They don’t need violence from the left to become fascists, they can do it by themselves.

They win no matter who wins any given election

Yes, because both parties in power in the US fundamentally stand for the same geopolitically. Geopolitics are mostly bipartisan in the US.

As an EU citizen, thats laughable. German police was very recently beating up women in a pro-palestine protest, and there are plenty of jailed journalists.

The only thing new is it’s the US doing it from across the world

Bahahahahahahhaa

Go ask a Vietnamese or a North Korean what they think of that statement, lmao

a prefect microcosm of how Stalin’s regime operated with the violently anti-communist Nazi’s

You’re saying this to a Spaniard. From 1936 to 1939, during the Spanish civil war (which the fascists ended up winning thanks to the inaction of western powers and the military intervention of fascist Italy and Germany), the Soviet Union was openly against fascism in Spain. They delivered weapons, troops, planes and tanks in the antifascist struggle on the opposite end of the continent, and were the only country to do so. Three pictures you’ve pulled out of CIA-sponsored anticommunist sources don’t change the material and historical reality that the Soviet Union was staunchly antifascist, both in rethoric and in action. This is 3 years before Molotov-Ribbentrop. Why did the Soviet Union support antifascist Spain on the opposite side of the continent?

that doesn’t change the fact that the USSR acted to project and protect its own influence.

Well… Obviously? If my country was communist and antifascist, and was threatened by a fascist country, I would think it morally correct to extend the influence and projection of my country. Do you disagree with this?

Stalin’s USSR was a hard turn from Lenin’s korenisatsiya

Almost as if the experiences from the Civil War and the historical and material conditions of 1939 were different from those of 1917… Granting independence to Poland and seeing it immediately invade Ukraine and Belarus must have been a kick in the balls to Marxists believing in idealistic approaches to the question of nationalities, and that’s just one example of many. If you again don’t see how unity was important (and actually achieved) in a country which managed to maintain social cohesion and a functioning economy during the loss of 27 million people in the struggle against Nazism, I tend to think I’m arguing against an idealist who doesn’t analyse the material and historical constraints of policy.

My whole point with this is: what makes you think yourself more intelligent, well-versed and moral than the Marxist revolutionaries who achieved the first successful collectivisation of the economy of a country, the lasting elimination of the bourgeoisie, and ultimately the defeat of Nazism in Europe which saved millions if not tens of millions of lives from extermination? And also importantly, why are you so intent in conflating Socialism with some sort of Russian Imperialism as if the Bolsheviks weren’t the greatest possible break with Russian Imperialism that could be achieved in Russia?

Modern Poland started after the last fucking Russian left Polish soil

Why the consistent conflating of the Soviet Union and “Russians”? Almost as if your argument here is coming purely from Russophobia, and not from the material and historical analysis of a country with 300 million people, approximately only half of which were Russian. Stalin himself was Georgian, and his successor Khruschyov was Ukrainian.

miserable low-life imperialistic Russians

Oh I see, so it’s just Russophobia. Should have guessed it. If you’re Polish, I’m sorry that you’ve been brainwashed by the nationalist far-right into hating the people who contributed most to the elimination of Nazism in your homeland, which if you remember correctly, exterminated millions of your kind. But hey, you can overcome it. I’m Spanish and I overcame the worst parts of the Islamophobia and Arabphobia that our institutions regurgitate onto us, so you can do it too!

Nobody with a sane mind in Europe

As someone from Spain (country where the fascists actually won the war and remained in government for 40-odd years), I actually wish we had had a neighboring communist country who helped us out of fascism, instead of capitalist countries whitewashing our ACTUALLY fascist authoritarian regime. Btw, the Soviet Union was the ONLY country in the world to sell weapons to antifascists in Spain during our civil war against fascism, and they sent troops to teach my people to use planes and tanks against fascists. I wonder why they did that?

“I’m not going to engage with most of what you wrote, here are two sensationalist pictures without context as a rebuttal of your well-sourced historical analysis” isn’t the own you think it is. I already graced you with more of my time than you deserve, people who come across the post will be free to judge the quality of my analysis vs yours and form their own opinions.

Btw, you accuse me of “Russian Imperialism”? I clearly and loudly condemned the horrors of the Russian Empire, what the heck are you talking about? If you’re reducing the USSR to a single nationality, I have bad news for you: you’re disregarding the struggle of millions of people from non-slavic-Russian ethnicities who participated in the Soviet project.

