To stomp out commies you gotta promote reactionary forces, as they'll happily go beat up strikes. Then you need to memoryhole everything, and say tsar was okay, everything was going great. Whole eastern europe exists in imagined history, where children will argue with parents about how oppressed they were
Also if you memoryhole communism as disproved by the natural selection of history, you basically just have a stretch of great men to look at, and what explanation do you have then except nationalism and their personal strength uplifting the country?
Whole eastern europe exists in imagined history, where children will argue with parents about how oppressed they were
Can you elaborate on this? Have you actually seen such arguments?
I've talked to a lot of Russian people and I've noticed there's a big "personality change" around the age of 26. Like everyone younger than that is basically some "normie" who only watches western (and Kpop + anime) media, while many of the people older than that are actually broad-minded and know a good deal about other (non-european) cultures.
The older ones are also chiller, and tbh even looked different and no it's not because of age--I'm partially basing this on the Russians I was talking to at age 19 in 2012 (who are now 30+)
Doubt i can see them in other people families lol. I've heard from older people from georgia, poland, ukraine, russia. they just say the children don't understand and they've decided fuck it, not important to argue about.
Like younger people will fully absorb grey aesthetics from media, and then be mildly surprised by family photos of happy people doing their thing, surprisingly in normal color, not an nkvd/kgb/stasi agent in sight
I've heard from older people
How old are these people usually (and how old are you, roughly I understand privacy is a thing)
grey aesthetics
some guy at the CIA: we need to use the smog filter AND the grey filter
50-60, i was around 30, they were tourists, so like not poorest slice of population, but travelling inside europe is not that expensive
The deliberate suppression of progressive elements combined with the reactionary elements being the other "nationalist" option in not just the common usage but in the sense of promoting resistance and independence from the influence and meddling of the west.
Also in terms of the reactionary elements providing a target and reason for the obvious decline and suffering of people, the red menace is already beaten so you can either assert that everything is basically fine and according to plan(asking people to be delusional) or you can provide false targets and causes.
This also basically goes for East Germany. In practical terms it was annexed by the western side, looted for all its worth then had anything connected to communism dismantled and suppressed harder than nazism(west germany of course infamously at one point had more former nazi party members in the state than nazi germany had active ones).
So who is to blame for the poverty and for what reason? Well communism is suppressed so theres basically one other option for people to take unless they want to take the option of "things are basically fine."
Two words: American imperialism
Same story for Afghanistan, Iran, Indonesia, Chile and many many more examples in the developing world.
I don’t know about “most progressive” lol. But I imagine WWII made a lot of politicians and people go back to conservatism to promote more births and “women’s work” since people were dying at a fast rate, and the majority of soldiers sent to fight were men. Then after that, people didn’t really shift back to Lenin-era policies and attitudes. The historical nihilism after Stalin’s death also made many citizens apathetic about civics and ideology, and I’m assuming the result of that is that people worried about the next day instead of broader society.
Also, Soviet citizens were still practicing orthodox Christianity even though it wasn’t encouraged or allowed in many places. You can see this with stats of people who “didn’t believe” during the USSR period vs the explosion of believers following its downfall - though its also possible that the horrid conditions of post-soviet Russia made people desperate enough to resort to religion as a guide to life once more.
Socialist states also tend to be slow about progressivism because they had just overthrown a reactionary state, or they simply ignore/forget about their own progressive history. Then when the enemy flanks them with similar progressive policies, the socialist states become flustered and start marking everything as capitalist decadence. Cuba was like this, but it’s an ML state so it recognized the tides are turning and that the new generation of revolutionaries will not just be rugged bearded men. It now has possibly the most progressive constitution of all countries, but the west will never give them credit for evolving past its bigoted history.
In other words, it’s just shit slinging at the expense of marginalized people. Countries just associate traits that transcend (most) ideology with the enemy. China associates feminine men with capitalist brainwashing while the US associates feminine men with communist brainwashing. In modern times, politicians ought to be smart and realize that a lot of their citizens are loyal and nationalist regardless of their identity and that it would be wise to accept them to defend the state.
Think about whatever country you live in. Think about everyone you know IRL (not online, that’s a bad sample). How knowledgeable and engaged are they about the socio-economic and political conditions they live in? I’m guessing the answer is probably “not very”.
While I think the average Soviet citizen was more politically engaged than the average American is now, most people back then weren’t like, expert socialism understanders. Most people, in most places and times, more or less just go with the flow and live their lives and don’t give much thought to the broader society in which they live.
So then as others in this post have said, once communism was murdered in those places, you needed to have counterrevolutionary forces promoted. Most people aren’t going to push back, really.
Equal rights for women, labor rights, workers representation, overthrow of feudalism and support for decolonial struggles
To add to the other comment, universal education and healthcare. Even their infrastructure projects would be considered progressive.