this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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2 things:
The victors write history
After Lenin the USSR was not really communist anymore but more really a totalitarian state that didn't believe in the values of communism. Just like China.
Everything would probably have been better if Lenin didn't die so fast and then Trotsky would have ruled.
Flashback to stories of Rus conquests written by the Rus that said the people asked to be conquered
“History is written by the victors” is a tired cliché that doesn’t always hold up super well if you spend a moment to consider it.
Who conquered Rome? Surely, it was a people remembered for their great military prowess, right? Nope, still commonly remembered as barbarians thousands of year later.
The Mongols had one of the largest empires in history, and yet in much of the lands they conquered, they’re remembered as being monstrously ugly brutes, which is where words like “mongoloid” and “mongrel” come from.
Mask off trot lmao
To be clear, the alternative here is Stalin. There are like only five people who would be worse choices
Trotsky was as much a tyrant and potentially even more blood would have been spilled. Trotsky was a strong proponent of war communism which was brutal towards the Russian civilians.
Stalin believed in the values of communism, he just also believed everyone was out to get him. Economically he followed Lenin's plan of nationalization and collectivization even more zealously then Lenin would have. Lenin wasn't as paranoid as Stalin and probably wouldn't have killed and gulaged millions of "suspicious" people but he was still very much a dictator and was willing to use any means necessary to achieve his goals, same with Trotsky.
With any of them the super structure of the state and how it's organized may vary a bit, but it would have all been built off a nationalized and collectivized base. Whether you want to call that base communism is up to you, but you can't say one is and one isn't.
Lenin did put plenty of people in Gulags. Communism = fascism.
He did but not nearly as much as Stalin.
Equating soviet style communism and fascism completely ignores the base. Yes the structure of the government is similar but in fascism the underlying economic system is still capitalistic and market based, while in Soviet style communism it is nationalized and planned. It also ignores ideology, fascism is about asserting national and racial supremacy to the detriment of inferior races, communism is about seizing the means of production from the bourgeoisie and giving control to the proletariat. Even if the government structure is similar, the policies those governments enact are wildly different. Thats like saying reddit and lemmy are the same because they both work on up voted content percolating up.
Yeah, right, fascism is so capitalistic! This is why Mussolini forced labour unions and nationalised 75% of the Italian economy. What a capitalist!
Until the next tyrant came along. It's a system that is always bound to fail.
It is a system that never gets transitioned to fully. It doesn't fail because it has basically never existed. If I invade your house, kill your father, and make you call me the milk man, that doesn't make me a milk man.