#soviet apologists

[vigilantsycamore]

Controversial opinion on tumblr.edu: signing a pact with the Nazis to divide up Eastern Europe between the two of you, helping them for half of World War Two, and only changing sides after they attacked you, is in fact bad

[vigilantsycamore]

*inhales* hoo boy

We've got Mensheviks - a rival political party to Bolsheviks - being equated with reactionaries, fascists, and nazis. Aside from Trotsky - a former Menshevik who switched sides - I don't know

That and saying that they were killed by communism pretty much confirms this person thinks Bolshevism/Leninism is the only real communism, which is kind of like how TERFs call themselves the only real feminists, if TERFs had historically established a mass-murdering dictatorship that collaborated with the Nazis to invade smaller countries

Oh, and there's the "kulak" thing. The list of people the USSR persecuted as kulaks includes "peasants who own two cows" and "indigenous leaders who didn't want the state to seize their people's land". Oh yeah, and Ukrainians

The grain-burning thing is just bullshit. The Holodomor was caused by the USSR imposing harsh grain quotas on Ukrainian farms and shipping pretty much all the grain to elsewhere in the USSR

Holodomor is Ukrainian for death by hunger. Do you think the rabid German nationalists were using the Ukrainian language in their propaganda?

Also, the idea that the Holodomor is Nazi propaganda originates from a Canadian "historian" whose work is pretty much discredited nowadays and who's only taken seriously by people who want to make Stalin out to be some sort of misunderstood saint. Fuck Tottle and everyone who promotes his "work"

[vigilantsycamore]

Speaking as someone whose country spent 44 years under a Soviet-controlled puppet regime, which still affects my country's politics to this day, if you call criticism of tankies "bootlicking" I hope you get run over by a tank when you protest not being able to buy food.

[vigilantsycamore]

The most famous example of a Marxist-Leninist state, which these fuckers continuously defend against all criticism, is the USSR, which among other things:

subjected thousands of people to show trials and state purges

suppressed of trade unions, strikes, and protests

used military force to keep their satellite states in line

(okay i'll admit i can't immediately think of a counter to the women's rights point, but how many high-ranking Soviet politicians can you name who were women?)

annexed several nations that had achieved independence from the Russian Empire, and installed Soviet-aligned regimes in many of their neighbouring countries, destroyed indigenous communities, co-operated with Nazis, forcibly deported countless people, orchestrated a major famine, persecuted local languages and promoted Russian instead, encouraged antisemitic state purges, suppressed Islam in Muslim-majority SSRs

equated being gay with being a fascist and recriminalised homosexuality pretty fucking quick

carried out the aforementioned annexations of sovereign nations and setting up of puppet regimes without any attempt to consult the people living there

destroyed one of the largest inland seas in Eurasia, an ecological disaster which is still seriously affecting the local people to this day

and brutally suppressed any protests against all this

[vigilantsycamore]

I'm mentally ill. Several of the people I interact with on here are also mentally ill. We've all managed to make it this far without, say, deliberately whitewashing a dictator's legacy, or spreading Putinist propaganda about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Hence why when I saw people say that someone who has done those things on several occasions "did nothing wrong" and that, because that person happens to be mentally ill (again, like me and several other people I know), everyone criticising her is "just ableist", my initial reaction was to get pissed off.

It's like calling a queer person homophobic for criticising a bigot who happens to also be queer.

[vigilantsycamore]

Love this fantasy world some of you have concocted where every left-wing critique of regimes like the USSR comes from westerners, as if western leftists aren't the second-most likely demographic (after ruscists) to call Eastern Europeans "nazis brainwashed by the west" for not wanting to worship Stalin

[vigilantsycamore]

Soviet apologists will look at dozens of different forms of socialism, pick one of the worst possible ones, and then call you a fascist when you say you don’t think people should be executed by firing squad for not wanting to starve

[vigilantsycamore]

"Lol I bet all the fake leftists are going to call me a tankie for saying [marginally leftwing talking point]" says person who, two posts down, refers to Eastern European accounts of what the Soviet Union was like as "deceitful western propaganda"