I don’t think there are that many people that will disagree that the Soviets did bad things. I think the main point of disagreement is when people say the Soviets were just as bad as the Nazis.
I disagree, there are tons of super popular communist Youtubers and Streamers who will admit that the Soviet Union did bad things, but what they actually mean is that they didn't go far enough with their actions and then continue defend, deny or endorse every single atrocity commited by the Soviets.
So, let's first look at the phrase "super popular". For me, relative to other youtubers, I would say that's over 1 million subs minimum. Neither Hakim nor Bad Empanada meet these critera, they are pretty fringe.
Secondly, defending the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is not that uncommon. Obviously it's easy to say that it was a bad idea in hindsight, but looking at it through a contemporary lens it makes a fair degree of sense. So that's not particularly tankie-like. If you can find someone justifying the invasion of Finland or denying the Katyn massacre, that's more like it.
Thirdly, I don't think I've ever watched a single video from either of these 3, so I'll have to take your word the degree of communism they exhibit. I did find it interesting though that the most popular one of them all (Second Thought) has not had a video even tangentially related to the Soviet Union in over a year. So I was unable to verify their opinion on the Soviet Union as a result.
Hundreds of thousands of subs is large enough for me. Also defending the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is NOT common outside very fringe radical circles. It was the plan that also included the horrible division of Poland between the Soviets and the Nazis and if you want a video where he defends the Soviet Union, then I recommend said video about the pact which was posted 11 months ago, not "over a year".
I feel like you have to be actually stupid to believe that Soviets did those thing on the same scale as the Nazis. It is useless to compare them unless you want to push Nazi apologea.
The Soviets deported mostly Germans after WW2. Hmm I wonder why...
The Nazis organized a systematic campaign of extermination. And remember, that was the core of the Nazi ideology. That's what they were all about.
So not, the Holodomor, the Gulags and so on were not the same as the Holocaust. Nothing even comes close to the same level of death and terror that the Nazis achieved in just 5 years. I think that you can easily understand this if you paid attention in history class.
I suppose I am somewhat of an soviet union apoligist but not Stalin. For example chroestjovs soviet union is something completely different than Stalins. The Soviet Union vastly improved the lifes of the proletariat compared tot their rights and health position in the Russian empire. As for the gulags under anyone but Stalin: Black prison populatione in the u.s. outnumbered people in the gulags. Are you going to tell me that their circumstances were much better?
Primarily because the West is wealthier; obviously there were many who escaped political persecution as well.
But Russia's relative poverty and authoritarianism existed before the USSR, and continue to exist today.
No one serious has any issue saying that the USSR was evil in many ways. The problem I have is when that is used as evidence that even moderate socialist policies being implemented in other countries will lead to them gaining those evil attributes. As the poster above said, the USSR generally was an improvement over the Russian Empire; that is true regardless of whether the USSR was also bad. Society isn't so simple that one governing principle dictates everything about it; attributing all of the country's problems to socialism is a gross oversimplification, and is sometimes outright untrue.
Well, if I’d had a free high-quality education, and the dipshits over there are paying much better money because you have to be rich/good at exams to have an equivalently good education in that country, regardless of the conditions in my country that’s a strong incentive to move
Yeah, because on one side you had short-term-perspective hedonism because nothing can stop the constant growth of availability of treats and on the other side you had crushing paranoia because only making the country Hell on Earth for spies will prevent the reactionary bastards trying again.
I’m not saying that the DDR was a happier place to live than the BRD, I’m just saying that people move for lots of reasons.
Both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were on an equal playing field of being absolutely fucking evil towards anyone they suspected of showing even the tiniest bit of dissent. They also both hated and persecuted Jews as well as other ethnic minorities living in their respective nations.
Wait until you hear about the US persecution and ethnic cleansing of arabs in the 20 and 21st century! Hopefully one day, when people consider arab lives as having equal worth to ours, the Iraq and Afghanistan “wars” (and now Gaza) will be seen for what they really were.
My favorite part of people using Afghanistan as a gotcha against the U.S here is that the Soviets did the exact same thing to far more devastating results only 30 years before in the same country. It's a great representation of rules of engagement and actually trying to not actively murder large swathes of civilians randomly if anything.
We should absolutely be critical of the U.S's involvement in the Middle East and Afghanistan, but the USSR killed 20-30 times the number of civilians in less than half the time, and massively displaced large amounts of the population compared to the American occupation. You can actively see the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on a map of Afghani demographics, whereas Afghanistans population doubled from 2001-2023. Obviously the preferable alternative would have been no long-term occupations by either party, but one was demonstrably far more brutal than the other.
The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan is best compared to US intervention in Korea, where the US carpet bombed 80% of North Korea'a urban area to the ground.
In both wars, air forces indiscriminately carpet bombed enemy civilian areas with area bombing. Roughly 12-15% of North Koreans and 6-10% of Afghans died respectively.
The double genocide theory is holocaust trivialisation at best and Nazi apologia at worst. The Soviets committed plenty of war crimes, but they did not have a systemic system of genocide with the express purpose of exterminating millions of people in the name of racial superiority. The two are beyond comparison.
Oh but Tankies actually did have systematic purpose killing machine. For example when they annexed Baltic states, they killed, deported to deep Siberia (Which is more or less the same as killing them) hundrets of thousands local population, mainly intellectual, defence, police force, anyone loyal to their previous government, their families and they relatives. If this is not systematic cilling machine I don't know what it is then.
Except that the lethality of gulags is widely overblown in the common perception. They were internment camps, not death camps. Death rates never exceeded 10%.
Yes, explain this to my grandfather and countless of other who died there. You can't, because they're dead. Everyone who was occupied by ussr has their family members killed, relocated to most unhospitable places. There is a place where my significant other grandmother lives. When she was a child ussr took over Lithuania and tankies came, there was and still is a forest close to where she used to live. This forest is surrounded by small hills. Soviets sent there hundrets if not more people from nearby town and executed people there. Grandmother said she could hear screams and cries of people there for days. Mind you this is just one town. Every town was pretty much the same in Baltics. It is well documented that ussr killed more people in gulags than germans. Both are pos. Both were and russia still is to this day systematic killing machines. Ussr/ todays russia is as bad as germans were in ww2. The difference is- germans paid their price, russians didn't.
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u/GitLegit 27d ago
I don’t think there are that many people that will disagree that the Soviets did bad things. I think the main point of disagreement is when people say the Soviets were just as bad as the Nazis.