this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2025
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It's laughable if you haven't read a book in your life about actual Soviet policy, economic relations, and the meaning of the word "imperialism".
Your friend has the luxury of considering themselves Ukrainian thanks to the fucking Soviet Union. Ukraine had up until the formation of the Russian Socialist Federation of Soviet Republics in 1917 been a people without representation split between Poland and the Russian Empire. The first Bolshevik constitution gave all the nations and peoples of the Russian Empire full and unilateral right to secession and independence. Poland became independent this way and immediately invaded the newly established Ukrainian People's Republic (first time in history that Ukraine had a representation and an administration of itself, courtesy of the Bolsheviks). Lenin himself fought other socialists like Rosa Luxembourg in order to enable an independent Ukraine, as opposed to the homogenous "socialist national identity" that they proposed, this is a historical fact.
The Bolsheviks, during the Russian civil war, fought Poland and gave back Ukraine's territories to its people, and Ukraine was established as an independent republic within the USSR. In the following decades, and for the first time in its history, the citizens of Ukraine would gain access to education and the possibility of choosing an education in Ukrainian language, a majority of the published literature and newspapers were published in Ukrainian, and just 40-odd years after Ukraine's first ever autoctonous administration and representation, a Ukrainian would become the president of the Soviet Union.
The fact that over the past 30 years, a russophobic and anticommunist nationalist sentiment has been fostered in Ukraine, as has been in most of Eastern Europe since the advent of capitalism as a political tool against Russia, doesn't invalidate any of that, and the fact that Ukrainians generally feel that way doesn't automatically make it right, in the same sense that American exceptionalism is a general sentiment in the US and it's wrong. As an example, most Polish people view the crisis of the 80s (which gave rise to Solidarity) as a consequence of Soviet meddling in their economy. The reality of the consensus of serious economists who study this issue is that Poland went, against the advice of the Soviet Union (proving again that its "iron grip" in the eastern block wasn't such), went into debt with western banks and financial institutions and paid the consequences.
The fact that you even compare the two shows how little idea you have of what you're talking about. Modern capitalist Russia is a liberal democracy on a downwards spiral towards fascism, the Soviet Union was a worker's state and didn't exert imperialism. The trade terms of the USSR were generally beneficial to the countries that traded with it (see Cuba's crisis in the 90s after trade with the USSR stopped), USSR was a net exporter of raw materials and fossil fuels which it did at international prices even within the COMECON. If you have studied unequal exchange, this means that the Soviet Union was subsidising other states because of the imbalance in international prices of raw materials vs manufactured, high added-value goods. The USSR assisted immensely in anti-imperialist struggle: wars of Korea and Vietnam, Chinese revolution, Cuban revolution...
What you're doing here is proving that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, and you consider yourself a leftist but you've done no study of the material history of socialism and you parrot the talking points of the US State Department.
My friend Ukrainian friends should be grateful the the USSR? Barf. Clever you never mention to holodomor. But i bet that is very conveniently not genocide for you. Maybe you should tell African countries to be grateful for their imperialism next since it brought them boarders and some modernization while you're at it.
Look, you accuse me of not reading. But you seem high on only reading the propaganda you've gobbled up. You're so biased it's invalidated most of what you'd consider an argument. Though its hard to consider it much if an argument when in this very thread you've contradict yourself and offer up fallacies left and right.
I'm not comparing Russia to the USSR. I'm saying that authoritarian capitalism never ended there.
Enjoy your personal cult flavor of imperialism while doing mental gymnastics to call it something else. When a government forceful controls others, its imperialism. Just because you think they were good imperialists doesn't mean they weren't imperialists.
"Holodomor" is a newly coined term to categorize a famine as a genocide. A famine took place in the early 30s in the USSR as a consequence of failures during THE FIRST ATTEMPT IN HISTORY of collectivizing agriculture, which led to millions of deaths both inside and outside Ukraine. You guys never mention the deaths in Central Asia and in Russia proper, because it's not convenient to your narrative.
The reality is that while there was a famine in the USSR, and it disproportionately affected Ukraine, there is simply no evidence to talk of intent. The dekulakization process was a difficult period of Soviet history, but the famine took place between 1930 and 1933 and largely disappeared afterwards, with no other such event in Ukrainian history happening ever after during Soviet rule. There is no motive against Ukrainians (a worker's state killing workers isn't a smart thing), there is no evidence of motive, and there is no evidence of intentionality, calling the USSR famine of 1930 "Holodomor" is (a western manufacture)[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Holodomor&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3] of atrocity propaganda against communism, and to boost russophobia. The famine was a disaster and a failure of soviet policy, but calling it "genocide", or saying that it was targeted against Ukrainians, is simply insulting.
The Soviet Union, like it or not, saved Ukraine from the Russian Empire, and later from the Nazi invasion. The number of people who died in famines pales with the millions of lives that were saved from Nazi occupation and the ensuing extermination of the Slavic "untermenschen", had there been not a Soviet Union there would simply be no Ukraine to speak of right now.
