[Transcript]
There’s plenty you can criticise about the Soviet Union, but it’s patently false to claim it was worse than the Tsarist era that preceeded it.
Personally, I don’t like the tsarist era either for the Jewish pogroms and huge wealth inequality, but there were steps to industrialise and reform (albeit too little too late). However, to then claim the Soviet Union was an improvement when it arbitrarily imprisoned kulaks, and to a certain point just three people into prison and accused them of being kulaks, committed the mass genocide of Ukrainians in the Holodomor and overthrew a democratic government and replaced it with a one-party dictatorship that didn’t even tolerate difference of opinion within itself just rubs off wrong on me. Thoughts?
[Transcript]
I think the Russians were hungry under the Tsar, and very hungry under the Soviets.
[Transcript]
It was worse than the tsars
[Transcript for my favorite reply]
Did the Tsar have gulags?
Did the Tsar have a surveillance state?
Did the Tsar enforce a man-made famine that killed hundreds of thousands of people?
(Spotted here.)
I agree there were famines and purges and relocation of 1.3 million kulak families into inward villages of Russia. But we have to see why it happened , under Tsar the status quo of kulakization was maintained. Farm lands were under landlords and village capitalists and production was low. Stalin wanted to modernize agriculture by implementing collective farming with modern machines, soviet people and stalin made some gross miscalculation as they thought the transition to machines will be quick and fast paced. It was not but anyway the modernization or urbanization went ahead. There was cultural revolution and Reformation in all of Russia. Similarly, the purges were set against corrupt people but it unfortunately became too ideological and certain good people who criticized certain policies inside USSR became it’s victims. Nonetheless, with mistakes and trials and tribulations a whole illiterate, backward society defeated the Nazi and went space.