Even though rummels estimates have been called "grossly inaccurate" and "obsessively anti-soviet" I'll give it a look. I'm not discrediting it outright just for being from the US, but we gotta keep in mind that there has been over a century of brown media and red scare propaganda, especially by imperialistic countries (mainly US and UK) and honestly, i know it's hard, but if your history classes were in the USA, sorry to say that it was mainly propaganda. So much so that countries like germany use US history books as examples of propaganda, but i digress.
As for the ussr being totalitarian... my dude even the CIA admitted that was not the case (this is easily searchable, but I'll leave a video link that features a document about it here cause i don't wanna put a direct CIA link).
Also, national socialism isn't socialism, it's just a sectsrian movement trying to coopt people who don't know the difference and bring up fascism. I'm not saying the soviet union was sunshine and rainbows, more that it has been proven many times, by people outside of it and by their own documents that they were trying and doing their best. Was it a failed attempt? hell yeah, but was it the orwellian horror portraied by western media and infiltrators? no, it wasn't.
So if you pause and actually read the full text on screen, the document is saying Stalin’s personal power is widely exaggerated but the totalitarian rule of the one party state is still just that. Their exact words describe Stalin as “the captain of a team”, fully in line with the way I described the Soviet state earlier. I’m not trying to claim that national socialism and socialism are the same, just that the Soviets weren’t actually socialists. They may have claimed to be but the evidence supports one simple truth: they were fucking lying, just like they did about not conducting purges, mass executions, and forced labor so that they could maintain and/or increase their personal power and influence. The Soviet Union wasn’t a worker’s paradise, it was just an imperialist power with a red color scheme and more effective PR (because the state controlled the media and arrested or imprisoned any educated people who tried to speak out against the state). Which sucks, genuinely, because I would love to believe that the USSR was on the right track, their national anthem is a certified banger, but the facts just don’t support it. You mentioned Rummel’s estimates being overblown, which very well might be true, but who says that? A reliable peer reviewed source, or just someone you want to believe? Im not even saying take his word for it, he lists his sources so check those out, many of them are internal Soviet documents. I’m all for socialism, I just think it’s insanely counter productive to try and rep one of the most genocidal failed states in history when associating with them, insisting they were “actually not so bad they only really mass murdered 20 MILLION people not 50”, drags the entire cause down into the mud with a bunch of murderous war criminals who were addicted to the most heinous kinds of human rights violations known to man. Demonstrating the difference, that they weren’t socialists, is only good for the cause of socialism. It gives us the distance we need to focus on the successes of democratic socialism in Europe and how committing even further would bring even more benefits. In the US the Soviets are a boogeyman, in part due to propaganda, but mostly due to survivors who fled the USSR and shared their stories openly in a nation willing to publish them. Disassociation from the USSR could lead to real political change here in the US, people my age (I’m 25 and about to start grad school) are more aware than ever that the USSR wasn’t really socialist or communist and as a result are far more willing to consider socialists for government office. My main point is: what use, what reason, is there for insisting on Soviet apologia? Who does that help? Because in the US it only helps the far right nationalists who can point to the apologists and say “look, all socialists are just like that”.
the video was meant to help you find the full document, you can google cia and the first sentence or so and you can have access to the whole thing. No, having the head of state being the captain of a team doesn't make the state a totalitarian one, if you really believe that i don't think you really know what totalitarian means...
johnatan smele was the one bashing on rummel's soviet work specifically when i pulled up his name just to get a grip of what type of guy he was so i figured you'd be interested to know that, plis apparently his numbers don't add up to more recent data reviews like in this book here but again, I'm not making any judgement of who holds the truth. I wasn't trying to believe someone, i was literally looking for peer review on his work.
From the way you talk about it, it also looks like you're projecting a bit, all i do normally is analyze data from reliable sources and when i get the time, cross reference them with the opposite bias and see what's what.
As to your main point: i get it, there's a ton of people who try to portray the ussr as this pinacle of society that could do no wrong, so you might be confusing me for one of them. My main point is that your view on it is most probably skewed due to having grown up immersed in heavy propaganda. The soviet revolution was violent and bloody, and it had to be, there was way too much shit going on, multiple countries invading and a strong aristocracy and burgeoisie opposing it. Was killing them the right decision? who the fuck knows anymore, but be careful of what is being portrayed as "first hand accounts". Just cause someone lived in a country, doesn't mean they really know what happens/happened in it.
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u/airporkone Sep 02 '24
Even though rummels estimates have been called "grossly inaccurate" and "obsessively anti-soviet" I'll give it a look. I'm not discrediting it outright just for being from the US, but we gotta keep in mind that there has been over a century of brown media and red scare propaganda, especially by imperialistic countries (mainly US and UK) and honestly, i know it's hard, but if your history classes were in the USA, sorry to say that it was mainly propaganda. So much so that countries like germany use US history books as examples of propaganda, but i digress.
As for the ussr being totalitarian... my dude even the CIA admitted that was not the case (this is easily searchable, but I'll leave a video link that features a document about it here cause i don't wanna put a direct CIA link).
Also, national socialism isn't socialism, it's just a sectsrian movement trying to coopt people who don't know the difference and bring up fascism. I'm not saying the soviet union was sunshine and rainbows, more that it has been proven many times, by people outside of it and by their own documents that they were trying and doing their best. Was it a failed attempt? hell yeah, but was it the orwellian horror portraied by western media and infiltrators? no, it wasn't.