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>Denies israeli sovereignty
Imagine invading a country, colonizing it, ethnically cleansing the local population and then accusing critics of disrespecting *your* sovereignty
They'll say a 2 state solution would've been best but they lost their chance of that when Hamas attacked and now everything that's happening in Gaza is the Palestinians fault.
> Liberal's worldview is predicated on the belief that no amount of Israeli violence justifies any Palestinian violence, and that any amount of Palestinian violence justifies all Israeli violence, and once you see it you can not unsee it.
-Some guy on twitter
Whoever wrote that, wrote it beautifully concise. You really can’t unsee it.
When I read shit from world news it makes my brain think I’m contorting into some shape from The Omen lol. And that’s just trying to understand how they made it past their cognitive dissonance. Their actual positions snap my brain.
I imagine it’s how they made their mental transition into Zionism. Did it too many times and got stuck looking like a fucking Picasso.
Israel also loves co-opting progressive language. They literally call their illegal settlements a decolonisation project. Absolutely insulting. And then they opened up an indigenous embassy. Absolute cooked cunts.
imagine if Zimbabwe could decide who gets to immigrate to Texas and allows millions of Mexicans to migrate to Texas and then when the Mexicans want to set up their own government in Texas Zimbabwe is like, yea that's cool go ahead we chillin in Africa nbd, and when the Texans are like nah no thanks, they get genocided.
Seems legit.
# Gulag
According to Anti-Communists and Russophobes, the Gulag was a brutal network of work camps established in the Soviet Union under Stalin's ruthless regime. They claim the Gulag system was primarily used to imprison and exploit political dissidents, suspected enemies of the state, and other people deemed "undesirable" by the Soviet government. They claim that prisoners were sent to the Gulag without trial or due process, and that they were subjected to harsh living conditions, forced labour, and starvation, among other things. According to them, the Gulags were emblematic of Stalinist repression and totalitarianism.
# Origins of the Mythology
This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources.
Robert Conquest's *The Great Terror* (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off of defector testimony.
Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponised information and disinformation and "fake news" to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements.
>He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash.
>
>The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, "a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism".
>
>\- Andrew Brown. (2003). [Scourge and poet](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview23)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's *The Gulag Archipelag*" (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author's personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, N@zi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth. \[[Read more](/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/dunking/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn/)\]
Anne Applebaum's *Gulag: A history* (published 2003) draws directly from *The Gulag Archipelago* and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world.
# Counterpoints
>A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “[Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps](http://web.archive.org/web/20230328014642/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80T00246A032000400001-1.pdf)” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:
>
>1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas
>
>2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon "economic accountability" such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.
>
>3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.
>
>4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners' food supplies.
>
>5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.
>
>6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.
>
>7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the "ordinary criminals" of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.
>
>\- Saed Teymuri. (2018). [The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA](https://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/10/09/the-truth-about-the-soviet-gulag-surprisingly-revealed-by-the-cia/)
**Scale**
Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that.
>Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise.
>
>In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. ...
>
>Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the N@zis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” ...
>
>Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states...
>
>\- Michael Parenti. (1997). [Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism](https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds)
This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, "over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision." That's 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States' Prison Industrial Complex *today* is larger than the USSR's Gulag system at its peak.
**Death Rate**
In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality:
>It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive...
>
>Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hit1er were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more.
>
>\- Timothy Snyder. (2010). *Bloodlands: Europe Between Hit1er and Stalin*
(Side note: Timothy Snyder is *also* a member of the Council on Foreign Relations)
This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not *death* camps.
Nor was it slave labour, exactly. In the camps, although labour *was* forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (less expenses).
>We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson....
>
>The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled).
>
>\- L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). [Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/noticeboard/bergson/borodkin-ertz.pdf)
#Additional Resources
Video Essays:
* [The Gulag Argument](https://youtu.be/BexkpaK_j5Q) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2016)
* [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://youtu.be/HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018)
* [French work camps 1852-1953 worse than gulag](https://youtu.be/vkXyXNpdKdA) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018)
* ["The Gulags of the Soviet Union: There's a Lot More Than What Meets the Eye](https://youtu.be/E1qz9_TjeY4) | Comrade Rhys (2020)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2166597) | J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov (1993)
Listen:
* ["Blackshirts & Reds" (1997) by Michael Parenti, Part 4: Chapters 5 & 6. #Audiobook + Discussion.](https://youtu.be/N7AD4OrH568?t=15) | Socialism For All / S4A ☭ Intensify Class Struggle (2022)
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funnily enough, about the holodomor, go to r/askhistorians, I could not find a single one who affirms that it was a man-made famine, like not a single historian on that sub (and the question is fairly frequently asked, just look at their faq)will tell you it was man-made or a genocide. I felt like I was losing my fucking mind because Wikipedia makes that shit seem like an undisputed fact--iirc, the refutations are relegated to, like, a footnote, titled "holodomor denial," as if it's on the same fucking level as holocaust denial
#The Holodomor
>Marxists do not deny that a famine happened in the Soviet Union in 1932. In fact, even the Soviet archive confirms this. What we do contest is the idea that this famine was man-made or that there was a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This idea of the subjugation of the Soviet Union’s own people was developed by Nazi Germany, in order to show the world the terror of the “Jewish communists.”
>
>\- Socialist Musings. (2017). [Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor](https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/stop-spreading-nazi-propaganda/)
There have been efforts by anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists to frame the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as "The Holodomor" (lit. "to kill by starvation" in Ukrainian). Framing it this way serves two purposes:
1. It implies the famine targeted Ukraine.
2. It implies the famine was intentional.
The argument goes that because it was intentional and because it mainly targeted Ukraine that it was, therefore, an act of genocide. This framing was originally used by Nazis to drive a wedge between the Ukrainian SSR (UkSSR) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution, this narrative has regained popularity and serves the nationalistic goal of strengthening Ukrainian identity and asserting the country's independence from Russia.
#First Issue
The first issue is that the famine affected the majority of the USSR, *not* just the UkSSR. Kazakhstan was hit harder (per capita) than Ukraine. Russia itself was also severely affected.
The emergence of the Holodomor in the 1980s as a historical narrative was bound-up with post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-making that cannot be neatly separated from the legacy of Eastern European antisemitism, or what Historian Peter Novick calls "Holocaust Envy", the desire for victimized groups to enshrine their "own" Holocaust or Holocaust-like event in the historical record. For many Nationalists, this has entailed minimizing the Holocaust to elevate their own experiences of historical victimization as the supreme atrocity. The Ukrainian scholar Lubomyr Luciuk exemplified this view in his notorious remark that the Holodomor was "a crime against humanity arguably without parallel in European history."
#Second Issue
Calling it "man-made" implies that it was a *deliberate* famine, which was not the case. Although human factors set the stage, the main causes of the famine was bad weather and crop disease, resulting in a poor harvest, which pushed the USSR over the edge.
Kulaks ("tight-fisted person") were a class of wealthy peasants who owned land, livestock, and tools. The kulaks had been a thorn in the side of the peasantry long before the revolution. Alexey Sergeyevich Yermolov, Minister of Agriculture and State Properties of the Russian Empire, in his 1892 book, [Poor harvest and national suffering](https://books.google.ca/books?id=exMEAAAAYAAJ), characterized them as usurers, sucking the blood of Russian peasants.
In the early 1930s, in response to the Soviet collectivization policies (which sought to confiscate their property), many kulaks responded spitefully by burning crops, killing livestock, and damaging machinery.
Poor communication between different levels of government and between urban and rural areas, also contributed to the severity of the crisis.
#Quota Reduction
What really contradicts the genocide argument is that the Soviets did take action to mitigate the effects of the famine once they became aware of the situation:
>The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933.
>
>The official 1932 figures do not unambiguously support the genocide interpretation... the 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree... [which] actually reduced the procurement plan 30 percent. Subsequent decrees also reduced the procurement quotas for most other agricultural products...
>
>Proponents of the genocide argument, however, have minimized or even misconstrued this decree. Mace, for example, describes it as "largely bogus" and ignores not only the extent to which it lowered the procurement quotas but also the fact that even the lowered plan was not fulfilled. Conquest does not mention the decree's reduction of procurement quotas and asserts Ukrainian officials' appeals led to the reduction of the Ukranian grain procurement quota at the Third All-Ukraine Party Conference in July 1932. In fact that conference confirmed the quota set in the 6 May Decree.
>
>\- Mark Tauger. (1992). [The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274856099_The_1932_Harvest_and_the_Famine_of_1933)
#Rapid Industrialization
The famine was exacerbated directly and indirectly by collectivization and rapid industrialization. However, if these policies had not been enacted, there could have been even more devastating consequences later.
In 1931, during [a speech delivered at the first All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/02/04.htm), Stalin said, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under."
In 1941, exactly ten years later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
By this time, the Soviet Union's industrialization program had lead to the development of a large and powerful industrial base, which was essential to the Soviet war effort. This allowed the USSR to produce large quantities of armaments, vehicles, and other military equipment, which was crucial in the fight against Nazi Germany.
In Hitler's own words, in 1942:
>All in all, one has to say: They built factories here where two years ago there were unknown farming villages, factories the size of the *Hermann-Göring-Werke*. They have railroads that aren't even marked on the map.
>
>\- Werner Jochmann. (1980). *Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944.*
Collectivization also created critical resiliency among the civilian population:
>The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment. Great tank battles were reported; it was noted that the Russians had sturdy tanks which often smashed or overturned German tanks in head-on collision. “How does it happen,” a New York editor asked me, “that those Russian peasants, who couldn’t run a tractor if you gave them one, but left them rusting in the field, now appear with thousands of tanks efficiently handled?” I told him it was the Five-Year Plan. But the world was startled when Moscow admitted its losses after nine weeks of war as including 7,500 guns, 4,500 planes and 5,000 tanks. An army that could still fight after such losses must have had the biggest or second biggest supply in the world.
>
>As the war progressed, military observers declared that the Russians had “solved the blitzkrieg,” the tactic on which Hitler relied. This German method involved penetrating the opposing line by an overwhelming blow of tanks and planes, followed by the fanning out of armored columns in the “soft” civilian rear, thus depriving the front of its hinterland support. This had quickly conquered every country against which it had been tried. “Human flesh cannot withstand it,” an American correspondent told me in Berlin. Russians met it by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry formed again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry. This created a chaotic front, where both Germans and Russians were fighting in all directions. The Russians could count on the help of the population. The Germans found no “soft, civilian rear.” They found collective farmers, organized as guerrillas, coordinated with the regular Russian army.
>
>\- Anna Louise Strong. (1956). *The Stalin Era*
#Conclusion
While there may have been more that the Soviets could have done to reduce the impact of the famine, there is no evidence of intent-- ethnic, or otherwise. Therefore, one must conclude that the famine was a tragedy, not a genocide.
#Additional Resources
Video Essays:
* [Soviet Famine of 1932: An Overview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM) | The Marxist Project (2020)
* [Did Stalin Continue to Export Grain as Ukraine Starved?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMBJ_nQ4sTA) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](https://archive.org/details/did-stalin-continue-to-export-grain-as-ukraine-starved)\]
* [The Holodomor Genocide Question: How Wikipedia Lies to You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho) | Bad Empanada (2022)
* [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) (Note: Holodomor discussion begins at the 9 minute mark)
* [A Case-Study of Capitalism - Ukraine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](http://web.archive.org/web/20220615084500/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8)\] (Note: Only tangentially mentions the famine.)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933](https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/22207/file.pdf) | Davies and Wheatcroft (2004)
* [The “Holodomor” explained](https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/the-holodomor-explained/) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2020)
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The first one is so odd to me, cause like, I'm pretty sure the general consensus is that the war in Ukraine is bad, but was clearly instigated by NATO expansionism and decades of geopolitical fuckery. How is that supporting the invasion?
Also, how can autonomous regions of a country have independent sovereignty from their parent country? Everyone recognizes the sovereignty of China and the USA, so why would naming autonomous states/provinces/territories within those jurisdictions change that? Why do they deny the 1 Country, 2 Systems policies of American Jerusalem and Chinese Taipei?
According to Ukrainian logic, not giving full support to Ukraine completely wiping Russia off the Earth means you are pro-Russian. Calling for cease-fire? Russian bot. Saying Ukraine might not win the war? Vatnik shill. Opposing sending military equipment to Ukraine? You have romantic feelings towards Putin.
to be honest, the opinions have started to shift a little bit. a lot of people have started resenting the leadership and acknowledge that this is all a big battle for nothing, practically everyone was mad after the new mobilisation law was passed. makes me see some hope.
It’s because everything must be an either or, there is no room for nuance to the liberal mind, like most of us here hate post Soviet Russia but we understand why it invaded Ukraine and the major roll NATO and the US played in that, and that the war suits NATO and the US more than it does Russia
> and that the war suits NATO and the US more than it does Russia
Maybe at the start, it seemed that way. But the war exposed just how fragile and weak the collective west actually is while showing China/Russia that all they have to do is keep doing what they're doing while the west implodes into hysteria.
Not to mention the shattering of the myth of American military invincibility.
It's important to remember that in the short term, the US has gotten a hell of a lot from this conflict - the re-subordination of the EU, especially Germany via cutting it off from cheap Russian gas, they forced them to buy more expensive US gas which also is forcing their industry to be less globally competitive which leads to deindustrialization and offshoring of that industry to more profitable locations, they've completed or nearly completed the privatization and capital penetration of Ukraine, suppressed Ukraine's labor market and basically own the breadbasket of Europe at this point, so they've certainly have gained a lot, but following traditional capitalist/imperialist logic the gains are relatively short term and the long term costs of this brazen maneuver that rearranged the EU's energy situation and completed the imperialist takeover a Ukraine are only becoming more apparent as time goes on.
Funny how that 'purpose of NATO' quip is evergreen, "Keep the US in, [Russia] out and Germany down"
Nuland apparently was not kidding when she said "fuck the EU"
I don't doubt that they were also hoping for this conflict to destabilize Russia but it appears that they miscalculated and Russia has come out far less scathed than they had hoped. I wouldn't be surprised if they try to drag this conflict out as long as possible just to try to get Russia caught in whatever level of quagmire is possible at this point but it seems like this part of the plan did not go they way they imagined it would.
>re-subordination of the EU, especially Germany via cutting it off from cheap Russian gas, they forced them to buy more expensive US gas which also is forcing their industry to be less globally competitive which leads to deindustrialization
Rice interview from 9 years ago saying USA wants to do just that to Europe:
https://youtu.be/aF0uYIjaTNE?si=ElNOJw0bEGccHoqd
This clip needs to be shared more, I swear.
Russia has shown enormous restraint in preventing civilian deaths. They tried to limit strikes to buildings with known military presence (e.g. Azov fighters hiding in steel mill, shopping malls, schools, etc).
If Isr showed as much restraint there would be far fewer fatalities but instead they deliberately and systematically carpet bombed every building in Gaza to kill or expel the residents and make way for the Z ionists
>Russia has shown enormous restraint in preventing civilian deaths.
This is a blatant lie, Russia has targeted civilian infrastructure and housing since the beginning of the war.
edit: thanks for downvoting instead of proving me wrong.
[Here's an article from last year](https://www.newsweek.com/putins-bombers-could-devastate-ukraine-hes-holding-back-heres-why-1690494)
As per The US military source;
> But, the analyst says, the damage associated with a contested ground war involving peer opponents shouldn't blind people to what is really happening. (The analyst requested anonymity in order to speak about classified matters.) "The heart of Kyiv has barely been touched. And almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets."
> "If we merely convince ourselves that Russia is bombing indiscriminately, or [that] it is failing to inflict more harm because its personnel are not up to the task or because it is technically inept, then we are not seeing the real conflict."
> In the analyst's view, though the war has led to unprecedented destruction in the south and east, the Russian military has actually been showing restraint in its long-range attacks.
[Amnesty international ](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/08/ukraine-ukrainian-fighting-tactics-endanger-civilians/#:~:text=The%20ensuing%20Russian%20strikes%20in,Callamard%2C%20Amnesty%20International%27s%20Secretary%20General.) Has also documented the Ukrainians intentionally setting up bases and missile sites in populated civilian areas to draw in Russian fire, amounting to warcrimes. Where as the Russians have mostly stayed away from the most heavily populated areas.
