#stalinism

[cannibal-rainbow]

this is the same person who says the working class Ukrainians should surrender or unite with Russian proletariat to stop the War... without any weapons and tanks (bc no dirty western help silly).

this is also a very funny way of saying "imperialism is awesome when the right kind of people are doing it". Imverysmart Tankies like this are enlightened unlike the stupid masses. If all the soviets states were full of working class people who had their freedom to choose their political stances why the state had to send the tanks in when the people choose to protest? Weren't they willingly under soviet rule? ah yes, because those workers were not the right kind of people. Of course all good workers must choose to follow the purest of the ideology, there's no other option.

#leninism #stalinism #txttletale #ukraine #tankies #imperialism #soviet union #tankies gotta wank

[workersolidarity]

#communism #socialism #marxism leninism #socialist politics #socialist worker #socialist #communist #marxism #marxist leninist #progressive politics #politics #socialist news #soviet union #ussr #soviet communism #stalinism #stalin #lenin

[nicklloydnow]

“Looking from East to West in the 90s, like Alice through the looking-glass, one could feel as confounded as the residents of Animal Farm. The Russian premier Boris Yeltsin spent the 90s spearheading "shock therapy" for the former Soviet Union. This process of economic liberalization, privatization and asset-stripping led to the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of an oligarchic elite, leaving the rest of the country to impoverishment, psychological shock, endemic organized crime and corruption. To the benefit of its leaders and the detriment of its people, the East became a mirror-image of the West's worst excesses. The Manics' critique of Western capitalism and its turbocharged adoption by the East, allied to their lack of faith in the practical application of communist ideology — though not the ideology itself — makes "Revol" an extension of the axiom of post-communist cynicism which states that Soviet leaders "were lying when they told us about communism, but were telling us the truth about capitalism."

The Manics' use of Soviet imagery in a post-Soviet world was not new, but The Holy Bible, with its lyrical preoccupations the band's adoption of military uniforms and the semi-logo of a Soviet war medal, saw it become something more definitive. How much of this was aesthetic opportunism, and how much politically earnest? Like the Manics, I grew up in impeccably Old Labour territory and, way before discussions on how to be a fan of problematic things, remember being starry-eyed about the Soviet Union. Any yearning for the USSR, though, had less to do with the reality of its final days and more to do with its symbolic opposition to a Conservative regime which was then laying siege to the industry, economy and community of my part of the country. I looked East in the way one might look to the stars in the hope of arbitrary rescue by occupants of interplanetary craft, with expectations about as realistic.

What had been a source of fear and fascination in the 1980s was, in the postmodern vacuum of the 90s, safely powerless and therefore kitsch. Fascination with the communist past — dubbed Ostalgie — tended to be denied any political dimension, allowed to manifest only in ironic or mocking forms, and very rarely linked with contemporary anti-capitalist critique (Pyzik, Poor). The Holy Bible's suffusion in Soviet chic, though, had more to it than ironic recuperation. Nicky Wire, when asked, "What do you think makes sense?", responded: "Certain kinds of socialism, where everyone is given a chance. A true egalitarian society where everyone is offered an education." As basic and uncontroversial as this is — and note the cautious "certain kinds" of socialism, pre-empting the conflation of socialism with Stalinism — it highlights the band's commitment to keeping the idea alive in politics and culture. The later Manics' Labourism appears almost uninterestingly mellow in comparison to The Holy Bible's morbid fascination with the extremes of Soviet communism, but neither approach denies the contemporary relevance of political history, or presents it merely as kitsch.” - Rhian E. Jones, ‘Unwritten Diaries: History, Politics and Experience through The Holy Bible’ [p. 76 - 78]

“Ballard, Saville, The Holy Bible all use shock tactics, aesthetics of gorgeous abjection to assault the viewer. Ballard does it with crashed bodies and psychologies smashed to shards; Saville with bloated bodies out of control, tragic flesh of saints, sanctified for their suffering with no meaning, of no purpose beyond the physical carrying-through of their existence. The Holy Bible does it with its ruptured squabbles, soul sores leaking pus of humanity's capitulation to the dark side, rotten missives, accusations, breakdowns and weaknesses, as if it can't stop shaking anymore.

