Soviet-Empire.com U.S.S.R. and communism historical discussion.
[ Active ]
Forum Index » Discussion » Votes & Polls » Best Socialist Country [ Go to page ][ Previous ][ 1, 2, 3 ]
 30 Nov 2011, 21:33
Wakizashi the Bolshevik wrote: You like Brezhnev better than Kryushchev??? And Stalin too??? USSR would have been better off with Trotsky at the helm that Stalin. Stalin almost caused the USSR to fall to the Germans. He just walked away for about six days and let them walk right into Russia with no resistance. Some leader!!!  30 Nov 2011, 22:33
I wonder why do so many people vote the USSR just because it was the most prominent, in Czechoslovakia there were many jokes towards the relative backwardness of the USSR compared to us. The gap between the USSR and the GDR is even larger. It was not a shithole, but it was far from the best socialist country. I know it, my mother lived in the Ukraine in the Brezhnev era and later years and while life was not bad, it was backward compared to CSSR (Czechoslovak Socialist Republic) in which my father and his side of my family grew up. And the 1968 invasion, while wrong, had almost 0 casualties as our goverment did not declare war to the USSR - it was a "depose the current leadership" invasion, not "shoot at civillians" invasion.
All the things Aodaliya_Ren mentions here viewtopic.php?f=125&t=49398 apply to CSSR too, except that in the CSSR much more people had cars, and in the 1980s many people could buy an 8-bit computer. The infrastructure was infinitely better also and people had more disposable income. 01 Dec 2011, 01:31
Neuron wrote: I'm glad you share my minority view, comrade. 01 Dec 2011, 02:40
Me too, me too.
Everybody in the GDR knew how poor "the Russians" were. 01 Dec 2011, 03:38
Well at least they made their cars with steel and not cotton waste and-plastics.
Besides the USSR would have been a bit more richer but the W.P. would have been significantly more poorer had there been no "friendship prices" for Soviet oil and gas et cetera.Of course to provide brotherly countries with "friendship-priced" oil was an internationalist obligation of the USSR. 01 Dec 2011, 12:45
Quote: This is an important point. So much of the left now is defensive, nostalgic, fighting old battles. In the 1900s up to maybe the 50s, communists were the modernisers seeking to sweep away the old ways. Now we are definitively on the back foot, staring down at our shoes and talking about how great it would have been to live in an underdeveloped, bureaucratic form of socialism. 
Soviet cogitations: 2868
Defected to the U.S.S.R.: 16 Nov 2005, 17:55 Party Bureaucrat 01 Dec 2011, 13:20
Of course technology has improved since the sixties and seventies (the "golden" era), but I don't find people's nostalgia and appreciation of the socialist past to be backwards in any way. A lot of us see that the past 20-30 years saw an enormous step back in social development and look upon the 1960s and 1970s as the true height of civilization.
Keep in mind that even if the left is considered to be fighting yesterday's battles, it is in fact the right that is doing that even more. If you notice modern thinkers among capitalists in the Anglo-Saxon world, the ideology that most of them espouse harkens back to the days of Dickensian Britain/Gilded Age USA. Anyway, in answer to the question, I choose the USSR. I admit this is because, of all socialist countries, I have read far more about the USSR than any of the other countries.  "History is a set of lies agreed upon." --Napoleon Bonaparte 01 Dec 2011, 14:01
Marshal Konev wrote: You made an interesting point there, comrade. I'd like to say that nostalgia which you refer to above is always connected with something good. People are never nostalgic about bad things. Seeing how many people are nostalgic of those times is a circumstantial proof of how well people lived (or thought to live) compared to today. 01 Dec 2011, 14:49
I didnt read the question as "which fictional country do you want to live in".
In that case, the great republic of pizza and blowjobs is high on the list. I hope in my lifetime i'll live in either the nordic socialist commonwealth of scandinavian soviets or the united soviet states of america, but the question was about existing socialist states Soviet America is Free America!
Under communism, there is no freedom; you are not free to live in poverty, be homeless, to be without an education, to starve, or to be without a job 01 Dec 2011, 15:24
Loz wrote: Well, that would be the case if the USSR was an imperialist country. But it wasn't. And some Warsaw Pact countries like Czechoslovakia or GDR were also more industrially developed than the USSR, so their higher living standard was not just because of USSR's help. 01 Dec 2011, 15:43
I think one other reason that some people choose the USSR despite its comparative backwardness in the material sense to some other Eastern Bloc nations may have to do with conceiving it the world's main bastion of socialism. It was the USSR, due to historical circumstances, that formed the largest and most powerful socialist state, with all the prestige, responsibilities and problems that went along with it. Vast distances, defense spending, and projects like space exploration contributed to lower levels of development, but they also bread national pride. Some parts of the country, like Moscow and environs, the Baltics, the Caucasian republics, and some industrial and research cities in Siberia had it better than other places, but there were also pockets of underdevelopment that lasted well into the 1980s. I think that starting point and national culture also played a role, with Russia beginning as one of the poorest and backward nations in Europe, while places like Czechoslovakia (the Czech part in particular) had much higher literacy, greater infrastructure, and industrial development at the turn of the 20th century.
"The thing about capitalism is that it sounds awful on paper and is horrendous in practice. Communism sounds wonderful on paper and when it was put into practice it was done pretty well for what they had to work with." -MiG
|
Alternative Display:
Mobile view
|
||||||
Forum Index » Discussion » Votes & Polls » Best Socialist Country [ Go to page ][ Previous ][ 1, 2, 3 ]
[ Top ]
More Historical Forums: The History Forum. Political Forums: The Politics Forum, The UK Politics Forum.© 2000- Siberian Fox network. Privacy.
