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Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

Lots of contention here around the narrative. The original link should be removed and replaced with the original source that has what’s seems to be accurate and different narratives for the pictures. The linked site seems to simply steal what is a pretty nice coverage of the archive.

https://www.rferl.org/a/the-manhoff-archive/28359558.html

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Thanks - we've switched the top link to that from https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/stalin-era-soviet-union-pic....

Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

As discussed on 03-jun-2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36174792 221 comments

And the ads on the link posted to HN - very inappropriate subjects and pop up video ads. Grrr

Please email the mods! They can change the link :)

[flagged]

I reckon OP means quotes like these: Manhoff captures the scarcity of consumer goods, the omnipresent surveillance, and the ever-present fear of being monitored by the Soviet security apparatus.

A lot of socialist commentators push back on such portrayals, dismissing them as capitalist propaganda. Michael Parenti was one such. He argued that life in the USSR was in stark contrast to what the world were made to believe by the US State Machinery/Hollywood.

Here is a longish talk on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FNOm8hY1QU (It is an interesting listen, even if you do not believe in the ideal.)

Then there is Angela Merkle's "almost comfortable" statement: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/life-in-communist-east... A point she expands in her memoir about growing up in East Germany. There were bad things. There were good things.

Considering the basket case that Russia has become, maybe the USSR wasn't so bad after all.

I have no bone to pick on either side but there were a number of comments here about the footnotes to the pictures so I went to look up the source material and could not find good references to those footnotes so wanted to point out they the images are stolen and the text that comes with it is probably made up.

Ah ok. Sorry, I misread your comment then :)

Sorry if you did not read the comments here. Lots of folks were pushing back on the probably AI generated footnotes and story are in the original link. I was simply sharing the source material which I think has much better background on the photos and diary.

Your link did not trouble me, your language did. At the time reading, most of the comments here were nuked and grey so I went strait to the pictures and ignored the article text.

You broke the site guidelines here by posting aggressively. Please don't do that.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

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