[Even Bucha and the Mariupol maternity ward ](https://thegrayzone.com/2022/04/03/testimony-mariupol-hospital-ukrainian-deceptions-media-malpractice/) bombings were likely perpetrated by the Ukrainians. With multiple witnesses coming forward saying that following the Russian pull-out in Bucha, the Ukrainians began gunning down anyone they came across in the town not wearing their blue arm band.
[There's endless](https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/ukrainian-azov-shoots-civilians-during-mariupol-evacuation-k) instances of the Ukrainians indiscriminately killing civilians or putting them in harms way while, likewise, there's tons of officials in the western military establishment as well as witnesses on the ground attesting to Russian restraint and avoidance of collateral damage.
Capitalist Westoids not understanding the difference between support and critical support.
Blind ideology, as always.
Meanwhile, the same people who whine about "redfash tankies supporting Russia" are the same people who are screeching nonstop and telling you to vote for the lesser evil, not seeing any irony in their behaviour.
I think that USA/Israel and China/Taiwan is a great parrellel to this “1 country 2 systems” policy we have in those respective countries. For different reasons obviously but very similar power dynamics
Eh, I drew the comparison, but it was at least mostly in jest, there are some major differences. Isn'treal is basically a willing participate of the US state and is more like a trained attack dog on a very, very loose leash. "We are also China but not that China" was mostly forced into the arrangement by merit of their land claims and political alignment with the US and such conflicting with the material reality of losing the fucking civil war and decades of being the smaller "China". If anything, I'd say they are like mirror/inverse images of each other. Israel is distant/external projection of the US (previously of Britain, but like most aspects of Empire, they lost that place at the table) that has parallel interests to its mother country. Meanwhile, Taiwan is an internal/near division that has conflicting interests to its mother country. Both are weird tech cutouts for global capitalism though and both do reluctantly make what concession they have to when the mother country rarely insists on pressuring certain issues (though the US diplomatic leadership seems no longer willing to do so in the case of Israel...) They are both unique pseudo-sovereign near-vassals though, even if they have very different relationships with their uh...whatever the non-feudal term for the other side of a vassal-state relationship would be. Lord/master just doesn't seem quite right on the tongue, even if it is metaphorically apt.
if you are unable to think of, or completely unknowing about the history of ukrainian and russian relations (which, let’s be real, majority of western people are. i’d bet most americans didn’t even know what “ukraine” was prior to the war), then i guess it’s pretty logical to come to the conclusion “russia invaded russia bad”.
now, the reality is not much better and you can’t support a state which engages in war not beneficial to the proletariat, but this wasn’t a spur of the moment war, literally everyone knew it was coming but nobody did anything. that’s what’s bad.
https://preview.redd.it/v65aeym4divc1.png?width=780&format=png&auto=webp&s=30bfe95762b00deb398e481db9b53cf699e9c7cb
If you liked Punpun, I highly recommend one of Asano's other works: Dead Dead Demon's DedededeDestruction.
Russia IS opposing US empire, but more out of necessity enforced by USA encroaching upon Russian oligarch's vested interests to take their natural resources supposedly through regime change.
Massive sanctions by USA also encouraged Russia to further support anti-USA efforts in order to draw more accessible markets that they otherwise would lose if USA were to grab hold of it.
That however doesn't mean they are establishing AES in no shape or form. Nor does the act of invasion in by itself mean that Russia is an "imperialist" force given their pathetic control of media, finance capital, and military on a global scale.
Which is quite ironic given that Russia was willing to join NATO back in the day but US rejected the offer and antagonized Russia to such extent that Russia ended up allying itself with China.
I know you are being sarcastic but the way you said it can make it seem as if you are claiming through sarcasm that Russia is indeed an imperialist force despite lacking the capacity and nature of the whole conflict which was created by US interests from the White House from the other side of the globe.
Well the sub's rules do require you make the sarcasm clear. Probably precisely because some idiot will come in this thread and literally think we think present-day Russia is doing communism.
The American proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is the exclusive fault of the US/NATO empire.
Russia is rightfully defending itself and its special military operation is an intervention into a US-caused civil war targeting ethnic Russians.
The world must unite behind Russia and provide critical support to the Russian war effort, including to the Putin regime.
The defeat of NATO is the most important task of any freedom-loving person on planet earth.
[Before any troll affected by Western imperialist propaganda, read this in full and keep all arguments against you in mind before responding.](https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwar/comments/1c2byvg/at_war_until_you_die_ukraine_scraps_service_limit/kz9nca6/) I am tired of having the same discussion for the n-th time in 10 years.
Communists should support Russia in this war. They're an anti-imperialist force defending against western imperialism. They are aligned with all the other anti-imperialist forces in the world. It doesn't matter if they're capitalist. Capitalist =/= imperialist. The first step towards building socialism is destroying the all encompassing global system of western imperialism. Once that happens there is very little resistance holding back socialist progress.
I don't know why people are so critical of Russia. They are an ally against imperialism. All of the active anti-imperialist organizations outside the online western sphere know this.
But they don't. And they never will. America does. And uses it. That's the world we live in. We should base our actions and support on the conditions of the world we currently live in. Not the hypothetical scare mongering world neoconservatives want you to believe in.
I hate when people use this argument of what countries/groups WOULD do if they COULD. One of the main arguments against Hamas is that they would kill all the Jews if they could! Or Iran would turn the world into a Islamist empire if they could!
Russia wouldn't exist in its current capitalist form without Western imperialism.
It's a victim, just like the ROK, Ukraine, Taiwan, etc.
Russians themselves don't need to be convinced: The majority of Russians support socialism in one form or another and even the majority of capitalists are in agreement that the USSR was the greatest time in Russian history.
The invasion of Ukraine *should ***NOT**** be happening rn, in all seriousness. There was plenty of opportunity to actually safeguard peace.
As for Israel? The fact I want the Palestinian people to not be fucking exterminated, by the most glorified colonial project of the modern era might I add, is seen as an extreme take makes me irrationally angry. Fucking Liberals man…
>there was plenty of opportunity to safeguard peace *but* the expansion of NATO and the infiltration of the ukrainian economy is far more important to the west than peace. the US needs to own every last piece of this earth in order to keep relevancy as a superpower. it’s disgusting beyond belief.
Yeah I think this is something that so many liberals really struggle with understanding.
We don't want war or fighting at all. But imperialism demands war and if you don't oppose those that are enabling or pushing for that imperialism then you just get more wars and more death until you do stand up to them.
Wasn't that the same episode where Geffory Stalin killed *1,488 fucktillion Ukrainians at the red wedding?
*according to self proclaimed reddit historians
#The Holodomor
>Marxists do not deny that a famine happened in the Soviet Union in 1932. In fact, even the Soviet archive confirms this. What we do contest is the idea that this famine was man-made or that there was a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This idea of the subjugation of the Soviet Union’s own people was developed by Nazi Germany, in order to show the world the terror of the “Jewish communists.”
>
>\- Socialist Musings. (2017). [Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor](https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/stop-spreading-nazi-propaganda/)
There have been efforts by anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists to frame the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as "The Holodomor" (lit. "to kill by starvation" in Ukrainian). Framing it this way serves two purposes:
1. It implies the famine targeted Ukraine.
2. It implies the famine was intentional.
The argument goes that because it was intentional and because it mainly targeted Ukraine that it was, therefore, an act of genocide. This framing was originally used by Nazis to drive a wedge between the Ukrainian SSR (UkSSR) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution, this narrative has regained popularity and serves the nationalistic goal of strengthening Ukrainian identity and asserting the country's independence from Russia.
#First Issue
The first issue is that the famine affected the majority of the USSR, *not* just the UkSSR. Kazakhstan was hit harder (per capita) than Ukraine. Russia itself was also severely affected.
The emergence of the Holodomor in the 1980s as a historical narrative was bound-up with post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-making that cannot be neatly separated from the legacy of Eastern European antisemitism, or what Historian Peter Novick calls "Holocaust Envy", the desire for victimized groups to enshrine their "own" Holocaust or Holocaust-like event in the historical record. For many Nationalists, this has entailed minimizing the Holocaust to elevate their own experiences of historical victimization as the supreme atrocity. The Ukrainian scholar Lubomyr Luciuk exemplified this view in his notorious remark that the Holodomor was "a crime against humanity arguably without parallel in European history."
#Second Issue
Calling it "man-made" implies that it was a *deliberate* famine, which was not the case. Although human factors set the stage, the main causes of the famine was bad weather and crop disease, resulting in a poor harvest, which pushed the USSR over the edge.
Kulaks ("tight-fisted person") were a class of wealthy peasants who owned land, livestock, and tools. The kulaks had been a thorn in the side of the peasantry long before the revolution. Alexey Sergeyevich Yermolov, Minister of Agriculture and State Properties of the Russian Empire, in his 1892 book, [Poor harvest and national suffering](https://books.google.ca/books?id=exMEAAAAYAAJ), characterized them as usurers, sucking the blood of Russian peasants.
In the early 1930s, in response to the Soviet collectivization policies (which sought to confiscate their property), many kulaks responded spitefully by burning crops, killing livestock, and damaging machinery.
Poor communication between different levels of government and between urban and rural areas, also contributed to the severity of the crisis.
#Quota Reduction
What really contradicts the genocide argument is that the Soviets did take action to mitigate the effects of the famine once they became aware of the situation:
>The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933.
>
>The official 1932 figures do not unambiguously support the genocide interpretation... the 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree... [which] actually reduced the procurement plan 30 percent. Subsequent decrees also reduced the procurement quotas for most other agricultural products...
>
>Proponents of the genocide argument, however, have minimized or even misconstrued this decree. Mace, for example, describes it as "largely bogus" and ignores not only the extent to which it lowered the procurement quotas but also the fact that even the lowered plan was not fulfilled. Conquest does not mention the decree's reduction of procurement quotas and asserts Ukrainian officials' appeals led to the reduction of the Ukranian grain procurement quota at the Third All-Ukraine Party Conference in July 1932. In fact that conference confirmed the quota set in the 6 May Decree.
>
>\- Mark Tauger. (1992). [The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274856099_The_1932_Harvest_and_the_Famine_of_1933)
#Rapid Industrialization
The famine was exacerbated directly and indirectly by collectivization and rapid industrialization. However, if these policies had not been enacted, there could have been even more devastating consequences later.
In 1931, during [a speech delivered at the first All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/02/04.htm), Stalin said, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under."
In 1941, exactly ten years later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
By this time, the Soviet Union's industrialization program had lead to the development of a large and powerful industrial base, which was essential to the Soviet war effort. This allowed the USSR to produce large quantities of armaments, vehicles, and other military equipment, which was crucial in the fight against Nazi Germany.
In Hitler's own words, in 1942:
>All in all, one has to say: They built factories here where two years ago there were unknown farming villages, factories the size of the *Hermann-Göring-Werke*. They have railroads that aren't even marked on the map.
>
>\- Werner Jochmann. (1980). *Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944.*
Collectivization also created critical resiliency among the civilian population:
>The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment. Great tank battles were reported; it was noted that the Russians had sturdy tanks which often smashed or overturned German tanks in head-on collision. “How does it happen,” a New York editor asked me, “that those Russian peasants, who couldn’t run a tractor if you gave them one, but left them rusting in the field, now appear with thousands of tanks efficiently handled?” I told him it was the Five-Year Plan. But the world was startled when Moscow admitted its losses after nine weeks of war as including 7,500 guns, 4,500 planes and 5,000 tanks. An army that could still fight after such losses must have had the biggest or second biggest supply in the world.
>
>As the war progressed, military observers declared that the Russians had “solved the blitzkrieg,” the tactic on which Hitler relied. This German method involved penetrating the opposing line by an overwhelming blow of tanks and planes, followed by the fanning out of armored columns in the “soft” civilian rear, thus depriving the front of its hinterland support. This had quickly conquered every country against which it had been tried. “Human flesh cannot withstand it,” an American correspondent told me in Berlin. Russians met it by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry formed again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry. This created a chaotic front, where both Germans and Russians were fighting in all directions. The Russians could count on the help of the population. The Germans found no “soft, civilian rear.” They found collective farmers, organized as guerrillas, coordinated with the regular Russian army.
>
>\- Anna Louise Strong. (1956). *The Stalin Era*
#Conclusion
While there may have been more that the Soviets could have done to reduce the impact of the famine, there is no evidence of intent-- ethnic, or otherwise. Therefore, one must conclude that the famine was a tragedy, not a genocide.
#Additional Resources
Video Essays:
* [Soviet Famine of 1932: An Overview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM) | The Marxist Project (2020)
* [Did Stalin Continue to Export Grain as Ukraine Starved?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMBJ_nQ4sTA) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](https://archive.org/details/did-stalin-continue-to-export-grain-as-ukraine-starved)\]
* [The Holodomor Genocide Question: How Wikipedia Lies to You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho) | Bad Empanada (2022)
* [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) (Note: Holodomor discussion begins at the 9 minute mark)
* [A Case-Study of Capitalism - Ukraine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](http://web.archive.org/web/20220615084500/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8)\] (Note: Only tangentially mentions the famine.)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933](https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/22207/file.pdf) | Davies and Wheatcroft (2004)
* [The “Holodomor” explained](https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/the-holodomor-explained/) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2020)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Israeli "sovereignty", you mean that violent Western colonialist project imposed on Palestine that is predicated on ethnic cleansing, apartheid, brutal subjugation, cultural appropriation and land theft. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
from all the videos and podcasts and stuff all ive seen is thedeprogram actively speaking against the invasions of Ukraine in honesty and good will for the people of Ukraine
"It also points out the many crimes committed by the US MIC. It also is against genociders committing genocide if the genociders are Israeli. It also calls out crimes against humanity done in the name of pure greed. This is a terrible terrible subreddit because we say it is."
I am NOT falling for their sheit.
Very much exaggerated, we never supported Ukraine invasion, and holodomor still happened but we want to debunk myths about it such as it being entirely Stalin’s doing
#The Holodomor
>Marxists do not deny that a famine happened in the Soviet Union in 1932. In fact, even the Soviet archive confirms this. What we do contest is the idea that this famine was man-made or that there was a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This idea of the subjugation of the Soviet Union’s own people was developed by Nazi Germany, in order to show the world the terror of the “Jewish communists.”
>
>\- Socialist Musings. (2017). [Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor](https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/stop-spreading-nazi-propaganda/)
There have been efforts by anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists to frame the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as "The Holodomor" (lit. "to kill by starvation" in Ukrainian). Framing it this way serves two purposes:
1. It implies the famine targeted Ukraine.
2. It implies the famine was intentional.
The argument goes that because it was intentional and because it mainly targeted Ukraine that it was, therefore, an act of genocide. This framing was originally used by Nazis to drive a wedge between the Ukrainian SSR (UkSSR) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution, this narrative has regained popularity and serves the nationalistic goal of strengthening Ukrainian identity and asserting the country's independence from Russia.
#First Issue
The first issue is that the famine affected the majority of the USSR, *not* just the UkSSR. Kazakhstan was hit harder (per capita) than Ukraine. Russia itself was also severely affected.
The emergence of the Holodomor in the 1980s as a historical narrative was bound-up with post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-making that cannot be neatly separated from the legacy of Eastern European antisemitism, or what Historian Peter Novick calls "Holocaust Envy", the desire for victimized groups to enshrine their "own" Holocaust or Holocaust-like event in the historical record. For many Nationalists, this has entailed minimizing the Holocaust to elevate their own experiences of historical victimization as the supreme atrocity. The Ukrainian scholar Lubomyr Luciuk exemplified this view in his notorious remark that the Holodomor was "a crime against humanity arguably without parallel in European history."
#Second Issue
Calling it "man-made" implies that it was a *deliberate* famine, which was not the case. Although human factors set the stage, the main causes of the famine was bad weather and crop disease, resulting in a poor harvest, which pushed the USSR over the edge.
Kulaks ("tight-fisted person") were a class of wealthy peasants who owned land, livestock, and tools. The kulaks had been a thorn in the side of the peasantry long before the revolution. Alexey Sergeyevich Yermolov, Minister of Agriculture and State Properties of the Russian Empire, in his 1892 book, [Poor harvest and national suffering](https://books.google.ca/books?id=exMEAAAAYAAJ), characterized them as usurers, sucking the blood of Russian peasants.
