Posts from How many Soviet republics were there?

Based on what you said, Alexey, it can be assumed that you created this topic only to find out how many people lived in the Soviet Union, because the number of "mental perceptions" equals the number of people living in that territory. Regarding the socio-economic and political formation. I suggest creating a topic where we can discuss (based on facts, our personal opinion, and the opinions of other people) what the USSR was, as an economic formation (was it communism, socialism, or perhaps state capitalism?). Was the USSR a totalitarian or democratic country? Or maybe authoritarian? Were the principles of natural law observed? Was it a monarchy or a republic? And so on.

Judging by the posts in this thread, that's exactly what's being discussed. The topic title essentially covers all such questions.

The topic title doesn't accurately reflect all the questions I've raised, as the word "how many" in the topic suggests that the answer should be the number of USSRs.
Oh well, I won't nitpick the words.
So, I believe that the Soviet Union was one of the bloodiest states of the 20th century, and communism is one of the most inhumane ideologies in all of world history. Communists are no better than fascists. During collectivization, communists killed millions of their own citizens. Finally, communists sought a world revolution (and, consequently, world domination), and given how they built their state in Russia, Belarus, etc., let's not say that this revolution was supposed to be peaceful.

Let's break it down point by point: 1. Millions – that's how many? Please provide a specific number. And are liberal reforms less inhumane if Russia's population is decreasing by almost 500,000 per year, with no economic growth? 2. World revolution and world domination are different things. The USA also strives for world domination, but it doesn't build communism in other countries at its own expense; instead, it extracts all their resources. 3. Have you read the programs of the RCP(b) and the CPSU? Please elaborate on the points about inhumanity. 4. Were there alternative ways to increase the country's power in 20 years? It's easy to talk about inhumanity, but the result was there. And now, more people are dying, and there are no results.

Alexey, let's go through this point by point:
1) There is no official, i.e., published by the Soviet authorities, statistics on this matter. This does not go beyond the principles of assessment adopted by the Soviet leadership, when "crime is steadily declining," and the figures are replaced by this phrase. However, according to the most modest estimates, more than 16 million people died in the camps (and some camps still existed under Gorbachev). In Ukraine in 1932-33, approximately 5 million peasants were deliberately starved to death by the grain distribution system introduced by Soviet bureaucrats and Stalin. People were deliberately killed as part of state planning. Of course, people died not only in Ukraine.
2) I did not say that world domination and world revolution are the same thing. I meant that the communists, through world revolution, tried to achieve world domination.
“The United States also seeks world domination, but at the same time, it does not build communism in other countries at its own expense, but, on the contrary, pumps out all the resources from them.”
Reading this phrase, I don't even know where to start. One might think that building communism at one's own expense is a good thing. The United States extracts resources from other countries at the expense of its own taxpayers, i.e., not entirely for free, if you look at it at the level of countries (otherwise, budget expenditures on war are involved). But the point is not this; it is better to consider the chains:

A) Taxpayers' money – war – resources

B) Plundering of one's own people and the murder of dissenters in order to accumulate capital for the construction of communism – "building communism at one's own expense" - any resources (in case of successful construction)

Both are bad, but which is worse?
And what does America have to do with it.

3) The fact that there are no points in the programs of the RCP(b) and the CPSU about inhumanity does not mean that this inhumanity was not implied (facts – the Gulag, collectivization – say the opposite). And, in general, I know only one state – Nazi Germany – where inhumanity (genocide against the Jewish people) was enshrined in law (correct me if I am wrong).
Communism, however, is inhuman in its essence: it strives for world revolution (which will not be done peacefully, because no sane person will give up the right to make economic decisions and give up their family (if they already have one) and voluntarily give their wife for public use); bureaucracy, which is an integral part of this system, because someone must make decisions, for example, about whether to sow wheat or oats, destroys the illusory ideas about communism as a paradise on Earth and shows that communism is not equality, but an economic pyramid that can only exist within the framework of the whole world.
4) I didn't understand the question. It should be read: was there an alternative to millions of deaths? If so, then there was.

