I remember there was an end-goal of a communist state to ultimately disband bureaus

To my understanding, the way communists understand “the state” that they want dismantled, is the structures of power of class repression. Communists (myself included) define the state in capitalism as the set of institutions that maintain the repression on workers that enables the domination by capitalists. When we talk of the dictatorship of the proletariat, we simply mean that the state, instead of maintaining the repression against workers, is turned around and instead represses the capitalists to maintain the workers in power (which we see as desirable since workers are the majority and our goal is the elimination of the capitalist class and hence all class relations). The elimination of the state in end-goal communism, the way I see it, is about not needing anymore those structures to repress capitalists because capitalism has been thoroughly eliminated and history has progressed beyond it, in the same way that Europe hasn’t fallen back to feudalism because it was made obsolete by capitalism. This doesn’t mean, however, that all institutions are dismantled. Representative bodies, associations of technicians and specialists in one way or the other (research insitutes, healthcare, meteorology… you name it), and other types of institutions that we associate with modern states would still exist. Many of these imply political power: a higher-up of a research institution in nuclear power will obviously have some higher degree of decision-making over energy policy than your average citizen.

I don’t think communism and democracy aim at the same outcome. Democracy as a concept doesn’t explicitly aim to the elimination of class in society, and communism does, for example.

Do you have any comment on my insights on guaranteeing of human rights by historic socialist nations?

Or did you perhaps mean the Doji bara / Skull Famine

Hmmm. Fair enough. Now let’s do an exercise: let’s go to lemmy.world search, and look for the words “skull famine”, see how many results we get. Oh, we get exactly 2 results containing the words “skull famine”, two copypastas from 2 years ago which are simply a list of western atrocities. I wonder why a famine in India with 10+ million deaths has only 2 results in lemmy.world… Compare that to the search of the word “holodomor”. My point stands, doesn’t it?

That’s why meaningless phrases like “Demographic extrapolations and comparative economics” are such an easy thing to parrot - you’re just saying “and then we do statistics, QED” without having to engage with the actual difficult part (the math)

Good that you’re a data scientist specializing in public health data modeling! Will be interesting. The thing is, you can easily do these studies for the particular case of the transition to capitalism, because you can use many metrics: alcohol consumption, violent crime statistics, drug use, deaths from certain diseases, expenditure in healthcare, number of suicides… etc. You can take all of those metrics and see how they all vastly increase in the transition to capitalism. Sure, if it were just one of those metrics, then you maybe would be able to say it’s because of another reason, but when all of these metrics consistently rise sharply during a horrifying economic crisis byproduct of capitalism in several post-soviet republics at the same time, you can quite confidently both calculate numbers, and blame them on capitalism. As a matter of fact, this has been done widely for modern capitalist Russia, with this study talking of 3.5 million probable deaths between 1990 and 1998 alone, and this other study by Paul Cockshott reaching the figure of 12 million excess deaths between 1986 and 2008, though this latter one using much simpler methodology. Similar studies can be carried out for Ukraine, which suffered even harder since the crisis took longer to recover, and either way the numbers point towards the millions. And this is only excess deaths, not including lack of childbirth and economic migrations, both also counting in the millions.

Because that’s the name it was given by the Ukranian peoples that survived it?

Then why don’t we use any Indian names for the very many famines in India due to British occupation? Why do we call them neutral names like “Bengal famine” and not “exterminatron 3000”?

millions of “lives saved” (pop quiz: how do you measure that?)

Demographic extrapolations and comparative economics. Example: Brazil between 1930 and 1960 went from 36 years to 52. USSR went from 30 to 65. By comparing the evolution of socialist life metrics with capitalist life metrics at starting equal levels of development, you can find out that socialism massively boosted life metrics. You can also compare with the country itself in pre- and post- socialist times:

Surely you, so concerned with Ukrainians, knew about the horrifying demographic crisis caused by the capitalist restoration? The millions of lives lost and ruined by unemployment, suicide, malnutrition, defunding of healthcare and treatable disease, alcoholism, drug abuse and violent crime. Now, compare the hiccup in the graph in the 1930s, with the unrecoverable drop after 1990. And look at the vertical axis.