By the way, it is RICH that you call the USSR (which saved Europe from Nazism) an imperialist nation, while your comment history is full of support for meaningful pro-democrat anti-Trump protests and respect for “due process”. Showing a total lack of disrespect towards the tens of millions who actually gave their lives in the struggle against fascism while getting to feel good going to peaceful, non-disruptive, meaningless, oligarch-organized political protests that happen within the Overton Window of the most murderous empire to ever exist: the US empire. Wanna fight fascism? Join an actual socialist organization in your area, socialism is historically the only force that has been powerful enough to defeat fascism. Good luck otherwise operating within the framework of the same democrats that funded the turn-to-the-far-right of the GOP over the past decades.

Way to prove you haven’t read my whole comment. I already answered to why the soviets “carved Eastern Europe” including quotes from western politicians at the time who were very aware of the invasions of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (i.e. Churchill in 1944 or the US ambassador to the USSR in 1941). The Soviet politicians admitted as much:

“The Soviet Government, in concluding the Non-Aggression Treaty with Germany, first and foremost secured peace for our country for the foreseeable future. We have moved our defensive lines far to the west. …If the war in the West continues for a long time, we stand to remain apart from it and gain those extra months—or perhaps a year or more—to strengthen our defenses. The old frontier, which was indefensible, has been replaced by a new one, affording us far greater security in the event that war is forced upon us later” October 31, 1939 (Molotov and Stalin to the Supreme Soviet), Soviet Foreign Policy, 1939–1941: Documents and Materials (a Soviet-era collection).

Do you see any trace of “Russian nationalism and expansionism” in the words of Stalin (who btw was Georgian)? Any declarations of imperialist desire? Or exclusively a pragmatic push-to-the-west in the face of a Nazi invasion to, in the words of Stalin and Molotov, moving the defensive lines far to the west because the old frontier was indefensible?

the Polish military inflicted heavy losses on German armor units and the after action reports from the German field commanders showed their deficiencies, which later proved to be 100% correct.

That is wonderful, and I very much appreciate the Polish resistance against Nazism, both during and after the invasion. The Polish antifascist partisans were truly effective and an unquestionable help in the defeat of Nazism, my utmost respect to all of them. My point with my initial comment was not the denigration of Polish partisans, but simply to correct the history-erasure that supposes not talking about Soviets and the Red Army when it comes to the existence of a modern Polish state, instead of the colonial ashes of an entirely genocided Nazi colony.

Ohhh here we go again with the Motherboard-Ribbedcock revisionism and Polish nationalist propaganda! I’ll answer point by point:

Poland existed for a long ass time, even when it wasn’t on the map. It had no less than 6 armed conflicts and rebellions against the Russian Empire

Exactly. The Polish people have been mostly oppressed for centuries under the rule of the Russian Empire and whatever German-dominated empires that have controlled the region. That’s an unfortunate truth that I completely agree with. That’s why I see the Bolsheviks ending the Tsarist Empire as a good thing, and allowing Poland to exert its right to self-determination as based.

Poland lost 6 million people in WW2, 17% of their population

That is a horrific example of why I’m a fervient antifascist and I happily defend those who actually eliminated fascism, Poland was absolutely decimated by Nazi genocide. Poles were considered “slaviv untermenschen” and Polish Jews doubly so. The Red Army liberating Poland saved millions of people from a fate like that eventually

17% of their population; by far the largest of any country

Well, that is unless you count modern Belarus which lost 25-30%. Anyway, my actual argument is that 80% of Nazi casualties were sustained in the Eastern Front against the Soviets. The battle of Stalingrad was the first allied victory that proved the world that Nazis aren’t invincible.

Polish independence was gained through the collapse of the Russian Empire; Moscow was in no position to claim control over anything anyway

You may make that argument, but this is a bad reading of the Bolshevik policy in my humble opinion. If you want to know further about the Bolshevik position on Poland and on national identities and self-determination, the letters between Rosa Luxembourg and Lenin (in which Lenin argues for example for the right of Ukrainians to have their own republic, and for the first time pushing for an autonomous Ukrainian government and a recognition of Ukrainian culture, against Rosa Luxembourg’s position that nationalism is generally bad) are quite enlightening about the real, moral position of Bolsheviks towards the national question. You may of course disagree, this is just a vibes-based topic.