Let's go through the points again.
1. How then do you explain that the population of the USSR grew steadily, and specifically during the 60-80s it increased by 80 million. Is this all because of a "hard life," right?
2. Any major country strives for world own dominance. And there is nothing wrong with that. But no one remembers that Great Britain was the largest colonial power, squeezing every last drop out of its colonies.
3. For your information, GULAG is an office. A concentration camp is a British invention. And, I repeat, 8-20% of those in the camps were political prisoners in different years. Now in Russia, more people are imprisoned without any camps at all. And there is more bureaucracy in Russia now than there was in the USSR under Brezhnev, even though the population has decreased by almost 100 million. As for the essence of communism—it's not even funny anymore. Where did you read such nonsense? Try reading Marx and Engels for once before speaking. Do not attribute someone else's stupidity to them.
4. I wonder what alternative options there were?

No sane person would refuse the right to make economic decisions and give up their family (if they have one) and voluntarily offer their wife for public use.

Gur, you seem to be confused. There is no concept of exchanging wives in communist theory. "Free marriage" was advocated by nihilists in the 19th century, but nihilists evolved into anarchists, not communists... In the USSR, on the contrary, the thesis "family is the cell of society" was promoted, to the point that people were publicly reprimanded for marital infidelity (this, of course, sounds ridiculous, but if compared to the swingers lifestyle promoted today, it is perhaps even preferable). I won't talk about divorce rates; everyone already knows that. People have somehow forgotten how to create families these days. Well, the topic of benefits for families has already been discussed, and that's not what I'm talking about.
Before anyone jumps on me, I want to clarify that in this post, I am not advocating for the USSR, but simply clarifying facts. I just wanted to correct you: you seem to have gotten something wrong about the family. This did not exist in either communist theory or socialist practice.

It seems that everyone here considers themselves an expert on these issues. I don't know what they're reading, but it has nothing to do with reality. Most likely, they're not reading anything at all. I'm amazed at where people get this collection of liberal propaganda clichés from. Do they not want to think, or are they simply incapable of it?

Official propaganda is carried out by people who are not only not less intelligent but also much smarter than us...
Any state propaganda. And everything is presented in such a way that people simply become incapable of perceiving any other statement. Just as in the USSR, people firmly believed that in the USA, blacks were still being thrown out of "white" buses, so now people firmly believe that in the USSR, everyone was lined up, dressed in the same gray robes, and forced to march in step...
In fact, trying to destroy the image created by propaganda is already starting to play by the provocatively imposed rules. So I will no longer try to convince... especially since more than three-quarters of those who spoke in the topic have already figured everything out for themselves and ended the discussion.

Here, I found more or less normal statistics on the repressions and the Holodomor of 32-33.
So, about the Holodomor.
According to estimates by Ukrainian historian Pykhorovych, it is 640 thousand people. Now Ukraine loses 400 thousand people annually.
Even the most ardent anti-communists in Ukraine do not give figures higher than 3.5 million, though without providing a single piece of evidence. Where are the 6 million?
So, about the repressions.
According to the report of the Prosecutor General of the USSR Rudenko, the number of people convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes for the period from 1921 to February 1, 1954, by the OGPU Board, NKVD "troikas", Special Council, Military Board, courts and military tribunals was 3 777 380 people, including 642 980 sentenced to the highest measure of punishment.
According to data from historian Zemskov (not a communist): "In total, by 1940, there were 1 850 258 prisoners in camps, colonies and prisons... There were about 667 thousand death sentences over the entire period."
Where are the 16 million?
Mr. Liar-pants, as Korovyov used to say.

