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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
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Dec 15, 2014 22:11
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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? There was very little distinction between the political elite and 'other' elites. If you wanted to be a prestigious doctor, engineer, or scientist you had to work within the political system. This is why most areas of Soviet academia aside from physics and math were so atrophied, there was more concern with politics than research. As for standard of living, you would have access to better housing, cars, get to travel / vacation, etc. You would get to skip the line for a lot of stuff that was theoretically available to everyone but in practice wasn't.
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Dec 16, 2014 19:40
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At least 3 million executions, deaths in Gulags and Kulak resettlement camps were actually recorded by the USSR itself. There were obviously deaths not officially recorded, and that doesn't include ethnic deportations either, where people were basically shuffled around the USSR because Stalin was paranoid minorities were going to rise up. Then the famines killed another 6 or 8 million, although those were not intentional. So bottom line it's 3+ million in direct deaths, plus another 6 or 8 million in the famines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#Calculating_the_number_of_victims
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Dec 21, 2014 07:47
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 you're actually, unironically making the "but life expectancy rose!!!!" argumentHere's an argument: Short of being an actual European colony, the Soviet government was about the worst possible outcome for Russia, given the circumstances. It was better than being a colony, I'll grant that. But beyond that there is almost literally nothing positive that the Soviet government did that comparable states did not do better. Japan was in a very similar position developmentally to Russia in the early 1900s, and Russia ended up an impoverished shithole while Japan ended up a developed country. Most if not all South American countries did better as well icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 09:45 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 21, 2014 09:38
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Grifter posted:I know next to nothing about Soviet history. Reading this thread lead me to read the wikipedia article on the Stalin's Great Pure, and that is sickening. It did raise a question though. The article mentions that Staling wiped out a lot of the intelligentsia, which seems to mostly include artists (writers, poets, theater owners, etc.). Did this part of the purge also get academics? If so, how did they so quickly recover to bootstrap themselves into space in a period that's basically a generation later? The purges were of people involved in politics and public life. A bunch of mathematicians sitting in a room cranking out ICBM designs don't have to interact with politics at all
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Dec 24, 2014 11:32
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Baconroll posted:Post Stalin how long was it before the courts started to judge some cases based on evidence and were actually willing to find people innocent for 'non-political' offenses ? Generally speaking the USSR's bureacracy was thoroughly corrupt, which to be fair is also the case in most developing countries. I imagine the court systems were heavily overloaded, and if you were going to trial for a non-political crime you could just pay off the judge. If you couldn't, well, then expect a lovely third world bureacracy that may or may not ever get around to trying you. I'm not sure what crime rates were like in the USSR, but I imagine they were significantly higher than whatever was reported As for political crimes they mostky stopped after Stalin unless you really went out of your way to be annoying like Solzhenitsyyn et al. I believe no party members were executed after the 1950s, just shuffled around and given dead end posts if they fell out of favor icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Dec 25, 2014 |
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Dec 25, 2014 04:33
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Tony Homo posted:What do you think of Gorbachev? Gorbachov was a good guy, but the USSR's problems ran so deep there was no fixing them. There could have been a China style economic liberalization without political liberalization, but Gorbachov wanted political liberalization first and foremost. If he had stayed in power I guess he might have been able to fix Russia's economy more successfully than what happened IRL (complete failure) but I don't really think it would have been possible for a former Party member to remain in control of the post-Communist Russia icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 06:15 on Dec 25, 2014 |
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Dec 25, 2014 06:11
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AKA Pseudonym posted:Did the coup plotters stand a chance or was that enterprise doomed from the start? Well, part of the problem with the USSR and the reason a reformer like Gorbachev came to power was that the conservative hardliners were basically still Stalin's old cronies, and by 1990 they were mostly dead leaving no real candidates to lead the USSR. Gorbachev was like 40 years younger than the next choice. So even if they had succeeded, the problems of leadership and popular unrest would have still been there. They also acted way too late, Gorbachev was accumulating power from the early 80s, and by 1991 he had already done most of the work of dismantling the USSR. icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 06:27 on Dec 27, 2014 |
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Dec 27, 2014 06:24
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