Lenin renegged on that “self determination” just a few years later in 1919 when they marched the Red Army into Poland

Why conveniently leave out the fact that this was a response to Poland invading modern Ukraine and [Belarus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish–Soviet_War], and then the RSFSR? The Bolshevik response against Poland in 1919 wasn’t unwarranted, Poland quite literally started that war to gain some more territory of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to “restore historical borders” nationalist bullshit, don’t you think?

Maybe they would have lost less had the Soviets not joined the Germans in slicing up their country

I have quite a few things to argue against this, hence why I left it for the end. I hope we can argue in good faith about it:

1) Most of the invaded “Polish” territories actually belong to modern Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus. In 1919, Poland started the Polish-Ukrainian war and invaded Ukraine, Belarus and part of the RSFSR as we saw. This “carving of Poland by the Soviet Union” liberated many formerly oppressed non-Polish national ethnicities such as Lithuanians in Polish-controlled Vilnius arguably being genocided, or ceding the city of Lviv to the Ukraine SSR.

2) The Soviet Union had been trying for the entire 1930s to establish a mutual-defense agreement with Poland, France and Britain against the Nazis, under the doctrine of the then-People’s Commisar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov. This decade-long proposal for mutual-defence went completely ignored by France and England, which hoped to see a Nazi-Soviet conflict that would destroy both countries, and Poland didn’t agree to negotiations by itself either. The Soviet government went as far as to offer to send one million troops together with artillery, tanking and aviation, to Poland and France. The response was ignoring these pleas and offerings.

Furthermore, this armistice between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany happened only one year after the Munich Betrayal. The Soviet Union and France had a Mutual Defense Agreement with Czechoslovakia, which France (together with the UK) unilaterally violated in agreement with the Nazis when ceding Czechoslovak territories to Nazi Germany. Stalin offered France, as an alternative to the Munich Betrayals, a coordinated and two-front attack to Nazi Germany, which France rejected in favour of the Munich Agreements.

3) The Soviet Union had been through WW1 up to 1917, the Russian Civil War up to 1922 (including a famine that killed millions) in which western powers like France, England or the USA invaded the Bolsheviks and helped the tsarist Whites to reestablish tsarism, which ultimately ended with a costly Bolshevik victory; the many deaths of famine during the land-collectivization of 1929-1933, and up to 1929 was a mostly feudal empire with little to no industry to speak of. Only after the 1929 and 1934 5-year plans did the USSR manage to slightly industrialize, but these 10 years of industrialization were barely anything in comparison with the 100 years of industrialization Nazi Germany enjoyed. The Soviet Union in 1939 was utterly underdeveloped to face Nazi Germany alone, as proven further by the 27 million casualties in the war that ended Nazism. The fact that the Soviet Union “carved Eastern Europe” was mostly in self-defense. The geography of the Great European Plain made it extremely difficult to have any meaningful defenses against Nazis with weaponry and technological superiority, again proven by the fact that the first meaningful victory against Nazis was not in open field but in the battle of Stalingrad, which consisted more of a siege of a city. The Soviet Union, out of self-preservation, wanted to simply add more Soviet-controlled distance between themselves and the Nazis. You don’t have to take my word for all of this, you can hear it from western diplomats and officials from the period itself. I hope you won’t find my choice of personalities to reflect a pro-Soviet bias:

“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)

“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.

"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact’s signing)

"It seemed to me that the Soviet leaders believed conflict with Nazi Germany was inescapable. But, lacking clear assurances of military partnership from England and France, they resolved that a ‘breathing spell’ was urgently needed. In that sense, the pact with Germany was a temporary expedient to keep the wolf from the door” Joseph E. Davies (U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1937–1938) Mission to Moscow (1941)

I could go on with quotes but you get my point.

4) The Soviet Union invaded Poland 2 weeks after the Nazis, at a time when there was no functioning Polish government anymore. Given the total crushing of the Polish forces by the Nazis and the rejection of a mutual-defense agreement from England and France with the Soviets, there is only one alternative to Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland: Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland. Seriously, what was the alternative, letting Nazis genocide even further east, killing arguably millions more in the process over these two years between Molotov-Ribbentrop and Operation Barbarossa? France and England, which did have a mutual-defense agreement with Poland, initiated war against Germany as a consequence of the Nazi invasion, but famously did not start war against the Soviets, the main reason in my opinion being the completely different character of the Soviet invasion. Regardless of this, please tell me. After the rejection of mutual-defense agreements with the Soviet Union: what was the alternative other than Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland?

