Help me debunk 'If the Soviet Union was so great, how come people wanted to leave? How come they had to build a wall to keep people in?'
How debunk this?
How debunk this?
If the USSR wanted to keep workers in, that means it understood that it couldn't function without them. Does your current country act like it understands this?
there are some accounts in one of the :parenti: books about how former communist, and particularly east german, people were hoodwinked and took everything they had from socialism for granted.
Don't need a book. I lived through the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia myself. People absolutely took everything good in socialism for granted and thought they were going to keep it, while also getting the capitalist treats as well. What followed was a nightmare of transition to crony capitalism, mixed in with a war. As a kid, I was also "hoodwinked" by the western media, but realised something was off with the whole narrative of wonderful capitalism, when I traveled abroad and was shocked to see so many homeless people and people going through garbage...something I haven't ever seen in socialist Yugoslavia. Soon after the transition, garbage scavengers became a regular thing and now it's all just a bunch of failed sorry states and ruined societies, staying barely afloat, mostly because of the achievements of the past socialist governments.
it's always telling that the former socialist citizens living in capitalism praise it always talk about their own successes and treats and people that those who despise capitalism always talk about the poverty experienced by not just themselves but others. nice little microcosm of ideology there. none to be found in watching a human being scavenge the waste of others for food.
yeah, in hungary, we thought we were getting western european social democracy (or rather, what we imagined that was). when in fact, this mythical beast was already on the way out even in western europe.
During the 2020 lockdowns, there were some stores that hid empty shelves with posters of shelves with food. I came across a Reddit thread about this and some descendent of East Germans said “wow this is just like east Germany”
Then an actual ex-East German guy showed up and said “actually, it’s nothing like east Germany. There weren’t many options to choose from but no one ever starved or struggled to find a home.”
The descendent guy got upset and said “stop praising a murderous regime.”
weren’t many options to choose from
The addiction to the theater of "choice" that comes with US consumerism is one of the most mind-numbing things to have to keep retreading with reactionaries. I don't give it a shit if there are forty brands of oatmeal on the shelves. Just give me one that's minimally processed and not covered in sugar and corn slurry.
My favorite supermarket chain in the world is a Colombian chain called D1. There's only one choice for most things and they're nearly all store brand. Prices are low, quality is consistently high (their wine/liquor buyer in particular is a genius), and because they aren't filling up aisles with 100 variations of the same thing, they can stock a little bit of everything in a small corner store. It is perfect.
Ask any psychologist at random and they'll tell you straight-up that excess choice drives people insane. It's even more infuriating because half the shit here comes out of the same chute, into seven different labeled bags with difference price tags because the suburban boat dads need to feel like they're buying something better than the filthy poors.
migration from the eastern bloc wasn't actually that bad outside of East->West Germany, and that was because the west germans literally bribed people who'd already gotten fantastic state-funded educations in the east
If you think a cheeky response would be suitable, "If America is so great, why are they moving to mexico in record numbers?" :
https://www.businessinsider.com/number-of-people-moving-from-us-to-mexico-2019-5
https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/us-citizens-moving-to-mx-record-numbers/
Basically though, people move for lots of reasons, and the reasons and rates of movement can vary depending on national or global events. It helps if you can get them to narrow down a specific period of migration. That said, a lot of the time liberals are thinking about people leaving the USSR in the late 80's and early 90s as it was getting turbo-fucked by neoliberalism and being actively destroyed -- which, shockingly, was the major driver of people leaving at that time.
People want to move to the imperial core to get a share of the spoils. It's not like people in communist countries want to move to the places capitalism exploits the most. They aren't trying to escape communism to go work in a third-world sweatshop or mine.
If we're talking the Berlin Wall in specific, this passage from chapter 8 of William Blum's Killing Hope: US Military & CIA Interventions since WWII is very relevant.