All three want to make their mark on you, perceive their own mission as one of violence upon the spectator: a moral mission because amidst all the white noise and static of the information-entertainment world, the jeering is too loud, and the crying is all but drowned out. In the service of truth, the artist must lacerate, and the profound abjection of the body, the scarification of the self, the breaking of the taboo of the illusion of sanctity of the body as self-contained whole, is a perfectly acceptable way for encroaching on the complacency that allows us to live complicit lives. Aesthetic butchery is thus a moral enterprise. Obscenity, critically modulated, pulls you out of your comfort zone and makes you confront yourself, or at least the parts you hide daily in order to live in polite society and in good conscience with yourself.” - Daniel Lukes, ‘Fragments Against Ruin: The Books of Manic Street Preachers' The Holy Bible’ [p. 226, 227]

“The present absence of Richey endured even through the years immediately following his disappearance, when the band was most vociferously separating from their past. Speaking in 1996, Nicky stated, "We'll never fill that gap. We'll never get anoth er guitarist. James will never go over to that side of the stage" (qtd in Maconie, "We Shall Overcome" 88); the space of stage right became a sacred site of remembrance for the band, but also a heightened, present absence for fans. In the documentary for the tenth anniversary edition of The Holy Bible, James describes his discomfort whilst playing Reading Festival in 1994 as a three-piece (at this time, Richey was hospitalized), which included the fact that some of the fans "were staring at the space of the stage where Richey should be, refusing to look at me." This desire to look at the empty space usually occupied by an object perceived as valuable is arguably an expression of the connection between emptiness as an index of a sign that holds symbolic meaning; the absence ironically brings more meaning to the surface than was originally recognized in the object itself. In his discussion of the spectators who flocked to see the empty space in the Louvre from which the Mona Lisa had been stolen in 1911, Darian Leader posits that this incident makes manifest the split between art and the space it usually occupies, thereby prompting an interrogation of the usually unseen or hidden meaning in the artwork that typically isn't in question. In becoming a signifier of totemic mythologies of tortured genius and martyred rock stars, Richey's absence became an index for that signifier, whereby spectators intuit meaning even by staring into the void of the lost signifier. These mythologies then perpetuate a kind of lovely knowledge because they fit into an already established perspective and narrative of popular culture. Within the last twenty years, the proliferation of music magazine covers featuring Richey have played into this lovely knowledge, rather than confront the difficult knowledge his disappearance evokes.” - Larissa Wodtke, ‘Architecture of Memory: The Holy Bible and the Archive’ [p. 302, 303]

All passages from Triptych: An Examination of the Manic Street Preachers’ Holy Bible (2017)

#manic street preachers #holy bible #revol #communism #socialism #soviet #soviet union #soviet kitsch #ostalgie #chic #stalinism #nicky wire #richey james edwards #richey edwards #richey james #james dean bradfield #sean moore #triptych #rhian jones #wales #pyzik #agata pyzik #poor #poor but sexy #daniel lukes #larissa wodtke #ballard #jg ballard #crash

[zarya-zaryanitsa]

Stalinist attitudes towards homosexuality and the events surroudning criminalization of homosexuality in Soviet Union in 1934 - excerpts from professor Dan Healey’s book „Russian homophobia from Stalin to Sochi”

In the same chapter I analyze the Soviet return to a ban on “sodomy” in 1933-34. It was a Stalinist measure, proposed by the security police and backed with relish by Stalin and his Politburo. Stalin personally edited the new penal article. This was the moment when the Soviet state adopted a modern anti-homosexual politics, the birth of modern Russian political homophobia. (…)

On September 15, 1933, deputy chief of the OGPU (secret police) Genrikh Yagoda proposed to Stalin that a law against “pederasty” was needed urgently. Stalin and Yagoda used the crude term pederastiia to discuss male homosexuality; but government lawyers revived the tsarist term muzhelozhstvo (sodomy) for the published law that was eventually adopted in March 1934. Yagoda reported that in August-September 1933, OGPU raids had been conducted on circles of “pederasts” in Moscow and Leningrad, and other cities of the Soviet Union. Yagoda wrote that these men were guilty of spying; they had also “politically demoralized various social layers of young men, including young workers, and even attempted to penetrate the army and navy.” From a recent collection of FSB archive documents of political cases against young Communists, it is clear that during the early 1930s, the secret police were obsessed with detecting counterrevolutionary moods among young people. Stalin forwarded Yagoda’s letter to Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich, noting that “these scoundrels must receive exemplary punishment” and directing a law against “pederasty” should be adopted. In the months that followed, Yagoda the secret policeman steered its passage through the various legislative drafts. (…)