The beginning of a book filled with all sorts of stats and numbers
V.I. Gromov, G.A. Vasilyev. The Collapse of the USSR - Causes and Consequences
Year 1998
Beginning:
No matter how hard the regime-friendly media tried to diminish the role and significance of Soviet power, to forget everything good and bring the dark pages of history to light, presenting them in a distorted, aggravated form, they could not instill own people with disgust for the Great October, for the USSR. The conquests of October and socialism are too great, and nothing will eclipse them throughout the world. They passed through the lives of generations and every Soviet family.
Now let us consider in more detail what people had in the USSR, and what they have now lost.
1. We had a comradely, brotherly society. We had a mighty, proud state that depended on no one. We had confidence and hope for an even better life. Today's rulers have forgotten and do not even utter the words upon which our lives stood: work, justice. One cannot fail to mention today how persistently the Soviet government worked, strengthening the power of the country and increasing the welfare of the people.
2. We had everything that a working people needs for a normal human life. First and foremost—guaranteed work according to one's calling and desire, and that which was needed by the country. We regularly received wages twice a month, and the thought never occurred that salary could be delayed. We had affordable free housing, free education (of the highest level), free medical care, health resorts, preventoriums, vacation homes, pioneer camps, tourist bases...
3. The USSR, despite all the difficulties of its history, ensured a type of life that guaranteed the preservation of every people, even the smallest. There was neither national assimilation, nor apartheid, nor unbearable social and cultural discrimination here. Divided peoples lost these guarantees for the sake of mythical benefits of isolation and openness to the West. The fate of many of them, if things continue this way, is to disappear from the face of the Earth.
4. The USSR excluded the emergence of an internal "third world" within it. The destruction of the union, based on the principle of a common historical destiny, immediately led to regional and national economic stratification and the "dumping" of the crisis into "weak" regions with their rapid impoverishment. The power of the market and the greed of the compradore bourgeoisie are such that no "sovereignization" will save one from extremely unfavorable relations with strong partners. The policy of the reformers inevitably leads to relations of the type "first world - third world" within Russia, which itself as a whole will become, in the best case, part of the "third world" in relation to the West.
5. The USSR was the only country in the world that was self-sufficient in mineral, ecological, and human resources. This integrity gave the national economy of the USSR enormous efficiency. The destruction of the USSR plunged all peoples without exception into ruin. All of them lost economic independence, the restoration of which global competitors will try to prevent.
6. The USSR provided its citizens with a life under conditions of real legal protection and, by international standards, high reliability and safety. The Soviet person lived without seeing weapons, OMON with dogs, or even a rubber baton. The collapse of the USSR created a completely new system of threats and dangers for citizens—with the simultaneous emergence of brutal police states.
7. The union state of the USSR removed from the peoples the enormous burden of each people creating its own bureaucratic superstructure, the maintenance of which not only requires huge expenditures but also deforms society. Today, under slogans of "debureaucratization," a monstrously large official apparatus has emerged on the lands of the USSR with all its attributes, including corruption. Two hundred of "their own" embassies inside the USSR and four hundred abroad! The efficiency of the bureaucracy (the volume of real functions performed by one employee of the apparatus) has decreased dozens of times compared to the USSR. Even a healthy economy cannot withstand such a burden.
8. In the USSR, the most efficient system of agriculture was created....

But that's all just for laughs. Here is a good book—Evgeny Piskun. Thermidor in the USSR. The Ideas of L.D. Trotsky and Soviet Reality from the 1920s-1980s. It mostly talks about the opposition in the party and how the bourgeois seized power even after Stalin.

