This seems to be the thing most Westerners find hard to grasp. For many people communism was good.
If you didn't want too much you would get everything you wanted without struggle, which for many was heaven.
Sure, there might have been people that had it "ok." But my family, all of my relatives, all my Russian friends that immigrated from the USSR/Russia (except for a few die hard Russian patriots that wouldn't admit any fault in Russia even if it put their family to death) all have the same, general opinion of it.
And yes, there were the lazy drunks that loved the fact that they could drink on the job all day, not do a single thing, and never get fired. The incompetent idiots that got jobs in positions they had no clue about, I'm sure they loved their job security. But for the average hardworking people that were trying to create the best life for their families, it was pretty shitty.
Such is life.
It's also good to keep in mind that when you get most of your information from people who chose to leave the selection bias is rather high/peculiar.
This is naive. Please don't pay too much attention to those who weren't there.
It was heaven for Russians, because a nation that has been historically at the bottom of the ladder, got to play in the big leagues. Who cares if your standard of living sucks? It always sucked.
> If you didn't want too much you would get everything you wanted without struggle, which for many was heaven.
If you want to find out how Communism gives "to those according to need and from those according to ability", then I urge you to visit North Korea.
I assure you, that is exactly how communism worked in the past and continues to work today.
For anyone interested what Ukrainian nationalists have to do with this, this is an example of their thinking.
I assure you it is not.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_leap_forward * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_revolution * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_spring * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_rouge
There are many more of course, too numerous to put here. Mass starvation and death is not the exclusive domain of communism for sure, but communist societies of the past sure seem to have been prone to it. The "Communist" countries today that aren't complete shit-holes (like China and Vietnam) are the ones that have moved away from strict command economies and allowed markets to form.
As for Holodomor, I was just pointing that out because we're talking about Ukraine here. Whether through malicious intent or incompetence and mismanagement, Stalin's regime was still responsible for countless needless deaths.
Furthermore, socialism is inevitable. Just look at the world today- distinctly more socialist than it was 100 years ago.
My parents have lived in both communism and capitalism and believe a mixed society is probably the best.
While you find them in every system, you find them more frequently in totalitarian ones.
> Furthermore, socialism is inevitable. Just look at the world today- distinctly more socialist than it was 100 years ago.
Yes, but less socialist than 50 years ago, which suggests it's an ebb and flow type of deal, rather than some death march toward communism.
> My parents have lived in both communism and capitalism and believe a mixed society is probably the best.
My parents have lived in both communism and capitalism and believe capitalism is best.
The leaders were driven by the ideology. Their actions were driven by a desire to achieve their vision of a communist utopia. People went along with these plans because the ideology promised them a better life. By your logic, was National Socialism not evil because the Holocaust was the fault of Hitler and his Lieutenants?
> Just look at the world today- distinctly more socialist than it was 100 years ago.
I'm not criticizing socialism, I am specifically criticizing hard-line communism as practiced in the past by the Soviet Union and in the present by nations like North Korea and Cuba. The fact that the Soviet Union collapsed and the People's Republic of China moved away from orthodox communism is an indication of how valid that ideology was.
> My parents have lived in both communism and capitalism and believe a mixed society is probably the best
And that's what we have today in most western countries. In fact, that's what we had in the west even during the Cold War. Again, not saying that any semblance of socialism is inherently bad. I'm saying that orthodox communism has, does, and will always, lead to suffering for the general population.