When in mid-September 1933 Yagoda wrote to Stalin, recommending the adoption of a formal law against sodomy, he apparently cited a figure of 130 arrests of “pederasts” for the operations in “Moscow and Leningrad.” According to Ivanov, the archives of the St. Petersburg FSB reveal that during August-September 1933, 175 men were arrested on grounds of homosexual relations in Leningrad alone. The raids on “pederasts” continued and probably expanded to the principal “regime” cities, including Kharkov and Kiev. It appears that somewhere inside the central secret police machinery, an order originated in late July or early August 1933 to begin arrests of “pederasts” known to the authorities on their card-indexes either as “anti-social” or “declassed” elements, or as a security threat with international dimensions. (…)

In the 1993 release of correspondence between Yagoda and Stalin leading to the sodomy ban, one other significant document was published from the same file in the Presidential Archive. It is a sixteen-page letter to Stalin, from a homosexual British Communist, Harry O. Whyte (1907-60), an ex­ patriate journalist living in Moscow who loved a man who was a Soviet citizen. His Soviet lover was arrested sometime during late 1933 or early 1934. The release of the Whyte letter said little about its provenance and the author. It was typical of the 1993 publication that this document also appeared without commentary, but was labeled “Humor from the Special Collections” by archivists or editors who failed to show any historical empathy or intellectual curiosity.

Whyte, who worked for the English-language Moscow Daily News, wrote to Stalin, in May 1934, asking him to justify the new law. The journalist boldly explained why it violated the principles of both Marxism and the Soviet revolution. He argued that persecution of the law-abiding homosexual was typical of capitalist regimes and fascist ones: Nazi Germany’s “racial purity” drive was just the most extreme example of the push in both systems for “labor reserves and cannon fodder.” “Constitutional homosexuals, as an insignificant portion of the population . . . cannot present a threat to the birth rate in a socialist state.” Their position was analogous to that of other unjustly persecuted groups: “women, colored races, national minorities” and the best traditions of socialism showed tolerance of the relatively insignificant number of naturally occurring homosexuals in the population. He asked Stalin, “Can a homosexual be considered a person fit to become a member of the Communist Party?” In a revealing reaction, Stalin scrawled across the letter, “An idiot and a degenerate. To the archives.” Whyte got a blunt answer to his question: he was expelled from the Communist Party; he hastily left the Soviet Union for England in 1935. (…)

The dictator turned to his cultural spokesman Maxim Gorky, to explain the law’s rationale for Soviet and European readers. Gorky wrote an article that appeared in Izvestiia and Pravda on May 23, 1934, and later in a German-language socialist newspaper in Switzerland, in which he compared healthy Soviet youth to the degenerate youth of Nazi Germany. “Destroy the homosexuals - and fascism will disappear” he concluded, propounding the genocide of a social group on the grounds of sexuality. Later in 1936, People’s Commissar of Justice Nikolai V. Krylenko gave a speech to the central Soviet legislature in which he explained that the law was necessary because homosexuals were not healthy workers but “a declassed rabble, or the scum of society, or remnants of the exploiting classes.”

#life in the stalinist utopia am i right #don't let tankies trick you into overlooking the crimes of stalinism #stalinism #ussr #soviet union #eastern europe #lgbt #lgbt history #communism

[blackswaneuroparedux]

I learned the value of humour during the time of Stalinist terror. I could always recognise a person who was not a Stalinist, a person whom I needn’t fear, by the way he smiled. A sense of humour was a trustworthy sign of recognition.

Milan Kundera

When he was a university student Milan Kundera could not resist joking about Stalin’s utopian Marxist-Leninism, and so later in 1950 he was ejected from the Czech Communist party for harbouring “hostile thoughts”, and expelled from college. It didn’t stop him from making fun of the authoritarian perniciousness of the Marxism thought police that he was forced into exile to France where he became a French citizen.

#kundera #milan kundera #quote #czech #french #novelist #writer #author #literature #society #culture #humour #communism #stalinism #czechoslovakia

[anarchistin]

this is your daily reminder that marxist leninists are not communists and don't even know what communism is. their greatest contribution to communism is convincing the world that state capitalism is socialism.

you don't need to read marx let alone be a marxist to be a communist, as so many of them insist. marxism is a lens to look at the world and its history with but communism itself has nothing to do with marx. you can be a communist even if marx never existed, as many were and are.

marxism and communism are not the same thing and you should be wary of those who conflate the two.