Regarding Molotov-Ribbentrop and the invasion of “Poland”: I’m gonna please ask you to actually read my comment and to be open to the historical evidence I bring (using Wikipedia as a source, hopefully not suspect of being tankie-biased), because I believe there is a great mistake in the way contemporary western nations interpret history of WW2 and the interwar period. Thank you for actually making the effort, I know it’s a long comment, but please engage with the points I’m making:

The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR. From that Wikipedia article: “The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia’s assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.” Poland could have literally been saved from Nazi invasion if France and itself had agreed to start a war together against Nazi Germany, but they didn’t want to. By the logic of “invading Poland” being akin to Nazi collaboration, Poland was as imperialist as the Nazis.

As a Spaniard leftist it’s so infuriating when the Soviet Union, the ONLY country in 1936 which actively fought fascism in Europe by sending weapons, tanks and aviation to my homeland in the other side of the continent in the Spanish civil war against fascism, is accused of appeasing the fascists. The Soviets weren’t dumb, they knew the danger and threat of Nazism and worked for the entire decade of the 1930s under the Litvinov Doctrine of Collective Security to enter mutual defense agreements with England, France and Poland, which all refused because they were convinced that the Nazis would honor their own stated purpose of invading the communists in the East. The Soviets went as far as to offer ONE MILLION troops to France (Archive link against paywall) together with tanks, artillery and aviation in 1939 in exchange for a mutual defense agreement, which the French didn’t agree to because of the stated reason. Just from THIS evidence, the Soviets were by far the most antifascist country in Europe throughout the 1930s, you literally won’t find any other country doing any remotely similar efforts to fight Nazism. If you do, please provide evidence.

The invasion of “Poland” is also severely misconstrued. The Soviets didn’t invade what we think of when we say Poland. They invaded overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands that Poland had previously invaded in 1919. Poland in 1938, a year before the invasion:

“Polish” territories invaded by the USSR in 1939:

The Soviets invaded famously Polish cities such as Lviv (sixth most populous city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (important city in western Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of freaking modern Lithuania). They only invaded a small chunk of what you’d consider Poland nowadays, and the rest of lands were actually liberated from Polish occupation and returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian socialist republics. Hopefully you understand the importance of giving Ukrainians back their lands and sovereignty?

Additionally, the Soviets didn’t invade Poland together with the Nazis, they invaded a bit more than two weeks after the Nazi invasion, at a time when the Polish government had already exiled itself and there was no Polish administration. The meaning of this, is that all lands not occupied by Soviet troops, would have been occupied by Nazis. There was no alternative. Polish troops did not resist Soviet occupation but they did resist Nazi invasion. The Soviet occupation effectively protected millions of Slavic peoples like Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians from the stated aim of Nazis of genociding the Slavic peoples all the way to the Urals.

All in all, my conclusion is: the Soviets were fully aware of the dangers of Nazism and fought against it earlier than anyone (Spanish civil war), spent the entire 30s pushing for an anti-Nazi mutual defence agreement which was refused by France, England and Poland, tried to honour the existing mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia which France rejected and Poland didn’t allow (Romania neither but they were fascists so that’s a given), and offered to send a million troops to France’s border with Germany to destroy Nazism but weren’t allowed to do so. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a tool of postponing the war in a period in which the USSR, a very young country with only 10 years of industrialization behind it since the first 5-year plan in 1929, was growing at a 10% GDP per year rate and needed every moment it could get. I can and do criticise decisions such as the invasion of Finland, but ultimately even the western leaders at the time seem to generally agree with my interpretation:

“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)

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this

Holodomor

Yeah, a bad famine happened in the USSR between 1930 and 1933, no need for a scary special word to refer to it. Famines were commonplace in the region up to that point, and this one was the result of unforeseen difficulties in the first successful collectivization of land in human history. It was not intended or targeted, unlike the repeated famines in India under British rule. As I’ve explained in other comments, it was a tragedy that took place during the necessary rapid collectivization of agriculture that enabled the industrial revolution which saved Eastern Europe from extermination by Nazis.

