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Comment by drewcoo | Hacker News Reader

> how that experiment ended

(not as taught from Texas-approved history books)

The Soviets lifted an unprecedented number of people out of poverty. This was unequalled until China in the following century. They would likely have achieved more and lasted longer without the constant harassment of capitalist countries. (Remember when the US even invaded Soviet soil? Most Americans do not.)

The US and some European powers managed to convince Soviets to switch to an American-style economy, run by oligarchs. Those countries proceeded to loot the Soviet Union for anything they could find. And so we have today.

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How would you describe the millions the Soviets lifted to death by starvation and millions used as slave labor, or is that only in the Texas approved history books?

The problem with revolutions is that when the prevailing power structure is turned upside down, it allows the most ruthless people to rise to the top, from where they unleash waves of terror to eliminate opposition, consolidating control in their bid to forge a new power structure.

This is what happened in France, what happened in Russia, and what has happened in many other cases. It is not an ideological phenomenon, has nothing to do with communism, and it happens because a society refuses to reform for so long that the system collapses under its own corruption. We are heading down that same path by refusing to institute moderate reforms while we still have the option to do so.

And of course, the chaos of revolution is not the only way for a vicious tyrant to gain power and institute a reign of terror...

The mass starvation was linked to communist policies of state planning and collectivization. In reality the lower classes were mass starved in order to bring some utopia that never came.

This was not only driven by vicious men, this was there from the very start, this was inherent in the revolution and its ideology, and mainly caused by real shortages stemming from economic issues

You can see it with Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and i'm probably only missing more examples due to ignorance. You have an economic system which is "scientific", but is actually just a mass experiment resulting in deaths of millions. And an ideology that is so sure of itself as it is "proven" it never stops or self-questions

I think this is a reasonable description of what happened, and a real danger. Dogmatically gettng stuck on one set of economic and social possibilities just because they fit into the grand benevolent -ism is the issue is always fraught.

It goes both ways, of course.

When people say: "Oh, we can't do socialism, or anything that looks or feels even a tiny bit like socialism, because look what happened with Lenin et al!", I think they are ironically engaging in the very essence of what lead to these attempted revolutions going so poorly.

Social and economic rigidity and dogmatism is the issue.

Socialism has some good ideas, and can be hellishly bad. Capitalism has some good ideas, and can be hellishly bad. Same for anarchism, veganism, hedonism, and so on. This isn't to say that all ideologies are equal, but that dogmatism is generally very dangerous.

That's largely an american thing, most of europe is social democrat without resorting to killing millions.

However, defending the revolutions that resulted in catastrophe and complete failure is in my opinion dangerous. We don't need another trial at an extreme ideology that knows everything to guess the end result

Any good suggestions for trustworthy and non-propagandistic books that go into this?

I've only read one excellent (French, translated) collection of the writing of Alexandra Kollontai, and otherwise nothing much of length on the topic. Kollontai was already enough to suspect that the usual simplistic narrative as whispered by our interlocuteur here might not be the whole story whatsoever.

I lived in USSR.

No, thank you. I'm not a fan of capitalism, either, but that society was hardly a stellar example of an alternative.

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