#marxism #marxism leninism #stalinism #lenin #state capitalism #communism #socialism

[dostoyevsky-official]

После 24 февраля 2022 года в России, по данным экспертов из «Мемориала», разрушили не менее 22 памятников и мемориалов ссыльным, узникам польского восстания, финским солдатам. [...] На фоне разрушений и сноса мемориалов иностранным репрессированным в стране наблюдается рост числа памятников Сталину, устраивавшему эти репрессии. По данным канала «Можем объяснить», сейчас в России, в общественных местах (без учета музеев) установлено не менее 110 памятников Сталину. Из них с советских времен сохранились лишь 9%, подавляющее большинство монументов (91%) установлено с начала президентства Путина. После 2014 года темпы возведения фигур Сталина увеличились вдвое, сейчас памятники установлены в 40 регионах России.

[...] «Сегодня они берутся за памятники и учебники, а завтра контроль властей станет ещё более тотальным. Буквально два года назад мы жили совсем в другой стране. Каждый раз, когда я посещал это место, я думал о том, насколько важна каждая живая душа, не оказавшаяся забытой жертвой, на местном мемориальном комплексе. Потому с начала всем известных событий мне стало страшно, что историю снова перепишут, а люди останутся забытыми», — рассказывает Иван.

[...] Сейчас же кампания по исчезновению памятников идет по всей стране, причем, в большинстве случаев, виновники вандализма неизвестны, а полиция бездействует. Экспертка убеждена, что разрушения и демонтаж памятников «осуществляются хоть и не руками, но по указке властей».

[...] «Чаще всего мы приезжаем в конце ноября или ранней весной, когда снега по колено и приходится прокапывать себе дорогу. Тем острее можно прочувствовать состояние тех людей, в большинстве своем женщин, стариков и детей, которых привезли на станцию Костоусово в феврале 1940 года. Заслуживают ли эти люди того, чтобы памятники над их могилами были разрушены? У граждан, имеющих польское происхождение, такая ситуация вызывает большое беспокойство. Жители этих сёл считали, что пребывание поляков на их территории, это часть их истории, памяти», — пояснила «Вёрстке» Марина Лукас, уточнив, что в годы установки памятников местная администрация никак этому не препятствовала.

[...] В июне, в поселке Речка Мишиха в Бурятии неизвестные разрушили памятник ссыльным полякам-каторжанам, погибшим после восстания в 1866 году. [...]

«Памятники, которые помнят о государственном насилии, государству не нужны. Чаще всего это касается тех преступлений советской власти, которые показывают их имперский характер, когда жертвами преступлений становились поляки или литовцы. Но мы замечаем, что пропадают и памятники преступлений царской России, например, польским восставшим, которых сослали в Сибирь. Примечательно, что их советская власть воспевала, указывая на то, что они боролись с царизмом. А при нынешней власти за то, что они поляки, за то, что они посмели бороться с имперской властью, этот памятник снесли», — поясняет исследовательница памяти из «Мемориала» Александра Поливанова.

[...] В большинстве случаев бюсты Сталину устанавливают не в мегаполисах, а наоборот, в маленьких городах и поселках.

[...] «Поддержка террора — это очередная глупость обреченных на нищету и вымирание жителей города», — заключила девушка, добавив, что, вероятно, памятник предназначен для запугивания сотрудников завода.

[...] По мнению Поливановой, установкой памятников Сталину чиновники хотят показать идею доминирования государства над человеком.

«Те, кто ставит ему памятник, в реальности не хотел бы оказаться при Сталине. Скорее, это символ силы государства, мощи, государственной гегемонии над человеком», — заключает исследовательница.

(x)

#memory #stalinism

[ohsalome]

Both the Soviet and the German empires have achieved their genocidal goals through the destruction of local institutions and networks. Both were claiming they were doing it for the sake of "creating the better world". Both were painting the victims of their policy as "the necessary sacrifice". One regime was destroyed, and has become synonymous with evil. The other was left to live, and now people are still defending their actions as being "good in theory, but failed in practice due to human factor".

[source: Sarah Cameron - The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence and Making of Soviet Kazakhstan]

#history #kazakhstan #Aşarşılıq #Qazaqstandağı #famine #artificial famine #ussr #soviet history #communism #kazakh history #qazaqstan #joseph stalin #stalinism

[deadpresidents]

Russian archival records obtained for this book show that [Joseph] Stalin colluded with his favorited U.S. candidate in 1948, Henry Wallace, [Franklin D.] Roosevelt’s Soviet-friendly wartime Vice President.