The Association of Political Refugees from the East, and the Investigating Committee of Freedom-minded Jurists of the Soviet Zone, were two of the other groups involved in the campaign against East Germany. The actions carried out by these operatives ran the spectrum from juvenile delinquency to terrorism; anything "to make the commies look bad". It added up to the following remarkable record:
- through explosives, arson, short circuiting, and other methods they damaged power stations, shipyards, a dam, canals, docks, public buildings, gas stations, shops, a radio station, outdoor stands, public transportation;
- derailed freight trains, seriously injuring workers; burned 12 cars of a freight train and destroyed air pressure hoses of others;
- blew up road and railway bridges; placed explosives on a railway bridge of the Berlin-Moscow line but these were discovered in time—hundreds would have been killed;
- used special acids to damage vital factory machinery; put sand in the turbine of a factory, bringing it to a standstill; set fire to a tile-producing factory; promoted work slow-downs in factories; stole blueprints and samples of new technical developments;
- killed 7,000 cows of a co-operative dairy by poisoning the wax coating of the wire used to bale the cows' corn fodder;
- added soap to powdered milk destined for East German schools;
- raided and wrecked left-wing offices in East and West Berlin, stole membership lists; assaulted and kidnapped leftists and, on occasion, murdered them;
- set off stink bombs to disrupt political meetings
- floated balloons which burst in the air, scattering thousands of propaganda pamphlets down upon East Germans;
- were in possession, when arrested, of a large quantity of the poison cantharidin with which it was planned to produce poisoned cigarettes to kill leading East Germans;
- attempted to disrupt the World Youth Festival in East Berlin by sending out forged invitations, false promises of free bed and board, false notices of cancellations; carried out attacks on participants with explosives, firebombs, and tire-puncturing equipment; set fire to a wooden bridge on a main motorway leading to the festival;
- forged and distributed large quantities of food ration cards—for example, for 60,000 pounds of meat—to cause confusion, shortages and resentment;
- sent out forged tax notices and other government directives and documents to foster disorganization and inefficiency within industry and unions;
- "gave considerable aid and comfort" to East Germans who staged an uprising on 17 June 1953; during and after the uprising, the US radio station in West Berlin, RIAS (Radio In the American Sector), issued inflammatory broadcasts into East Germany appealing to the populace to resist the government; RIAS also broadcast warnings to witnesses in at least one East German criminal case being monitored by the Investigating Committee of Freedom-minded Jurists of the Soviet Zone that they would be added to the committee's files of "accused persons" if they lied.
Although many hundreds of the American agents were caught and tried by East Germany, the ease with which they could pass back and forth between the two sectors and infiltrate different enterprises without any language barrier provided opportunities for the CIA unmatched anywhere else in Eastern Europe.
Throughout the 1950s, the East Germans and the Soviet Union repeatedly lodged complaints with the Soviets' erstwhile allies in the West and with the United Nations about specific sabotage and espionage activities and called for the closure of the offices in West Germany they claimed were responsible, and for which they provided names and addresses. Inevitably the East Germans began to tighten up entry into the country from the West.
The West also bedeviled the East with a vigorous campaign of recruiting East German professionals and skilled workers. Eventually, this led to a severe labor and production crisis in the East, and in August 1961, to the building of the infamous Berlin Wall.
The passage starts on page 61 of the pdf, and corresponding citations are on page 228.
added soap to powdered milk destined for East German schools
When you're definitely the good guys
Generally, people on this site will say not to entertain "debates" in general and that can be pretty good feedback.
For your edification though, here are a few points to consider. These are all, pretty much taken from :parenti: 's Blackshirts and Reds or Against Empire
In fact the US has a policy of mostly taking in refugees from these countries. The US rarely, if ever, takes in refugees from people fleeing their puppet regimes. It would make them look bad (Chile and much of South America is a great example)
This is an excellent point that never exactly occurred to me in this way, for some reason
The west said fuck you, and also spent vast amounts of money on military at the expense of its citizenry. There are people going hungry and freezing to death in the US.