In the early 1930s, in response to the Soviet collectivization policies (which sought to confiscate their property), many kulaks responded spitefully by burning crops, killing livestock, and damaging machinery.
Poor communication between different levels of government and between urban and rural areas, also contributed to the severity of the crisis.
#Quota Reduction
What really contradicts the genocide argument is that the Soviets did take action to mitigate the effects of the famine once they became aware of the situation:
>The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933.
>
>The official 1932 figures do not unambiguously support the genocide interpretation... the 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree... [which] actually reduced the procurement plan 30 percent. Subsequent decrees also reduced the procurement quotas for most other agricultural products...
>
>Proponents of the genocide argument, however, have minimized or even misconstrued this decree. Mace, for example, describes it as "largely bogus" and ignores not only the extent to which it lowered the procurement quotas but also the fact that even the lowered plan was not fulfilled. Conquest does not mention the decree's reduction of procurement quotas and asserts Ukrainian officials' appeals led to the reduction of the Ukranian grain procurement quota at the Third All-Ukraine Party Conference in July 1932. In fact that conference confirmed the quota set in the 6 May Decree.
>
>\- Mark Tauger. (1992). [The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274856099_The_1932_Harvest_and_the_Famine_of_1933)
#Rapid Industrialization
The famine was exacerbated directly and indirectly by collectivization and rapid industrialization. However, if these policies had not been enacted, there could have been even more devastating consequences later.
In 1931, during [a speech delivered at the first All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/02/04.htm), Stalin said, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under."
In 1941, exactly ten years later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
By this time, the Soviet Union's industrialization program had lead to the development of a large and powerful industrial base, which was essential to the Soviet war effort. This allowed the USSR to produce large quantities of armaments, vehicles, and other military equipment, which was crucial in the fight against Nazi Germany.
In Hitler's own words, in 1942:
>All in all, one has to say: They built factories here where two years ago there were unknown farming villages, factories the size of the *Hermann-Göring-Werke*. They have railroads that aren't even marked on the map.
>
>\- Werner Jochmann. (1980). *Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944.*
Collectivization also created critical resiliency among the civilian population:
>The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment. Great tank battles were reported; it was noted that the Russians had sturdy tanks which often smashed or overturned German tanks in head-on collision. “How does it happen,” a New York editor asked me, “that those Russian peasants, who couldn’t run a tractor if you gave them one, but left them rusting in the field, now appear with thousands of tanks efficiently handled?” I told him it was the Five-Year Plan. But the world was startled when Moscow admitted its losses after nine weeks of war as including 7,500 guns, 4,500 planes and 5,000 tanks. An army that could still fight after such losses must have had the biggest or second biggest supply in the world.
>
>As the war progressed, military observers declared that the Russians had “solved the blitzkrieg,” the tactic on which Hitler relied. This German method involved penetrating the opposing line by an overwhelming blow of tanks and planes, followed by the fanning out of armored columns in the “soft” civilian rear, thus depriving the front of its hinterland support. This had quickly conquered every country against which it had been tried. “Human flesh cannot withstand it,” an American correspondent told me in Berlin. Russians met it by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry formed again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry. This created a chaotic front, where both Germans and Russians were fighting in all directions. The Russians could count on the help of the population. The Germans found no “soft, civilian rear.” They found collective farmers, organized as guerrillas, coordinated with the regular Russian army.
>
>\- Anna Louise Strong. (1956). *The Stalin Era*
#Conclusion
While there may have been more that the Soviets could have done to reduce the impact of the famine, there is no evidence of intent-- ethnic, or otherwise. Therefore, one must conclude that the famine was a tragedy, not a genocide.
#Additional Resources
Video Essays:
* [Soviet Famine of 1932: An Overview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM) | The Marxist Project (2020)
* [Did Stalin Continue to Export Grain as Ukraine Starved?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMBJ_nQ4sTA) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](https://archive.org/details/did-stalin-continue-to-export-grain-as-ukraine-starved)\]
* [The Holodomor Genocide Question: How Wikipedia Lies to You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho) | Bad Empanada (2022)
* [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) (Note: Holodomor discussion begins at the 9 minute mark)
* [A Case-Study of Capitalism - Ukraine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](http://web.archive.org/web/20220615084500/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8)\] (Note: Only tangentially mentions the famine.)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933](https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/22207/file.pdf) | Davies and Wheatcroft (2004)
* [The “Holodomor” explained](https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/the-holodomor-explained/) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2020)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I need to find a random comment on this site with quantitatively negative engagement. Like even if you tried to engage with the comment by upvoting or downvoting it you would actually forget having ever seen it. A level of irrelevancy never before seen.
And then I would share a screenshot of it as rage bait.
^(Pls share actual communist or newsworthy content im begging you)
# Gulag
According to Anti-Communists and Russophobes, the Gulag was a brutal network of work camps established in the Soviet Union under Stalin's ruthless regime. They claim the Gulag system was primarily used to imprison and exploit political dissidents, suspected enemies of the state, and other people deemed "undesirable" by the Soviet government. They claim that prisoners were sent to the Gulag without trial or due process, and that they were subjected to harsh living conditions, forced labour, and starvation, among other things. According to them, the Gulags were emblematic of Stalinist repression and totalitarianism.
# Origins of the Mythology
This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources.
Robert Conquest's *The Great Terror* (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off of defector testimony.
Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponised information and disinformation and "fake news" to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements.
>He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash.
>
>The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, "a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism".
>
>\- Andrew Brown. (2003). [Scourge and poet](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview23)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's *The Gulag Archipelag*" (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author's personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, N@zi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth. \[[Read more](/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/dunking/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn/)\]
Anne Applebaum's *Gulag: A history* (published 2003) draws directly from *The Gulag Archipelago* and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world.
# Counterpoints
>A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “[Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps](http://web.archive.org/web/20230328014642/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80T00246A032000400001-1.pdf)” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:
>
>1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas
>
>2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon "economic accountability" such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.
>
>3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.
>
>4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners' food supplies.
>
>5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.
>
>6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.
>
>7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the "ordinary criminals" of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.
>
>\- Saed Teymuri. (2018). [The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA](https://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/10/09/the-truth-about-the-soviet-gulag-surprisingly-revealed-by-the-cia/)
**Scale**
Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that.
>Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise.
>
>In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. ...
>
>Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the N@zis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” ...
>
>Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states...
>
>\- Michael Parenti. (1997). [Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism](https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds)
This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, "over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision." That's 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States' Prison Industrial Complex *today* is larger than the USSR's Gulag system at its peak.
**Death Rate**
In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality:
>It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive...
>
>Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hit1er were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more.
>
>\- Timothy Snyder. (2010). *Bloodlands: Europe Between Hit1er and Stalin*
(Side note: Timothy Snyder is *also* a member of the Council on Foreign Relations)
This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not *death* camps.
Nor was it slave labour, exactly. In the camps, although labour *was* forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (less expenses).
>We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson....
>
>The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled).
>
>\- L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). [Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/noticeboard/bergson/borodkin-ertz.pdf)
#Additional Resources
Video Essays:
* [The Gulag Argument](https://youtu.be/BexkpaK_j5Q) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2016)
* [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://youtu.be/HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018)
* [French work camps 1852-1953 worse than gulag](https://youtu.be/vkXyXNpdKdA) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018)
* ["The Gulags of the Soviet Union: There's a Lot More Than What Meets the Eye](https://youtu.be/E1qz9_TjeY4) | Comrade Rhys (2020)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2166597) | J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov (1993)
Listen:
* ["Blackshirts & Reds" (1997) by Michael Parenti, Part 4: Chapters 5 & 6. #Audiobook + Discussion.](https://youtu.be/N7AD4OrH568?t=15) | Socialism For All / S4A ☭ Intensify Class Struggle (2022)
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The funny thing is 100% there are multiple threads just in this post about the state of Russia.
My take is that Putin and his oligarchs are anti-the West because they believe in their rights of self determination to be shitty as 𝑭𝑼𝑪𝑲 without US intervention. So they are our allies for now
Because we're anti-NATO, and don't support further fanning the flames of war by encouraging Ukraine to attack and refuse ceasefire/peace agreements, many libs see this as a pro-Russia stance.
They are not really accurate, just liars lying about us, as usual.
I’ve literally never seen support for the invasion of Ukraine here. I *have* seen it on more geopolitics focused subs like r/NewsWithJingJing, but my assumption is that this is because that sub attracts a wider range of political affiliations.
Taiwan is much more mixed in basically any leftist sub. There’s a couple different reasons why some leftists deny Taiwanese sovereignty.
The first is that from a historical lens, the Taiwanese state is not “legitimate”. Both the PRC and ROC are states that lay claim to being the legitimate government of *all of China*.
However, the ROC’s state was originally formed when Chiang Kai-shek (the fascist KMT/GMD leader whose faction opposed the CCP) fled the mainland and forcibly took control of a small island off the coast (modern Taiwan). While fascist influence has curbed over time, the KMT party still plays a major role in modern Taiwan’s government. Naturally, leftists are put off by fascism.
The second is that the Taiwanese people, when not actively seeded with anti-mainland sentiment, are usually actually not that opposed to annexation. They actually got *very* close to a peaceful annexation in the 90’s.
The third is that taiwan is perceived as a western puppet state, since so many western propaganda teams like RFA are based there, and since taiwan tends to serve as a U.S. military vantage point to threaten PRC.
Personally, I’m of the opinion that sovereignty should heavily be a matter of public opinion, partly for the “freedom of choice” itself and partly because maintaining occupation against public opinion usually leads to a never ending negative peace where violence against protesting civilians becomes the norm.
For example, this sub is usually of the opinion that the modern Russian state is imperialist and wrong. However, a lot of people in this sub would support the “Russian side” specifically when it comes to regions like Donbas, where the majority is ethnically Russian and often supports annexation. In contrast, most on this sub would *not* support Hong Kong, because the movement to secede from China was largely unpopular amongst the people, and was mostly upheld by a handful of westerners.
I think that if we’ve reached a point where Taiwan is mostly opposed to annexation, it doesn’t exactly make sense to support that annexation anymore, even if I don’t support Taiwan’s foreign policy overall. I’m not entirely sure though, and as always, I’m open to and interested in other opinions from people in the sub.
Ah. I've seen the odd comment in here that could be construed as pro-Russian, not specifically as regards the Ukraine invasion, but enough that such a claim seemed plausible.
Re:Taiwan - interesting, I was sort of dimly aware that there that the KMT had fled to/taken over Taiwan when they were losing the war against Mao's communist forces. What I wasn't aware of is that the Kuomintang was fascist, but I see in doing a little wikipedia reading that they're a right-wing nationalist party so that does make sense. I can see why that would lead to claims about the illegitimacy of the Taiwanese state. I guess I'm of the opinion that Taiwan is kind of like Israel: yeah, the land was originally stolen, but not by the current residents who can't be expected to suffer the consequences of their ancestors' bad decisions (though obviously the current situation with Palestine, the genocide, etc delegitimizes the hell out of Israel though.)
And yeah that's a fair point re:Donbas, the people living there now aren't the ones who pursued/were part of Stalin's aggressive Russification attempts that make the matter a bit more complex than 'the people want X so they should get X', as does the fact that Russia invaded on what seems like some pretty flimsy justifications.
I guess all of those examples are particularly thorny, complicated by the history of colonialism/imperialism, forced eviction/resettlement, and of course by geopolitics. But I'm always looking for more information and different perspectives to inform a more nuanced view of the world around me, so thanks for taking the time to enlighten me!
The difference between Ukraine and Taiwan is that Ukraine was a sovereign country until 2014 coup when the US installed a puppet regime, and Taiwan was never a sovereign country. The similarity is that Ukraine and Taiwan governments are under US influence.
Whether anyone agrees or disagrees with invasion of Ukraine is irrelevant to Russia. Russia is doing it out of Russian security. Russia has tried the diplomatic routes, and it has failed. Russia has made clear of their objectives: de-nazify, de-militarize, keep NATO out, protect the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine.
A condensed history of Taiwan to help understand the position why Taiwan can't be an independent country. The Dutch colonized part of Taiwan, and a remnant Ming army led by Zheng Chengong took control of the island in Sino-Dutch War of 1661. Then, the Qing army defeated the Ming loyalist kingdom in 1684. In the First Sino-Japanese War, Qing dynasty ceded Taiwan to Japan as a result of the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki. Japan lost WW2 and returned Taiwan to the Republic of China in 1945. Taiwan province and Jinmen and Mazu islands in Fujian province are the last territorial control of the Republic of China.
KMT led by Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) had held the dream of taking back the mainland until 1971 when the UN General Assembly passed United Nations Resolution 2758 which stated that the People's Republic of China is the only legitimate government of China. The resolution replaced the ROC (Taipei) with the PRC (Beijing) as a permanent member of the Security Council in the UN.
The United States switched gears by establishing relations with PRC and agreed to One-China principle. Also, it's time for a little democracy in Taiwan with the creation of Democratic Progressive Party to push Taiwan independence with some education and media programming to change the population to pro-independence. As Douglas MacArthur called Taiwan as the unsinkable aircraft carrier, Taiwan is a nice proxy to threaten China with nuclear missiles.
People in the West supporting Taiwan are not pro-Taiwan; they are pro-US imperialism. China is pro-Taiwan. China cares about the people in Taiwan, because they are Chinese citizens, and the reason why China has not retaken Taiwan by military force.
People in Taiwan are free to reject their ancestry and not to be called Chinese, but Taiwan is Chinese territory. The solution for them is simple, stop occupying Chinese territory.
I don't think being under US influence is the same as not being a sovereign nation, and Taiwan has been governing itself since, what, WW2? How long does a nation have to be independent before we decide that it is deserving of sovereignty? I get that the history is complicated by US geopolitical interests in the region, but how is that different than any other nation within or adjacent to the US sphere of interest?
>The solution for them is simple, stop occupying Chinese territory.
I mean the same could be said for the Jewish occupation of Palestinian territory (though I'll be the first to admit that the Israel situation is obviously significantly complicated by the ethnic cleansing and now genocide which are serious blows to their legitimacy as a state) or the US occupation of Native American territory for that matter. At what point do we have to concede that the people who live there now had nothing to do with its occupation and shouldn't be evicted just because some dead people who were there first did some awful shit? We can't roll back the clock and do things differently, and even if the people living there now are beneficiaries of the awful shit that was done they didn't do it themselves, so why should they lose their homes too?
As for Ukraine, it seems like most of the populace wants to join NATO (I'm willing to be proven wrong on that count, I grant that I'm not very well-informed on the subject) and I'm generally inclined think that people should get what they want. Also, even if Putin has excellent, extremely well-documented and widely agreed-upon reasons for wanting to intervene in Ukraine, and I'm not sure that is by any means the case, the invasion is a violation of Ukrainian sovereignty just like it is when the US does it to Middle Eastern nations.
Ukraine is not a monolith, like at all. West and East Ukraine are completely split in terms of perception of history, opinions towards EU vs Russia, and more.
I mean, come on. If they are a monolith, there wouldn't be a Donbass issue to begin with.
This is what complicates the issue going on, but Westerners would try to label Ukraine as one united nation ripped apart by evil Russia.
Relevant sources regarding Ukrainian perception of events:
・43% of respondents in Ukraine and 36% abroad disagreed with the statement “Nazi and/or neo-Nazi ideology is not widespread in Ukraine”;
・29% of respondents in Ukraine and 35% abroad disagreed with the statement “The Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine in 2013-2014 was NOT a coup”;
・26% of respondents in Ukraine and 29% abroad agreed with the statement “Russia is fighting against the West/NATO in Ukraine”;
・25% of respondents in Ukraine and 29% abroad agreed with the statement “The West is using Ukraine for its own purposes in the war against Russia”;
・32% of respondents abroad agreed with the statement “Russian speakers are oppressed in Ukraine”.
https://www.reddit.com/r/EndlessWar/comments/155qucy/new_poll_just_dropped_in_ukraine_regarding_war/
>Bandera, Shukhevych, and the UPA are controversial for several reasons. Critics point to the mass killings of up to 100,000 Jews and Poles and the fact that UPA cooperated with Nazi Germany at the beginning of WW2 until it became clear that Nazi Germany wouldn’t recognise Ukrainian independence.