The nature of Wallace’s relationship with the Kremlin has long been a subject of speculation. Soviet intelligence is known to have unimaginatively code-named the Vice President CAPTAIN’S DEPUTY during the war. But no evidence has ever emerged that Wallace was recruited as a Soviet agent. He was, however, we can now discern, a Soviet tool. He sincerely believed that “peaceful coexistence” between the Soviet Union and the United States not only could be achieved, but was essential for world peace. All the while, he looked away from (and naively followed Soviet propaganda denying) the existence of Stalin’s mass forced labor and terror programs. According to [President Harry S.] Truman’s counsel Clark Clifford: “It was never clear to me how aware he [Wallace] was of the uses to which the Communist Party was putting him, but whether he knew it or not, he was following the communist line, serving communist ends, and betraying those Americans who supported him as a serious alternative to the two main candidates [in 1948].” Wallace’s naivete about Soviet communism turned him into an asset for Stalin, if not a recruited Soviet agent.

Wallace decided to run in the 1948 U.S. election as the Progressive Party nominee. In April and May that year, he secretly liaised with Stalin about public policies that would be advantageous for the Soviet Union, coordinating his public statements with the dictator. Wallace secretly met with the youthful Soviet ambassador to the UN in New York, Andrei Gromyko, who dispatched the candidate’s messages to the Soviet foreign minister, [Vyacheslav] Molotov, and to Stalin himself. In his memoirs, Gromyko admitted to meeting Wallace, but downplayed the meeting’s significance, suggesting that after talking with him he considered that Wallace had lost contact with the pulse of American life. Archival documents in Moscow reveal that in fact Stalin took Wallace’s position and candidacy seriously, approving his public positions, and answering questions that the former Vice President put to him, which Stalin annotated in his distinctive pencil. Their alignment produced a published open letter from Wallace to Stalin, vetted by the Soviet leader in advance, to which Stalin then publicly replied, all as agreed between the two men.

Wallace’s Presidential election bid in November 1948 dismally failed; he ended up getting barely 2 percent of the vote, while Truman, to his and the nation’s surprise, won a second term. He defeated New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey in one of the greatest upsets in U.S. Presidential history. Ironically, the staff of Wallace’s failed 1948 campaign included none other than the Soviet atom spy Ted Hall. Following his unsuccessful White House run, Wallace had a crisis of faith in his pro-Stalinism. This may have been caused by his realization that Stalin had used and discarded him after the election. Stalin had gotten what he wanted from Wallace. In 1952, Wallace published an article, “Where I Was Wrong,” describing “Russian Communism” as “utterly evil.” The Kremlin and its intelligence services nevertheless learned an important strategic lesson for later in the Cold War: that it could use the freedoms inherent within American electoral campaigns to influence candidates favorable to the Soviet Union.

-- From Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West by Calder Walton, Simon & Schuster, 2023 (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

#History #Henry A. Wallace #Vice President Wallace #Soviet Union #Cold War #Cold War History #Joseph Stalin #Stalin #Stalinism #Communism #Soviet History #Espionage #1948 Election #Harry S. Truman #President Truman #Thomas E. Dewey #FDR #Franklin D. Roosevelt #President Roosevelt #Roosevelt Administration #Politics #Political History #Russia #Russian History #Soviet Communism #Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West #Spies #Calder Walton #Simon and Schuster #Simon & Schuster

[aryanvieon]

sylveon is a libertarian

#sylveon #pokemon #lgbtqia #lgbt #lgbtq #trans #transgender #transfeminine #eevee #eeveelution #eeveelutions #communism #marxism #commie #deprogram #leftist #anarchism #leftism #maoism #stalinism

[cannibal-rainbow]

i hope people realise this person:

posted also this post:

#tankies gotta wank #i really really dont want to see this genocide denier on my dash anymore #ukraine #stalinism #leninism #why the tumblr tankies are always from the americas #hmm??

[tomorrowusa]

Shocker, Putin wins his own rigged election!

If Trump wins in the US in 2024 expect the 2028 election to go something like Russia's bad parody of democracy this weekend.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was slated to win the country's presidential election, state-run exit polls showed Sunday. The government-run VTsIOM pollster showed the 71-year-old had won a landslide, having secured an estimated 88% of the vote in the three-day election that included no real opposition candidates. The exit polls were released following the closure of polling stations in Russia's westernmost region of Kaliningrad on Sunday evening. If confirmed, the result would be a record for Putin, who received 76.7% of the vote in the last presidential election in 2018. The former KGB spy would become Russia's longest-serving leader in more than 200 years, overtaking Josef Stalin.

One way to drive up turnout is to force people to vote.

