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Comment by moltar | Hacker News Reader

The article feels very much agenda filled. The past was not all so terrible. And remembering the past is just history. It’s good to know history, whatever it is. I know it’s hard for the west to understand that where history has been rewritten numerous times to fit the narrative.

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It was not all so terrible indeed. It was much worse. A couple of American journalists in 1940s USSR? They would see as much of real Soviet life as modern tourists would of North Korea.

USSR even had a special programme targeting famous artists/writers etc. They'd invite them to Moscow or Leningrad and give them a majestic tour about how nice Soviet life is.

We had an interesting situation in Lithuania. A lot of local inteligentsia took the tour in 1930s and initially supported Soviet occupation. Quite a few of them quickly backpedaled when they saw how real day-to-day soviet life looks like.

That programme is one of the reasons why a lot of famous people in the West supported USSR during cold war. Old the bad things must be bourgeois propaganda anyway..

Having lived pieces of that and seen survivors, I’d say it was pretty bad and quite a bit worse than the article describes. Unless you belonged to the nomenclatura and were ok with being at the mercy of the Aparat.

Solzhenitsyn would say otherwise.

> I know it’s hard for the west to understand that where history has been rewritten numerous times to fit the narrative.

Or the East. Or any civilization.

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