FreedomPatriot @[email protected]

@genmaicha @adiz @freepatriot my general impression of the USSR is that the authoritarians got in their own way most of the time. they did not genuinely understand what they were asking for, and then resorted to ultraviolence when it was impossible.

the wikipedia page on the five year plans kind of hints at this. top brass thought they could simply dictate western level production and gulag everyone until they got it.

this is impossible, because the west relies on permanent underclasses. their socialist framework could never product iphones in the same way because apple relies on terrible working conditions to make the phones cheap, then turn around and pocket the difference.

i think they could have gotten there but it would have been slower and more like switzerland (everything being blobdamn expensive)

@genmaicha i admittedly do need more books on russia. i'm mostly buried in therapy and cybernetics books rn

@freepatriot @adiz

@adiz @icedquinn @freepatriot I have trouble taking you seriously

@icedquinn @freepatriot @adiz It's a lot more complicated than that. From what I remember, Trotsky was an international socialist, while Stalin was for "socialism in one country", and that was the main conflict between them. There was also an ethnic element, where the old guard were very Jewish and a lot of Stalin's lackeys like Beria were Caucasian. Trotsky and co. were more of genuine ideologues as far as I can tell, and a lot of academics like to characterize them as idealists, but they pretty much wanted to reengineer humanity from the ground up to suit their needs, brutally destroying all the old institutions along the way. In a way, the Trotskyists are a lot like our modern neocons and woke liberals.

@adiz @icedquinn @freepatriot some of the tsars were pretty neglectful, but Stalin deliberately killed off tons of people on a scale never seen before