‘Forced to vote’ Election watchdog warns of likely voter coercion as early lines form outside Russian polling stations

#russia #dictatorship #rigged election #vladimir putin #stalinism #fascism #totalitarianism #donald trump #фальсифицированные выборы #россия #диктатура #владимир путин #путин хуйло #долой путина #путлер #тоталитаризм #россия - террористическая страна #союз постсоветских клептократических ватников #путин – это лжедмитрий iv а не пётр великий #трамп - путинский пудель

[cryobombz]

Bam Bam Bam

#communism #socialism #marxism #stalin #marxism leninism #stalinism

[zarya-zaryanitsa]

Political Famines in the USSR and China

In both countries, excessive requisitions were justified by overestimations of the actual harvest. In the USSR, the method of measuring grain “in the field” generated a systemic upward bias, so that planned procurements ended up seizing a much larger quota of the available grain than was officially stated. In China, overestimation reached its height in 1958, when the CCP boasted of a harvest twice as large as that of the previous year (in 1979 the figure was revised downward by half).

In both countries, the burden imposed by procurements on the villages (in 1960, Chinese peasants were left with 212 kilograms of grain per person, compared with the 295 kilograms they had relied on for a very meager existence in 1957) soon sparked turmoil that was blamed on the peasants’ natural conservatism, ignorance, and treachery, which induced them to hide part of the harvest. In both the USSR and China, leaders justified their choices by resorting to extreme statist ideologies. Requisitions focused on grain-producing areas, where the state knew it could obtain more. Political famines were therefore paradoxically concentrated in traditionally richer areas, where food had rarely been a problem. (…) In the USSR the most important grain-producing area was Ukraine (a few other non-Russian regions, such as the Kuban and the German Volga Republic, were also important), and the resulting focus on Ukraine had devastating effects on the relationships between Moscow and the local Communists.

Both the USSR and China had reserves of grain—in 1933, for example, Soviet reserves averaged around 1.4 million tons—but leaders in both countries refused to use reserves to aid the stricken areas except on selected occasions and for selected purposes, such as facilitating the springtime planting of seeds or supplying important industrial and mining centers in rural ar- eas or key border regions. In the USSR, for example, Ukrainian border oblasts suffered much less than internal areas because of the regime’s security and propaganda concerns. The same was true in China, where districts adjacent to state borders were only slightly affected.

Even though the reserves were not huge, they could have prevented hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of deaths if they had been used. The use of reserves, however, was never contemplated, especially in 1933 (when famine in Ukraine was used as an operational tool) and in 1960 (when it was impossible to admit the catastrophe generated by the choices made at Lushan). (…)

The exodus to cities or supposedly better-off areas within each country also continued. This migration, however, was transformed by the tragic food situation of 1932–1933 in the USSR (and 1931–1932 in Kazakhstan) and in post-1959 China, when hunger became the primary driver. Moreover, in contrast to what happened before 1932, the Soviet state efficiently halted the exodus by reintroducing internal passports and denying them to peasants. Especially but not solely in Ukraine, drastic measures were also adopted to prevent starving peasants from buying train tickets and entering cities and to return them forcibly to certain death in the villages.

- Political Famines in the USSR and China: A Comparative Analysis by Andrea Graziosi

#life in the stalinist utopia am i right #some more stalin as per anon’s request #ussr #china #ukraine #holodomor #communism #stalinism

[thequietabsolute]

Famine belongs to the Communist tetrarchy — the other three elements being terror, slavery and, of course, failure, monotonous and incorrigible failure.

— Martin Amis, from Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

#martin amis #koba the dread #nonfiction #soviet union #stalinism #famine #ukraine #literature #quote

[anarchistin]

But it wasn’t Franco’s forces that ended the anarchist revolution – ironically it was the supposed communists on the Republican side which who were controlled by the Soviet Union who squelched the revolution in exchange for Soviet aid and weapons. Why would they do this?

In theory, the anarchists were accomplishing all the goals that the Soviet Union was aiming for. The theoretical justification for the dominance of the communist party of the USSR was that it was supposed to guide the country through industrialization to increase productive capacity enough so that there would be enough material plenty for communism to exist – and once that happens, the state is supposed to become obsolete and you just have a world of freely associating communes and cooperatives.

And this is exactly what the anarchists were putting into practice directly, without having to go through any intermediary dictatorship phase. But of course, the fact that the anarchists were putting worker controlled socialism directly into practice democratically without any party or bureaucratic dictatorship was as an existential threat to the Soviet elite, and therefore the anarchists socialism could not be tolerated.

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