Thing is, regardless of what anyone says, you’ll probably not be moved to consider a state you fundamentally disagree with as “successful”. My following two paragraphs are mostly based on data collected and published by western studies, and compiled in a book called “Human Rights in the Soviet Union”, by Albert Szymanski, which I highly encourage reading to anyone interested in socialism.
By the 70s, the USSR had eliminated homelessness and unemployment. It guaranteed free healthcare to every citizen, free education up to university level, men retired at 60 and women at 55. It drastically improved the material conditions of hundreds of millions of people, lifting them from feudal agrarian societies like the Russian Empire or the central-asian countries, to industralized societies with welfare state. They progressed the rights of women to the point that there were more female engineers in the USSR than in the rest of the world combined. There were widely available and affordable canteens and food at the workplace so that women wouldn’t have to cook at home if they didn’t desire to do so, as well as affordable childcare and kindergartens to prevent women from being tied home by children. Free abortions were available for every woman. In most republics, including Kazakhstan, Latvia, Uzbekistan, Lithuania… there were more publications in the local official language (in which people could study at schools and take university exams in) than in Russian. The vast majority of the population was content with the government, except possibly in Estonia and Georgia due to the strong and long-lasting nationalist movements in those countries.
The USSR went from being a feudal backwater country in Eastern Europe, to extremely rapid industrialization that enabled the defeat of the Nazis, and to eventually become the second world power for the latter half of the 20th century. All of this was achieved without the exploitation of 3rd world countries’ resources and labor, the USSR never engaged in colonialism and, since it was mostly a self-sufficient country, it didn’t partake in unequal exchange either. In the past of the country, mainly in the Stalin period, there was massive and unjustified repression with terrible consequences for millions of people, but that was a phenomenon that exclusively took place in the paranoia between 1935 and 1945 approximately, afterwards this level of repression was never seen again. We should condemn this for what it was, but does it invalidate all the achievements of the USSR? Should the UK, for example, be dismantled as a state, because all the benefits that it generated for its population were at the expense of the oppression and murder of tens if not hundreds of millions across the British Empire? Would you classify the UK as a failed state as a consequence? Is the USA a failed state because it developed under the premise of the Manifest Destiny doctrine, which implied ans turned into the genocide of practically the entirety of the native population?
Many people in the world saw such a country as the USSR and decided to follow its steps, that’s why there were plenty of leftist movements in many developing countries such as Iran (Mossadegh), Congo (Lumumba), Chile (Allende), Cuba… Most of these movements didn’t “fail”, but were eliminated by elaborate western-country ploys to do so, as is the case of the three former that I mentioned.
My point is, you probably disagree with the point of what I’m saying, but what metrics would you actually use to consider whether a country is a success or a failure?
Well I’d at least state that the countries absorbed into the Soviet union where not free to do so. So stating that the Soviet union did not partake in colonialism is only part of the story. They conquered their neighbors and with all the people and resources of these countries managed a lot of that. Also many countries in the world where aligned with the Soviet union so they where also part of the international market.
To be honest I can’t really speak to how these relationships where forged and maintained, but a lot of these USSR aligned countries had ruling classes that where also not the nicest people to put it mildly.
So maybe some aspects where good, there is plenty of bad to be found as well. As this was the world back then.
The western block where by no means holy, but I’d argue better for most of their people overall. How the American system ended up in its current form I don’t know but I tend to see a lot of similarities between the wealthy elite of either system abusing the workers in an unsustainable way.
Edit: I had the privilege to discuss old vs new with my east German grandparents in law. And they had a lot of good to say about their communist days. Especially the labor market, equal rights, and access to goods. It took time but everything was available. But when asked if they preferred then or now they said now… when asked why. The answer got to me. “Because now if someone rings your doorbell unexpectedly you don’t have to worry about dissapearing”. They told me they knew multiple families that where all arrested and never heard from again.
Well I’d at least state that the countries absorbed into the Soviet union where not free to do so
While what you say is partly true (although the reality is more complicated for many countries such as Ukraine or Belarus or Armenia or most of Central Asia), when you say “the countries” were not free to do so, what do you mean exactly? Because I don’t think anyone is really free to belong to a country or to other for the most part. I’m Spanish and I didn’t choose to be so, and there are plenty of people in my country who don’t feel Spanish but are forced to be so, especially in Basque areas and Catalonia. I’ve never been asked what nationality I want to belong to, or what country I wish to be born in.
