this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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This is remarkably liberal. In times of existential war, strict control and competent planning was necessary. The NEP was strictly necessary going from barely out of feudalism to a somewhat developed industrial base upon which economic planning can actually function properly. The system of soviet democracy waa far better at letting workers run society, and the wealthiest in the USSR were only about ten times as wealthy as the poorest (as compared to the thousands to millions under Tsarism and now capitalism).
The USSR was a dictatorship of the proletariat, through and through. There is no fantasy version of socialism that can ever exist without needing to deal with existing conditions, obstacles, and barriers.
I really don’t want to believe that requisitioning the grain of peasants at gun point and killing those who protested , burning their villages and raping their women as punishment was necessary. I don’t believe that sending the Tcheka to union leaders who had “bottom up” demands and disappearing them was either.
The kromstadt sailors, who made the October revolution happen, didn’t want that. They wanted socialism without the dictatorship, they wanted power to the soviets, democracy. They mutinied to ask for that and were killed / had to flee to finland.
The USSR was not run by the workers, that was propaganda. It was run top down by the communist party apparatus, specifically the politburo, of whom most were from the intelligentsia, not workers nor peasants.
Again, very ahistorical understanding. The USSR was not this comically evil Red Scare version you seem to think it was. The bourgeois farmers, the kulaks, that burned their crops and fought the red army rather than collectivizing were directly responsible for making famine worse. The Krondtadt rebellion was led by Stepan Petrichenko, who became a White Army soldier after the failure of the rebellion. What the sailors demanded in civil war would have led to the loss of the war for everyone.
The USSR was run by the workers. For starters, kulaks were wealthy bourgeois farmers that you frame as "peasants" and paint systemic sexual abuse was weilded as punishment. The Kronstadt sailors were largely unsupported as their demands were unsustainable, and amounted to active sabotage of the war effort. Terrorists, Tsarists, and fascists were targetted, yes.
Nobody is saying the USSR was perfect, but taking the opposite approach and believing wholeheartedly every Red Scare myth is also wrong.