That's because you haven't, your entire analysis is vibes-based, and the only references that you could possibly point towards in these topics are reddit/.world comments that you've read and assimilated because they're compatible with your US State Department propaganda anticommunist views.
When an actually-existing socialist state ensures a degree of homogeneity in policy and objectives in its area of influence, it's not called imperialism, it's called geopolitics, which are a sad truth of class war. But sure, keep praising leaders who achieved absolutely nothing because they were killed as soon as they were about to enact the slightest socialist policy. Go on, suck off Allende's cock (who resulted in Pinochet), the Spanish Second Republic (which resulted in Franco), and your dear Swedish loser whose movement and ideas were so grassroots that they died with him. Because to you anticommunist leftists, the only valid leftist movements are those that die prematurely and don't have to face real-world conditions. You compare theory with reality, and when the dire reality of class war doesn't adequate to your moralism, you reject it.
Non intentional genocides and sad truths are lame excuses for an authoritarian regime that took away the autonomy of other nations and caused disproportional death of those they were trying to control.
Sweden made rapid advances in social welfare and programs under Olof. Sorry he didn't subjugate enough people for you to feel like it was good socialism. Enjoy the boot but be careful because it doesn't just stomp on the people you think deserve it.
Imagine not knowing what genocide means.
The USSR saved tens of millions of lives. The life expectancy in imperial Russia was around 30, by the 50s it as 60, and they stopped Nazism which would have genocided as many Slavs as they possibly could.
Oh wow, a western leftist who doesn't understand unequal exchange, imperialism, and the yoke that Europe imposes on the global south, colour me surprised. Well, maybe I'm being too generous, and you just don't care about the lives of the Asians and the browns that die in the plantations and factories of the products your perfect social democracy consumes!
Imaging not understanding sarcasm. It's rich to say I don't care about people who die when you're the one cherry picking which genocides to support.
It's honestly disgusting that you go talking about "genocides" that you have absolutely done 0 research on, using numbers as a political tool and comparing unintended famine deaths to actual genocide such as Holocaust or Gaza.
Thanks for not answering to the rest of the comment though, you obviously can't argue against the USSR saving millions of lives and your lack of care for the oppressed in the global south
Its honestly disgusting how much you try to explain away disproportionate grain quotas so much that you mass starve the very people producing your food and are conveniently also trying to subjugate as unintentional. I'm sure you have lovely things to say about the Irish potato famine as not being genocide too. It's only genocide when checks notes the imperialists I don't like do it.
Genocide doesn't have to be sophisticated, systematic, and performed with guns to be effective. I didn't compare this situation to the holocaust for a reason.
Intent is a wishy washy excuse when the reality is targeted death of a specific subjugated people. It's how everyone tries to weasel out of being accused of genocide. Israel doesn't want to kill all of the Palestinians. Its not their intent. They just want the land and mass Palestinian death is just an unintended side effect. If I roll my eyes any harder I'll lose them to the back of my head.
but lets look to Raphael Lemkin who is the one credited with coming up with the term genocide:
The fact that you speak of Ukrainians as "people to subjugate" really tells of how little understanding you have of the topic. Comparing a historically colonial region like Ireland, to an area literally liberated and given a nationality, borders, education in their language and press in their language such as Ukraine, is absurd. You have no fucking idea what imperialism is, and it shows very severely. Go read a book lmao
Ukraine was literally saved from Nazism and from Russian/Polish imperialism by the USSR, but you're a fake socialist who's never read a fucking book, who glorifies useless leaders who never got to power and never had to face the realities of class war, and replicates US state department propaganda
OK genocide apologist.
Forcing a people to be part of your system against their wishes is subjugation. The Ukrainians wanted independence. They literally fought for it and lost. Excusing genocide because there was some bonus education is disgusting. Excusing imperialism because you like the perks makes you an imperialist.
Source: Ukrainian nationalist propaganda.
A part of the population in a small region of Ukraine wanted anarchism, and was promptly defeated by communists in the context of a civil war against fascism because anarchy doesn't work. Ukrainians should thank the soviets for the ensuing industrialisation that allowed the defeat of the Nazis, a sparse set of agricultural communes would have been exterminated by Nazis. Anarchists simply don't understand this, and refuse to understand the historical and material conditions that surround them in favour of idealism, which is why their projects don't live long enough to see widespread adoption anywhere.
The lack of prior attempts, the lack or motives, the lack of intent, the fact that it was a famine in a particular event of land collectivisation, and the fact that there was no continuation over time, prove it wasn't a genocide. I'm not excusing genocide because there wasn't, I'm criticising poor collectivisation policy which led to famine both inside and outside Ukraine.
Consolidating socialism in a region isn't imperialism, which you'd know, again, if you had read any socialist literature. But you'd rather go with your vibes-based Reddit leftism.