Poland exists because its people fought back against authoritarian bastards

Poland kinda exists because it was saved from genocide by the red army. After that, it existed as an independent country in which its language and culture were maintained and supported by the government. You may argue it exists in a different form after the 1980s Solidarity movement, but Poland very much existed before that and that’s a consequence of Soviet (not just Russian, but also Ukrainian, Kazakh and other nationalities) soldiers who gave their life in the fight against Nazism. 27 million soviets died in total in WW2.

Even in the 1910s, when Poland obtained its independence from the Russian Empire, it did so thanks to the Bolsheviks creating a constitution granting all peoples of the former Russian empire the right to self-determination and unilateral secession, not because an autoctonous Polish movement forced any government to give it independence.

What historical events are you talking about when you refer to Poland existing because they fought against authoritarianism?

Edit: some people have brought up comments about the role of Polish resistance in WW2. My point was not at all to diminish the valiant efforts of the Polish antifascist partisans, most of whom I consider heroes of the struggle against Nazism. I just think it’s unfair to erase the role of the Red Army of the Soviet Union in the existence of modern Poland. Without it, probably Poland (as many other eastern-European countries) would be the ashes of Nazi genocide and colonization.

Are you aware that Wikipedia is predominantly edited by western males below 50 years of age using western media as sources for information?

If there was an online encyclopedia predominantly edited by Chinese users using Chinese news sources, would you take it at face value when discussing geopolitically-charged topics about the USA? May I remind you that the US has military bases in Philippines, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea?

Regardless of your opinion on this, if you read my previous comment again, you’ll notice I’m talking about economic violence.

It’s not like China can be trusted either

What exactly are you talking about? China has at no point in my lifetime exerted economic violence or taken violent policy turns towards harming other economies. They’ve been a reliable trading partner since they opened up to trade in the Deng Xiaoping/Nixon years, and done absolutely nothing remotely comparable to the US tariffs of recent (or economic embargoes to “enemy” countries like Venezuela).

You surely heard about this

Or about this

Those are just two examples from the past month. Edward Snowden? Julian Assange? Do those names ring a bell?

Also, Bernie is openly not against the genocide in Gaza. He openly talks of “Israel’s right to defend itself” and consistently talks of the “war” (not the GENOCIDE) using bothsideism

they are children of people who ran your beloved USSR. Putin’s grandpa was a cook

You’re absolutely laughable, as I said I disengaged with you already.

Do you not understand your words just don’t match anything real?

I’m the only one who provided source information instead of “vibes-based” analysis.

I’m not going to give you any sources

I noticed already, hence me disengaging.

Have you not looked at western media during the GENOCIDE in Gaza? All of them collectively talking about “war in Israel and Palestine”, playing both sides, and curating the truth. For fuck’s sake, the average Republican in the USA lives in a completely different world of covid denialism, and thinks Elon performed an accidental Roman salute.

I’m gonna stop engaging with your “I know better than empirical evidence approach based on my vibes of who controlled what”. Enjoy bootlicking the corporate overlords that plunge your country in imperialist war, at least now you have bananas and soda, even if people can’t afford housing.

Any stats about USSR and shares of income, inequality and such are bullshit

The elites didn’t formally own anything - well, neither they do in Russia today, but they do control that property and use it freely.

This word [kulak] is a propaganda marker

training technicians to work as bad engineers. Training as in “training dogs”. Because the industrialization required some kind of engineers.

Essentially half of your rebuttal is unsourced “no bro, that’s not true”, when I’ve given you my sources for the information. You’re just showing cognitive dissonance. I was too considerate in my original comments assuming that you’d listen to actual evidence and data. Income inequality figures are bullshit, elites didn’t own and they dont own today either (false, oligarchs in modern Russia do own their companies), kulaks didn’t exist (Do you think peasants in 1917 majorly owned the lands they were working??), university studies weren’t real (I guess the first satellite and human in space and the pioneering research and military industry were just false too)… You’re just desperately denying and holding on to your propagandised version of the reality of the Soviet Union, with your greatest issue being that you couldn’t buy the soda you wanted, and discarding things like guaranteed housing, while ignoring most of my previous comment.

My bloodline’s male part on the Jewish side mostly vanished on the frontlines

My utmost respect to your ancestors who gave their lives in the fight against Nazism. I hope you’ll show more respect to them and to the emancipatory project they defended with their lives.

it was approaching something like US south at the same time

Lmao, so essentially slavery, just without the racial component of the US. Please, tell me again: what percentage of the farmers owned in 1917 the lands that they were farming. Oh wait, I forgot you don’t care about data.

