Anyone nodding to a "but the USSR achieved so much!" take should keep in mind that those achievements were accomplished with full disregard for human life/the environment, let alone freedom. But full literacy! Yes, used to read propaganda. No Soviet citizen was free or pursued self-actualization. - ThreadSky

popovaprof.bsky.social • 60 days ago

Anyone nodding to a "but the USSR achieved so much!" take should keep in mind that those achievements were accomplished with full disregard for human life/the environment, let alone freedom. But full literacy! Yes, used to read propaganda. No Soviet citizen was free or pursued self-actualization.

Comments

tomtancredi.bsky.social•60 days ago

Very good engineer and math curriculum under the Soviet system. They caught up dramatically

popovaprof.bsky.social•60 days ago

So what? That's beside the point I'm making.

tomtancredi.bsky.social•60 days ago

It matters a lot. This was a land based empire of dozens of cultures and languages. A centralized and brutal government was needed to unite them it was effective until it wasn't - part of that was literacy. Central Asia was always a mess to govern except now there's aging nukes

popovaprof.bsky.social•60 days ago

Centralized and brutal govt is never "needed" and you're simply rephrasing my point-- the achievements were accomplished through repression and disregard for human life and dignity.

tomtancredi.bsky.social•60 days ago

Yeah, achievements were accomplished through a lot of bad stuff. Most come through competition and war, which are engines for repression and disregard of human life. We are lucky to live in the brief point of experimentation with liberal democracies, but it's not normal. Russia is normal.

ustinoff.bsky.social•58 days ago

You have obviously never been in Russia.

elstersen.bsky.social•60 days ago

I think it's actually to the point, but more supporting it than contradicting it. All human creativity, all ambition, was channeled into a few "allowed" pursuits. This one, helping the military complex, was of course allowed. Kvant journals were amazing. But at what price, and why?..

elstersen.bsky.social•60 days ago

My favorite (or perhaps anti-favorite?) example is this whole outdoorsy culture and the so-called Bard and Tourist songs. People building their entire identities, lives, around spending as much time as they could outside of the soviet reality. In a forest, on a mountain, in a tent, with a guitar.

elstersen.bsky.social•60 days ago

One of the few escapisms that was allowed, to a degree (although with a footnote on songs and their lyrics), as it was loosely adjacent to physical culture and sports, and so ultimately again to the military complex... Such a gray, sad reality. That some people romanticize and valorize now...

plasticpraetor.bsky.social•60 days ago

Communism was a machine that consumed humans to manufacture misery. All "progress" was solely in the service of increasing communism's reach and ability to manufacture more misery.

fnix.link•60 days ago

Re: propaganda: https://bsky.app/profile/ahjohnson.bsky.social/post/3leh7yhtepc22

Of course, not comparable in uniformity and centralization to the USSR, modeled on the historically brutal Russian state as it was, but the idea the West doesn’t do propaganda is incredibly naive, at best. One only has to look at coverage of Israel.

popovaprof.bsky.social•60 days ago

Who said the West doesn’t do propaganda? My point was simply that the achievement of full literacy is clouded by the fact that what people could actually read was severely limited by state censorship. And before we go into another « but the West… » loop, Soviet censorship was worse.

fnix.link•60 days ago

Agreed with that.

fnix.link•60 days ago

I just feel like we are in a moment where those Western accomplishments are under threat by the very people who avoid responsibility through blind West-chauvinism.

From Martin Wolf's newest book: “Without ethical elites, democracy becomes a demagogic spectacle hiding a plutocratic reality.“

popovaprof.bsky.social•60 days ago

Tbh, I'm more worried abt bothsidism. It leads to increasing # of Westerners believing the US is worse than USSR or russia and any/all actors who undermine American intl standing are on the right side of history. This is a recipe for democracies' loss to ru (and others') malicious expansionism.

fnix.link•60 days ago

Not worse (I think the proportion believing that is marginal), but not the shining city on a hill either. Even someone like Timothy Snyder says the US has more in common nowadays with oligarchic Russia than egalitarian European welfare states.

leondotcom.bsky.social•60 days ago

Are you comparing Soviet propaganda with west?
Non compliance with Soviet propaganda resulted in gulag
With west , you don’t have to read and say fuck Biden/Trump with no problems

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply