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Hi A/T! This thread is about the  GLORIOUS UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS, PARADISE OF THE OPPRESSED PROLETARIATFeel free to both ask and tell about the USSR: its history, the commissars, the Great Patriotic War, the KGB, Putin's rise to power, anything and everything behind the Iron Curtain. I have a good bit of knowledge about how the Red Army operated during WW2, as well as knowledge of the Soviet secret weapons programs (Biopreparat, the Dead Hand system outside of Moscow, etc), so if you have questions on those feel free to ask me. Let me tell you about the Soviets' biological weapons program, Biopreparat: From the 1970s onward, Biopreparat was the USSR's biowarfare agency. Its entire purpose was to create pathogens for use in warfare, and employed upwards of 30,000 people in laboratories across the entire Soviet Union. It was founded by Yuri Ovchinnikov, who convinced General-Secretary Eyebrows (Leonid Brezhnev) of the necessity to develop bioweapons. Upon hearing that the capitalist pigdogs would fall en masse to germs, Brezhnev sanctioned Biopreparat and weaponization of pathogens began. Ovchinnikov's scientists managed to weaponize the following: Smallpox Bubonic Plague Anthrax Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis Tularemia The flu Brucellosis Marburg virus (holy loving Christ)  Ebola and the scariest thing: EBOLAPOX  - a weaponized, water/fluid borne hybrid of the Ebola virus and the Smallpox virus. Not only were you covered in pustules, they provided an easy escape route for your blood when it decides to vacate your body as you lie on the ground twitching uncontrollably as disease ravages your poor husk of a barely-living corpse.Post the most USSRest poo poo you got or ask questions if that's your thing
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Dec 13, 2014 00:02
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 08:37 |
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Hogge Wild posted:Who's your favourite General Secretary of the CP of the USSR and why? My favorite Secretary General would be Khrushchev, or Gorbachev. Khrushchev because of his efforts at de-Stalinization and Gorbachev for his perestroika and glasnost programs. They were the two most progressive leaders in the entirety of the USSR, in my opinion. The Deadhand system... The Deadhand is a system called "Perimeter" in Russian. It is an underground nuclear arsenal command and control center outside of Moscow. It is designed to automatically launch the Russian ICBM fleets at pre-determined targets in the event of a nuclear strike on Moscow, or a sufficiently powerful seismic event that is consistent with the level of seismic activity typically seen in a nuclear explosion. The idea behind the system's design was that, if one of the monitors detects this kind of activity, it is to be assumed that Moscow has been destroyed in a first-strike by the United States or NATO and that the Moscow leadership has been killed or otherwise put into a position where they cannot order a retaliatory strike. In this case, the Deadhand system will automatically trigger and the West becomes radioactive dust. The system still receives regular system updates, and it is rumored that it cannot be deactivated.
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Dec 13, 2014 06:49
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Slurin posted:I think that a form of government that has killed millions and millions of its own people through starvation and execution programs that were developed from murdering millions and millions of people in other countries (holodomor) in a relentless quest of money and power despite being a form of government which beleive that money and power is evil is awesome - big fat gay op Please tell us more about your custom title Slurin.
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Dec 14, 2014 19:55
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Opposite posted:Actually I was always curious about how did the commies perceive alcohol consumption? Did they think that the rampart alcohol consumption in USSR was affecting the general population in a negative way or it was tolerated or even encouraged pretty much like how drugs are viewed in North Korea: as a debouch or a way to make people more docile. Gorbachev at least recognized that the rampant alcoholism that was decimating the USSR's life expectancy and productivity was a bad thing. He introduced massively unpopular legislation limiting alcohol purchases to certain times of day, ABV, where it could be sold, and a bunch of other things. It was so unpopular that there was some minor talk of overthrowing Gorbachev just to get rid of the alcohol laws.