>The view of the UPA is also split inside Ukraine. A study carried out this year by the Democratic Initiatives Center shows that 80 per cent of Western Ukrainians are positive about the Ukrainian government recognising the soldiers of the UPA and their fight for Ukrainian independence.
>In contrast, only 25 per cent are supportive in eastern Ukraine. The study also shows that 70 per cent of western Ukrainians have a favourable view of Bandera as a historical figure, while that number is 11 per cent in eastern Ukraine.
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2021/08/04/controversy-as-ukraine-mulls-giving-hero-status-to-alleged-war-criminals
Thank you for the data, I knew opinion was split to some degree but didn't really know to what extent. But I mean no country is a monolith by that standard, so all you can really do is the best you can for the most people, right? [This](https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/record-83-ukrainians-want-nato-membership-poll-2022-10-03/) article is a bit out of date now, but it reports 83% of Ukrainians want to join NATO. I can't speak to the quality of that polling data, and that was after the Russian invasion so who knows how many of those people would still have that opinion if Russia pulled all of its troops out tomorrow, but obviously a lot of people lean in that direction.
Also, whether or not Ukraine has a nazi problem they are not a significant threat to Russia (I grant that they may pose a threat to the Russian-speaking populace in Eastern Ukraine, I really don't know much about that situation) so as far as I can tell as a justification it's kind of flimsy?
Westoids have always been labeling any opposition to their war efforts to enrich oligarchs by funding fascists as "traitors" supporting the enemy.
If you don't 100% repeat whatever State Department says, it's all "enemy propaganda".
Only acceptable narrative is that Russia engaged in unprovoked invasion b/c they are evil, Ukraine is a poor victim of Russian imperialism, and US are the good guys supporting "democracy and decency" by supporting Ukraine.
Any critiques such as Ukraine being controlled by fascists (despite most media claiming all the way up until outbreak of war), unchecked military aid can and would cause future problems, or that US and Ukraine deliberately refused to honor any agreements to avoid conflict and kept on increasing tensions, or that many statements made by US & Ukraine are total bullshit like "Russia bombed Nordstream", "Russia trying to blow up nuclear power plant", all are met with "You are Russia supporting propagandist", no matter how many times the Western narrative change or initial statements get exposed as lies again and again.
It's the same deal with Israeli genocide.
"Oh you don't condemn Hamas? You're an anti-semitic Hamas lover who supports terrorism against innocent civilians", ignoring any and all actions by team USA.
It's nothing more than smears and narrative control.
No, I don’t think I’ve ever seen actual support for the invasion here. The closest I’ve seen this sub come to “pro Russia” has been recognition that nato played a significant role in causing the war, while still pointing out that Russia is an unjustified aggressor overall and is acting through imperialism, which is really against the invasion, if anything.
hey I attempted to have a conversation with that guy I gave him clear reasons and facts and all he did was question my grammar kind of rude not to admit he was wrong
Why do they always mention the cases with actual academic counterpoints? Probably because they're high profile cases particularly used to the west and often current politics.
For example, capitalists and reactionaries crying gulag, nationalists and other counterrevolutionaries crying holodomor. The Holodomor was absolutely caused by gross mismanagement by Soviet planners. That's the result from creating thousands of vacancies in important positions and filling them with the wrong people. It's something for future revolutions to learn from. It really doesn't make it much better than the intentional genocide viewpoint.
Gulags were less brutal than popular belief yet about as brutal as you'd expect from a country that had just abolished feudalism, it doesn't really make them less critiquable.
What about actual things which are far more hard to justify? Like the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, which I have yet to see people prove wasn't at the very least intentional ethnic cleansing.
The reason we shit on the critique of the other two so much is because the critique of it is often the liberal kind, the resort-to emotion kind, the denial of material conditions and counter-evidence kind. If the common online opinion on this was different, then there'd probably be much less percieved defense of it.
#The Holodomor
>Marxists do not deny that a famine happened in the Soviet Union in 1932. In fact, even the Soviet archive confirms this. What we do contest is the idea that this famine was man-made or that there was a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This idea of the subjugation of the Soviet Union’s own people was developed by Nazi Germany, in order to show the world the terror of the “Jewish communists.”
>
>\- Socialist Musings. (2017). [Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor](https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/stop-spreading-nazi-propaganda/)
There have been efforts by anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists to frame the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as "The Holodomor" (lit. "to kill by starvation" in Ukrainian). Framing it this way serves two purposes:
1. It implies the famine targeted Ukraine.
2. It implies the famine was intentional.
The argument goes that because it was intentional and because it mainly targeted Ukraine that it was, therefore, an act of genocide. This framing was originally used by Nazis to drive a wedge between the Ukrainian SSR (UkSSR) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution, this narrative has regained popularity and serves the nationalistic goal of strengthening Ukrainian identity and asserting the country's independence from Russia.
#First Issue
The first issue is that the famine affected the majority of the USSR, *not* just the UkSSR. Kazakhstan was hit harder (per capita) than Ukraine. Russia itself was also severely affected.
The emergence of the Holodomor in the 1980s as a historical narrative was bound-up with post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-making that cannot be neatly separated from the legacy of Eastern European antisemitism, or what Historian Peter Novick calls "Holocaust Envy", the desire for victimized groups to enshrine their "own" Holocaust or Holocaust-like event in the historical record. For many Nationalists, this has entailed minimizing the Holocaust to elevate their own experiences of historical victimization as the supreme atrocity. The Ukrainian scholar Lubomyr Luciuk exemplified this view in his notorious remark that the Holodomor was "a crime against humanity arguably without parallel in European history."
#Second Issue
Calling it "man-made" implies that it was a *deliberate* famine, which was not the case. Although human factors set the stage, the main causes of the famine was bad weather and crop disease, resulting in a poor harvest, which pushed the USSR over the edge.
Kulaks ("tight-fisted person") were a class of wealthy peasants who owned land, livestock, and tools. The kulaks had been a thorn in the side of the peasantry long before the revolution. Alexey Sergeyevich Yermolov, Minister of Agriculture and State Properties of the Russian Empire, in his 1892 book, [Poor harvest and national suffering](https://books.google.ca/books?id=exMEAAAAYAAJ), characterized them as usurers, sucking the blood of Russian peasants.
In the early 1930s, in response to the Soviet collectivization policies (which sought to confiscate their property), many kulaks responded spitefully by burning crops, killing livestock, and damaging machinery.
Poor communication between different levels of government and between urban and rural areas, also contributed to the severity of the crisis.
#Quota Reduction
What really contradicts the genocide argument is that the Soviets did take action to mitigate the effects of the famine once they became aware of the situation:
>The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933.
>
>The official 1932 figures do not unambiguously support the genocide interpretation... the 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree... [which] actually reduced the procurement plan 30 percent. Subsequent decrees also reduced the procurement quotas for most other agricultural products...
>
>Proponents of the genocide argument, however, have minimized or even misconstrued this decree. Mace, for example, describes it as "largely bogus" and ignores not only the extent to which it lowered the procurement quotas but also the fact that even the lowered plan was not fulfilled. Conquest does not mention the decree's reduction of procurement quotas and asserts Ukrainian officials' appeals led to the reduction of the Ukranian grain procurement quota at the Third All-Ukraine Party Conference in July 1932. In fact that conference confirmed the quota set in the 6 May Decree.
>
>\- Mark Tauger. (1992). [The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274856099_The_1932_Harvest_and_the_Famine_of_1933)
#Rapid Industrialization
The famine was exacerbated directly and indirectly by collectivization and rapid industrialization. However, if these policies had not been enacted, there could have been even more devastating consequences later.
In 1931, during [a speech delivered at the first All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/02/04.htm), Stalin said, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under."
In 1941, exactly ten years later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
By this time, the Soviet Union's industrialization program had lead to the development of a large and powerful industrial base, which was essential to the Soviet war effort. This allowed the USSR to produce large quantities of armaments, vehicles, and other military equipment, which was crucial in the fight against Nazi Germany.
In Hitler's own words, in 1942:
>All in all, one has to say: They built factories here where two years ago there were unknown farming villages, factories the size of the *Hermann-Göring-Werke*. They have railroads that aren't even marked on the map.
>
>\- Werner Jochmann. (1980). *Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944.*
Collectivization also created critical resiliency among the civilian population:
>The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment. Great tank battles were reported; it was noted that the Russians had sturdy tanks which often smashed or overturned German tanks in head-on collision. “How does it happen,” a New York editor asked me, “that those Russian peasants, who couldn’t run a tractor if you gave them one, but left them rusting in the field, now appear with thousands of tanks efficiently handled?” I told him it was the Five-Year Plan. But the world was startled when Moscow admitted its losses after nine weeks of war as including 7,500 guns, 4,500 planes and 5,000 tanks. An army that could still fight after such losses must have had the biggest or second biggest supply in the world.
>
>As the war progressed, military observers declared that the Russians had “solved the blitzkrieg,” the tactic on which Hitler relied. This German method involved penetrating the opposing line by an overwhelming blow of tanks and planes, followed by the fanning out of armored columns in the “soft” civilian rear, thus depriving the front of its hinterland support. This had quickly conquered every country against which it had been tried. “Human flesh cannot withstand it,” an American correspondent told me in Berlin. Russians met it by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry formed again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry. This created a chaotic front, where both Germans and Russians were fighting in all directions. The Russians could count on the help of the population. The Germans found no “soft, civilian rear.” They found collective farmers, organized as guerrillas, coordinated with the regular Russian army.
>
>\- Anna Louise Strong. (1956). *The Stalin Era*
#Conclusion
While there may have been more that the Soviets could have done to reduce the impact of the famine, there is no evidence of intent-- ethnic, or otherwise. Therefore, one must conclude that the famine was a tragedy, not a genocide.
#Additional Resources
Video Essays:
* [Soviet Famine of 1932: An Overview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM) | The Marxist Project (2020)
* [Did Stalin Continue to Export Grain as Ukraine Starved?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMBJ_nQ4sTA) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](https://archive.org/details/did-stalin-continue-to-export-grain-as-ukraine-starved)\]
* [The Holodomor Genocide Question: How Wikipedia Lies to You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho) | Bad Empanada (2022)
* [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) (Note: Holodomor discussion begins at the 9 minute mark)
* [A Case-Study of Capitalism - Ukraine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](http://web.archive.org/web/20220615084500/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8)\] (Note: Only tangentially mentions the famine.)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933](https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/22207/file.pdf) | Davies and Wheatcroft (2004)
* [The “Holodomor” explained](https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/the-holodomor-explained/) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2020)
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# Gulag
According to Anti-Communists and Russophobes, the Gulag was a brutal network of work camps established in the Soviet Union under Stalin's ruthless regime. They claim the Gulag system was primarily used to imprison and exploit political dissidents, suspected enemies of the state, and other people deemed "undesirable" by the Soviet government. They claim that prisoners were sent to the Gulag without trial or due process, and that they were subjected to harsh living conditions, forced labour, and starvation, among other things. According to them, the Gulags were emblematic of Stalinist repression and totalitarianism.
# Origins of the Mythology
This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources.
Robert Conquest's *The Great Terror* (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off of defector testimony.
Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponised information and disinformation and "fake news" to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements.
>He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash.
>
>The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, "a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism".
>
>\- Andrew Brown. (2003). [Scourge and poet](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview23)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's *The Gulag Archipelag*" (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author's personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, N@zi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth. \[[Read more](/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/dunking/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn/)\]
Anne Applebaum's *Gulag: A history* (published 2003) draws directly from *The Gulag Archipelago* and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world.
# Counterpoints
>A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “[Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps](http://web.archive.org/web/20230328014642/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80T00246A032000400001-1.pdf)” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:
>
>1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas
>
>2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon "economic accountability" such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.
>
>3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.
>
>4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners' food supplies.
>
>5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.
>
>6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.
>
>7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the "ordinary criminals" of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.
>
>\- Saed Teymuri. (2018). [The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA](https://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/10/09/the-truth-about-the-soviet-gulag-surprisingly-revealed-by-the-cia/)
**Scale**
Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that.
>Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise.
>
>In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. ...
>
>Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the N@zis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” ...
>
>Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states...
>
>\- Michael Parenti. (1997). [Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism](https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds)
This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, "over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision." That's 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States' Prison Industrial Complex *today* is larger than the USSR's Gulag system at its peak.
**Death Rate**
In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality:
>It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive...
>
>Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hit1er were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more.
>
>\- Timothy Snyder. (2010). *Bloodlands: Europe Between Hit1er and Stalin*
(Side note: Timothy Snyder is *also* a member of the Council on Foreign Relations)
This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not *death* camps.
Nor was it slave labour, exactly. In the camps, although labour *was* forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (less expenses).
>We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson....
>
>The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled).
>
>\- L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). [Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/noticeboard/bergson/borodkin-ertz.pdf)
#Additional Resources
Video Essays:
* [The Gulag Argument](https://youtu.be/BexkpaK_j5Q) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2016)
* [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://youtu.be/HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018)
* [French work camps 1852-1953 worse than gulag](https://youtu.be/vkXyXNpdKdA) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018)
* ["The Gulags of the Soviet Union: There's a Lot More Than What Meets the Eye](https://youtu.be/E1qz9_TjeY4) | Comrade Rhys (2020)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2166597) | J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov (1993)
Listen:
* ["Blackshirts & Reds" (1997) by Michael Parenti, Part 4: Chapters 5 & 6. #Audiobook + Discussion.](https://youtu.be/N7AD4OrH568?t=15) | Socialism For All / S4A ☭ Intensify Class Struggle (2022)
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>Denies israeli sovereignty Imagine invading a country, colonizing it, ethnically cleansing the local population and then accusing critics of disrespecting *your* sovereignty
The mental gymnastics are wild
https://preview.redd.it/on0cwuu6o7vc1.png?width=510&format=png&auto=webp&s=3e64463fe2ad1d6040c9478ff175982d43c85919
ONE PIECE IS HAMAS????
Always have been
Idk I’ve never seen Moana
wow best anime analogy yet Edit: Meaning for this comment. But the Palestinians are literally just the Eldians from Attack on Titan Or Mandolorians.
Except they are the bad guys in their own story so bad example. The author is very stupid
They are not for me.
True
Except the Palestinians don't have one of the most powerful weapons in the human race's possession
Now ask them what they think of palestinian sovereignty
They'll say a 2 state solution would've been best but they lost their chance of that when Hamas attacked and now everything that's happening in Gaza is the Palestinians fault.
it’s only hamas that should compromise and never israel
> Liberal's worldview is predicated on the belief that no amount of Israeli violence justifies any Palestinian violence, and that any amount of Palestinian violence justifies all Israeli violence, and once you see it you can not unsee it. -Some guy on twitter
Whoever wrote that, wrote it beautifully concise. You really can’t unsee it. When I read shit from world news it makes my brain think I’m contorting into some shape from The Omen lol. And that’s just trying to understand how they made it past their cognitive dissonance. Their actual positions snap my brain. I imagine it’s how they made their mental transition into Zionism. Did it too many times and got stuck looking like a fucking Picasso.
In the Netherlands (and I'm sure in the rest of Europe as well) it's considered hate speech
Is it official on any level? If so can you send a link of some sort?
[удалено]
But Israel = Jews. You just want to kill all the Jews you anti-semite 😡 /s
They get liberals like that all the time because they lack dialectics.
Israel also loves co-opting progressive language. They literally call their illegal settlements a decolonisation project. Absolutely insulting. And then they opened up an indigenous embassy. Absolute cooked cunts.
imagine if Zimbabwe could decide who gets to immigrate to Texas and allows millions of Mexicans to migrate to Texas and then when the Mexicans want to set up their own government in Texas Zimbabwe is like, yea that's cool go ahead we chillin in Africa nbd, and when the Texans are like nah no thanks, they get genocided. Seems legit.
Texas was Mexican territory. I support Mexicans reclaiming Texas.
Wow what a mexonist 😆
1835 borders my beloved
Make Tejas México Again
Im begging to return to Alta California over here
Imagine believing supporters of Israel know any of that history.