Excerpts from it: "Events in our country fully confirm the cognitive value of Marxist theory, and only on its basis can they be reliably explained. At the same time, the very fact of the restoration of capitalism in the USSR can neither refute nor prove the validity of Marxist theory. The possibility of backward development of human society or a separate part of it, a people or a country, is entirely possible. In his time, K. Marx wrote regarding events in France in the middle of the XIX century: 'A whole people, believing that they had accelerated their progressive movement through revolution, suddenly find themselves transported back into a dead era...' This is exactly what happened to the peoples of Russia at the end of the XX century. Such backward movements of history are possible also in ideological life, when a new theoretical system is for some time pushed aside by an old one, more primitive and hindering social development. A classic example of this event is in the Roman Empire in the II century AD. By this time, Christianity was already the dominant religion. But Emperor Julian, who earned the nickname the Apostate, subjected the new religion and its convinced supporters to persecution and tried to revive paganism. There were immediately a large number of recent theorists and practitioners of 'real Christianity' who renounced their convictions and engaged in the 'revival' of dying pagan traditions and persecutions of their more steadfast comrades. Only two years passed and Christianity again became the dominant force, with whose determining spiritual influence the next millennium of history of the Old World is connected.
Marxism is currently experiencing a period similar to that of Christianity during the time of Julian the Apostate. Such a situation is not the result of deficiencies or peculiarities of its theory, but the result of class struggle."

... At the June Plenum of the Central Committee in 1957, the short period of balance in the class struggle in the USSR, which had lasted since 1953, ended. The period of restoration of capitalism in our country began. It proceeded relatively slowly and 'peacefully'...

I don't know about the first book, but in Piskun's book everything looks real. All those repressed were mostly "degenerate personalities," party members who abused their position, supporters of Trotsky. One of the prerequisites for victory in the Second World War was that Stalin managed to remove all traitors ready to surrender to the fascists in order to share power with them in the USSR.

In general, in my opinion, only Lenin and Stalin were real. In terms of loyalty to communism. This is also stated in the book. The book also says that the experiment with socialism ended in success. The economy flourished, depending on the state. But unfortunately, Stalin had no worthy successor and Khrushchev and his circle seized power. Generally, thinking about this whole topic gets creepy. It pisses me off how f...king mercantile and selfish all these officials and other bureaucrats are. And yet it could have been awesome...

Here is another cool book "I.V. Milonov. Communism - the bright future of humanity," but it's more like a small journalistic brochure. It has few pages. It says that, like, class struggle will continue forever until these classes no longer exist. Under communism, there are no classes.
It seems to me that communism will definitely be in the future.

I have one more theory. After all, man is basically an animal. Although today they deny the existence of natural selection in society, it seems to me that capitalism creates exactly those conditions in which one has to survive. In the end, the strongest survives—that is, the one who has more strength and cunning to earn money. Selection has changed its forms. Society chooses capable people for obtaining profit.

The USSR, as many know, was founded by Lenin and Stalin, who overthrew the Tsar and the entire nobility with the Red Army. The amusing thing is that the Romanov dynasty ruled for 300 years, while the USSR couldn't last even 100.

I suggest a counter-topic: "Is the unwillingness to use search a disease or a bad habit?"

The funny thing is that the Romanov dynasty ruled for 300 years, while the USSR couldn't last even 100 years.

If we measure the "correctness" of a social order in years, then primitive communism will win. Before getting involved in such an argument, it would be good to familiarize yourself with the basics of political science and sociology. It enriches you, you know.

The search function also doesn't work very well; I once created a topic that was essentially a clone, after using the search function several times with different variations of the title for my future topic. To be absolutely sure that the topic isn't a clone, you have to manually check everything.
Regarding the topic: The USSR, in terms of the standard of living, was perhaps better than it is now in some ways, meaning people had some form of social protection. However, the non-capitalist system led to the fact that even the most ordinary sausage wasn't available on store shelves. And, in my opinion, all these communist and socialist systems have outlived their usefulness, which is what led to the collapse of this superpower.

information for internal use, there are currently only 90 million people left in Russia! instead of the official 130 million, of which 75+ are Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians; there are just as many, if not more, in Germany, France, and England. a large-scale genocide of the Russian (Slavic) people is taking place, but it is very professionally disguised.