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From the book "Stalin" the seminal work of Historian Domenico Losurdo
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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chapotraphouse
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I will remind you that the USSR restored its economy to pre-war standards in just 5 years, after losing 27 million people and incalculable cost of destruction, while keeping pensions and social safety nets intact, without relying on foreign aid and investments like the Marshall Plan, and without degrading workers’ rights and wages.
There is not a single country in the history of humanity that can even remotely approach this level of economic and social achievements. None.
Yes, this is an awful thing phased as a good one. "The standard of living in russia in 1950 was so incredibly low, that not even an entire world war made all that much of a difference in the standard of livng."
Incredibly low compared to whom? The US that had a couple hundred years of head start from exploiting black slaves (where do you think all the wealth in the American South came from) and looting resources from overseas colonies?
The fact that the USSR was able to close the gap in such a short period of time was exactly the reason of widespread anti-communist propaganda, the meddling of political affairs in post-war Europe including arming fascists through Gladio to destroy the European left, and ironically, financial aid to rebuild Western Europe because they were really afraid of workers uprisings bringing post-war Europe towards the Soviet sphere.
Hey this isn't simulated liberalism at all, I've been had!
tsarist russia wasn't a barren patch of dirt, they'd also collected a bunch of capital from imperialism, it was certainly behind the US or germany in the 1890s but not so severely as to constitute 'hundreds of years' of development. the bolsheviks actually in large part came from and used a genuine industrial proletariat, in contrast to China which had to have a much higher reliance on the peasantry. let's not muddle our narratives of communist development here
The Russian Civil War from 1917-1922 created massive destruction with millions of casualties, together with great famines that were partially caused by petty bourgeoisie destroying their stock. The bourgeoisie would rather burn down the country rather than having the communists have them. That was why Lenin had to introduce NEP because supplies and goods were in such shortage that they could barely get their economy going.
Stalin said in 1931:
Socialist industrialization was what saved the world from Nazism.
that Stalin quote is a perfect support for what i said, thanks!
i'm urging against exaggeration, i'm not ignorant of the civil war & challenges of industrialization
Besides the Tsars literally prevented industrialization like many other european royalties (like poland or two sicilies for example). So there were only foreign-owned industrial zones in the big cities.