Why didn’t this happen in Finland?

I already explained but here we go again: the USSR was a shining example of what socialism could achieve, right in Europe. If Finland had been colonised, they would have risked a socialist revolution there.

As I said, conversation over. You’re not willing to listen.

MWAHAHAHA, I live in fucking Russia

Yes, you live in Russia, not in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately for you I’m afraid.

Were it a feature it would match the social adverts and state propaganda

You surely don’t expect the material limitations of an industrializing, isolated and besieged economy to appear in propaganda? It was a feature in the sense that it was a known effect of “socialism in one country”, not in the sense that it’s the desired goal. You surely understand that, no matter how good the policy, there are limitations to material reality?

Oh yes, better distribution via acquaintances and relations

Corruption DID happen, unsurprisingly, it’s something that happens in all systems. It’s just that, when it happens under socialism, it’s a scandal, but when it happens in capitalism it’s normalized. In my country there’s a 6 month waiting list for going to a specialist doctor many times in public healthcare, and I could skip that by paying a sum of money to a private physician and getting examined in their private clinic legally. It’s essentially the same concept, except that for some reason it’s normalized and even praised under capitalism (which leads to it being much more prevalent than in socialism), whereas socialism fought against it. Speaking of corruption and propaganda: Surely the state with active anti-corruption propaganda and regular purges of its party and social systems was less corrupt than the capitalist states that normalize corruption in economic activity under the guise of “free contracts between individuals”?

parts of USSR far from anything with a sea port people would see something like oranges or bananas extremely rarely

Wait, you’re telling me that an economically isolated country focusing on a self-reliant economy which is located in one of the northernmost regions of the planet, had difficulties with the availability of certain fruits? (bananas are tropical and can’t be grown in the USSR for the most part). This just proves how to you, the default-normal is the availability of produce with origin in exploited regions of the world. Please, go check where the bananas at your supermarket are coming from, and how the workers in the plantation are treated. That’s the problem with Russian libs: you guys don’t understand that NOW your country engages in exploitation of the global south, just like any other developed capitalist country. THAT’s why you have fucking bananas.

Housing wasn’t bought, it was assigned and sometimes given, so talking about cost is useless.

“People had universal, guaranteed access to free or affordable housing, so talking about housing is useless”. Truly a big-brain take. You probably are lucky enough that you don’t have to spend half of your salary in housing as most people are forced to do, otherwise you wouldn’t be making that point.

There were people still living in communal apartments

Yes, a few people after the 70s still were living in such communal apartments, but it was a minority. Most housing by the time the USSR was industrialized were Khruschyovki and Brezhnevki, famously non-communal. I’d love it if you brought me a source telling me how many people lived in communal housing by the 80s, I’ll respond to you with data of 2024 Spain (my homeland) of how many people have to share a flat with one kitchen and one bathroom (and pay 1/3rd of their income in the process instead of 3% of their income).

It was a miserable society requiring more bootlicking than you can possibly imagine to do something you consider a given in your land

Poor Soviets, having the highest unionization rates in the world and being able to actually bargain through their union at work instead of having to bootlick their corporate overlord 8h a day 5 days a week. Wait, we don’t count that right? Being a wage-slave in a capitalist company isn’t bootlicking, we call it “networking” and “corporate culture” it’s actually cool. Fucking hell give me a break.

Building so many tanks that most of them just slowly turned into rust after 1991 is a useless direction of resources in your book?

Are you really Russian? Don’t you understand the absolute fear of another invasion that the Great Patriotic War (after WW1 and after the civil war) installed in Soviet people and leadership? There’s a reason why even many opposition supporters in the modern Russian Federation go to parades in the Victory Day, it’s not because they support Russian Nationalism and the status-quo. It’s because they understand the immense sacrifice of 20+mn lives that the Soviet Union undertook to SAVE EUROPE FROM NAZISM AND FASCISM. If you don’t understand that the USSR was under constant attack by the USA in the cold war, you don’t understand Soviet history. It fucking sucks spending 10-15% of your GDP in military, but siege socialism is what it is, the USSR tried to de-escalate and was met with nuclear weapons in Turkey. You’ve listened to too much “Radio Svoboda” I think.