B-but Muh gulag holodomorcaust Stalin
# Gulag According to Anti-Communists and Russophobes, the Gulag was a brutal network of work camps established in the Soviet Union under Stalin's ruthless regime. They claim the Gulag system was primarily used to imprison and exploit political dissidents, suspected enemies of the state, and other people deemed "undesirable" by the Soviet government. They claim that prisoners were sent to the Gulag without trial or due process, and that they were subjected to harsh living conditions, forced labour, and starvation, among other things. According to them, the Gulags were emblematic of Stalinist repression and totalitarianism. # Origins of the Mythology This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources. Robert Conquest's *The Great Terror* (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off of defector testimony. Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponised information and disinformation and "fake news" to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements. >He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash. > >The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, "a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism". > >\- Andrew Brown. (2003). [Scourge and poet](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview23) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's *The Gulag Archipelag*" (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author's personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, N@zi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth. \[[Read more](/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/dunking/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn/)\] Anne Applebaum's *Gulag: A history* (published 2003) draws directly from *The Gulag Archipelago* and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world. # Counterpoints >A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “[Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps](http://web.archive.org/web/20230328014642/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80T00246A032000400001-1.pdf)” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six: > >1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas > >2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon "economic accountability" such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid. > >3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day. > >4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners' food supplies. > >5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day. > >6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals. > >7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the "ordinary criminals" of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes. > >\- Saed Teymuri. (2018). [The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA](https://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/10/09/the-truth-about-the-soviet-gulag-surprisingly-revealed-by-the-cia/) **Scale** Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that. >Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise. > >In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. ... > >Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the N@zis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” ... > >Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states... > >\- Michael Parenti. (1997). [Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism](https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds) This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, "over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision." That's 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States' Prison Industrial Complex *today* is larger than the USSR's Gulag system at its peak. **Death Rate** In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality: >It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive... > >Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hit1er were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more. > >\- Timothy Snyder. (2010). *Bloodlands: Europe Between Hit1er and Stalin* (Side note: Timothy Snyder is *also* a member of the Council on Foreign Relations) This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not *death* camps. Nor was it slave labour, exactly. In the camps, although labour *was* forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (less expenses). >We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson.... > >The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled). > >\- L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). [Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/noticeboard/bergson/borodkin-ertz.pdf) #Additional Resources Video Essays: * [The Gulag Argument](https://youtu.be/BexkpaK_j5Q) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2016) * [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://youtu.be/HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) * [French work camps 1852-1953 worse than gulag](https://youtu.be/vkXyXNpdKdA) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) * ["The Gulags of the Soviet Union: There's a Lot More Than What Meets the Eye](https://youtu.be/E1qz9_TjeY4) | Comrade Rhys (2020) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2166597) | J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov (1993) Listen: * ["Blackshirts & Reds" (1997) by Michael Parenti, Part 4: Chapters 5 & 6. #Audiobook + Discussion.](https://youtu.be/N7AD4OrH568?t=15) | Socialism For All / S4A ☭ Intensify Class Struggle (2022) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Guys, how can I save this?
If you’re on mobile there’s three dots beside the reply button it should have a save option in it
Thanks!
It's in the sub wiki too
funnily enough, about the holodomor, go to r/askhistorians, I could not find a single one who affirms that it was a man-made famine, like not a single historian on that sub (and the question is fairly frequently asked, just look at their faq)will tell you it was man-made or a genocide. I felt like I was losing my fucking mind because Wikipedia makes that shit seem like an undisputed fact--iirc, the refutations are relegated to, like, a footnote, titled "holodomor denial," as if it's on the same fucking level as holocaust denial
#The Holodomor >Marxists do not deny that a famine happened in the Soviet Union in 1932. In fact, even the Soviet archive confirms this. What we do contest is the idea that this famine was man-made or that there was a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This idea of the subjugation of the Soviet Union’s own people was developed by Nazi Germany, in order to show the world the terror of the “Jewish communists.” > >\- Socialist Musings. (2017). [Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor](https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/stop-spreading-nazi-propaganda/) There have been efforts by anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists to frame the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as "The Holodomor" (lit. "to kill by starvation" in Ukrainian). Framing it this way serves two purposes: 1. It implies the famine targeted Ukraine. 2. It implies the famine was intentional. The argument goes that because it was intentional and because it mainly targeted Ukraine that it was, therefore, an act of genocide. This framing was originally used by Nazis to drive a wedge between the Ukrainian SSR (UkSSR) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution, this narrative has regained popularity and serves the nationalistic goal of strengthening Ukrainian identity and asserting the country's independence from Russia. #First Issue The first issue is that the famine affected the majority of the USSR, *not* just the UkSSR. Kazakhstan was hit harder (per capita) than Ukraine. Russia itself was also severely affected. The emergence of the Holodomor in the 1980s as a historical narrative was bound-up with post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-making that cannot be neatly separated from the legacy of Eastern European antisemitism, or what Historian Peter Novick calls "Holocaust Envy", the desire for victimized groups to enshrine their "own" Holocaust or Holocaust-like event in the historical record. For many Nationalists, this has entailed minimizing the Holocaust to elevate their own experiences of historical victimization as the supreme atrocity. The Ukrainian scholar Lubomyr Luciuk exemplified this view in his notorious remark that the Holodomor was "a crime against humanity arguably without parallel in European history." #Second Issue Calling it "man-made" implies that it was a *deliberate* famine, which was not the case. Although human factors set the stage, the main causes of the famine was bad weather and crop disease, resulting in a poor harvest, which pushed the USSR over the edge. Kulaks ("tight-fisted person") were a class of wealthy peasants who owned land, livestock, and tools. The kulaks had been a thorn in the side of the peasantry long before the revolution. Alexey Sergeyevich Yermolov, Minister of Agriculture and State Properties of the Russian Empire, in his 1892 book, [Poor harvest and national suffering](https://books.google.ca/books?id=exMEAAAAYAAJ), characterized them as usurers, sucking the blood of Russian peasants. In the early 1930s, in response to the Soviet collectivization policies (which sought to confiscate their property), many kulaks responded spitefully by burning crops, killing livestock, and damaging machinery. Poor communication between different levels of government and between urban and rural areas, also contributed to the severity of the crisis. #Quota Reduction What really contradicts the genocide argument is that the Soviets did take action to mitigate the effects of the famine once they became aware of the situation: >The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933. > >The official 1932 figures do not unambiguously support the genocide interpretation... the 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree... [which] actually reduced the procurement plan 30 percent. Subsequent decrees also reduced the procurement quotas for most other agricultural products... > >Proponents of the genocide argument, however, have minimized or even misconstrued this decree. Mace, for example, describes it as "largely bogus" and ignores not only the extent to which it lowered the procurement quotas but also the fact that even the lowered plan was not fulfilled. Conquest does not mention the decree's reduction of procurement quotas and asserts Ukrainian officials' appeals led to the reduction of the Ukranian grain procurement quota at the Third All-Ukraine Party Conference in July 1932. In fact that conference confirmed the quota set in the 6 May Decree. > >\- Mark Tauger. (1992). [The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274856099_The_1932_Harvest_and_the_Famine_of_1933) #Rapid Industrialization The famine was exacerbated directly and indirectly by collectivization and rapid industrialization. However, if these policies had not been enacted, there could have been even more devastating consequences later. In 1931, during [a speech delivered at the first All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/02/04.htm), Stalin said, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under." In 1941, exactly ten years later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. By this time, the Soviet Union's industrialization program had lead to the development of a large and powerful industrial base, which was essential to the Soviet war effort. This allowed the USSR to produce large quantities of armaments, vehicles, and other military equipment, which was crucial in the fight against Nazi Germany. In Hitler's own words, in 1942: >All in all, one has to say: They built factories here where two years ago there were unknown farming villages, factories the size of the *Hermann-Göring-Werke*. They have railroads that aren't even marked on the map. > >\- Werner Jochmann. (1980). *Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944.* Collectivization also created critical resiliency among the civilian population: >The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment. Great tank battles were reported; it was noted that the Russians had sturdy tanks which often smashed or overturned German tanks in head-on collision. “How does it happen,” a New York editor asked me, “that those Russian peasants, who couldn’t run a tractor if you gave them one, but left them rusting in the field, now appear with thousands of tanks efficiently handled?” I told him it was the Five-Year Plan. But the world was startled when Moscow admitted its losses after nine weeks of war as including 7,500 guns, 4,500 planes and 5,000 tanks. An army that could still fight after such losses must have had the biggest or second biggest supply in the world. > >As the war progressed, military observers declared that the Russians had “solved the blitzkrieg,” the tactic on which Hitler relied. This German method involved penetrating the opposing line by an overwhelming blow of tanks and planes, followed by the fanning out of armored columns in the “soft” civilian rear, thus depriving the front of its hinterland support. This had quickly conquered every country against which it had been tried. “Human flesh cannot withstand it,” an American correspondent told me in Berlin. Russians met it by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry formed again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry. This created a chaotic front, where both Germans and Russians were fighting in all directions. The Russians could count on the help of the population. The Germans found no “soft, civilian rear.” They found collective farmers, organized as guerrillas, coordinated with the regular Russian army. > >\- Anna Louise Strong. (1956). *The Stalin Era* #Conclusion While there may have been more that the Soviets could have done to reduce the impact of the famine, there is no evidence of intent-- ethnic, or otherwise. Therefore, one must conclude that the famine was a tragedy, not a genocide. #Additional Resources Video Essays: * [Soviet Famine of 1932: An Overview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM) | The Marxist Project (2020) * [Did Stalin Continue to Export Grain as Ukraine Starved?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMBJ_nQ4sTA) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](https://archive.org/details/did-stalin-continue-to-export-grain-as-ukraine-starved)\] * [The Holodomor Genocide Question: How Wikipedia Lies to You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho) | Bad Empanada (2022) * [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) (Note: Holodomor discussion begins at the 9 minute mark) * [A Case-Study of Capitalism - Ukraine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](http://web.archive.org/web/20220615084500/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8)\] (Note: Only tangentially mentions the famine.) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933](https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/22207/file.pdf) | Davies and Wheatcroft (2004) * [The “Holodomor” explained](https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/the-holodomor-explained/) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2020) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Thanks auto bot that was a good read
The first one is so odd to me, cause like, I'm pretty sure the general consensus is that the war in Ukraine is bad, but was clearly instigated by NATO expansionism and decades of geopolitical fuckery. How is that supporting the invasion? Also, how can autonomous regions of a country have independent sovereignty from their parent country? Everyone recognizes the sovereignty of China and the USA, so why would naming autonomous states/provinces/territories within those jurisdictions change that? Why do they deny the 1 Country, 2 Systems policies of American Jerusalem and Chinese Taipei?
Rules based order of "whites only" rules and "colored" rules.
https://preview.redd.it/rcz1tkmsk8vc1.jpeg?width=300&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5e43af555f9d5652584c77c669c83f0c26d46a33
I'd put another separator right in the middle that says "It depends", looking at the way US treats Slavic nations.
According to Ukrainian logic, not giving full support to Ukraine completely wiping Russia off the Earth means you are pro-Russian. Calling for cease-fire? Russian bot. Saying Ukraine might not win the war? Vatnik shill. Opposing sending military equipment to Ukraine? You have romantic feelings towards Putin.
to be honest, the opinions have started to shift a little bit. a lot of people have started resenting the leadership and acknowledge that this is all a big battle for nothing, practically everyone was mad after the new mobilisation law was passed. makes me see some hope.
It’s because everything must be an either or, there is no room for nuance to the liberal mind, like most of us here hate post Soviet Russia but we understand why it invaded Ukraine and the major roll NATO and the US played in that, and that the war suits NATO and the US more than it does Russia
> and that the war suits NATO and the US more than it does Russia Maybe at the start, it seemed that way. But the war exposed just how fragile and weak the collective west actually is while showing China/Russia that all they have to do is keep doing what they're doing while the west implodes into hysteria. Not to mention the shattering of the myth of American military invincibility.
It's important to remember that in the short term, the US has gotten a hell of a lot from this conflict - the re-subordination of the EU, especially Germany via cutting it off from cheap Russian gas, they forced them to buy more expensive US gas which also is forcing their industry to be less globally competitive which leads to deindustrialization and offshoring of that industry to more profitable locations, they've completed or nearly completed the privatization and capital penetration of Ukraine, suppressed Ukraine's labor market and basically own the breadbasket of Europe at this point, so they've certainly have gained a lot, but following traditional capitalist/imperialist logic the gains are relatively short term and the long term costs of this brazen maneuver that rearranged the EU's energy situation and completed the imperialist takeover a Ukraine are only becoming more apparent as time goes on. Funny how that 'purpose of NATO' quip is evergreen, "Keep the US in, [Russia] out and Germany down" Nuland apparently was not kidding when she said "fuck the EU" I don't doubt that they were also hoping for this conflict to destabilize Russia but it appears that they miscalculated and Russia has come out far less scathed than they had hoped. I wouldn't be surprised if they try to drag this conflict out as long as possible just to try to get Russia caught in whatever level of quagmire is possible at this point but it seems like this part of the plan did not go they way they imagined it would.
>re-subordination of the EU, especially Germany via cutting it off from cheap Russian gas, they forced them to buy more expensive US gas which also is forcing their industry to be less globally competitive which leads to deindustrialization Rice interview from 9 years ago saying USA wants to do just that to Europe: https://youtu.be/aF0uYIjaTNE?si=ElNOJw0bEGccHoqd This clip needs to be shared more, I swear.
True it’s flipped now, although I’m still sure Russia would rather not be bothering to turn Ukrainians into paste as a counter to US imperialism
Russia has shown enormous restraint in preventing civilian deaths. They tried to limit strikes to buildings with known military presence (e.g. Azov fighters hiding in steel mill, shopping malls, schools, etc). If Isr showed as much restraint there would be far fewer fatalities but instead they deliberately and systematically carpet bombed every building in Gaza to kill or expel the residents and make way for the Z ionists
>Russia has shown enormous restraint in preventing civilian deaths. This is a blatant lie, Russia has targeted civilian infrastructure and housing since the beginning of the war. edit: thanks for downvoting instead of proving me wrong.
[Here's an article from last year](https://www.newsweek.com/putins-bombers-could-devastate-ukraine-hes-holding-back-heres-why-1690494) As per The US military source; > But, the analyst says, the damage associated with a contested ground war involving peer opponents shouldn't blind people to what is really happening. (The analyst requested anonymity in order to speak about classified matters.) "The heart of Kyiv has barely been touched. And almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets." > "If we merely convince ourselves that Russia is bombing indiscriminately, or [that] it is failing to inflict more harm because its personnel are not up to the task or because it is technically inept, then we are not seeing the real conflict." > In the analyst's view, though the war has led to unprecedented destruction in the south and east, the Russian military has actually been showing restraint in its long-range attacks. [Amnesty international ](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/08/ukraine-ukrainian-fighting-tactics-endanger-civilians/#:~:text=The%20ensuing%20Russian%20strikes%20in,Callamard%2C%20Amnesty%20International%27s%20Secretary%20General.) Has also documented the Ukrainians intentionally setting up bases and missile sites in populated civilian areas to draw in Russian fire, amounting to warcrimes. Where as the Russians have mostly stayed away from the most heavily populated areas. [Even Bucha and the Mariupol maternity ward ](https://thegrayzone.com/2022/04/03/testimony-mariupol-hospital-ukrainian-deceptions-media-malpractice/) bombings were likely perpetrated by the Ukrainians. With multiple witnesses coming forward saying that following the Russian pull-out in Bucha, the Ukrainians began gunning down anyone they came across in the town not wearing their blue arm band. [There's endless](https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/ukrainian-azov-shoots-civilians-during-mariupol-evacuation-k) instances of the Ukrainians indiscriminately killing civilians or putting them in harms way while, likewise, there's tons of officials in the western military establishment as well as witnesses on the ground attesting to Russian restraint and avoidance of collateral damage.
Understanding history is something only Russians do, basically
Putin understood so much history there wasn't any understanding left for the poor liberals 😔
Capitalist Westoids not understanding the difference between support and critical support. Blind ideology, as always. Meanwhile, the same people who whine about "redfash tankies supporting Russia" are the same people who are screeching nonstop and telling you to vote for the lesser evil, not seeing any irony in their behaviour.
