Dude, the time period in question was 1970-1990. I have already been very clear, from my very first post in this thread, that the USSR managed to pull off decent development up to that point. Try to keep up. Yeah, why behave honorably when you can just pre-emptively tell people what they think and dismiss them on that basis...
Two points. Since you acknowledge the massive growth before 1970, you acknowledge that socialism works (and I mean real socialism, not Sweden socialism). Thus, my original assertion remains: that we should examine what went wrong so that we can better implement it in the future. Regarding your question, the Soviet Union under Kruschev and onwards was focusing on capital production so there was a point of diminishing returns. Combine that with liberal reforms such as glasnost and perestroika, and you have a recipe for disaster. Gorbachev put the final nail in the coffin by selling out Soviet workers to Western companies. Fine, are you willing to discuss the USSR and Maoist China without resorting to the "millions died" argument? Not that they didn't, but that history isn't that simple.
Historical revisionism and total bullshit. In Ukraine alone, at least 3.5 million people were deliberately starved to death by the Soviet regime during the 1930's. The Soviets forcibly-removed/ethnically-cleansed millions from Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Southern/Central Asian SSRs. They were complicit in the murder/imprisonment of countless thousands within the Warsaw Pact communist regimes.
Famines were occurring all over the place during that time period. The Ukraine myth has been debunked several times. It's not a myth that a famine occurred, but that Stalin deliberately sought to create one, or that it was consciously planned. And it all has to do with how statistics are taken. Mortality rates reflect excess deaths above a given norm meaning that if the norm was India, it would appear that no one in the USSR died. If you applied those same standards to the US, it would mean that 7 million people died during the Great Depression. Be careful how you get your statistics. Edit: Excuses are not needed. Nobody said socialism would make people immortal, only that it would be an improvement on capitalism and it was. Fewer people died in the Soviet states by far from preventable causes than pre-revolutionary Russia.
Sorry Comrade, but you can't bullshit this chickadee. My family lived in Russia (Czarist/Soviet) for centuries.
Learned something new about you Xotica. Times were hard with the. change over is that correct? An I know only what I've read an heard. But there was sever poverty all the way from the 60's till the 80's? An when USSR "fell" free enterprise an black market was big. Please correct me if I'm wrong..
In Cuba before there were rich and poor , the bloody traitor Castro eliminated the rich and now they are all poor, except the blood sucker the the party members. As an example all the new millioners in Russia now, they were before party members they exploited the system then and filled them self with wealth and as change took place , the truth come out. Why do you have to compare USSR to USA they both are corrupt and funny, Compare the former USSR to Switzerland Denmark , and many more European nation . The stupid Bolsheviks tried to remove God with their atheism from the Russian people. Have you been lately there , the churches are growing like mushrooms. ( even Putin is a believer in God ) The stupid Bolsheviks biggest failure was to full around with peoples mind ( believe ) The Cuban traitor have learned , so he invited the Pope for a visit . ete.ete.
Indeed. The dark dividends from 80 years of Communist Party mismanagement, corruption, and recidivism.
The logical fallacy you seem to consistently revert to is known as "Post hoc ergo propter hoc." That things were arguably better, in material terms, in Russia in 1991 than they were before the communists seized power, does not mean the communists improved anything. Improvements in technology alone would have have improved life (and certainly, imo, had a more positive impact on quality of life in Russia than communism did over the same period), even had the czar remained in power. Life is far better for Americans now than it was in 1917, too, but the reasons why that is are far more complex than "capitalism did that."
That logic is false. Many countries are indeed hardly better than they were fifty or a hundred years ago. The USSR was better in 1991 than Czarist Russia in 1917 because of very clear industrialization and economic policies of the Soviets. I even provided sources for this a few posts back. It didn't "just happen". It was policy. The same for Maoist China. While I'm on the topic of Mao, I'd like to address the inevitable "Mao killed millions of people" argument, which is usually espoused by people who read the "Black Book of Communism" and think it is a holy source of wisdom about communism. Aside from the fact that that book has been debunked and the numbers are exaggerated, there is a very clear difference between "killed by" and "died under". It may indeed be true that as many as 40 million people died under Mao Zedong. However, Zedong did not give any executive order calling for the deliberate murder of people, and indeed, death by famine is a result of policy and material conditions and not deliberate murder. Zedong did enable rural peasants to hold trials for the landlords and carry out sentences, which resulted in the execution of 800,000 landlords across China (at least), but these were local expressions of anger at the very landlords who let the peasants starve for decades. Fewer people died, by far, under Mao than before Mao. Furthermore, there seems to be a double standard that exists for critics of socialism/communism. If somebody dies under socialism, he was murdered by socialists and it is a flaw of the system itself. When numerous people die under capitalism, it's just a few bad people, and there's nothing wrong with the system itself. You can't examine history by comparing a country like China to the United States. You have to compare pre-revolutionary China to post-revolutionary China
Communism, and democracy are two failed attempts at the same thing, peace. May I stand with both my American, and Russian brothers? One world, gentlemen.