The soviet union was great, in comparison to everything before and after on the same land
I assume you mean the Berlin wall. East germany was much poorer than west germany. This was the case before WW2, and it is still poorer today. It wasn't helped by events like the Dresden bombings or Russia taking some of its industrial capital as reparations
East germany quickly produced the most educated working class it ever had with free universities. West germany had better wages and more treats because of their wealth. Therefore, people flocked to the west. That doesn't mean east germany was inherently worse under socialism! They simply started with worse material conditions. The wall was an 'authoritarian' measure to prevent brain drain. I don't know if it was the best option, but I understand why it was built. Perhaps a compromise could have been freedom of movement within the eastern bloc, to give people the opportunity to build socialism elsewhere if they wanted
Socialism isn't utopian, but it is the most democratic way to distribute and build the resources we have, and give people the most opportunities. The entire USSR was always way poorer than the US, or modern China, but it accomplished so much more for the common person than its successor states ever will
These are good arguments. I wasn't talking only about Berlin though, but this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigration_from_the_Eastern_Bloc
Wasn't emigration heavily restricted? Or have I been disinfo'ed
Educate specialists for free
specialists want that pmc blood money, not 50 percent more than worker money
…
emigration of people highly invested in by the state
emigration gets restricted cause it doesn’t make any sense to do this for society
A Hungarian economist stated that "it was quite obvious that the socialist countries—like other countries—intended to prevent their professionals, trained at the expense of their society, from being used to enrich other countries."[62] Eastern European spokesmen maintained that they were keeping would-be emigrants from suffering from insufficient linguistic and cultural preparation.[63] They also stressed the debt that individuals owed to socialist states, which offered care from birth, including subsidized education and training[63] and, thus, they justified the emigration restrictions as an "education tax" with the states having a right to recoup its investment.[64] Open emigration policies would create a "brain drain", forcing the state to readjust its wage structure at a cost to other economic priorities.[65] Bulgarian and Romanian representatives had long argued that they could not afford to match western salaries and, without emigration restrictions, they "would become like Africa."[65] The restrictions presented a quandary for some Eastern Bloc states that had been more economically advanced and open than the Soviet Union, such that crossing borders seemed more natural—especially between East and West Germany where no prior border existed.
yeah the Wikipedia article basically states what I wrote above
a physical wall only existed in Germany, but the restricted borders were along the entire eastern bloc like @Vampire said, for the same reason
The Stalin personality cult era after WWII when he was slipping off into dementia while suffering delusions doesn't really need to be defended. Even the USSR admonished Stalin for his mismanagement and cruelty.
Emigration slowed down during the Khrushchev era, and then picked up again after the Afghanistan war debacle began unfolding. So it is not like it was constant either.
Stalin near the end had gone through half-a-dozen strokes, and was taking medical advice from a veterinarian.
His suspicious nature went into full blown paranoia, and he pretty much lost it.
“Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have been immortal. Had he died in 1966, he would still have been a great man but flawed. But he died in 1976. Alas, what can one say?”
I agree, think stuff like the Leningrad Affair was incredibly stupid on Stalin's part. Like bruh you're gonna die soon anyway maybe don't purge thousands of your most popular cadres? Those guys would have been useful a few decades down the road.
Party should have thanked Stalin for his service throughout the 30s and 40s and then forcibly retired him post war in favor of Malenkov. Instead they let his brain melt which gave the Khrushchevites an opportunity to trash his entire legacy for a little temporary popular support, all while compromising the greater ideological project.
Hindsight is 20/20 and all though, and sticking with Stalin till death for stability's sake probably looked like the best option at the time after the most destructive war in human history
After Stalin abandoned Lenin's internationalism and started promoting the socialism in one country model, it was mostly downhill. Even though Stalin executed most of the Nazbol leadership, he appropriated the same sort of Russian nationalism to drive support for the Winter War in Finland, which was an absolute disaster.
The USSR's ideological project of international socialism ended with Lenin. Stalin went full hog nationalist and the USSR's socialist project never really recovered after Stalin's purges. Stalin eliminated 75% of the Comintern.