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Dec 15, 2014 18:55
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Radio Talmudist posted:Finding something interesting =/= agreeing with that something. I mean OP may be sympathetic to the USSR but I have no reason to believe that he would be. I'm sympathetic to the USSR only to the degree that I agree that the tsarist regime was ruinous to the Russian Empire and that World War One was tanking things further, so I sympathize with the feeling that a revolution was needed. I disagree with what the Soviets ended up doing, but I think that, had Trotsky been able to come to power like Lenin intended, things would have gone much differently. Lenin's definitely guilty of major transgressions (attempting to further the Bolsheviks' popularity with the workers at the expense of the peasants, forced industrialization at the cost of many lives and livelihoods, purges of his own) but his revolutionary success could be attributed to several things: 1. WW1. The first World War was a complete meat grinder for the Russian Empire. Russia was still a rural, mostly unindustrialized empire with little in the way of modern technology, roads (beyond dirt tracks), and education. WW1 was the catalyst that allowed Lenin to even make his arguments heard: - The bourgeoisie were throwing away Russian lives for nothing - Capitalists were profiting off of Russian blood - The tsar (Nicholas II) was completely out of touch with the war and what it was doing to his Empire The war was so unpopular within Russia that Lenin's promise to bring Russia out of it gained him a lot of popularity in the major cities and in the countryside. And when the Revolution actually began, it was fought primarily by people on the bottom tiers of society who wanted to bring the nation out of the war before they were drafted and sent to fight the Germans. Once Lenin's Bolsheviks took control of the government, he was true to what he said and negotiated a separate peace with Germany. This gave Lenin an air of trustworthiness that he built off of to create the Red Army and began conscripting people. The opposition, the White Russians, were determined to restore the tsarist government, and the Russian Civil War began in earnest. To answer your question a bit better, one of the deciding factors in the Civil War was Lenin basically turning the Cheka loose on White sympathizers (courtesy of Felix Dzherzinsky) while bringing revolution east across the country. He established a power base by going into major towns and cities across the east and ordering the creation of local Soviets (worker/peasant/citizen) and turning over control of local governments to the people living there, which then reported to the regional authority or directly to Moscow. There was also forcible redistribution of wealth and land, with land reform happening rapidly, which endeared him to the local peasants that had their own land for the first time in history. Not that Lenin cared anything about peasants (he actually considered them ignorant and worthless, but there was a charade to maintain in order to solidify his base with the people he thought were the real future of the USSR - the factory workers and tradesmen). Again, this isn't glowing praise for Lenin or the USSR. He was only able to win the Civil War by being incredibly brutal - do some reading on Felix Dzherzinsky's Cheka, Lavrentiy Beria, and some of the original Bolsheviks. Some of their atrocities are astounding, and wouldn't be surpassed until Stalin's Terror in the 1930s.
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Dec 15, 2014 20:41
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icantfindaname posted:Trotsky was nearly as authortarian and sociopathic as Stalin, and was 100% in favor of the same kind of collectivization that Stalin pursued IRL. Nothing would have changed except maybe the USSR would have started WW2 earlier I looked this up, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I was wrong about what I said: Paul Mattick posted:The dictatorship of the party state, masquerading as the dictatorship of the proletariat, was a sustitutionism personified by Trotsky. Trotsky saw no contradiction between the dictatorship of a party leadership supported by the authoritarian rule of managers, army officers, specialists, and the transition to a post capitalist society. He was the champion of a top down bureaucratic centralism : ” Reporting to the sixth Congress of Soviets in 1918, Trotsky complained that not all soviets and workers have understood that our administration has been centralised and that all orders issues from above must be final ” Source: Paul Mattick, (2007), Anti Bolshevik Communism, p66, Merlin Press, Monmouth. However, I think that the paranoia and the Terror would not have been as severe as it was under Stalinism, albeit still present.
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Dec 15, 2014 22:21
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Gabriel Pope posted:What did the Soviet "upper class" look like, outside of the political elite? e.g. if you were a prestigious doctor, engineer, scientist etc. what sort of impact would that have on your standard of living? Well, if you were living during Stalinism, you were probably executed or deported to a Gulag where you would practice your profession under the closest scrutiny. Post-Stalin, you were given a nicer apartment, you had access to special grocery stores that were only available to the elite (which had such luxurious items as oranges and limes), and your extended family didn't have to share an apartment with 2-3 other families.
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Dec 16, 2014 19:39
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Radio Talmudist posted:Do you know how marriages were conducted in the USSR for non-Christians? Were there civil ceremonies? The USSR was legally atheist, so there were only civil ceremonies in front of a judge, as far as I know.