Katyn

Katyn and similar incidents in Poland number in the tens of thousands of victims, most of them military and law enforcement. It’s not like Poland didn’t have expansionist ambitions that needed to be fought against.

Gulags

Gulag is just the name of the prison system of the USSR. The fact that many people died in the Gulags during WW2 is consequence of the food shortages that Nazis themselves caused in the USSR during their invasion:

Literal alliance with the Nazis

This is simply ahistorical and untrue. In 1936 already, the Soviet Union was the only country to send weapons, munitions, tanks and aviation to Republican Spain in the Spanish Civil War against fascism, fighting the Nazis in proxy war. Regarding Molotov-Ribbentrop, this deserves its own comment, so I’ll post it below this one

The word was used in print in the 1930s in Ukrainian diaspora publications in Czechoslovakia as Haladamor

And why exactly did that term stick in the west, only transliterated as Holodomor instead? And why is it overwhelmingly discussed with this term since the 2000s? Maybe because the usage of the word is political in nature as I explained?

As for the name of the famine broadly, in Wikipedia it appears as Soviet famine of 1930-1933.

I’m not interested in anticommunist propaganda that doesn’t even portray the class differences between Kulaks and non-landowning peasants. Being born in the west I’ve been exposed to my fair share of anticommunism throughout my life, and I continue to be exposed to it whenever I bring historical facts to lemmitors.

If you were truly concerned about the lives of Ukrainians, you’d be condemning the capitalist restoration and the end of the USSR, which brought untold suffering and death on the Ukrainian people:

Do you also have a scary word like “Holodomor” to refer to the immense post-1990 suffering in Ukraine? Or do you reserve your propagandistic catchy words to anticommunist propaganda exclusively?

So, as I had predicted, the only sources for intentionality against Ukrainians are a few personal remarks by Stalin in some obscure letter to a writer. I literally called this out before you brought up your comment because if there were any further evidence, it would be plastered all over, since there are BIG reasons for western propaganda to promote Russophobia and anticommunist sentiment now that Ukraine is an ideological hotbed.

Also, your source doesn’t discriminate between Kulaks and non-landowning peasants, again as I called you out for in another comment. Funnily enough the only numerical evidence in your source supports my thesis: that the regions most affected by the grain requisitions were the main grain-producing regions, including Ukraine and the Caucasus but also Southern Russia (not mentioned because you don’t care about Russians dying).

The final remark by Stalin is also true, by the way. The vast majority of peasants in 1929 were non-landowner peasants exploited by Kulaks in exchange for miserable wages, and by 1933 the collectivization was essentially complete and these peasants could now work their own lands collectively. There is no cynism there: one of the main motivations behind the Russian Revolution was the redistribution of lands, and the Bolsheviks achieved this for the first time in human history.

Answer, o defender of Ukrainians. Or maybe your concern was only performative and you don’t give one flying fuck about Ukrainians if you can’t weaponize them against communism? Look at the 1930 hiccup in the graph and compare it to 1990. Now tell me how much you really care about Ukrainians.

So, grain requisitions? I never denied that those happened, I denied that it was used as a tool to oppress farmers. You also keep conflating Kulaks and non-landowning peasants, which is bad analysis.

What a load of unsourced bullshit full of lies. This is an opinion article written by a western anticommunist, full of tropes, lies. From claiming that in 1917-1921 Ukraine fought for “liberation from Bolsheviks” (when the Bolsheviks saved most of Ukraine from Polish invasion in the Polish-Ukrainian war), to completely ignoring the role of rapid industrialization in the Soviet Union and the saving of Ukraine from Nazi extermination. It implies that countrywide policies were taken only in Ukraine such as grain requisitions or grain exports, it implies no famine relief was taken (it was taken), and provides no evidence whatsoever that the famine striking especially hard in Ukraine has anything to do with political motivations, especially when, as stated in the article, there was an indigenization policy in the early 1920s in Ukraine (as in the rest of the USSR).

Your claim of repression of Ukrainian intellectuals obviates the repression of Russian intellectuals, and the fact that, after Stalin, the following two presidents of the USSR were Ukrainian. There is no claim of precedent or followup of repression in Ukraine other than two specific years of famine, and at the time, many Ukrainian workers like Stakhanov, Praskovya Angelina or Maria S. Demchenko were praised Union-wide for their excellent work.

