My main contact with ml circles were a reading group some years back and hexbear. Unfortunately, I missed the lively debate there.
Sentiments like “if you suffered under the Soviet Union, you deserved it, because only fascists suffered” were much more common than any discussion of how fucked up the ethnic cleansings of the party were under Stalin. Or how the great purge in general weakened the Soviet Union.
The prison system was bad. As were many other prison systems at the time. It’s undeniable that they were used for political intimidation and sometimes even petty personal revenge (see the whole Lysenko-affair). Shutting down the discussion around with "“Gooolag hundreds million dead” isn’t helpful either.
As for repealing for example the decriminalization of homosexuality, this was done in the interwar years between the civil war and WW2.
I don’t think it’s reproducing CIA proganda to say that Stalin’s leadership had a negative impact on the project of the USSR.
Hexbear is an internet forum. I don’t know how or why you expect high quality discourse on an anonymous memes forum. ML is predominant in hexbear, yeah, and it’s thankfully one of the places of the internet where you don’t have to preface every discussion of the USSR with 5 paragraphs on how horrifying repression was.
Through MLs though, I’ve encountered the deepest sources I’ve seen on this. I’ve seen the website of the Gulag museum, the dicussion on the Вдудь Russian channel when he interviews victims of Gulag in Kolyma, the discussion in the book “People’s Republic of Walmart” that deals partially with Soviet economic planning, the books “Economic History of the USSR” and “Farm to Factory” discuss it, and there’s a deep discussion in “Human Rights in the Soviet Union” by Albert Szymanski, in the final chapters. The “Stalin Eras” saga of the “Proles Pod” podcast has a long discussion of the events leading to the repression, too, if you’re interested.
Is that enough discussion that I’ve been exposed to exclusively from ML sources? Or not?
My main contact with ml circles were a reading group some years back and hexbear. Unfortunately, I missed the lively debate there. Sentiments like “if you suffered under the Soviet Union, you deserved it, because only fascists suffered” were much more common than any discussion of how fucked up the ethnic cleansings of the party were under Stalin. Or how the great purge in general weakened the Soviet Union.
The prison system was bad. As were many other prison systems at the time. It’s undeniable that they were used for political intimidation and sometimes even petty personal revenge (see the whole Lysenko-affair). Shutting down the discussion around with "“Gooolag hundreds million dead” isn’t helpful either.
As for repealing for example the decriminalization of homosexuality, this was done in the interwar years between the civil war and WW2.
I don’t think it’s reproducing CIA proganda to say that Stalin’s leadership had a negative impact on the project of the USSR.
Hexbear is an internet forum. I don’t know how or why you expect high quality discourse on an anonymous memes forum. ML is predominant in hexbear, yeah, and it’s thankfully one of the places of the internet where you don’t have to preface every discussion of the USSR with 5 paragraphs on how horrifying repression was.
Through MLs though, I’ve encountered the deepest sources I’ve seen on this. I’ve seen the website of the Gulag museum, the dicussion on the Вдудь Russian channel when he interviews victims of Gulag in Kolyma, the discussion in the book “People’s Republic of Walmart” that deals partially with Soviet economic planning, the books “Economic History of the USSR” and “Farm to Factory” discuss it, and there’s a deep discussion in “Human Rights in the Soviet Union” by Albert Szymanski, in the final chapters. The “Stalin Eras” saga of the “Proles Pod” podcast has a long discussion of the events leading to the repression, too, if you’re interested.
Is that enough discussion that I’ve been exposed to exclusively from ML sources? Or not?