Your regular reminder that I personally loathe Noam Chomsky for the reprehensible things he said in apologia for the Khmer Rouge - and has never really taken back. He was no friend to the Cambodian people.
(Not to mention his stance on Ukraine).
It's a bit funny because how quick the left usually is to cut people loose for failing purity tests, but there's always the few who manage to get into the state of grace where the test must be wrong.
Tbh the left is pretty fucking awful at enforcing the “supporting Russia/genocides committed by vaguely leftist seeming countries” purity test nowadays
I really, really winds me up with folks valorize the USSR. I really do not think most folks understand the sheer scale of horror and baseline violence society operated under, how totally pervasive the kleptocracy was, how incompetent it was, how vicious it was, or how nationalistic and expansionist.
my advisor grew up in the soviet union, he was in the science world so he played by a laxer set of rules (his beatles album that he bought on the black market with a month's salary would be confiscated but he wouldn't be thrown into prison for it, for instance), and it still sounded horrible
My aunt visiting from the Baltics to the USA in the 70s/80s broke down and cried when she saw American grocery stores, she couldn't believe it. An uncle was tortured by Soviets, and lived in paranoid fear in the USA thereafter. Just two small examples of many in my family. Really gets to me.
Yeah a friend's grandmother came over after friend's father from the former Soviet bloc. She made him spend literally days driving all over to grocery stores because she just couldn't believe the stores were real, and not state showpieces. I heard LOTS of these stories growing up in the 90s.
I visited my cousin in West Germany in the late 1980s and not only couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the 20 flavours in the ice cream parlour in her tiny Bavarian town, but also was amazed she could ask her teacher critical questions abt the material and not fear her parents would be fired
After the wall fell, my grandfather, who was a professor of chemistry--literally just chemistry, no defense contracts, nothing particularly special--and was approached by a middle-aged man who confessed that this man's whole job for years had been to spy on my grandfather. His whole job. For years.
I really think folks in the West misunderstand how totalizing that regime was, or how paranoid, or just how wildly /oppressive/ the whole state was, because there's really no reference point for it
I was speaking with an old lady in the Baltics at her dinner table, and mid-conversation she stood up and nervously closed the dining room door before returning and speaking further on the topic. It was instinct honed by decades of Soviet paranoia. It was everywhere, even in your safest spaces.
Timothy Garton Ash is kind of an annoying centrist way too optimistic about the transformative power of the market for me, but I think his book on reading his own Stasi file after ‘89 should really be widely read as a way to show people the intense scrutiny *anyone* could be under.
This is why seeing people say that the U.S. is a totalitarian state or fascist or whatever is so, so ick to me...yes, there's a lot about the U.S. that's extremely bad, but it still doesn't come close to how those governments just completely permeated and suffocated everything
We’ve definitely had some versions writ small — the old description of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission as a “corn-pone Stasi” wasn’t hyperbole.
This is a very specific thing but NYC has an NYC specific strain of tuberculosis that comes from Russian prisons. It's origin comes from an overlap in systemic failures from both countries (the US specifically unwillingness to deal with homelessness and HIV) but I think about it all of the time.
I am very much grateful for whatever whim led me to take a Russian history class at uni. It was a class of 7, and there were at least four people with direct experience with the soviet bloc to give the material context. Otherwise I'm not sure I would have ever really understood it.
It was pretty interesting, because while we were learning and contextualizing from a western perspective, there were a (probably shouldn't have been) surprising number of things that they were also learning for the first time due to censorship.
In fact, conventional wisdom has almost turned to regret that these systems were supposedly destroyed whereas they actually collapsed onto themselves as a result of unsolvable dysfunction
We visited the museum of Communism in Prague a few years ago and it wasn't so much eye opening as it was just hurting your heart to read all the stories. Suffering for the enjoyment by the state.
Have there been other countries / states that suffered this immense of a "security" apparatus?
The 'duh! China' - sure, definitely now, going by the systems out in place like social scoring, I'm sure.
But what about 40+ years ago?
Oh, many folks in the West who grew up close enough to the USSR know. But it's amazing how positive the perception of the USSR/ Russia was for a long time. Bahr's "Ostpolitik" did real damage.
One of the things that's been repeatedly hard for me to wrap my head around is that ... Sometimes people really just are cartoon villains. There's no deeper plan, barely any profit motive, and so on.
Recent events have particularly rubbed my nose in this, of course.
My college professor of Eastern European history (who moved to the US after the USSR broke up) assigned Orwell's 1984 for class reading, as it was far better at conveying the skin-crawling paranoia of the Cold War-era Soviet bloc than any work of non-fiction she could find in English.
My friend connected with her family in Cuba a few years ago, an her cousin there was in university until he posted something about the government on Facebook, and he was suddenly not in university anymore
"Nineteen Eighty-Four" is the closest because it is, as is usual for Orwell, a mass of nonfiction written into a fictional narrative; Orwell wrote it as too science-fictional but omnipresent surveillance and oppressive paranoia come from what he knew the Nazis and Soviets were doing.
That’s the thing that ppl today can’t really understand—the USSR wasn’t just oppressive, it was also just insanely deprived of all manner of goods that Americans took for granted. Everything was old, broken, and dirty.
As a young American visiting for the first time, that’s what floored me—ppl in the US thought of the USSR as a great rival, but it just…didn’t even compare. It was like traveling back in time 50 years or more. Like what you thought of America looking like during the Depression
I don’t think there’s any analog for it in modern times. That feeling of stepping off the plane and thinking “wait, we were worried about *this*?” Which isn’t to say it wasn’t a military threat, in its crazed imperialist way. But as an *economic* threat? It was non-existent.
We toured some apartments in Pskov. These were clearly places Intourist felt comfortable showing Americans, and the ppl we met were relatively well off—and I remember thinking the apt blocks reminded me of my aunt’s Section 8 building in Toledo, but not as nice
My dad used to work airport security of some kind in the late 60s/early 70s, and he and his coworkers would encounter people flying back to USSR countries with sewing machines and other goods hidden under jackets and the like. Having family in the USSR, my dad would let them go.
I wouldn’t go that far. In terms of consumer goods, it was way better than USSR. All the Soviet Bloc was. In terms of oppression, quite similar to the USSR
I've always thought that it must have been extremely psychologically difficult for the East Germans to go from being the Soviet bloc's rich relations to West Germany's poor relations almost overnight.
"poor" to the scale that the 5.5% Reunification Tax Germany started collecting in 1991 to help bring former East Germany up to West German standards lasted thirty years
My grandfather had a story: he helped a lady he knew pick up her aunt who had gotten to the US from Hungary in the 50s - they drove in a car - they went to the store to pick up some stuff - and when the new arrival saw what was in the store, saw my grandpa had a car, asked the lady: "COMMISSAR???"
Yeah, I assume the aunt in this story saw a neat-pressed young man, with a new looking car, who dropped by a store which was full of a range of diverse goods, and assumed he must have juice.
But in America you don't need juice for that. Just the money.
May the money spread more evenly.