Surely you, as a Ukraine defender, are against the return of capitalism in Ukraine, which has caused the greatest mortality and demographic crisis in the region since Nazi invasion:

Where are your concerned comments on the millions of deaths of Ukrainians by capitalism through malnutrition, violent crime, suicide, alcoholism, drug use or treatable disease since 1990?

By it being systemic policy, what do you mean it? What policy, specifically, and in what timeframe?

Stalin disliking Kulaks or his personal beliefs towards peasants are not evidence of policy, and it’s the only source you will be able to provide. In contrast, I can bring you quotes by Anna Louise Strong, an American journalist (first woman to get a doctorate in Chicago university) who traveled and documented the USSR, proving that peasants generally supported the Bolshevik movement and government during the collectivization, and how most trials against Kulaks were carried out by peasants themselves. But go ahead, bring your sources.

The USSR in the early years had targeted food shortages in Ukraine and the Caucuses to starve the population into submission

This is a false anticommunist narrative created by western imperialists to boost anticommunism and Russophobia. Plenty of people in Southern Russia died during the 1930s famine, and there is no document proving anything remotely close to your claim of “starving people into submission”.

There was later a union wide food shortage because Stalin increased the export of wheat without adequately increasing production

Production was attempted to increase, and achieved subsequently, it simply lagged behind for a few years because, you know, it was the first ever successful experiment of land collectivization in human history, and there were unexpected difficulties that weren’t properly addressed with policy at the time. It’s easy to judge in hindsight, but the authorities really did everything they could to minimize the famine.

As for grain exports, these weren’t a capricious ideological decision, they were forced by the threat of external invasion. The USSR in 1929 was a preindustrial feudal shithole, conditions inherited from the Tsarist Empire. 80% of people were peasants, and life expectancy was of 28 years of age. The collectivization was carried out in a very rapid fashion in order to pursue rapid industrialization, again not out of ideological reasons. There was big debate in the CPSU against rapid collectivization, but the threat of external invasion (evidenced by the invasion by USA, Britain, France and many more countries during the Russian Civil War for the unforgivable sin of being communists) eventually triumphed and rapid industrialization was pursued.

Rapid industrialization, which necessitated rapid collectivization in order to relieve labour from the fields and move it to industry, was the key measure that allowed for the defense of the USSR 10 years later against Nazism. After yearly growths of 15% in GDP, the USSR industrialized just enough to defeat Nazism, at the horrendous cost of 25 million Soviet lives at fascist hands. Had the USSR not pursued rapid industrialization (only enabled by export of grains, the only product the USSR could offer at the time to international markets given its low level of development), Eastern Europe would have been genocided on an unimaginable scale, and Nazism wouldn’t have been defeated in Europe. Tens of millions of lives would have been lost to Nazi extermination.

Furthermore, the rapid industrialization boosted the economic capabilities of the country massively, allowing for universal healthcare, the elimination of hunger forever in the region, and therefore the more than doubling of life expectancy between 1929, when industrialization was kickstarted, to 1955 when Stalin died. People went from having a life expectancy of 28 years to above 60 in this timeframe. This, again, saved tens of millions of lives by any demographic measure you use. For comparison, Brazil went from 40 years of life expectancy to slightly above 50 in that timeframe.

With a centrally controlled food supply, a misstep can lead to there literally not being enough food

Agreed, let’s abolish Walmart then and advocate for collectively owned, decentrally planned agriculture. Love to see fellow comrades!

More people die from obesity than starvation. There are tons of options for free food. Nobody is going to starve to death

Ignoring the reality of the literal millions of people receiving food assistance with food stamp programs and charity kitchens isn’t as intelligent as you think it is. Some people can be obese while others in the same country experience food insecurity.

But they’re not by any metric you want to use. Study after study show that, at similar levels of development, socialism creates better outcomes in quality of life than capitalism.

