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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

I don't deny that it ended up that way.

But it's important to consider how external forces drove its development in that direction.

I do think that it could have turned out very differently.

Edit: What plumednom said, seriously.

It's true that they initially sided with Germany, but that was largely driven by the hate from other countries. And indeed, it was stupid to trust Hitler and his crazy crew. But it's undeniable that the Allies would not have won without their help. And the cost was immense. Far more than anyone born in the US can imagine. Consider even Leningrad.

And by the way, Putin lost his family in the sack of Leningrad.

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Stalin and people like him seems to be a general failure mode of socialist states.

While the revolution in general has a good reason to start it tends to go to the Robespierre style horror show, which in French republic case was ended as it was well, a republic. But it doesn’t seem to end when the form of new government is a dictatorship (dictatorship of the proletariat is just a dictatorship).

It depends where you start.

If you start with feudalism (Russia), the Confucian equivalent (China) or post-colonial ~slavery (most everywhere else) then sure.

But if you start with industrialized states with decent education, you can end up with Scandinavia.

The Scandinavian countries started from a fundamentally different premise. They're not based on a socialist principle--i.e. that property should be owned in common with the government controlling its use. They're dedicated market economies that evolved a strong social safety net. But their governments don't presuppose the right to control property and production. They impose taxes, which propertied interests can push back on. (And do--Sweden for example has abandoned its wealth tax, and its corporate taxes are competitive with those in the U.S. or U.K.)

See: https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/25/socialism-didnt-work-in...

> Sweden stood as the world’s fourth wealthiest country nearly five decades ago. Its taxes were lower than most western countries, including the United States. The economy was deregulated, and public spending was hardly above 10 percent gross domestic product (GDP).

> The 30-year experiment “was a brief interlude of failure,” Norberg said. To reform and save its economy, Sweden reverted back to its capitalist structure. It reduced public spending by a third, demolished taxes on property and inheritance, and reduced taxes in other areas. Defined benefits were cut and only defined contributions were permitted.

> The Scandinavian countries started from a fundamentally different premise. They're not based on a socialist principle--i.e. that property should be owned in common with the government controlling its use.

This cannot be emphasized enough. It’s social democracy, not socialism as in USSR. It’s as different from socialism as national socialism is.

Our regulations on private sector are aimed at keeping the markets free, thus efficient. Free doesn’t mean free from regulation, but free from natural monopolies etc.

One of the best examples is our mobile/internet regulation. There are no local monopolies and competition works quite well.

So while we do have a big public sector the private sector that actually pays for all of this has to be really efficient.

None of the Scandinavian countries had a violent revolution. They were never Communist. They're all still constitutional monarchies!

This is the kind of mistake that lazily equating communism with social-democrat governments leads you to make.

Or you can start as France which also was feudalism and end up in a republic. With Napoleon as a speedbump.

The difference is the aims of those rebellions.

Seeing as all the communist rebellions have resulted in hellholes kinda supports this.

I live in Finland so not scandinavia, but none of us nordic countries formed our system via rebellion.

Well, I think strongman rule is just the general failure mode of more advanced forms of government, I mean, it's either a single strongman or complete splintering into several states. there is nowhere further down to go.

Of more advanced forms of government or... all forms? I suppose societies that have always been strongman-governed aren't slipping into strongman government as a failure mode, but still.

The USSR had many challenges, especially WWI and WWII happening soon after founding. But pretty much every socialist experiment has ended in dictatorship. We just watched it happen before our eyes in Bolivia. It's worth considering that it may be a problem endemic to socialism.

Private property rights are the bulwark of a free society. You can have all the other individual rights you want, but those are just paper rights unless there are people with private resources to stand up to the government. Once you decide that the government has the right to allocate society's labor and capital as it sees fit, it naturally leads to the government controlling everything.

The reason for that alliance was the Soviets needed time to build their army for the expected war with Germany following the Munich agreement and the Germans needed Soviet oil. I don’t think either side trusted each other ever.

"external forces drove its development"

The worst of Stalin's purges were well before WW2 - I don't think you can blame external forces, certainly not ones active at that time, for Stalin's vicious paranoia.

The foreign hate and intervention started long before Stalin.

The allies of WWI literally invaded Russian to intervene on the anti-Soviet side. I think that is the dictionary definition of an external force.

The purges came later. There was no external force driving those, only internal forces (specifically: Stalin's unquenchable thirst for power).

> And by the way, Putin lost his family in the sack of Leningrad.

To be clear I think you mean the siege of Leningrad. Leningrad was never taken by the Nazis. I recommend 'The 900 Days' as an outstanding history of it.

Yes, OK, siege.

But sack or not, 1.5-2.0 million died, and the area was devastated.

> I don't deny that it ended up that way.

> But it's important to consider how external forces drove its development in that direction.

> I do think that it could have turned out very differently.

So imagine this was written in response to saying "Nazi Germany was angry and suspicious because it was a brutal fascist regime that relied on purging dissidents and killing millions to stay in power."

I think most people would have a bit of a bone to pick ... so ... I dont know - food for thought. I don't think we need to equivocate every time we condemn what the USSR was.

If France and Britain hadn't been such assholes after WWI, I doubt that the Nazis would ever have taken over.

The Nazis actually did a good job getting Germany functional again. That doesn't excuse in any way all the horrible stuff that they later did. But it does explain how they took over.

Watch "Triumph of the Will" sometime, from the perspective of people who had spent over a decade after WWI starving.

It's all just cycle of hate. Just how the abused grow up to be abusers. But on a hugely larger scale.

> It's all just cycle of hate. Just how the abused grow up to be abusers. But on a hugely larger scale.

In my view the nature of Nazi Germany was fundamentally different from the nature of German Empire and I do not think that it's nature was an understandable response to the actions of Franz and Britain.

So what do you think explains the difference?

Ever heard of the october revolution? That was the starting point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_Revolution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905_Russian_Revolution

You can keep going back a long long way....

Look, it was a mess. At that point, Russia was still a feudal state.

And some say that Lenin was actually a German agent, directed to destabilize Russia, and keep it out of WWI.

Russia would have fallen over from the stress of the war regardless, but the Germans did help with the transport of Lenin and some friends. Interestingly, wikipedia also mentions some american investment bankers wanting greater market access (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Revolution#American_su...).

That was the reason why the Germans agreed to allow him passage through Germany in the famous "sealed train", yes.

The starting point of what? Certainly not the internal instability of Russia. I hope nobody believes you can have a revolution without lots of internal strife preceding it. If you want a starting point for those troubles, you should probably take the shots in Sarajevo in 1914, and the world war that followed.

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