Nikolay Bukharin who advocated for gradual changes in agricultural policies like collectivization would have been a much better leader imho. A trained economist who worked out models on decentralizing a command economy, he was one of the last purged by Stalin in the Great Purge.
I'd agree generally. One of the most difficult obstacles for global communists to overcome in the last century is that Stalin tied the project of building communism (globally) with the national interests of the USSR. A lot of communists obviously didn't feel very comfortable with letting internationalism take a back seat to just always supporting Moscow and let the capitalists do the whole "reds are traitors who want to sell out their nation" propaganda a lot more effectively. The Sino-Soviet Split is another example of this, where Russian national interests won out over international solidarity.
Though about Bukharin, I can't say for sure how things would have turned out if he and the Right Opposition came out on top in the power struggle. I really like Bukharin personality, he seems like a good guy, smart too. Things like collectivization would have been more "relaxed" under him than Stalin definitely, and he probably would have been able to just bribe the peasant kulaks into cooperating rather than going full class liquidation on them like Stalin. I bet Bukharin economy would have likely been really impressive if it was allowed time and space to develop since he seemed to understand in a Marxist sense that Russia didn't get the benefit of prior capitalist accumulation and could do more to address that than just brute forcing the problem with massive, labor-intensive projects like Stalin did (with terrible health and safety regulations as well)
The major issue is that you still have the fuckin Nazi invasion happening in the 1940s, and without Stalin's aggressive campaign of industrialization it's possible a Bukharinist USSR just gets rolled over and genocided if that slower paced industrialization campaign means a weaker war economy. Things got pretty close a few times even with a hard ass like Stalin in charge. Plus to be fair in that global situation, stoking nationalism against foreign invaders does make sense even if it's not strictly communist.
That's one of the modern arguments modern Russians like to use to defend Stalin at least. They say "Bukharin would have dragged out collectivization until the 1950s, so we would have lost the Great Patriotic War and all died." But whose to say WW2 even goes the same way with Bukharin running things. It's possible Bukharin's more "lenient" leadership could have convinced the west to actually negotiate collective security agreement against Nazi Germany in good faith. Then the Nazis could be stopped at Sudetenland if something like the Franco-Soviet Mutual Assistance Treaty was taken seriously.
historical possibilities of that period of time are really fascinating
Read it in a book long ago.
Found an article with some of the keywords, but it is just the abstract. There are 10 sources for the paper though.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-1331.1999.tb00004.x
He increasingly withdrew from official functions and he muttered menacingly to his close associates that it was time for another purge.
Omg literally me
based
All the arguments used for "Failing USSR" are also applied to "Failing New York" and "Failing California".
If the United States is so great, why did Edward Snowden move to Moscow? If Texas is so great, why is Elon Musk still spending all his time in San Fransisco?
People leave their country for a million reasons, but every person who left the Soviet Union got lit up by the propaganda machine so we tend to think that way more people did it than actually did. The Soviets themselves put rules in place to try and prevent certain high-value people from leaving, like nuclear engineers, and this created a lot of friction between a certain class of professional and the state - but taken as a whole Soviet emigration wasn't much different than, say, American emigration today.
edit: East Germany is a different story, along with German-speaking minorities being expelled from Eastern Europe after World War 2. With the power of hindsight I think it's safe to say that the East German authorities mishandled the situation and made things worse for a long time before it stabilized, which is why 1/5 of East Germans left the country - but it did stabilize, with emigration dropping precipitously after 1953 with Stalin's death.
For the GDR, see:
For the Soviet Union, this is a thing you hear about many countries (Cuba and the DPRK for example). Since it's not accompanied by any data, you can simply say that people also immigrated to the USSR (or wherever else). This is equally valid. They don't know how many people immigrated to and from the Soviet Union, but they have an image cultivated by years of propaganda: so ask them. They'll be forced to tell you that they don't know. Then you will be done with it.