Has anyone encountered someone from a country that has had socialist in the past falling for propaganda.
I have a couple friends who know I’m a ML and its difficult to try to discuss communism around them because of how they fall for the anti red propaganda.
I can discuss the issues with them but they often dismiss everything at themselves being an authority on the subject as I do not live in a post socialist society. I ususally write them off as impossible to enter reasonable discussions with and also I focus mostly on the people within my region to agitate. But occasionally they’re a mutual friend or are in the vicinity of the discussion and return to the same old things.
Unnecessary but relevant story:
There was even an incident with a German I met at a party. I talked for a bit about normal stuff and mentioned how hard living was for me in my country because of capitalism and he shut me down not wanting to talk about politics which ofc I respect its a party. But later when I was discussing the feminist progress in socialist countries have accomplished and their impact on our country and culture with a professor I was totally chattin up(she wrote her final thesis on a similar matter), they came over and interrupted the conversation with their own opinions on the matter. Mostly referring to the history in Berlin of which ofc they hands personally experienced. Thankfully this didnt ruin the vibe and us socialists got social lmao.
But Its something I have encountered repeatedly and I’m not sure how to approach it. Especially as someone from a imperial country.
社会主義採用してた国の人とプロパガンダ信じるのがありますか? 少し友達に僕はMLだを知ってます。プロパガンダひっかかるので、辺で共産主義について話は難しです。
あの人とよく話せますけど、よく僕の意見は無視されますよ。あの人にとって、あの人は共産主義について権威振舞いますよ。あの人とちゃんと話無理と思いますて, 同国人とに焦点変わります。しかし、よくあの人辺がいますて、よく僕の話に遮ります。どうしようかな
[Edit: lmao I misclicked or something into the wrong community ty for the replies tho]
If I grew up under der Stasi I would also be skeptical of so-called communism.
But it’s ultimately a failure on their part to imagine a better world and better model of governance than one which relies on secret police.
I know this Serbian guy who is totally fuckin libbed out because of stories his dad told him, no even any personal experience. As soon as you start talking about social programs, he starts spouting Reaganite nonsense
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Bro said this while his post history is him mostly being a massive open source software fan lmao
I’ve been to several post-socialist (and attempted socialst) counties. No one seemed to like those days other than Yugoslavs who didn’t get fucked up in the war that loved Tito because he validated them. The corruption was the same, and most other things harder or worse. Like getting your family sent to the gulag farms because you owned a radio and committed the crime of hearing music from the next country over.
Well, I appreciate the attempt to engage in conversation by throwing someone else’s biased work at me, but there’s a number of problems with this article. Not the sources, though. I will say that these opinion polls are reliable as opinion polls. There’s just a lot more happening.
This article sounds great to anyone that’s never talked to a single person that lived under a socialist government listed here about the actual day-to-day of life, or the countries that they neglected to mention.
First off, nostalgia is classically an unreliable metric for all humans. A guy that loved the Tito era for entirely sexist and exploitative reasons explained it to me like this: “You know why everyone says they liked it back when Tito was around? We’re old. Back then, our dicks worked and we were strong and the girls were pretty!” Gross, but he has a point.
Not that you can have reliable polling from the socialist era to compare. Literally – people couldn’t trust the government enough to give their honest opinion. Most people were afraid they would will suffer at the hands of the government if they give their opinions. Sounds swell. (https://yorktowninstitute.org/purposeless-polls-how-soviet-citizens-rebelled-against-a-regime-that-rejected-open-communication/)
Nostalgia is generally not accepted as an accurate form of analysis of the past or assessment of the present because humans tend to only remember the good times. Called “Rosy Retrospection" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection). And that nostalgia is triggered by the unhappiness of the present – not that there wasn’t unhappiness back then, too. Just that people ignore that part. (https://allaboutpsychology.substack.com/p/the-psychology-of-nostalgia-why-everything)
Personally, all the Tito- and Stalin-loving people I’ve met have been the most racist, conservative fuckers alive in any of these countries listed. The ones that say ,“the gays ruined Eurovision.” That’s a direct quote from a former co-worker that loved Tito so much because it was a dictatorship of personality that her parents aligned with (another word for this: corruption and preferential treatment). My partner and I say “the gays ruined Eurovision” sarcastically now when watching Eurovision because of her.
Hungary – case in point. The same proportion of people that put Victor fucking Orban in office are selling you on Ye Olde Socialism? Are you kidding me? My friend, it’s not a 1:1 relationship of “socialism was lovely and everything was great” and “old crusty fucks know what they’re talking about.” Holy shit – did you not even remember Orban existed and is Trump’s bestie?
Let’s look at the glaring omission: Albania. And use the same exact source as the Serbia survey, Balkan Insight. As it turns out, a lot of people in Albania didn’t enjoy socialism because Enver Hoxha turned it up to 11. It was North Korea levels of brutal. So when some people who simply don’t hate that era, it pisses off the people that suffered immensely under socialism.
perfect quote:
“The main reason for this is because in the last 26 years there has never been a thorough process of de-communism. Young people in the schools don’t get any information about the atrocities of the communist regime. On the other hand, right-wing parties have also much abused anti-communist rhetoric,” she said.
Oh, look – another connection between the far-right and nostalgia for the socialist era. Hmm….
Speaking of Albanians, you know who else didn’t love the socialist era and Tito? Albanians (and many other ethnicities) in Yugoslavia. The problem with socialism is its authoritarian structure lends itself perfectly to ethnic cleansing and marginalization. Albanians in Yugoslavia were more or less forbidden from participating in the economy. The Albanian reputation for sketchy shit is because on one side of the border Hoxha made life hell, and people that escaped had to hustle to survive outside of the regular economy.
All that Serbian nostalgia seems nice and lovely to you? Those Serbians also want to take back Kosovo and get rid of the Muslim population entirely. Remember? They fucking TRIED that already once. Did you forget a literal genocide in Yugoslavia as it collapsed? Ah yes, because we forget the bad things with nostalgia.
Let’s also look at how “Communist” Tito really was. Answer: Not very
Stalin and Tito got into a big fight because while Tito kept the word “socialist” in the name of the country, be liberalized the economy a lot. Which pissed Stalin off. It was the only thing that kept Yugoslavia from collapsing into an economic travesty that even the USSR couldn’t pull out of itself. https://schoolworkhelper.net/tito-stalin-dispute-1948-timeline-analysis-significance/
Part of this was economic relations between Yugoslavia and non-aligned movement countries in Africa. (https://afrinz.ru/en/2024/04/titos-african-diplomacy-how-yugoslavia-conquered-the-continent/) Tito engaged in trade – something not very socialist, right? Because he needed to to prop up the country’s economy. It’s a hard truth, but still a truth.
The result was that Bulgaria, Albania, and the USSR all saw Yugoslavia as something between threat and pariah. Albania built thousands of bunkers on its border with Yugoslavia as a jobs program utilizing Chinese cement imports, and used Yugoslavia’s “non-socialist” economic policies as a reason to paint them as a threat.
But doesn’t Bulgaria rank high on the nostalgia list? Sure, and it’s because joining the EU led to inflation and young people going to Germany for work. But shit – Bulgaria’s roads are nice. It’s not all bad.
Speaking of bad, the old guy that grounded the Tito love explained to me once why the Yugoslavs and Bulgarians didn’t get along back then or today. When this old guy was 18, he would get some blue jeans and like $20 in Yugo dinars and go into Bulgaria in his Yugo with some records and a full tank of gas. He would trade the jeans and records for Bulgarian Lev, and spend the weekend with sex workers and pretty much exploiting economic disparity at every angle. This is the nostalgia you think is so valid – people from one socialist country going to another that had it worse off and exploiting the people. Same thing the Russians did to Ukraine and Georgia.
I’m not saying that everything is nice in the post-European socialist world. It’s not. But accepting wistful nostalgia as honest truth is entirely foolish. Do I trust old white guys that loved the Jim Crow South to give me an honest assessment of the time and place as well? Fuck no. And because humans are humans, that’s a lot of what you’ll get.
But don’t take my word for it. Try reading books from people who recall the absurdly fucked up times.
Most books set in the USSR by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Secondhand Time — Svetlana Alexievich
Anything by Ismail Kadare
Gabriela Adameşteanu — Wasted Morning
The Truth That Killed - The Diary of Georgi Markov (killed by Bulgarian Secret Service for talking about life in soviet Bulgaria)
–Have you ever noticed how few books there are by people who just fucking loved living under any of these regimes? –
Now downvote away out of spite because I didn’t say you were right. It’s OK, I expected it all along.
The rise in the far-right in post-socialist countries is due to the systematic eradication of the left. These now capitalist countries are not democratic in any way, and their systems have largely been dominated by western finance capital.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was an anti-semitic Nazi sympathizer, and was arrested as such. His fiction is based on the folklore of the gulag system, and archival evidence and historical texts paint a much clearer picture of the soviet prison system. He’s essentially Yeonmi Park but for the USSR.
Here’s a real quote:
From an excellent thread going over his many ideological failings:
In his 2003 book, Two Hundred Years Together, he wrote that “from 20 ministers in the first Soviet government one was Russian, one Georgian, one Armenian and 17 Jews”. In reality, there were 15 Commissars in the first Soviet government, not 20: 11 Russians, 2 Ukrainians, 1 Pole, and only 1 Jew. He stated: “I had to bury many comrades at the front, but not once did I have to bury a Jew”. He also stated that according to his personal experience, Jews had a much easier life in the Gulag camps that he was interned in.
According to the Northwestern University historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern: Solzhenitsyn used unreliable and manipulated figures and ignored both evidence unfavorable to his own point of view and numerous publications of reputable authors in Jewish history. He claimed that Jews promoted alcoholism among the peasantry, flooded the retail trade with contraband, and “strangled” the Russian merchant class in Moscow. He called Jews non-producing people (“непроизводительный народ”) who refused to engage in factory labor. He said they were averse to agriculture and unwilling to till the land either in Russia, in Argentina, or in Palestine, and he blamed the Jews’ own behavior for pogroms. He also claimed that Jews used Kabbalah to tempt Russians into heresy, seduced Russians with rationalism and fashion, provoked sectarianism and weakened the financial system, committed murders on the orders of qahal authorities, and exerted undue influence on the prerevolutionary government. Petrovsky-Shtern concludes that, “200 Years Together is destined to take a place of honor in the canon of russophone antisemitica.”
His own wife called the Gulag Archipelago “folklore,” why on Earth are you listening to a rabid anti-semite and fiction author over actual historical evidence?
The USSR had steady and consistent economic growth, and provided free, high quality education and healthcare, full employment, cheap or free housing, and fantastic infrastructure and city planning that still lasts to this day despite capitalism neglecting it. This rapid development resulted in dramatic democratization of society, reduced disparity, doubling of life expectancy, tripling of functional literacy rates to 99.9%, and much more. Living in the 1930s famine would not have been good, but it was the last major famine outside of wartime because the soviets ended famine in their countries.

Literacy rates, societal guarantees in the 1936 constitution, reports on the healthcare system over time, and more are good sources for these claims.
The USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.
When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union.
The truth, when judged based on historical evidence and contextualization, is that socialism was the best thing to happen to Russia in the last few centuries, and its absence has been devastating.
Death rates spiked:

And wealth disparity skyrocketed alongside the newly impoverished majority:

Capitalism brought with it skyrocketing poverty rates, drug abuse, prostitution, homelessness, crime rates, and lowered life expectancy. An estimated 7 million people died due to the dissolution of socialism and reintroduction of capitalism, and this is why the large majority of post-soviet citizens regret its fall. A return to socialism is the only path forward for the post-soviet countries.
When you look at the US Empire and western Europe as having higher quality of life than the USSR, you are looking at the benefits of imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism and wishing the USSR also practiced this, instead of helping liberate colonies and the global south. Russia in particular was a semi-feudal backwater in 1917, and made it to space 5 decades later. The USSR was not the picture of wealth, but was for its time the picture of development and rapid progress.
The USSR was stable by the time it dissolved, it was dissolved from the top-down. It did not fail horribly, it was killed by a corrupt wing that had taken hold since Khruschev. It remained socialist until the very end, but by no means was it an inevitable failure, and modern socialist states have learned from it.
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Simple, fascism always glorifies the past, but tries to twist it into a point of national pride rather than socialist pride, combined with the fact that the left was thoroughly de-rooted. I didn’t debunk literally every author, because the first one I saw was a Nazi and a fiction writer. I also gave you many books written by people living in the USSR giving a positive overview of the experience, something you said is rare.
Right. You’ve got it.