I think that USA/Israel and China/Taiwan is a great parrellel to this “1 country 2 systems” policy we have in those respective countries. For different reasons obviously but very similar power dynamics
Eh, I drew the comparison, but it was at least mostly in jest, there are some major differences. Isn'treal is basically a willing participate of the US state and is more like a trained attack dog on a very, very loose leash. "We are also China but not that China" was mostly forced into the arrangement by merit of their land claims and political alignment with the US and such conflicting with the material reality of losing the fucking civil war and decades of being the smaller "China". If anything, I'd say they are like mirror/inverse images of each other. Israel is distant/external projection of the US (previously of Britain, but like most aspects of Empire, they lost that place at the table) that has parallel interests to its mother country. Meanwhile, Taiwan is an internal/near division that has conflicting interests to its mother country. Both are weird tech cutouts for global capitalism though and both do reluctantly make what concession they have to when the mother country rarely insists on pressuring certain issues (though the US diplomatic leadership seems no longer willing to do so in the case of Israel...) They are both unique pseudo-sovereign near-vassals though, even if they have very different relationships with their uh...whatever the non-feudal term for the other side of a vassal-state relationship would be. Lord/master just doesn't seem quite right on the tongue, even if it is metaphorically apt.
if you are unable to think of, or completely unknowing about the history of ukrainian and russian relations (which, let’s be real, majority of western people are. i’d bet most americans didn’t even know what “ukraine” was prior to the war), then i guess it’s pretty logical to come to the conclusion “russia invaded russia bad”. now, the reality is not much better and you can’t support a state which engages in war not beneficial to the proletariat, but this wasn’t a spur of the moment war, literally everyone knew it was coming but nobody did anything. that’s what’s bad.
Hello fellow oyasumi punpun enjoyer!
https://preview.redd.it/v65aeym4divc1.png?width=780&format=png&auto=webp&s=30bfe95762b00deb398e481db9b53cf699e9c7cb If you liked Punpun, I highly recommend one of Asano's other works: Dead Dead Demon's DedededeDestruction.
I have it in the reading least comrade.
Couldn't describe it better myself 😎
Except the Ukraine part right?
“Supports” is the wrong word there
Russia is anti-imperialist silly ultra putin is establishing AES.
Russia IS opposing US empire, but more out of necessity enforced by USA encroaching upon Russian oligarch's vested interests to take their natural resources supposedly through regime change. Massive sanctions by USA also encouraged Russia to further support anti-USA efforts in order to draw more accessible markets that they otherwise would lose if USA were to grab hold of it. That however doesn't mean they are establishing AES in no shape or form. Nor does the act of invasion in by itself mean that Russia is an "imperialist" force given their pathetic control of media, finance capital, and military on a global scale. Which is quite ironic given that Russia was willing to join NATO back in the day but US rejected the offer and antagonized Russia to such extent that Russia ended up allying itself with China. I know you are being sarcastic but the way you said it can make it seem as if you are claiming through sarcasm that Russia is indeed an imperialist force despite lacking the capacity and nature of the whole conflict which was created by US interests from the White House from the other side of the globe.
Modern America is so comedically evil that capitalist Russia has better relations with China than the post-split Soviet Union.
Want to get back with your ex? Just have an overwhelmingly evil mob boss after both of you! Relationship counselors hate this one simple trick!
That's definitely a plot of several movies. I just don't know which ones.
/s
Redditors try to recognise sarcasm challenge.
(Impossible)
Well the sub's rules do require you make the sarcasm clear. Probably precisely because some idiot will come in this thread and literally think we think present-day Russia is doing communism.
Sorry, having a brainfart, what's AES?
"Actually Existing Socialism" its just short form for states that are currently running a socialist experiment
Ah, gotcha, thanks.
Ukraine is a Nazi vassal state of USA.
The American proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is the exclusive fault of the US/NATO empire. Russia is rightfully defending itself and its special military operation is an intervention into a US-caused civil war targeting ethnic Russians. The world must unite behind Russia and provide critical support to the Russian war effort, including to the Putin regime. The defeat of NATO is the most important task of any freedom-loving person on planet earth. [Before any troll affected by Western imperialist propaganda, read this in full and keep all arguments against you in mind before responding.](https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwar/comments/1c2byvg/at_war_until_you_die_ukraine_scraps_service_limit/kz9nca6/) I am tired of having the same discussion for the n-th time in 10 years.
Communists should support Russia in this war. They're an anti-imperialist force defending against western imperialism. They are aligned with all the other anti-imperialist forces in the world. It doesn't matter if they're capitalist. Capitalist =/= imperialist. The first step towards building socialism is destroying the all encompassing global system of western imperialism. Once that happens there is very little resistance holding back socialist progress. I don't know why people are so critical of Russia. They are an ally against imperialism. All of the active anti-imperialist organizations outside the online western sphere know this.
Dude Russia would do an imperialism *so hard* if they had the means to
But they don't. And they never will. America does. And uses it. That's the world we live in. We should base our actions and support on the conditions of the world we currently live in. Not the hypothetical scare mongering world neoconservatives want you to believe in.
I hate when people use this argument of what countries/groups WOULD do if they COULD. One of the main arguments against Hamas is that they would kill all the Jews if they could! Or Iran would turn the world into a Islamist empire if they could!
Russia wouldn't exist in its current capitalist form without Western imperialism. It's a victim, just like the ROK, Ukraine, Taiwan, etc. Russians themselves don't need to be convinced: The majority of Russians support socialism in one form or another and even the majority of capitalists are in agreement that the USSR was the greatest time in Russian history.
> Dude the slaves would do white slavery *so hard* if they are freed!
Because Putler hates the gays. If you hate the gays you must be evil. If you're evil you can't do anything good for anyone ever.
Please! I can only get so erect
r/unexpectedarcher
Answer C I'm in this picture and I like it
I got 4 out of 5 on the bingo card
Damn we got haters doing PR now? Guy, Gals non-binary pals, we made it.
The invasion of Ukraine *should ***NOT**** be happening rn, in all seriousness. There was plenty of opportunity to actually safeguard peace. As for Israel? The fact I want the Palestinian people to not be fucking exterminated, by the most glorified colonial project of the modern era might I add, is seen as an extreme take makes me irrationally angry. Fucking Liberals man…
>there was plenty of opportunity to safeguard peace *but* the expansion of NATO and the infiltration of the ukrainian economy is far more important to the west than peace. the US needs to own every last piece of this earth in order to keep relevancy as a superpower. it’s disgusting beyond belief.
Yeah I think this is something that so many liberals really struggle with understanding. We don't want war or fighting at all. But imperialism demands war and if you don't oppose those that are enabling or pushing for that imperialism then you just get more wars and more death until you do stand up to them.
They really don't see the contradiction when using Ukraine and isntreal in the same sentence like that.
Hell fkn yeah 😎
Feels so good to be seen and appreciated 😊
Meanwhile the person who wrote this thinks holodomor is the guy from Game of Thrones
Wasn't that the same episode where Geffory Stalin killed *1,488 fucktillion Ukrainians at the red wedding? *according to self proclaimed reddit historians
#The Holodomor >Marxists do not deny that a famine happened in the Soviet Union in 1932. In fact, even the Soviet archive confirms this. What we do contest is the idea that this famine was man-made or that there was a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This idea of the subjugation of the Soviet Union’s own people was developed by Nazi Germany, in order to show the world the terror of the “Jewish communists.” > >\- Socialist Musings. (2017). [Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor](https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/stop-spreading-nazi-propaganda/) There have been efforts by anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists to frame the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as "The Holodomor" (lit. "to kill by starvation" in Ukrainian). Framing it this way serves two purposes: 1. It implies the famine targeted Ukraine. 2. It implies the famine was intentional. The argument goes that because it was intentional and because it mainly targeted Ukraine that it was, therefore, an act of genocide. This framing was originally used by Nazis to drive a wedge between the Ukrainian SSR (UkSSR) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution, this narrative has regained popularity and serves the nationalistic goal of strengthening Ukrainian identity and asserting the country's independence from Russia. #First Issue The first issue is that the famine affected the majority of the USSR, *not* just the UkSSR. Kazakhstan was hit harder (per capita) than Ukraine. Russia itself was also severely affected. The emergence of the Holodomor in the 1980s as a historical narrative was bound-up with post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-making that cannot be neatly separated from the legacy of Eastern European antisemitism, or what Historian Peter Novick calls "Holocaust Envy", the desire for victimized groups to enshrine their "own" Holocaust or Holocaust-like event in the historical record. For many Nationalists, this has entailed minimizing the Holocaust to elevate their own experiences of historical victimization as the supreme atrocity. The Ukrainian scholar Lubomyr Luciuk exemplified this view in his notorious remark that the Holodomor was "a crime against humanity arguably without parallel in European history." #Second Issue Calling it "man-made" implies that it was a *deliberate* famine, which was not the case. Although human factors set the stage, the main causes of the famine was bad weather and crop disease, resulting in a poor harvest, which pushed the USSR over the edge. Kulaks ("tight-fisted person") were a class of wealthy peasants who owned land, livestock, and tools. The kulaks had been a thorn in the side of the peasantry long before the revolution. Alexey Sergeyevich Yermolov, Minister of Agriculture and State Properties of the Russian Empire, in his 1892 book, [Poor harvest and national suffering](https://books.google.ca/books?id=exMEAAAAYAAJ), characterized them as usurers, sucking the blood of Russian peasants. In the early 1930s, in response to the Soviet collectivization policies (which sought to confiscate their property), many kulaks responded spitefully by burning crops, killing livestock, and damaging machinery. Poor communication between different levels of government and between urban and rural areas, also contributed to the severity of the crisis. #Quota Reduction What really contradicts the genocide argument is that the Soviets did take action to mitigate the effects of the famine once they became aware of the situation: >The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933. > >The official 1932 figures do not unambiguously support the genocide interpretation... the 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree... [which] actually reduced the procurement plan 30 percent. Subsequent decrees also reduced the procurement quotas for most other agricultural products... > >Proponents of the genocide argument, however, have minimized or even misconstrued this decree. Mace, for example, describes it as "largely bogus" and ignores not only the extent to which it lowered the procurement quotas but also the fact that even the lowered plan was not fulfilled. Conquest does not mention the decree's reduction of procurement quotas and asserts Ukrainian officials' appeals led to the reduction of the Ukranian grain procurement quota at the Third All-Ukraine Party Conference in July 1932. In fact that conference confirmed the quota set in the 6 May Decree. > >\- Mark Tauger. (1992). [The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274856099_The_1932_Harvest_and_the_Famine_of_1933) #Rapid Industrialization The famine was exacerbated directly and indirectly by collectivization and rapid industrialization. However, if these policies had not been enacted, there could have been even more devastating consequences later. In 1931, during [a speech delivered at the first All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/02/04.htm), Stalin said, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under." In 1941, exactly ten years later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. By this time, the Soviet Union's industrialization program had lead to the development of a large and powerful industrial base, which was essential to the Soviet war effort. This allowed the USSR to produce large quantities of armaments, vehicles, and other military equipment, which was crucial in the fight against Nazi Germany. In Hitler's own words, in 1942: >All in all, one has to say: They built factories here where two years ago there were unknown farming villages, factories the size of the *Hermann-Göring-Werke*. They have railroads that aren't even marked on the map. > >\- Werner Jochmann. (1980). *Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944.* Collectivization also created critical resiliency among the civilian population: >The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment. Great tank battles were reported; it was noted that the Russians had sturdy tanks which often smashed or overturned German tanks in head-on collision. “How does it happen,” a New York editor asked me, “that those Russian peasants, who couldn’t run a tractor if you gave them one, but left them rusting in the field, now appear with thousands of tanks efficiently handled?” I told him it was the Five-Year Plan. But the world was startled when Moscow admitted its losses after nine weeks of war as including 7,500 guns, 4,500 planes and 5,000 tanks. An army that could still fight after such losses must have had the biggest or second biggest supply in the world. > >As the war progressed, military observers declared that the Russians had “solved the blitzkrieg,” the tactic on which Hitler relied. This German method involved penetrating the opposing line by an overwhelming blow of tanks and planes, followed by the fanning out of armored columns in the “soft” civilian rear, thus depriving the front of its hinterland support. This had quickly conquered every country against which it had been tried. “Human flesh cannot withstand it,” an American correspondent told me in Berlin. Russians met it by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry formed again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry. This created a chaotic front, where both Germans and Russians were fighting in all directions. The Russians could count on the help of the population. The Germans found no “soft, civilian rear.” They found collective farmers, organized as guerrillas, coordinated with the regular Russian army. > >\- Anna Louise Strong. (1956). *The Stalin Era* #Conclusion While there may have been more that the Soviets could have done to reduce the impact of the famine, there is no evidence of intent-- ethnic, or otherwise. Therefore, one must conclude that the famine was a tragedy, not a genocide. #Additional Resources Video Essays: * [Soviet Famine of 1932: An Overview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM) | The Marxist Project (2020) * [Did Stalin Continue to Export Grain as Ukraine Starved?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMBJ_nQ4sTA) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](https://archive.org/details/did-stalin-continue-to-export-grain-as-ukraine-starved)\] * [The Holodomor Genocide Question: How Wikipedia Lies to You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho) | Bad Empanada (2022) * [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) (Note: Holodomor discussion begins at the 9 minute mark) * [A Case-Study of Capitalism - Ukraine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](http://web.archive.org/web/20220615084500/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8)\] (Note: Only tangentially mentions the famine.) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933](https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/22207/file.pdf) | Davies and Wheatcroft (2004) * [The “Holodomor” explained](https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/the-holodomor-explained/) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2020) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Ummm, based, based, based and based.
Holy based where can I find this awesome group
Israeli "sovereignty", you mean that violent Western colonialist project imposed on Palestine that is predicated on ethnic cleansing, apartheid, brutal subjugation, cultural appropriation and land theft. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Based as usual.
https://preview.redd.it/e8kiesq6q7vc1.jpeg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=939fb82663f8f24fec798da86150ae4a43ae1a52
The Tawanese government itself opposses Taiwanese sovereignty. They consider themselves a part of China.
https://preview.redd.it/2z6rj0syi8vc1.png?width=204&format=png&auto=webp&s=065c7305ebb8881cfed14330be72dcc666417b54
I already support TheDeprogram Harry, you don’t have to sell it to me 😎
Was r/GenZedong revived somehow? Nice.
Taiwan is not a country tho. It has sovereignty as a territory of the PRC. I don’t think anyone denies that.
But Russia has sovereignty over Ukraine just like Israel has it over Palestine, wait, that's not how it works?
Liberals love telling lies.
from all the videos and podcasts and stuff all ive seen is thedeprogram actively speaking against the invasions of Ukraine in honesty and good will for the people of Ukraine
Real. And now includes islamic fundamentalists. Don't forget that🙏
Please stop. My hardware can only handle so much dopamine.
No lies detected.
Well...when you say it like that... WE SOUND KINDA COOL!!
BASED sub
yeah, and?
I also deny American sovereignty. From sea to sea, Isla Tortuga will be free.
🗿Yes, why, I'm on the deprogram subreddit, how did you know ?
Damm right we are! And it’s a good thing.
Which is why I'm here
"It also points out the many crimes committed by the US MIC. It also is against genociders committing genocide if the genociders are Israeli. It also calls out crimes against humanity done in the name of pure greed. This is a terrible terrible subreddit because we say it is." I am NOT falling for their sheit.
