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Comment by lurquer | Hacker News Reader

At least as bad? I'd recommend you use your weekend to read up on Stalinist Russia.

Written by who? As far as the USSR doesn't exist anymore, it's not like people who never lived there, like me, can form an objective opinion about it.

The USSR collapsed less than 30 years ago finding people who lived during it on both sides isn’t hard neither it’s hard to find books on the subject from both sides of the iron curtain.

It depends a lot on where you live. I've yet to meet anyone from the former Eastern block who was an adult by the time it collapsed. About books, that's the problem, they're all biased in one way or another. Some will depict East Germany as a police state living hell, while others describe it as a paradise as long as you didn't get involved in certain things. It's difficult to figure out what was it all about.

> About books, that's the problem, they're all biased in one way or another.

This is no excuse for not becoming more educated on the subject if you are ignorant. Every source is full of bias. That's why reading more than one book on the same subject is a worthwhile endeavor, because even a supposedly objective history is full of some editorializing of the events. The trick is to recognize when the author is editorializing and when they are presenting the events as they happened, and to take the editorializing as the author's point of view and the events as factual unless proven otherwise.

Disagreeing with someone's opinion about something does not require you to disagree with their presentation of the facts.

Bias isn’t an issue everything has bias in it but in your case it wouldn’t be really hard to figure it out, East Germany was objectively a police state while it might not have been as bad as worst case for everyone it was never a paradise.

There is a difference between editorializing and fabricating complete nonsense and unless you are looking for facts to reenforce your own bias it’s not hard to distinguish between them.

Loads of people today who lived under Soviet rule want to return to soviets rule. Capitalism destroyed Eastern Europe. It's horrible over there right now.

Really? I'm living in Russia right now and can purchase an Advacodo from just about any grocery store.

If we're going to compare apples to apples (or really avocado to avocado), the US couldn't consistently put avocados on grocery store shelves outside of California until the late 1980s either. There were trade restrictions with Mexico, and California didn't yet have the capacity for much beyond local sales.

Not sure why you're being downvoted...

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/29/in-russia-no...

Because statistics are meaningless nearly no one surveyed actually lived under Stalin or spent time in the gulag.

Russian propaganda has been working on “restoring” the image of Stalin and the USSR diligently for over two decades heck just a few days ago they’ve arrested a Russian historian who authored a book on Stalin for being unpatriotic.

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/170146

https://www.rferl.org/a/second-historian-of-stalin-s-crimes-...

I mean, the statistics lean significantly towards those who were adults during the USSR.

It's hilarious that you literally link to radio free europe. "Statistics are meaningless" lolz

Statistics which are built on a state fabricated lie are meaningless when you objectively try to understand the history of the USSR the only thing that is meaningful is is just how bad the transition period is remembered and how well the current propaganda machine works.

It’s also interesting to see just what is driving it, countries like Estonia and Lithuania are EU countries which greatly benefited from integration with western society while the rest of the Russian vassal states were left to fend for themselves and essentially lost what little power they had even if it was only power by proxy.

Except, once again, the statistics say that the people who were alive tend to have the most favorable opinion. If it was just some conspiracy were everything was made up, you'd expect the opposite.

Stalin died in 1953 how many of the people surveyed were alive during that time to have a favorite view of him especially in comparison to reformers like Gorbachev vs how many of them are utterly brainwashed by the current Russian propaganda machine?

An easy answer would be too look at the numbers for the former USSR states which are now EU members.

Furthermore it's important to note that this is an aggregated statistical butchery from multiple surveys in none of which was a question asked along the lines of "would you rather live under the USSR or being free".

All of these were peripheral questions about various nationalistic identities and historical figures, all of which were heavily retconned in the past few decades by Russia.

Stalin used to be one of the most despised figures in Russian history even during the USSR today he is celebrated as a hero that is simply sickening.

That's false. He was arrested on pedophilia charges.[1][2] I don't understand how that's "unpatriotic".

1. https://www.newsweek.com/men-uncovering-stalin-era-atrocitie...

2. https://themoscowtimes.com/news/gulag-historian-detained-ped....

Are you serious? Go read The Gulag Archipelago.

Go read an actual scholarly look at the soviet prison and forced labour system, rather than essentially fiction.

It's not like the purges or the genocide of the Kulaks or the labor camps are heavily disputed subjects that may not have happened.

Kulak isn't a ethnic group, so there can't be a "genocide of the Kulaks". The definition of Kulak were the landowners who wouldn't collectivize. And yeah, a bunch of them were executed doing shit like lighting grain on fire during a famine out of spite for the government.

Alright, what is the word for systematically killing a large group of people grouped by something other than ethnicity?

Death penalty? At least that's what they call it in the USA.

Or, for doing absolutely nothing. It didn't even matter if they actually were "rich" or not.

Well, you could read the stuff that was written by the people who actually lived through it.

Many people who grew up in the Soviet Union, are still alive today. There are even a couple in this very thread, and apparently they know very much how horrible it was.

Yes, I could read that kind of stuff, but I would also find opinions of people who also grew up in the SU and miss it. In fact, I've recently read about polls where 60% of the russians regret the end of the USSR. So, I think this is not something black or white. You had to actually live there, not just watch it through television.

There very much are people who miss the USSR. Some are paid for it. Some honestly miss it because... well, I don't want to go into analyzing national mentality here, but there's a Russian saying that goes "if they are afraid of us, it means that they respect us". And people certainly were afraid of USSR.

This perceived loss of respect drives a lot of nostalgia for the USSR.

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