Bobby. wrote on Sep 23
rd, 2023 at 4:26pm:
Karnal wrote on Sep 23
rd, 2023 at 1:29pm:
Bobby. wrote on Sep 23
rd, 2023 at 7:59am:
chimera wrote on Sep 23
rd, 2023 at 7:47am:
When Russia gave orders in the revolution there were 5.5mill Reds and 1,023,000 Whites in May 1919. The Tsar had been shot the previous year but Whites kept obeying orders. Reds obeyed orders to kill them. Then Ukrainians. Then Poles. Anyone, really.
I reckon if Hitler had not invaded the Western countries:
France, Poland Holland etc -
the West may have joined him in defeating Russia.
The Russians were always ruthless criminals.
Oh? You forget the sympathies of the international workers' movement. In the 1930s, France was led by the communist-leaning Popular Front. The Soviet Union had the backing of the world's labour movement. Uncle Joe was seen as a hard-working patriot. Even the mainstream media revered the Soviet Union's ablility to industrialise and develop at lightning pace. The Soviets, of course, cultivated this propaganda.
Lefties in the first world envied Russia for going communist first. Russians were only seen as cu
nts after the Hungarian and Czech invasions. Prior to that, they were generally seen as the good guys.
That's not true -
the West was aware of how Stalin starved millions of Ukrainians to death
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomorby stealing all their food well before WW2.
Stalin was a monster and everyone knew it.
That's true. It's also true that news of the famine was skewed and buried by the Western press:
Quote:According to Patrick Wright,[22] Robert C. Tucker,[23] and Eugene Lyons,[24] one of the first Western Holodomor deniers was Walter Duranty, who won the 1932 Pulitzer prize in journalism, in the category of correspondence, for his dispatches on Soviet Union and the working out of the Five Year Plan.[25]
In 1932, he wrote in the pages of The New York Times that "any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda".[26] He said that while there was a bad harvest, and consequent food shortages, it did not rise to the level of a famine and that "there is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition."[24][27] Some have disputed the validity of his distinction between death from starvation and death from disease that is exacerbated by malnutrition.[24]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_denial#:~:text=Officially%2C%20the%20g...I'd recommend the film
Mr Jones. Great movie:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Jones_(2019_film)In the 30s and 40s, the Soviets were generally seen as a force for good in Western liberal, academic and media circles. This only changed slightly with George Orwell's
Homage to Catalonia, about the Soviets in the Spanish Civil War.
Animal Farm and
1984 were probably too metaphorical to be read as a specific critique of the USSR, although they certainly were.
Ultimately, it was the defection and publishing of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisvich and
Gulag Archipelago that saw the Western intelligencia turn on the Soviets in the late 1960s/70s.
From the 1930s to the 1970s, the labour movement, academic world and bourgeois left tended to view the USSR as benign. It was a right of passage for any well-connected young social democratic party member to visit the Soviet Union, tour their factories and collective farms.
If you were from a developing country, even more so. The Soviets funded engineering and other scholarships for students throughout Asia, Africa and the Middle East. People in places as far flung as Cambodia and Yemen still know some Russian from their time spent in Russian universities.
This is the "Ruski Mir" Vlad would like to recreate, but he forgets that it was soft power, not hard power from the barrel of a gun.
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