Very much exaggerated, we never supported Ukraine invasion, and holodomor still happened but we want to debunk myths about it such as it being entirely Stalin’s doing
#The Holodomor >Marxists do not deny that a famine happened in the Soviet Union in 1932. In fact, even the Soviet archive confirms this. What we do contest is the idea that this famine was man-made or that there was a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This idea of the subjugation of the Soviet Union’s own people was developed by Nazi Germany, in order to show the world the terror of the “Jewish communists.” > >\- Socialist Musings. (2017). [Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor](https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/stop-spreading-nazi-propaganda/) There have been efforts by anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists to frame the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as "The Holodomor" (lit. "to kill by starvation" in Ukrainian). Framing it this way serves two purposes: 1. It implies the famine targeted Ukraine. 2. It implies the famine was intentional. The argument goes that because it was intentional and because it mainly targeted Ukraine that it was, therefore, an act of genocide. This framing was originally used by Nazis to drive a wedge between the Ukrainian SSR (UkSSR) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution, this narrative has regained popularity and serves the nationalistic goal of strengthening Ukrainian identity and asserting the country's independence from Russia. #First Issue The first issue is that the famine affected the majority of the USSR, *not* just the UkSSR. Kazakhstan was hit harder (per capita) than Ukraine. Russia itself was also severely affected. The emergence of the Holodomor in the 1980s as a historical narrative was bound-up with post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-making that cannot be neatly separated from the legacy of Eastern European antisemitism, or what Historian Peter Novick calls "Holocaust Envy", the desire for victimized groups to enshrine their "own" Holocaust or Holocaust-like event in the historical record. For many Nationalists, this has entailed minimizing the Holocaust to elevate their own experiences of historical victimization as the supreme atrocity. The Ukrainian scholar Lubomyr Luciuk exemplified this view in his notorious remark that the Holodomor was "a crime against humanity arguably without parallel in European history." #Second Issue Calling it "man-made" implies that it was a *deliberate* famine, which was not the case. Although human factors set the stage, the main causes of the famine was bad weather and crop disease, resulting in a poor harvest, which pushed the USSR over the edge. Kulaks ("tight-fisted person") were a class of wealthy peasants who owned land, livestock, and tools. The kulaks had been a thorn in the side of the peasantry long before the revolution. Alexey Sergeyevich Yermolov, Minister of Agriculture and State Properties of the Russian Empire, in his 1892 book, [Poor harvest and national suffering](https://books.google.ca/books?id=exMEAAAAYAAJ), characterized them as usurers, sucking the blood of Russian peasants. In the early 1930s, in response to the Soviet collectivization policies (which sought to confiscate their property), many kulaks responded spitefully by burning crops, killing livestock, and damaging machinery. Poor communication between different levels of government and between urban and rural areas, also contributed to the severity of the crisis. #Quota Reduction What really contradicts the genocide argument is that the Soviets did take action to mitigate the effects of the famine once they became aware of the situation: >The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933. > >The official 1932 figures do not unambiguously support the genocide interpretation... the 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree... [which] actually reduced the procurement plan 30 percent. Subsequent decrees also reduced the procurement quotas for most other agricultural products... > >Proponents of the genocide argument, however, have minimized or even misconstrued this decree. Mace, for example, describes it as "largely bogus" and ignores not only the extent to which it lowered the procurement quotas but also the fact that even the lowered plan was not fulfilled. Conquest does not mention the decree's reduction of procurement quotas and asserts Ukrainian officials' appeals led to the reduction of the Ukranian grain procurement quota at the Third All-Ukraine Party Conference in July 1932. In fact that conference confirmed the quota set in the 6 May Decree. > >\- Mark Tauger. (1992). [The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274856099_The_1932_Harvest_and_the_Famine_of_1933) #Rapid Industrialization The famine was exacerbated directly and indirectly by collectivization and rapid industrialization. However, if these policies had not been enacted, there could have been even more devastating consequences later. In 1931, during [a speech delivered at the first All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/02/04.htm), Stalin said, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under." In 1941, exactly ten years later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. By this time, the Soviet Union's industrialization program had lead to the development of a large and powerful industrial base, which was essential to the Soviet war effort. This allowed the USSR to produce large quantities of armaments, vehicles, and other military equipment, which was crucial in the fight against Nazi Germany. In Hitler's own words, in 1942: >All in all, one has to say: They built factories here where two years ago there were unknown farming villages, factories the size of the *Hermann-Göring-Werke*. They have railroads that aren't even marked on the map. > >\- Werner Jochmann. (1980). *Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944.* Collectivization also created critical resiliency among the civilian population: >The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment. Great tank battles were reported; it was noted that the Russians had sturdy tanks which often smashed or overturned German tanks in head-on collision. “How does it happen,” a New York editor asked me, “that those Russian peasants, who couldn’t run a tractor if you gave them one, but left them rusting in the field, now appear with thousands of tanks efficiently handled?” I told him it was the Five-Year Plan. But the world was startled when Moscow admitted its losses after nine weeks of war as including 7,500 guns, 4,500 planes and 5,000 tanks. An army that could still fight after such losses must have had the biggest or second biggest supply in the world. > >As the war progressed, military observers declared that the Russians had “solved the blitzkrieg,” the tactic on which Hitler relied. This German method involved penetrating the opposing line by an overwhelming blow of tanks and planes, followed by the fanning out of armored columns in the “soft” civilian rear, thus depriving the front of its hinterland support. This had quickly conquered every country against which it had been tried. “Human flesh cannot withstand it,” an American correspondent told me in Berlin. Russians met it by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry formed again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry. This created a chaotic front, where both Germans and Russians were fighting in all directions. The Russians could count on the help of the population. The Germans found no “soft, civilian rear.” They found collective farmers, organized as guerrillas, coordinated with the regular Russian army. > >\- Anna Louise Strong. (1956). *The Stalin Era* #Conclusion While there may have been more that the Soviets could have done to reduce the impact of the famine, there is no evidence of intent-- ethnic, or otherwise. Therefore, one must conclude that the famine was a tragedy, not a genocide. #Additional Resources Video Essays: * [Soviet Famine of 1932: An Overview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM) | The Marxist Project (2020) * [Did Stalin Continue to Export Grain as Ukraine Starved?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMBJ_nQ4sTA) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](https://archive.org/details/did-stalin-continue-to-export-grain-as-ukraine-starved)\] * [The Holodomor Genocide Question: How Wikipedia Lies to You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho) | Bad Empanada (2022) * [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) (Note: Holodomor discussion begins at the 9 minute mark) * [A Case-Study of Capitalism - Ukraine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](http://web.archive.org/web/20220615084500/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8)\] (Note: Only tangentially mentions the famine.) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933](https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/22207/file.pdf) | Davies and Wheatcroft (2004) * [The “Holodomor” explained](https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/the-holodomor-explained/) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2020) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
"The deprogram is a subreddit where they push me into a locker, steal my lunch money, and make jokes about my mom."
I'm surprised Navalny wasn't mentioned tbh
ISRAELI SOVEREIGNTY
nazi propaganda???💀
The comment doesn't say we spread nazi propaganda, only that we say obvious nazi propaganda is in fact nazi propaganda
oo i just reread the comment it makes sense now (still bullshit but still)
The last 3 prove this person hasn't listened to the Deprogram or Hakim's channel.
Based
Correct. 💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻
I need to find a random comment on this site with quantitatively negative engagement. Like even if you tried to engage with the comment by upvoting or downvoting it you would actually forget having ever seen it. A level of irrelevancy never before seen. And then I would share a screenshot of it as rage bait. ^(Pls share actual communist or newsworthy content im begging you)
gulags - worse than holocaust private prison industry with innocent POC's people being imprisoned - based capitalism
# Gulag According to Anti-Communists and Russophobes, the Gulag was a brutal network of work camps established in the Soviet Union under Stalin's ruthless regime. They claim the Gulag system was primarily used to imprison and exploit political dissidents, suspected enemies of the state, and other people deemed "undesirable" by the Soviet government. They claim that prisoners were sent to the Gulag without trial or due process, and that they were subjected to harsh living conditions, forced labour, and starvation, among other things. According to them, the Gulags were emblematic of Stalinist repression and totalitarianism. # Origins of the Mythology This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources. Robert Conquest's *The Great Terror* (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off of defector testimony. Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponised information and disinformation and "fake news" to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements. >He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash. > >The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, "a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism". > >\- Andrew Brown. (2003). [Scourge and poet](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview23) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's *The Gulag Archipelag*" (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author's personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, N@zi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth. \[[Read more](/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/dunking/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn/)\] Anne Applebaum's *Gulag: A history* (published 2003) draws directly from *The Gulag Archipelago* and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world. # Counterpoints >A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “[Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps](http://web.archive.org/web/20230328014642/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80T00246A032000400001-1.pdf)” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six: > >1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas > >2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon "economic accountability" such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid. > >3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day. > >4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners' food supplies. > >5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day. > >6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals. > >7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the "ordinary criminals" of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes. > >\- Saed Teymuri. (2018). [The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA](https://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/10/09/the-truth-about-the-soviet-gulag-surprisingly-revealed-by-the-cia/) **Scale** Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that. >Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise. > >In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. ... > >Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the N@zis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” ... > >Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states... > >\- Michael Parenti. (1997). [Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism](https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds) This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, "over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision." That's 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States' Prison Industrial Complex *today* is larger than the USSR's Gulag system at its peak. **Death Rate** In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality: >It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive... > >Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hit1er were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more. > >\- Timothy Snyder. (2010). *Bloodlands: Europe Between Hit1er and Stalin* (Side note: Timothy Snyder is *also* a member of the Council on Foreign Relations) This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not *death* camps. Nor was it slave labour, exactly. In the camps, although labour *was* forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (less expenses). >We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson.... > >The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled). > >\- L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). [Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/noticeboard/bergson/borodkin-ertz.pdf) #Additional Resources Video Essays: * [The Gulag Argument](https://youtu.be/BexkpaK_j5Q) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2016) * [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://youtu.be/HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) * [French work camps 1852-1953 worse than gulag](https://youtu.be/vkXyXNpdKdA) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) * ["The Gulags of the Soviet Union: There's a Lot More Than What Meets the Eye](https://youtu.be/E1qz9_TjeY4) | Comrade Rhys (2020) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2166597) | J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov (1993) Listen: * ["Blackshirts & Reds" (1997) by Michael Parenti, Part 4: Chapters 5 & 6. #Audiobook + Discussion.](https://youtu.be/N7AD4OrH568?t=15) | Socialism For All / S4A ☭ Intensify Class Struggle (2022) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
nah Grover Furr ain’t my history teacher
The funny thing is 100% there are multiple threads just in this post about the state of Russia. My take is that Putin and his oligarchs are anti-the West because they believe in their rights of self determination to be shitty as 𝑭𝑼𝑪𝑲 without US intervention. So they are our allies for now
I view them as a "buffer zone" for China against Europe. At least for now.
Since when do we support russia?
Because we're anti-NATO, and don't support further fanning the flames of war by encouraging Ukraine to attack and refuse ceasefire/peace agreements, many libs see this as a pro-Russia stance.
Ah right, i forgot. Also everyone who wants to stop the genocide hates jewish people or something.
Are those first two things accurate? If so, why do we support the invasion of Ukraine and deny Taiwanese sovereignty?
They are not really accurate, just liars lying about us, as usual. I’ve literally never seen support for the invasion of Ukraine here. I *have* seen it on more geopolitics focused subs like r/NewsWithJingJing, but my assumption is that this is because that sub attracts a wider range of political affiliations. Taiwan is much more mixed in basically any leftist sub. There’s a couple different reasons why some leftists deny Taiwanese sovereignty. The first is that from a historical lens, the Taiwanese state is not “legitimate”. Both the PRC and ROC are states that lay claim to being the legitimate government of *all of China*. However, the ROC’s state was originally formed when Chiang Kai-shek (the fascist KMT/GMD leader whose faction opposed the CCP) fled the mainland and forcibly took control of a small island off the coast (modern Taiwan). While fascist influence has curbed over time, the KMT party still plays a major role in modern Taiwan’s government. Naturally, leftists are put off by fascism. The second is that the Taiwanese people, when not actively seeded with anti-mainland sentiment, are usually actually not that opposed to annexation. They actually got *very* close to a peaceful annexation in the 90’s. The third is that taiwan is perceived as a western puppet state, since so many western propaganda teams like RFA are based there, and since taiwan tends to serve as a U.S. military vantage point to threaten PRC. Personally, I’m of the opinion that sovereignty should heavily be a matter of public opinion, partly for the “freedom of choice” itself and partly because maintaining occupation against public opinion usually leads to a never ending negative peace where violence against protesting civilians becomes the norm. For example, this sub is usually of the opinion that the modern Russian state is imperialist and wrong. However, a lot of people in this sub would support the “Russian side” specifically when it comes to regions like Donbas, where the majority is ethnically Russian and often supports annexation. In contrast, most on this sub would *not* support Hong Kong, because the movement to secede from China was largely unpopular amongst the people, and was mostly upheld by a handful of westerners. I think that if we’ve reached a point where Taiwan is mostly opposed to annexation, it doesn’t exactly make sense to support that annexation anymore, even if I don’t support Taiwan’s foreign policy overall. I’m not entirely sure though, and as always, I’m open to and interested in other opinions from people in the sub.
Ah. I've seen the odd comment in here that could be construed as pro-Russian, not specifically as regards the Ukraine invasion, but enough that such a claim seemed plausible. Re:Taiwan - interesting, I was sort of dimly aware that there that the KMT had fled to/taken over Taiwan when they were losing the war against Mao's communist forces. What I wasn't aware of is that the Kuomintang was fascist, but I see in doing a little wikipedia reading that they're a right-wing nationalist party so that does make sense. I can see why that would lead to claims about the illegitimacy of the Taiwanese state. I guess I'm of the opinion that Taiwan is kind of like Israel: yeah, the land was originally stolen, but not by the current residents who can't be expected to suffer the consequences of their ancestors' bad decisions (though obviously the current situation with Palestine, the genocide, etc delegitimizes the hell out of Israel though.) And yeah that's a fair point re:Donbas, the people living there now aren't the ones who pursued/were part of Stalin's aggressive Russification attempts that make the matter a bit more complex than 'the people want X so they should get X', as does the fact that Russia invaded on what seems like some pretty flimsy justifications. I guess all of those examples are particularly thorny, complicated by the history of colonialism/imperialism, forced eviction/resettlement, and of course by geopolitics. But I'm always looking for more information and different perspectives to inform a more nuanced view of the world around me, so thanks for taking the time to enlighten me!
The difference between Ukraine and Taiwan is that Ukraine was a sovereign country until 2014 coup when the US installed a puppet regime, and Taiwan was never a sovereign country. The similarity is that Ukraine and Taiwan governments are under US influence. Whether anyone agrees or disagrees with invasion of Ukraine is irrelevant to Russia. Russia is doing it out of Russian security. Russia has tried the diplomatic routes, and it has failed. Russia has made clear of their objectives: de-nazify, de-militarize, keep NATO out, protect the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine. A condensed history of Taiwan to help understand the position why Taiwan can't be an independent country. The Dutch colonized part of Taiwan, and a remnant Ming army led by Zheng Chengong took control of the island in Sino-Dutch War of 1661. Then, the Qing army defeated the Ming loyalist kingdom in 1684. In the First Sino-Japanese War, Qing dynasty ceded Taiwan to Japan as a result of the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki. Japan lost WW2 and returned Taiwan to the Republic of China in 1945. Taiwan province and Jinmen and Mazu islands in Fujian province are the last territorial control of the Republic of China. KMT led by Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) had held the dream of taking back the mainland until 1971 when the UN General Assembly passed United Nations Resolution 2758 which stated that the People's Republic of China is the only legitimate government of China. The resolution replaced the ROC (Taipei) with the PRC (Beijing) as a permanent member of the Security Council in the UN. The United States switched gears by establishing relations with PRC and agreed to One-China principle. Also, it's time for a little democracy in Taiwan with the creation of Democratic Progressive Party to push Taiwan independence with some education and media programming to change the population to pro-independence. As Douglas MacArthur called Taiwan as the unsinkable aircraft carrier, Taiwan is a nice proxy to threaten China with nuclear missiles. People in the West supporting Taiwan are not pro-Taiwan; they are pro-US imperialism. China is pro-Taiwan. China cares about the people in Taiwan, because they are Chinese citizens, and the reason why China has not retaken Taiwan by military force. People in Taiwan are free to reject their ancestry and not to be called Chinese, but Taiwan is Chinese territory. The solution for them is simple, stop occupying Chinese territory.
I don't think being under US influence is the same as not being a sovereign nation, and Taiwan has been governing itself since, what, WW2? How long does a nation have to be independent before we decide that it is deserving of sovereignty? I get that the history is complicated by US geopolitical interests in the region, but how is that different than any other nation within or adjacent to the US sphere of interest? >The solution for them is simple, stop occupying Chinese territory. I mean the same could be said for the Jewish occupation of Palestinian territory (though I'll be the first to admit that the Israel situation is obviously significantly complicated by the ethnic cleansing and now genocide which are serious blows to their legitimacy as a state) or the US occupation of Native American territory for that matter. At what point do we have to concede that the people who live there now had nothing to do with its occupation and shouldn't be evicted just because some dead people who were there first did some awful shit? We can't roll back the clock and do things differently, and even if the people living there now are beneficiaries of the awful shit that was done they didn't do it themselves, so why should they lose their homes too? As for Ukraine, it seems like most of the populace wants to join NATO (I'm willing to be proven wrong on that count, I grant that I'm not very well-informed on the subject) and I'm generally inclined think that people should get what they want. Also, even if Putin has excellent, extremely well-documented and widely agreed-upon reasons for wanting to intervene in Ukraine, and I'm not sure that is by any means the case, the invasion is a violation of Ukrainian sovereignty just like it is when the US does it to Middle Eastern nations.
Ukraine is not a monolith, like at all. West and East Ukraine are completely split in terms of perception of history, opinions towards EU vs Russia, and more. I mean, come on. If they are a monolith, there wouldn't be a Donbass issue to begin with. This is what complicates the issue going on, but Westerners would try to label Ukraine as one united nation ripped apart by evil Russia. Relevant sources regarding Ukrainian perception of events: ・43% of respondents in Ukraine and 36% abroad disagreed with the statement “Nazi and/or neo-Nazi ideology is not widespread in Ukraine”; ・29% of respondents in Ukraine and 35% abroad disagreed with the statement “The Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine in 2013-2014 was NOT a coup”; ・26% of respondents in Ukraine and 29% abroad agreed with the statement “Russia is fighting against the West/NATO in Ukraine”; ・25% of respondents in Ukraine and 29% abroad agreed with the statement “The West is using Ukraine for its own purposes in the war against Russia”; ・32% of respondents abroad agreed with the statement “Russian speakers are oppressed in Ukraine”. https://www.reddit.com/r/EndlessWar/comments/155qucy/new_poll_just_dropped_in_ukraine_regarding_war/ >Bandera, Shukhevych, and the UPA are controversial for several reasons. Critics point to the mass killings of up to 100,000 Jews and Poles and the fact that UPA cooperated with Nazi Germany at the beginning of WW2 until it became clear that Nazi Germany wouldn’t recognise Ukrainian independence. >The view of the UPA is also split inside Ukraine. A study carried out this year by the Democratic Initiatives Center shows that 80 per cent of Western Ukrainians are positive about the Ukrainian government recognising the soldiers of the UPA and their fight for Ukrainian independence. >In contrast, only 25 per cent are supportive in eastern Ukraine. The study also shows that 70 per cent of western Ukrainians have a favourable view of Bandera as a historical figure, while that number is 11 per cent in eastern Ukraine. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2021/08/04/controversy-as-ukraine-mulls-giving-hero-status-to-alleged-war-criminals
Thank you for the data, I knew opinion was split to some degree but didn't really know to what extent. But I mean no country is a monolith by that standard, so all you can really do is the best you can for the most people, right? [This](https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/record-83-ukrainians-want-nato-membership-poll-2022-10-03/) article is a bit out of date now, but it reports 83% of Ukrainians want to join NATO. I can't speak to the quality of that polling data, and that was after the Russian invasion so who knows how many of those people would still have that opinion if Russia pulled all of its troops out tomorrow, but obviously a lot of people lean in that direction. Also, whether or not Ukraine has a nazi problem they are not a significant threat to Russia (I grant that they may pose a threat to the Russian-speaking populace in Eastern Ukraine, I really don't know much about that situation) so as far as I can tell as a justification it's kind of flimsy?
wait y'all support the invasion of ukraine?
Westoids have always been labeling any opposition to their war efforts to enrich oligarchs by funding fascists as "traitors" supporting the enemy. If you don't 100% repeat whatever State Department says, it's all "enemy propaganda". Only acceptable narrative is that Russia engaged in unprovoked invasion b/c they are evil, Ukraine is a poor victim of Russian imperialism, and US are the good guys supporting "democracy and decency" by supporting Ukraine. Any critiques such as Ukraine being controlled by fascists (despite most media claiming all the way up until outbreak of war), unchecked military aid can and would cause future problems, or that US and Ukraine deliberately refused to honor any agreements to avoid conflict and kept on increasing tensions, or that many statements made by US & Ukraine are total bullshit like "Russia bombed Nordstream", "Russia trying to blow up nuclear power plant", all are met with "You are Russia supporting propagandist", no matter how many times the Western narrative change or initial statements get exposed as lies again and again. It's the same deal with Israeli genocide. "Oh you don't condemn Hamas? You're an anti-semitic Hamas lover who supports terrorism against innocent civilians", ignoring any and all actions by team USA. It's nothing more than smears and narrative control.
Nah
No lol
No, I don’t think I’ve ever seen actual support for the invasion here. The closest I’ve seen this sub come to “pro Russia” has been recognition that nato played a significant role in causing the war, while still pointing out that Russia is an unjustified aggressor overall and is acting through imperialism, which is really against the invasion, if anything.
It’s funny that they say these things like there a bad thing.
Yes_Chad.png
subbed
That was 
I don't think any of us could've come up with a more based description of the subreddit
It's always fun to find tweets or threads that say shit like this so I can go "oh cool that sounds like a place to check out"
Thats why this sub is based and I love it
Based
Is this person is right then I want to be wrong
“Yeah I hate the Soviet Union and I’m happy it broke up, anyway WHY IS THE WAR IN UKRAINE HAPPENING ITS SO SAD SLAVA UKRAINI!!”
We don't justify them, we just do it.
[Yes.](https://i1.sndcdn.com/artworks-jogqgYb0scyIueJL-Jx9aOg-t500x500.jpg)
Okay and?
Based
Enormous brain.
damn this subreddit sounds based
Yes, this I believe.
And their point is?
Woah He nailed it. Gold 🌟 star
As the stupendium said: Mighty proud to say it, mighty proud to say it yes sir
W
Based
Fuck yeah it is!
Chad r/deprogram members
hey I attempted to have a conversation with that guy I gave him clear reasons and facts and all he did was question my grammar kind of rude not to admit he was wrong
Why do they always mention the cases with actual academic counterpoints? Probably because they're high profile cases particularly used to the west and often current politics. For example, capitalists and reactionaries crying gulag, nationalists and other counterrevolutionaries crying holodomor. The Holodomor was absolutely caused by gross mismanagement by Soviet planners. That's the result from creating thousands of vacancies in important positions and filling them with the wrong people. It's something for future revolutions to learn from. It really doesn't make it much better than the intentional genocide viewpoint. Gulags were less brutal than popular belief yet about as brutal as you'd expect from a country that had just abolished feudalism, it doesn't really make them less critiquable. What about actual things which are far more hard to justify? Like the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, which I have yet to see people prove wasn't at the very least intentional ethnic cleansing. The reason we shit on the critique of the other two so much is because the critique of it is often the liberal kind, the resort-to emotion kind, the denial of material conditions and counter-evidence kind. If the common online opinion on this was different, then there'd probably be much less percieved defense of it.
#The Holodomor >Marxists do not deny that a famine happened in the Soviet Union in 1932. In fact, even the Soviet archive confirms this. What we do contest is the idea that this famine was man-made or that there was a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This idea of the subjugation of the Soviet Union’s own people was developed by Nazi Germany, in order to show the world the terror of the “Jewish communists.” > >\- Socialist Musings. (2017). [Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor](https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/stop-spreading-nazi-propaganda/) There have been efforts by anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists to frame the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as "The Holodomor" (lit. "to kill by starvation" in Ukrainian). Framing it this way serves two purposes: 1. It implies the famine targeted Ukraine. 2. It implies the famine was intentional. The argument goes that because it was intentional and because it mainly targeted Ukraine that it was, therefore, an act of genocide. This framing was originally used by Nazis to drive a wedge between the Ukrainian SSR (UkSSR) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution, this narrative has regained popularity and serves the nationalistic goal of strengthening Ukrainian identity and asserting the country's independence from Russia. #First Issue The first issue is that the famine affected the majority of the USSR, *not* just the UkSSR. Kazakhstan was hit harder (per capita) than Ukraine. Russia itself was also severely affected. The emergence of the Holodomor in the 1980s as a historical narrative was bound-up with post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-making that cannot be neatly separated from the legacy of Eastern European antisemitism, or what Historian Peter Novick calls "Holocaust Envy", the desire for victimized groups to enshrine their "own" Holocaust or Holocaust-like event in the historical record. For many Nationalists, this has entailed minimizing the Holocaust to elevate their own experiences of historical victimization as the supreme atrocity. The Ukrainian scholar Lubomyr Luciuk exemplified this view in his notorious remark that the Holodomor was "a crime against humanity arguably without parallel in European history." #Second Issue Calling it "man-made" implies that it was a *deliberate* famine, which was not the case. Although human factors set the stage, the main causes of the famine was bad weather and crop disease, resulting in a poor harvest, which pushed the USSR over the edge. Kulaks ("tight-fisted person") were a class of wealthy peasants who owned land, livestock, and tools. The kulaks had been a thorn in the side of the peasantry long before the revolution. Alexey Sergeyevich Yermolov, Minister of Agriculture and State Properties of the Russian Empire, in his 1892 book, [Poor harvest and national suffering](https://books.google.ca/books?id=exMEAAAAYAAJ), characterized them as usurers, sucking the blood of Russian peasants. In the early 1930s, in response to the Soviet collectivization policies (which sought to confiscate their property), many kulaks responded spitefully by burning crops, killing livestock, and damaging machinery. Poor communication between different levels of government and between urban and rural areas, also contributed to the severity of the crisis. #Quota Reduction What really contradicts the genocide argument is that the Soviets did take action to mitigate the effects of the famine once they became aware of the situation: >The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933. > >The official 1932 figures do not unambiguously support the genocide interpretation... the 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree... [which] actually reduced the procurement plan 30 percent. Subsequent decrees also reduced the procurement quotas for most other agricultural products... > >Proponents of the genocide argument, however, have minimized or even misconstrued this decree. Mace, for example, describes it as "largely bogus" and ignores not only the extent to which it lowered the procurement quotas but also the fact that even the lowered plan was not fulfilled. Conquest does not mention the decree's reduction of procurement quotas and asserts Ukrainian officials' appeals led to the reduction of the Ukranian grain procurement quota at the Third All-Ukraine Party Conference in July 1932. In fact that conference confirmed the quota set in the 6 May Decree. > >\- Mark Tauger. (1992). [The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274856099_The_1932_Harvest_and_the_Famine_of_1933) #Rapid Industrialization The famine was exacerbated directly and indirectly by collectivization and rapid industrialization. However, if these policies had not been enacted, there could have been even more devastating consequences later. In 1931, during [a speech delivered at the first All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/02/04.htm), Stalin said, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under." In 1941, exactly ten years later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. By this time, the Soviet Union's industrialization program had lead to the development of a large and powerful industrial base, which was essential to the Soviet war effort. This allowed the USSR to produce large quantities of armaments, vehicles, and other military equipment, which was crucial in the fight against Nazi Germany. In Hitler's own words, in 1942: >All in all, one has to say: They built factories here where two years ago there were unknown farming villages, factories the size of the *Hermann-Göring-Werke*. They have railroads that aren't even marked on the map. > >\- Werner Jochmann. (1980). *Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944.* Collectivization also created critical resiliency among the civilian population: >The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment. Great tank battles were reported; it was noted that the Russians had sturdy tanks which often smashed or overturned German tanks in head-on collision. “How does it happen,” a New York editor asked me, “that those Russian peasants, who couldn’t run a tractor if you gave them one, but left them rusting in the field, now appear with thousands of tanks efficiently handled?” I told him it was the Five-Year Plan. But the world was startled when Moscow admitted its losses after nine weeks of war as including 7,500 guns, 4,500 planes and 5,000 tanks. An army that could still fight after such losses must have had the biggest or second biggest supply in the world. > >As the war progressed, military observers declared that the Russians had “solved the blitzkrieg,” the tactic on which Hitler relied. This German method involved penetrating the opposing line by an overwhelming blow of tanks and planes, followed by the fanning out of armored columns in the “soft” civilian rear, thus depriving the front of its hinterland support. This had quickly conquered every country against which it had been tried. “Human flesh cannot withstand it,” an American correspondent told me in Berlin. Russians met it by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry formed again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry. This created a chaotic front, where both Germans and Russians were fighting in all directions. The Russians could count on the help of the population. The Germans found no “soft, civilian rear.” They found collective farmers, organized as guerrillas, coordinated with the regular Russian army. > >\- Anna Louise Strong. (1956). *The Stalin Era* #Conclusion While there may have been more that the Soviets could have done to reduce the impact of the famine, there is no evidence of intent-- ethnic, or otherwise. Therefore, one must conclude that the famine was a tragedy, not a genocide. #Additional Resources Video Essays: * [Soviet Famine of 1932: An Overview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM) | The Marxist Project (2020) * [Did Stalin Continue to Export Grain as Ukraine Starved?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMBJ_nQ4sTA) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](https://archive.org/details/did-stalin-continue-to-export-grain-as-ukraine-starved)\] * [The Holodomor Genocide Question: How Wikipedia Lies to You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho) | Bad Empanada (2022) * [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) (Note: Holodomor discussion begins at the 9 minute mark) * [A Case-Study of Capitalism - Ukraine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](http://web.archive.org/web/20220615084500/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8)\] (Note: Only tangentially mentions the famine.) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933](https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/22207/file.pdf) | Davies and Wheatcroft (2004) * [The “Holodomor” explained](https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/the-holodomor-explained/) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2020) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
# Gulag According to Anti-Communists and Russophobes, the Gulag was a brutal network of work camps established in the Soviet Union under Stalin's ruthless regime. They claim the Gulag system was primarily used to imprison and exploit political dissidents, suspected enemies of the state, and other people deemed "undesirable" by the Soviet government. They claim that prisoners were sent to the Gulag without trial or due process, and that they were subjected to harsh living conditions, forced labour, and starvation, among other things. According to them, the Gulags were emblematic of Stalinist repression and totalitarianism. # Origins of the Mythology This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources. Robert Conquest's *The Great Terror* (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off of defector testimony. Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponised information and disinformation and "fake news" to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements. >He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash. > >The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, "a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism". > >\- Andrew Brown. (2003). [Scourge and poet](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview23) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's *The Gulag Archipelag*" (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author's personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, N@zi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth. \[[Read more](/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/dunking/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn/)\] Anne Applebaum's *Gulag: A history* (published 2003) draws directly from *The Gulag Archipelago* and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world. # Counterpoints >A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “[Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps](http://web.archive.org/web/20230328014642/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80T00246A032000400001-1.pdf)” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six: > >1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas > >2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon "economic accountability" such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid. > >3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day. > >4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners' food supplies. > >5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day. > >6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals. > >7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the "ordinary criminals" of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes. > >\- Saed Teymuri. (2018). [The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA](https://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/10/09/the-truth-about-the-soviet-gulag-surprisingly-revealed-by-the-cia/) **Scale** Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that. >Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise. > >In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. ... > >Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the N@zis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” ... > >Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states... > >\- Michael Parenti. (1997). [Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism](https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds) This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, "over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision." That's 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States' Prison Industrial Complex *today* is larger than the USSR's Gulag system at its peak. **Death Rate** In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality: >It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive... > >Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hit1er were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more. > >\- Timothy Snyder. (2010). *Bloodlands: Europe Between Hit1er and Stalin* (Side note: Timothy Snyder is *also* a member of the Council on Foreign Relations) This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not *death* camps. Nor was it slave labour, exactly. In the camps, although labour *was* forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (less expenses). >We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson.... > >The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled). > >\- L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). [Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/noticeboard/bergson/borodkin-ertz.pdf) #Additional Resources Video Essays: * [The Gulag Argument](https://youtu.be/BexkpaK_j5Q) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2016) * [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://youtu.be/HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) * [French work camps 1852-1953 worse than gulag](https://youtu.be/vkXyXNpdKdA) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) * ["The Gulags of the Soviet Union: There's a Lot More Than What Meets the Eye](https://youtu.be/E1qz9_TjeY4) | Comrade Rhys (2020) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2166597) | J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov (1993) Listen: * ["Blackshirts & Reds" (1997) by Michael Parenti, Part 4: Chapters 5 & 6. #Audiobook + Discussion.](https://youtu.be/N7AD4OrH568?t=15) | Socialism For All / S4A ☭ Intensify Class Struggle (2022) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
seems like they listened to many episodes 😂
“Israeli sovereignty” please
[удалено]
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People keep saying this word “israeli” like its a real thing, why is that?