I’ve spent the last few years devouring Soviet history. Books, papers, blog posts, podcasts, all of it. I can’t get enough. Not to brag, but I do feel as though I’ve achieved a certain level of understanding about the USSR, its history, and eventual collapse. But I’ve also put the work in.
And yet, whenever I engage people I know IRL or online, I’m amazed by how doggedly people will defend what they just inherently “know”: that the Soviet Union was an evil totalitarian authority dictatorship that killed 100 million of its own people and eventually collapsed because communism never works. None of these people (at least the people I know IRL) have learned anything about Soviet history beyond maybe a couple days of lectures and a textbook chapter in high school history classes. Like, I get that this is the narrative that nearly every American holds in their heads. The fact that people believe this isn’t surprising. But what is a little surprising to me is that, when confronted with a challenge to that narrative from someone they know has always loved history and has bothered to learn more, they dig their heels in and insist they are right and I am wrong.
This isn’t about me, I’m just sharing my experience with this. I’m just amazed at how Americans will be completely ignorant about a topic (not just the USSR) but will be utterly convinced their views on that topic are correct, despite their own lack of investigation into that topic. This is the same country where tens of millions of people think dinosaurs and humans walked around together and will not listen to what any “scientist” has to say about it, after all.
usians are the most propagandized people on earth
it’s even worse with the descendants of euro-immigrants. I know a polish guy, gay, super liberal, who is absolutely convinced of the most bloodthirsty and reactionary narratives about the USSR because he’s from a polish family, and his polish grandma would never lie. If I’m talking about any kind of effort to improve society somewhat and say “socialism is a good idea in theory, but never in practice, I should know, I’m polish, and both hitler and stalin genocided my people.” He’s generally a kind and friendly person who has been helpful on numerous occasions in the decade I’ve known him, but the second we start talking politics the gloves come off. He has a STEM background and gets paid fairly good, so I especially don’t care for the way he talks about working class people like they’re all ignorant trumpers who just need to learn to code.
Shouldn’t a techbro know that personal anecdotes are not evidence?
We need to write a doctoral thesis and even then it’s not enough.
But when they’re talking about how USSR bad it’s all “my grandma told me her dentist told her his ex girlfriend told him her husband told her a cab driver told him another passenger told them that they once saw Stalin strangle a Polish child to death with his bare hands”
The Soviet’s doing Katyn narrative is a religious part of Polish anti-communism.
Did they not do it? I was under the impression that Katyn massacre was carried out by the Soviets and could be considered a war crime but that doesn’t merit any comparison with what the Germans did and that drawing a false equivalence between them is basically Nazi apologia.
Here is a chapter dealing with the Katyn massacre from the book Blood Lies by Grover Furr.
The book itself is a point by point takedown of Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder (an anticommunist rewrite of history that tries to equivocate between Stalin and Hitler) mainly just by following the book’s own sources and finding none of them substantiate any of the claims made. I do recommend reading the whole of Blood Lies, but it is pretty long and the Katyn chapter should give you some idea of just how falsified the anticommunist orthodox narrative on the USSR is.
They dug up the site a few years ago and only found German shell casings.
Eye witnesses report that the Germans did it. The rope used to bind their hands was not a type made or used in the USSR. And the bullets in the bodies were of a German caliber.
Germany reportedly captured a labor camp holding Polish officer POWs near Smolensk and executed these prisoners captured from the Soviets at Katyn in 1941.
Then in 1943 just as Germany was about to lose control of the area, none other than Goebbels reported they had discovered a mass grave of soviet victims at Katyn.
The polish government in exile chooses to believe Goebbels without evidence.
(cw: a reference to animal cruelty)
The kitten-burners seem to fulfill some urgent need. They give us someone we can clearly and correctly say we’re better than. Their extravagant cruelty makes us feel better about ourselves because we know that we would never do what they have done. They thus function as signposts of depravity, reassuring the rest of us that we’re Not As Bad As them, and thus letting us tell ourselves that this is the same thing as us being good.
Someone already posted the brainwashing vs moral licensing essay so I just wanna add that if an American takes an anti-imperialist stance on their history, then they are grievously implicating themselves and everyone they know.
Because if the US hasn’t been fighting for freedom all this time, then what does that say about Americans? What does that say about you?
Most Americans prefer to avoid the question and the associated introspection because their lives are distant enough and comfortable enough that they can. Also, everyone understands what resisting the US entails, whether they’ll admit it or not, and know to keep their head down or else.
