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Comment on The Billionaires have spent a fortune making sure you hate Socialism.

Cowbee@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Life expectancy doubled in Russia, literacy rates went from 20-30% (depending on the region) to 99.9% within the span of decades. Healthcare was made free and high quality, same as education. Famine was gradually eliminated in a region where Tsarist agriculture made that a common affair. Homes were dramatically upgraded from wooden shacks in rural areas to decent apartments for everyone. I don’t know where in Eastern Europe your family is from, but the great majority of society saw dramatic improvements compared to semi-feudalism before it. Aristocrats and capitalists definitely lost out, and the transition wasn’t bloodless, but the vast majority of society pulled ahead.

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Tja@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Compared to feudalism. Low bar, huh?

Plus lol@famines. Ukraine wants a word.

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- Cowbee@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  The majority of socialist states emerged from semi-feudal societies, and they factually made dramatic improvements. The 1930s Soviet famine proves my point, the early 1930s was the last famine in the USSR outside of wartime, becuse by 1933 they had successfully collectivized agriculture and abolished the former Kulak system. The famine wasn’t caused by socialism, it was ended by it.
  
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  - Tja@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Holodomor is a river in Egypt.
    
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    Cowbee@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    I already acknowledged that there was a famine in the early 1930s. If your point was that this was a deliberate, intentional famine, then even serious liberal scholars believe it to have been a combination of adverse weather conditions and mismanagement. For instance, Mark Tauger wrote:
    
    [data] indicate that the famine was real, the result of a failure of economic policy, of the ‘revolution from above,’ rather than of a ‘successful’ nationality policy against Ukrainians or other ethnic groups.
    
    Tauger believes it was a failure of economic policy, not an intentional attack on ethnic Ukrainians. The 1930s famine was a combination of drought, flooding, and mismanagement. Further, the Kulaks, wealthy bourgeois farmers, magnified matters by killing their own crops in the midst of a famine rather than letting the Red Army collectivize them. The Politburo was also kept in the dark about how bad the famine was getting:
    
    From: Archive of the President of the Russian Federation. Fond 3, Record Series 40, File 80, Page 58.
    
    Excerpt from the protocol number of the meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party (Bolsheviks) “Regarding Measures to Prevent Failure to Sow in Ukraine, March 16th, 1932.
    
    The Political Bureau believes that shortage of seed grain in Ukraine is many times worse than what was described in comrade Kosior’s telegram; therefore, the Political Bureau recommends the Central Committee of the Communist party of Ukraine to take all measures within its reach to prevent the threat of failing to sow [field crops] in Ukraine.
    
    Signed: Secretary of the Central Committee – J. STALIN
    
    Letter to Joseph Stalin from Stanislaw Kosior, 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine regarding the course and the perspectives of the sowing campaign in Ukraine, April 26th, 1932.
    
    There are also isolated cases of starvation, and even whole villages [starving]; however, this is only the result of bungling on the local level, deviations [from the party line], especially in regard of kolkhozes. All rumours about “famine” in Ukraine must be unconditionally rejected. The crucial help that was provided for Ukraine will give us the opportunity to eradicate all such outbreaks [of starvation].
    
    Letter from Joseph Stalin to Stanislaw Kosior, 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, April 26th, 1932.
    
    Comrade Kosior!
    
    You must read attached summaries. Judging by this information, it looks like the Soviet authority has ceased to exist in some areas of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Can this be true? Is the situation in villages in Ukraine this bad? Where are the operatives of the OGPU [Joint Main Political Directorate], what are they doing?
    
    Could you verify this information and inform the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party about taken measures.
    
    Sincerely, J. Stalin
    
    Evidence doesn’t point to deliberately killing some of the Soviet Union’s most loyal citizens in the breadbasket of the entire USSR, when they desperately needed to advance agricultural production (and did).
    
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