking care of a lot of stuff such as guaranteeing workers access to housing and healthcare, organizing vacation, ensuring workplace safety, and obviously representing the will of workers: in every factory there was a factory newspaper where workers could submit their complaints or comments on the work organizing, and unions had the power to change the workplace director. As for sources of this, you can have a look at Pat Sloan’s “Soviet Democracy”, a book written by an Englishman who left the UK to go to the USSR in the Stalin era and lived there for about a decade; also Mick Costello’s “Worker Participation in the Soviet Union”, a book written after a series of interviews to workers all over the USSR by the author, published 1977 so a very different era, tells a lot about this. I think most of the misconception that “workers had no say in production” comes mostly from western anticommunist propaganda and isn’t substantiated by any serious evidence. If you have any works contradicting what I’ve said above, I’d be glad to look into it.

Lastly, regarding your point of “Soviet Union being the end state of Capitalism and the enslavement of the working class to the owner class”: who was said owner class?

Source for the graph above, hopefully you know Meduza well enough to know that it’s not very much aligned with socialism. Wealth inequality has never been lower in any Soviet Union territories as it was during the Soviet Union, not before, not after. In fact, wealth inequality was remarkably low compared to most capitalist countries (again as you see in the graph), and the highest salaries belonged actually not to politicians as you could expect, but to highly trained intellectuals such as University professors or military researchers (my sources for this are Albert Szymanski’s “Is the Red Flag Flying” and Robert C. Allen’s "Farm to Factory: a Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution). If there were an “owning class vs. working class” dynamic, wouldn’t we expect high wealth disparity between workers and “owners”, whoever they were? Why, if workers had no say over 70 years in industrial and economic production, was wealth inequality consistently at historic minima and not growing as is the case in proven class-societies such as capitalism (Russia post-1990 per the graph) or feudalism (Russia pre-1929ish per the graph)?

I’m not disagreeing with the quote or anything, I’m a revolutionary communist who participated in civil disobedience in pro-palestine demonstrations (I’ll be there in Madrid this very evening to push for a general strike against genocide). I just find it ironic to quote Churchill of all.

From your latter referendum:

The declaration also proclaimed that the republic has intent to become “a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs,”

Surely then you agree that the coming Ukrainian capitalist government violated the Ukrainian popular will by allowing NATO troops to be stationed in Ukraine more than a decade ago as confirmed by Jen Stoltenberg?

You mentioned nothing about the worst humanitarian crisis in Europe, only focusing on technicalities over referenda. My question stands: do you support the regime change that led to the worst humanitarian crisis in Europe, the war in Ukraine, and which prematurely ended the lives of millions of Ukrainians purely through economic destruction? Or do you want to focus on bickering over violated referenda instead of the material living conditions of people?

Going to pro-Palestine protest in Madrid today, it’s gonna be a BIG one. Gonna be beautiful, we’re pushing for general strike Italy style!! Free Palestine!

You seem to care so much about Ukrainians. Surely then you support the Soviet Union, which in 1991 71.5% of Ukrainians voted to uphold and whose antidemocratic dissolution led to the worst humanitarian crisis in the history of post-WW2 Europe:

Surely you support the system that kept Ukraine well-fed, industrialized and at peace with the neighboring sister region, which maintained Ukrainian presidents of the entire Union such as Khrushchev and Brezhnev, and whose dissolution led to Ukraine becoming the poorest country in Europe?

Quoting Churchill in this post lmao