A greedy sociopathic leader with lack of empathy will always cause starvation, be it capitalism or communism or any other system anywhere

Empirically false. At equal levels of development, communism provides better life metrics such as life expectancy, infant mortality or nutritional values, and socialism also has been the only way for previously colonized nations to develop. China and India were similarly developed 100 years ago, yet now China has a higher life expectancy than the USA whereas India still sees tremendous amounts of death from treatable disease and malnutrition. This example alone accounts for hundreds of millions of lives saved. Similarly, in the Tsarist empire, life expectancy was 28 years of age. By the death of “le evil dictator Stalin”, it was 60 years of age.

USSR leadership absolutely used forced requisition

True

as a tool of power and control and to punish the farmers

Bullshit.

The rapid collectivization of 1929-1934 was a very difficult endeavour, and is the FIRST IN HISTORY successful collectivization of agriculture. There have been many attempts since before the Roman Empire, but never had it been carried our successfully before. Grain requisitions were carried out because the effort of rapid collectivization was kickstarted in order to rapidly industrialize the nation. By introducing tractors into farms and collectivizing them in larger plots, fewer peasants were needed, and people could move to cities to build up an industrial sector. Moving people to cities meant feeding people in cities, and grain requisitions were carried out initially in order to force wealthy exploiter peasants (kulaks) to sell their grain at state mandated prices. Had it not been for the rapid collectivization and industrialization of the 1930s, the Soviets would have been crushed by Nazism, and tens of millions of people more would have been exterminated as it happened in Poland, Belarus or Ukraine. Rapid collectivization wasn’t an ideological decision, it was a pragmatic decision that averted the extermination of Eastern Europe at the hands of Nazism.

agrarian population and treated them like shit at least until later in the Union’s life

This is again bullshit. The region has never before or after seen the level of expenditure in infrastructure, education or healthcare that took place in rural USSR. Since the disappearing of the USSR, many massive rural exodus have taken place all over the eastern block.

The “near abroad” is/was a colonial empire

The USSR was definitely imperialistic, see Hungary

You’re spitting in the graves of the tens of millions of murdered by colonialism by comparing it to intervention in Hungary. Colonialism isn’t “maintaining an aligned bloc”, colonialism is the plunder, enslavement and murder of millions in the name of wealth and resource extraction. Go tell the tens of millions of enslaved Africans, of murdered Congolese and Native Americans and Palestinians how what happened in Hungary was colonialism. Disturbing the definitions of western colonialism in order to dunk on communism is honestly a disgusting attitude that trivializes the suffering of the millions upon millions of wretched of the Earth.

Find me anywhere where the USSR did 1% of the horrifying shit that the Brits did in India.

The Soviet Famine of the collectivization, which you inappropriately label “Holodomor” (scary word for a specific famine to make it sound like holocaust, I wonder if you have any other special scary words for other famines) is indeed an unfortunate event of Soviet History. Yet, you fail to see it in the bigger picture.

First of all, even during the famine, life expectancy remained higher than in Tsarist times, because of increasing access to healthcare and nutrition on average to peasants.

Secondly, the famine is an unfortunate consequence of the necessity of rapid collectivization and industrialization because of threat of external invasion. There was intense debate in the CPSU at the time regarding rapid collectivization and industrialization vs. progressive one, and ultimately rapid industrialization won because of the perceived threat of invasion by industrialized western powers with 100 years of industrialization behind their backs. Famously, in 1931, Stalin said in a speech that the USSR was 100 years behind and would have to make up for that difference in 10 years or they would be eliminated. Almost exactly 10 years later, Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.

By industrializing rapidly (15% yearly growth of GDP) thanks to rapid collectivization of agriculture, not only did the Soviet Union defeat Nazism and save every European nationality between Germany and the Urals from Nazi genocide (hence saving tens of millions of lives), but this rapid development managed to raise life expectancy from below 30 years old in 1929 to above 60 bu 1960, effectively saving tens of millions of lives more. By any demographic metric you use, compared to what came before (Tsarism) and what came after (capitalism), the USSR saved tens of millions of lives. Capitalism is the one that brought unemployment, hunger, drug abuse, violent crime, and a reduction of life expectancy after decades of progress.

Don’t believe me? Go check the data: