Many people on lemmy.ml deeply respect and admire authoritarian governments and organizations.
Iran, China, North Korea, Soviet Union…
The West has many flaws. But our flaws are nothing compared to these guys.
Iran hangs homosexuals. Iran shot 30,000 people in less than than 2 weeks. The Soviet Union had to build a fucking Iron wall to prevent people from escaping. The Soviets lied about the Chernobyl nuclear explosion. China censors the internet. China wants to eliminate Islam. North Korea is a totalitarian hellscape. Watching anime is a crime.
Why is lemmy.ml so fascinated with authoritarians?
That was not my argument. Revisit the thread
Although i haven’t read The tax in kind, I’ve read other literature about the NEP. I’ve also studied a fair bit on the history and politics of the USSR from the October revolution till Lenin’s death. I decided to postpone reading Capital until I finish university—even then, I’ll probably still delay further because it is very difficult.
Ukraine was still a net exporter of grain despite the aid. They also had to meet quotas else they wouldn’t receive aid.
Additionally, if there WAS aid, why were there still peasants attempting to flee Ukraine? The CC directives ordered all departures from Ukraine to be prevented further corroborating the genocide point.
Even if we give the USSR all the benefit of the doubt, there were still calls within the party warning how dangerous forced collectivisation would be. War communism proved you couldn’t forcibly collectivise grain without major consequences. Bukharin, all too fervent in his warnings about the famine, was purged. He would later be proven correct. I’ll never understand die-hard Stalin defenders.
I already explained how the soviets needed to export grain to gain industrial equipment, this industrial equipment was used to help boost agricultural output. It was a balancing act forced by low levels of development. The genocide point has no evidence, just suspicions. Peasants were attempting to flee because famine still existed, but had there been mass flight of the peasantry agriculture would have collapsed and famine would have spread. That’s why the famine was ended as quickly as it was.
You can absolutely find arguments against collectivization in the Bolsheviks. It remains true that collectivization was necessary, and the fact that it was completed when it was enabled the communists to beat the Nazis. What remains are the 2 real problems:
Drought and flooding severely damaged production, along with kulaks resisting collectivization by burning crops and killing livestock. This was out of the soviet’s hands.
Deliberate hiding of real conditions by Ukrainian communists. Even if we blame the Ukrainain communist leadership in particular, this was ultimately a failure on the part of the communists ocerall.
Collectivization was necessary, and did achieve its end goals, but at far greater a cost than necessary due to a combination of adverse weather and mismanagement. What it was not was genocide, as there was no desire to inflict famine nor a reason to.
Bukharin wasn’t purged for warning against collectivization (and even if he succeeded, the soviets likely would have been wiped out in World War II due to a delay in industrialization), he was purged for being part of a plot to overthrow the CPSU. I’m not a “die-hard Stalin defender,” I am trying to accurately convey what happened. Stalin made many mistakes, we can even see that here in how collectivization was handled. What we cannot see is genocidal intent from Stalin nor the rest of the Central Committee.
If you want an actual critique of Stalin by a communist using near exclusively western sources, Domenico Losurdo’s Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend. Stalin made numerous mistakes, and committed great crimes, such as re-criminalizing homosexuality and supporting the Nakba. At the same time, he was not a genocidal monster as the west portrays him as, and was in fact much better than contemporaries like Churchill.
Alright pal. This discussion is going in the usual discussion, which is nowhere. I don’t know why I came back to this platform