This is especially true for regimes in the 1920s (countries that annexed during the Russian Civil war) and the 1940s (countries that annexed during and after WW2). Polish citizens themselves, or Ukrainian, or Finnish, when in 1917 the first Bolshevik constitution declared the unilateral right of self-determination and secession for all peoples of the former Russian Empire, didn’t get to choose democratically whether they wanted to become independent. The local powerful authorities simply declared so, and afaik there was never any referendum about the topic in these countries. In some places this was very short-lasting, as for example in Ukraine when they were immediately invaded by Poland because of nationalist expansionism in the Polish-Ukrainian war. So, can you argue that these peoples of Ukraine were incorporated into the USSR against their will after the expulsion of the Polish forces from Ukraine by the Soviets, any more than they became independent against their will since there was no referendum?
I didn’t get to vote the constitution of my country since I was born too late for that. I didn’t get to choose the parliamentary form of it, I didn’t get to choose to have a fucking king, I didn’t get to choose whether I wanted to join the EU and abandon our previous currency. If my decision power is consistently ignored, can you argue that my national identity and my belonging to a state is good just because it’s by default? Second-generation Latvians, Uzbeks, or Georgians, didn’t get to choose what country they were born in and belonged to, any less than I do currently. In fact, most citizens of the USSR got to vote in 1991 in a referendum whether they wanted to maintain the USSR, and the overwhelming majority of citizens voted affirmatively… which was promptly ignored as the state was dissolved from the top-down, and plunged into the worst humanitarian crisis in Eastern Europe since WW2 with the application of Neoliberal shock therapy.
I had the privilege to discuss old vs new with my east German grandparents in law. And they had a lot of good to say about their communist days. Especially the labor market, equal rights, and access to goods. It took time but everything was available. But when asked if they preferred then or now they said now… when asked why. The answer got to me. “Because now if someone rings your doorbell unexpectedly you don’t have to worry about dissapearing”. They told me they knew multiple families that where all arrested and never heard from again.
As for this, I’m not familiar with the history of repression in Eastern Germany. I’d dare to say that your grandparents in law were “lucky”, in the sense that they got to have an employment for the most part after the dissolution of the country and the reunification with western Germany (which forced the deindustrialization of Eastern Germany in favour of western one, big part of the reason why there are so many inequality differences between the two afaik). Is the risk of unemployment and misery less serious than the risk of political oppression? We tend to think so, but for many people who don’t enjoy the most basic material rights, the answer isn’t that simple. I agree that oppression to those levels is something inherently negative, but it’s the common response of systems when there are sectors of the population that go against the system itself. In my country, Spain, cases of lawfare manufactured by the state and police apparatus and coordinated with mass media, destroyed the leftist party Podemos which used to be the 3rd biggest force in the parliament after the 2008 crisis. In the USA, the Black Panthers movement was eliminated by the CIA despite committing no real crime.
My point isn’t anything other than “let’s question the metrics that we use to compare one country to another”. To me, as a young person who may never be able to afford a house, who’s only seen the welfare state eroded further and further in his lifetime and maybe won’t have a public pension like my grandparents and parents enjoy/will enjoy, who’s seen the political oppression through lawfare and manufactured consent of progressive politicians, who doesn’t have a right to decide whether to eliminate the literal monarchy from his country, and who has seen Catalonian politicians jailed for wanting to make a referendum on the HUMAN RIGHT of self-determination, it’s hard for me to see the innumerable advantages of the capitalism that ravages the third world and destroys the climate of the planet I inhabit. Young people don’t unionize because they’re afraid that the hidden profiles that companies make of them and share with each other thanks to the internet will brand them as undesirable to be employed. If they’re unionized, they’re liable of getting arrested and getting a sentence to jail as happened to “las seis de la suiza”. How the fuck is this more democratic and less oppressive?
Ill leave arguing history. Smarter people than me can do that.
And just say that your last paragraph I agree to. I’m in my 40s and understand the sentiment all too well. I have the luxury that I own a house… but this was only possible because of the economic crash and subsequent fuckery with the interest rates which opened up a window for me and my wife where we where able to buy at the lowest house prices and with an interest rate equally low. For the rest I see everything you say and agree. I worry for people my age and younger as it seems to be getting worse.