The economic system means nothing for the nostalgia to work. The nostalgia is not for socialism. It was for anything else.
Anything. Not socialism specifically. Anything else.
So why lean so hard on a misunderstanding of those surveys you admit yourself is wrong?
Regretting the fall of the USSR and stating that they live worse lives economically than under socialism doesn’t make them all fascists. There’s a collective yearning for a time when life was better, that doesn’t make every one of them fascist, and the fact that fascists try to take advantage of this fact to gain power does not mean that socialism was secretly worse. I demonstrated numerous ways how the dissolution of socialism was disastrous to back this up, which you called “fangirling” (which itself is misogynistic and misgendering) and unrelated.
It’s always difficult for people to untangle their own experiences from being universal. It’s a common logical bias for most things, and we are all guilty of it at least occasionally.
“I know better than you because I am __”. It is the classic anecdotes are not evidence.
I personally am economically extremely communist while being very anti-soviet and anti-CCP, because I disagree with their authoritarian methods of enforcing socialism. Having grown up in a former Warsaw pact country I can see a lot of the great things that were outcomes of the communist ideals while simultaneously being surrounded by evidence of the awfulness as well. (And yes, I know “free” countries are also full of authoritarian bullshit and I am against that as well).
I think it’s important to remember that the viewpoints of those who endured or witnessed the outcomes of, for example, soviet, control are recognised and heard. That way we are able to untangle the implicit knots between the bad parts of certain regimes and the actual economic and social principles of different systems. E.g. is capitalism bad because America is an imperialist shitty asshole country which is capitalist? No, it’s bad because its underlying principles are flawed, and they also incentivise America to be a shitty asshole country.
It’s somewhat the same issue as the ad hominem fallacy, but towards a nation as an entity instead of a person.
I personally am economically extremely communist while being very anti-soviet and anti-CCP, because I disagree with their authoritarian methods of enforcing socialism.
Any socialist country that exists will need to use the state to oppress capitalists, fascists, and reactionaries. The working class holding state power over capitalists is a good thing. Being “extremely communist” while opposing all possible methods of building socialism isn’t being a communist, it’s letting the perfect version of socialism in your head become the enemy of existing socialism.
Fair points, however, there is a big difference between torture, abuse and murder, and limiting those from corrupting the system. Also, people wanting to live under a different economic system are not fascists I agree that fascism must be harshly dealt with, and it is a major failing of Western society, particularly over the past 5-10 years.
Similarly, complete suppression of the ability to spread and discuss ideas will always lead towards a backwards thinking society.
I do think that with the passage of generations and improvements of education people can revert back to being social creatures rather than individual. Greed is largely taught rather than innate.
I’m not really sure what you’re referring to specifically, because by and large socialist countries have persecuted genuine fascists, capitalists, and those guilty of genuine treason.
I personally am economically extremely communist while being very anti-soviet and anti-CCP, because I disagree with their authoritarian methods of enforcing socialism.
You’re a liberal. You have nothing to do with communism. There is no “economically communist”. Read a book and stop posting uninformed drivel.
You can be communist without being imperialist (in the case of the soviets), sending people to gulags, or massacring protesters 🙂
The soviets were not imperialist, and any socialist society will need to imprison fascists and deal with them as class struggle does not end overnight.
Like I said, read a book. You’re a confused liberal.
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The soviets did not have any colonies. China did not colonize Tibet nor Xinjiang. Neither the PRC nor Vietnam liberalized their economies, they retained proletarian control of the state and public ownership of the commanding heights of industry. The expansion of markets was a complement to the socialist system, not a change in system.
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The USSR was not “Russified.” It was a federation of multi-national ethnicities, which were protected by the soviets. Tsarist Russification was stopped by the soviets. Advocating for a common writing system and language was done alongside vast literacy programs and protecting ethnicities and languages. National liberation was taken incredibly seriously by the soviets.
Tibet was a feudal slave society backed by the CIA. The PLA liberated Tibet. Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth:
Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself “lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.” [12]
Secular leaders also did well. A notable example was the commander-in-chief of the Tibetan army, a member of the Dalai Lama’s lay Cabinet, who owned 4,000 square kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs. [13] Old Tibet has been misrepresented by some Western admirers as “a nation that required no police force because its people voluntarily observed the laws of karma.” [14] In fact it had a professional army, albeit a small one, that served mainly as a gendarmerie for the landlords to keep order, protect their property, and hunt down runaway serfs.
Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeatedremoved, beginning at age nine. [15] The monastic estates also conscripted children for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers.
In old Tibet there were small numbers of farmers who subsisted as a kind of free peasantry, and perhaps an additional 10,000 people who composed the “middle-class” families of merchants, shopkeepers, and small traders. Thousands of others were beggars. There also were slaves, usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born into slavery. [16] The majority of the rural population were serfs. Treated little better than slaves, the serfs went without schooling or medical care. They were under a lifetime bond to work the lord’s land — or the monastery’s land — without pay, to repair the lord’s houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand. [17] Their masters told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. And they might easily be separated from their families should their owners lease them out to work in a distant location. [18]
As in a free labor system and unlike slavery, the overlords had no responsibility for the serf’s maintenance and no direct interest in his or her survival as an expensive piece of property. The serfs had to support themselves. Yet as in a slave system, they were bound to their masters, guaranteeing a fixed and permanent workforce that could neither organize nor strike nor freely depart as might laborers in a market context. The overlords had the best of both worlds.
One 22-year old woman, herself a runaway serf, reports: “Pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished”; they “were just slaves without rights.” [19] Serfs needed permission to go anywhere. Landowners had legal authority to capture those who tried to flee. One 24-year old runaway welcomed the Chinese intervention as a “liberation.” He testified that under serfdom he was subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold. After his third failed escape, he was merciless beaten by the landlord’s men until blood poured from his nose and mouth. They then poured alcohol and caustic soda on his wounds to increase the pain, he claimed. [20]
The serfs were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for keeping animals. They were taxed for religious festivals and for public dancing and drumming, for being sent to prison and upon being released. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being cast into slavery. [21]
The theocracy’s religious teachings buttressed its class order. The poor and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon themselves because of their wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they had to accept the misery of their present existence as a karmic atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve in their next lifetime. The rich and powerful treated their good fortune as a reward for, and tangible evidence of, virtue in past and present lives.
Regarding Xinjiang, the best and most comprehensive resource I have seen so far is Qiao Collective’s Xinjiang: A Resource and Report Compilation. Qiao Collective is a group of Chinese diaspora living in the west, and they compiled an extremely comprehensive write-up of the entire background of the events, the timeline of reports, and real and fake claims. The majority of their sourcing is western, and they cite official Chinese government writing and white papers when relevant. Uyghur culture is preserved.
I also recommend reading the UN report as well as (especially) China’s response to it, which eclipses it in size and detail.These are the most relevant accusations and responses without delving into straight up fantasy like Adrian Zenz, Christian nationalist and professional propagandist for the Victims of Communism Foundation, does. Zenz’ work has been thoroughly discredited, yet is supported by western media for its utility in fearmongering. An example is lying about 8.7% of new IUDs as 80%, to back up claims of “forced sterilization,” from this chart:

As for the socialist market economies of Vietnam and China, they are not liberalized, and are still socialist. Private ownership is secondary to public, and is relegated to small/medium firms, as well as highly competitive, non-critical industries like tech. The commanding heights of the economy are overwhelmingly publicly owned, while private ownership typically is found in secondary industries and highly competitive non-critical industries like tech. In China, the CPC often has controlling shares of private companies as well, especially the larger ones. As these private firms grow, they are socialized and often folded into the public sector. This is why public ownership is the principal aspect of their economies, and determines the nature of Vietnam the PRC’s path on the socialist road.
See also the stages of socialism presented by Chinese economists, like Cheng Enfu:

The character of the state is a dictatorship of the proletariat. Whole-Process People’s Democracy is the form of consultative democracy in China. Local candidates are directly elected, and then these ladder upwards in indirect elections. The top conducts many surveys and tries to find policy from the people via the Mass Line, while practicing democratic centralism and maintaining the ability to quickly respond to changing conditions. Long-term policy change is slow but positive as consensus is built, short-term crisis is quickly adapted to as needed.
Both Vietnam and China have similar systems with unique characteristics best fitting their conditions.
How were the Soviets imperialist? They supported pretty much every national liberation movement, hell they would often even support nationalists. Honestly if you want to critique the USSR the best thing to point out would be their horrible environmental policies.