USSR’s economy since early 70s was built on selling oil and gas for everything it needed

Uh… If you check the trade balances of the USSR with other countries, you’ll find out that that wasn’t the case. The USSR traded mostly with COMECON countries, and yes, it exported natural resources like fossil fuels or minerals at international prices to COMECON countries and bought manufactured products. Again, it’s a consequence of siege socialism and of not engaging in imperialism. The USSR could have profited massively from exporting manufactured goods and importing raw materials with the global south, engaging in unequal exchange. But it didn’t do so because it understood that that’s immoral, and the exploitation of the global south goes against the very nature of socialism. I’m sorry that your ancestors didn’t pillage and loot the rest of the world as mine did. For a detailed discussion on this, you may wanna check Robert C Allen’s book “Farm to Factory”, or “Is the Red Flag Flying” by Albert Szymanski. I would bet my ass though, that you haven’t read a single book on soviet economic history, otherwise you wouldn’t be saying the nonsense you’re claiming.

All other areas of its economy had negative margin, one can say, and were intended to keep production of strategic goods, like weapons, in place, and the whole system of society.

Wow, an economy oriented towards the necessities of the people and the state rather than the profit of a few capitalist overlords? Disgusting, isn’t it? There’s a fucking reason the entire rural Russia is being depopulated: the state stopped investing in rural areas and people are suffering the consequences. Enjoy your free market.

You live in a post-industrial society where cars are really something one can live without

The Russian Federation, famous for building more public transit than the USSR? I really don’t get your point. If there’s a part of the world that excelled in building public transit, that’s the Eastern Bloc, out of socialist ideals, of intelligent central planning, and of economic necessity (public transit being more efficient than private combustion engine vehicles).

You should have met some of those people whose parents were Soviet hereditary elite

Ugh… really, you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. Hereditary wealth was incredibly less important in the USSR than in essentially any other country on Earth at the time, possibly with the exception of Sweden during some years. I’ll show you a Russian lib source you’ll love claiming as much, hopefully you won’t accuse them of being biased towards communism: As you can see, wealth distribution has never been more equitative in Russia than it was during Soviet times. Please, PLEASE, read a book before repeating anticommunist mantra.

It’s “serfs can go fuck themselves” instead of “poors can go fuck themselves”.

The Soviet Union lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty without engaging in economic imperialism or unequal exchange. Life expectancy was below 30 years-old in the 1910s, most people couldn’t read, and most people were essentially feudal serfs under the rule of Kulak and noble landowners. Education became free for everyone to the highest level, medicine was universal and free, men retired at 60 years old and women at 55 with guaranteed pensions, the 45h working week was standardized and people got holidays every year, economic standards rose massively, access to housing became universal, unemployment was eliminated legally and in practice, life expectancy rose above the 60 years of age and kept growing progressively, there were at some point more female engineers in the USSR than in the rest of the world combined… Really, that’s not “serfs can go fuck themselves”, that’s one of the most successful emancipatory experiences in the history of mankind. And the fact that you’re here on Lemmy, instead of breaking your back for your local exploitative English/French/German company that didn’t allow your country to industrialize and develop (or, worse, your bloodline exterminated by Nazis as they openly intended to do), is all thanks to the Bolsheviks.

subway stations in the middle of nowhere

This has been endlessly debunked… The “ghost cities” of China are majorly inhabited now, it’s just a centrally planned way of building cities rather than laissez-faire house construction… which leads to available public transit, mixed use areas, parks and amenities, opposed to the suburban sprawl of the US.

USSR-like shortages

You really don’t know what you’re talking about, are you? The USSR rarely had “shortages”, believe it or not. People having to go on waiting lists to acquire luxury products was a feature, not a bug, that guaranteed better distribution of scarce goods in a limited system. In capitalism, the consumption capabilities of people are limited by their income primarily. In the Soviet Union, because the basic necessities were extremely cheap (housing costing on average 3% of the monthly family income, transit ride prices being maintained from 1930 to the 70s without change, and inflation being on average 0% between the end of WW2 and the late 70s), people generally had money to spare.

When you live in a self-sufficient economy where you can’t extract more resources than you do or put more people in factories because employment rate is 100%, producing more of one thing implies producing less of another. The distribution of some luxury goods like cars, was handled through waiting lists, because the idea wasn’t that a wealthy class would be able to appropriate all the goods and leave the rest without anything (as it happens in capitalism). It’s not a shortage, it’s just another more equitable form of distribution of goods than “poors can go fuck themselves”.

What’s the incarceration rate in China? You guys are so fucking racist by swallowing the Anti-Chinese propaganda I swear to god.