#why does that post attract people who are really attached to their historical revisionism

[specialagentartemis]

Hi there, I'm coming from that post you made on historical revisions; how come you include praise for the USSR? Marxist-Leninist states saw that after the USSR's collapse, there was a marked decrease in quality of life and an increase in human suffering. The people that were affected negatively were the upper-middle to upper-class and the rich, which is why business owners and the like fled Cuba and other countries. This isn't a debate, historians and academics largely agree that the USSR overall was a good thing, and that the US was the problem. I'd link references but Tumblr doesn't let you do that anymore, but you can look it up anywhere and it will largely corroborate their claims.

"you can look it up anywhere and it will largely corroborate their claims." Okay, anon! I'll take you up on that!

Hmm looking up. "Stalinism thus became an outright symbol of Stalin's ruthless authoritarian rule over the U.S.S.R. and the multinational forces misrepresented as the international Communist movement during the dictator's lifetime." nope. how about: "... This was particularly the case during the purge era in the second half of the decade when diplomats were faced with the difficulties of representing a regime which had unleashed terror on its people, as well as having to deal with the fear that they too might perish in the purges." hmm nope. "Numerous scholars and survivors of the USSR's "Great Terror," a common designation for the years 1935-1939, have described the period as one of sweeping or even total fear among the Soviet population.'" uh oh. Well maybe the perspective has changed since the 80s--"From mid-1937 to nearly the end of 1938, the Soviet secret police carried out a mass terror against ordinary citizens. This "kulak operation," as it was called, accounted for about half of all executions during the "Great Purges" of 1937-38. By the time it ended in November 1938, 767,397 persons had been sentenced by summary troikas; 386,798 of them to death and the remainder to terms in GULAG camps." well surely not everyone believes this, you SAID I could look it up anywhere--"Political terror was part and parcel of Soviet politics. Within the context of world history, Soviet terror is not necessarily unique; mass terror is characteristic of many forms of politics (such as Hitler's Germany, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia). Within the context of Soviet history, however, the Great Terror of 1937-1938 is unique in that it was a policy of extraordinarily intense, concentrated, and purposeful killing of, at least, hundreds of thousands of people." but--"The ‘mass operations’ were large-scale campaigns of state repression, spanning from summer 1937 to autumn 1938, and marked the high point of the Great Terror. The first operation was launched on 30 July 1937 against former kulaks and other ‘anti-Soviet elements’; thereafter, similar operations targeted a range of different population groups, including national minorities such as Poles, Germans and Koreans." what about "Two decades have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but if you so much as scratch the surface of most family histories, you are likely to discover first-hand experiences of Gulags and deportations, dekulakisation and State terror. Yet there have been no legal processes put into place by which the atrocities of Stalinism would be officially recognised and condemned as crimes against humanity." noooo you said that historians were generally in agreement that the USSR was good! Maybe you meant, better in terms of personal freedoms than the US was at the time--oh. "Stalin's Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.) treated homosexuality as suspicious activity linked to sabotage, espionage, and a lack of political reliability. The U.S.S.R.'s most celebrated playwright Maxim Gorky was unequivocal in 1934 in seeing homosexuality as antithetical to the tenets of communism: "exterminate homosexuals and fascism (itself) will disappear." Homophobia ran rampant across the political spectrum." Uhhh here's a less harsh description of gulags? "Conditions were brutal and mortality rates were frighteningly high, with total deaths in the Gulag reaching well into the millions. Yet millions also survived and were released. No fewer than twenty percent of the Gulag population was released every year. At no point did the Gulag evolve into a system of industrialized death camps. Most Gulag prisoners stood at a crossroads. From the inhuman conditions in detention camps, prisoners would either reach redemption (and return to the social body) or final excision from society (through death)." damning with faint praise. Even this fairly neutral description of Stalin's rise from a source very sympathetic to the early revolutionaries describes the arrest, torture, imprisonment, and execution of Stalin's political enemies.

Maybe you simply mean economically. Here's an article that has lukewarm-at-best praise for the Soviet economy in the 60s-80s. Not horrible, certainly acknowledging the standard of living brought about by industrialization, but not glowing either. The freedom of women in the Soviet Union also wasn't bad. I can be fair.

But genuinely, Anon, historians don't even agree on whether relationships between the USSR and Poland were one of imperial control and denial of self-governance or undeniably imperial but more ambivalent relationship between the USSR and Poland in the post-WWII divvying up of influence in Europe between Churchill and Stalin, or whether Poles were actively persecuted and systematically murdered and if it should be counted as a genocide. Historians don't agree whether the USSR was a relatively safe place for Jews and pogroms were rare until WWII and only saw violent and repressive antisemitic policy become entrenched later under Khruschev, or if Stalin oversaw state-sanctioned anti-Jewish purges in the 1930s. Historians don't even agree on how many people died in the Holodomor. (This paper and this paper argue that Ukrainian archives and data were destroyed to intentionally obscure how many people died.)

The collapse of the Soviet Union saw a lot of conflict and difficulty in the post-Cold War world, as any really dramatic and sudden political transition will; some countries had positive outcomes, other countries had negative ones. Organized crime ramped up to fill political voids. Doesn't mean that the USSR "overall was a good thing" and certainly doesn't mean there's academic consensus about it.