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Dec 16, 2014 22:12
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Zak2k12 posted:Do you have any knowledge as to what degree were the other Warsaw pact countries included in the USSR's battle plans, in case a land war erupted in Europe? Did the WarPac have an effective command structure, akin to NATO, and were their armies capable of working together, or were the Soviets just banking on using their allies as cannon fodder until the Red Army came in to do the heavy lifting? I can find more information on this later, but the USSR's plan was basically: 1. Use up satellite countries as fodder, 2. Deploy Red Army, 3. If Red Army can't do it, nuke at the slightest chance of it going south and it looks like NATO will invade the Soviet Union.
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Dec 17, 2014 01:54
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icantfindaname posted:
I'm not disagreeing with you but I do think it's pretty darn funny that you're comparing the USSR to Japan when Japan wasn't all that much more developed, especially outside of the main cities. And in a lot of social ways, Japan was straight loving backwards with how the military class overtly controlled everything up to and including the Emperor. They didn't even pretend to be anything but a junta.
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Dec 21, 2014 09:49
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you're actually, unironically making the "but life expectancy rose!!!!" argument
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The level of industrialization during Stalin's Five Year Plans is astounding. Even taking into account the inflated production figures from factory managers that knew how to play the game, the speed and rate at which the USSR went from backwards, agrarian society to space-exploring, nuclear capable superpower is incredible. I hate to acknowledge that Stalin did anything correctly, but the New Economic Plan was designed to make USSR (primarily Russia) competitive with the rest of the industrialized world, and that's exactly what it did. Of course, millions of people died on the kholkozi and during the construction of Gulags, but you can't deny that Stalin's plan for industrialization worked because the end goal was to put the USSR on par with Western Europe at the very least in terms of industrial output and by the end of WW2, the USSR was the world's second largest economy (only behind the USA) despite having suffered the most damage and destruction during Operation Barbarossa. None of that would have been possible without the NEP and Gulag system, as terrible as that was. For reading, I suggest Gulag by Anne Applebaum. She goes into incredible detail about the Gulag system and how it was used as a Fifth Column for industrial output, as well as how as many as 2/3 of the USSR's population cycled through one Gulag or another, and what the conditions and society were like inside the camps. Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is also a great read if you're interested in this topic. HonorableTB fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 21, 2014 20:47
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 08:37 |
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VoteTedJameson posted:Can OP shed any light on the Soviet criminal justice system for me? I can't find much material at all. Was there any system in place for jury trials, with attorneys etc? Nominally yes, they were guaranteed by the Soviet Constitution, but largely what happened was that if a case made it to trial, it was a purely for appearances. The militia wouldn't prosecute a case unless they were 100% certain they had a conviction, and it didn't usually matter who the defendant was - if they were arrested, they were guilty. The system was designed to protect the state from an individual, rather than to protect an individual from the state. Criminal cases consisted of a pre-trial exam (think US depositions) before the indictment and the actual trial. In the prelim, the investigator interrogated the accused and the witnesses and examined evidence. The accused was informed of his/her rights before the examination. The trial court consisted of a professional judge with a 5-year term and two assessors (lay judges) from the population with a 2.5-year term. The proceedings were very informal - the judges first questioned accused and witnesses, then the procurator and defense counsel to corroborate the evidence in the indictment. The accused and the victim could question each other or the witnesses. The accused was presumed innocent, though not in the common law sense. The court decided by majority vote. The accused or the procurator could appeal decisions to a higher court consisting of three professional judges that reviewed the facts and the law. If the procurator appealed, the higher court could set aside the judgment and remand the case. Although the decision of the appeals court was "final", higher courts could review them as "supervision". Here, the accused or his/her counsel could submit briefs, but they could not appear in person. During the trial, the judges had the additional responsibility of educating the people like revealing and removing the causes and conditions that led to the crime. Judges kept legal technicalities to a minimum; the court's stated purpose was to find the truth, rather than to protect legal rights. Although most hearings were open to the public, hearings could also be held privately, if the Soviet Government deemed it necessary. That was how it was *supposed* to work, but during much of the USSR's life, what happened was that the Cheka/NKVD/KGB/MVD would receive a tip from an informant or collaborator, spend time investigating the subject, arrest them (very commonly for "wrecking" or "anti-state activities" or the USSR's favorite, "agitation"), and if Stalin was alive, they'd be given a bullet in the neck or, during Khrushchev/Brezhnev/Andropov/Chernenko they'd be given a show-trial. Gorbachev did away with a lot of this, but basically you couldn't ever expect to get anything close to a fair trial in the USSR at any time.
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Jan 11, 2015 09:46
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