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Comment by whycome | Hacker News Reader

> Recent Russian studies put the count of lost lives and unborn children as high as 170 million people.

wait, does this just mean pregnancies that didn't reach full term? Or like, a hypothetical number of kids that could have been born?

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The Bolsheviks were the first to get a country to legalize elective abortion in 1920. They did so as a temporary measure because so many women would have difficulty raising a child in the post-war environment.

It got to the point where hospitals were overwhelmed and they started setting up dedicated clinics.

They tried making it illegal again in the 30s but brought it back in 1955 because there was such demand.

So, presumably this 170 million number is written by someone who believes a fetus is a unique human life and the prevalence of elective abortion was so high as to be a not insignificant number of "lost lives".

By what actual scientific definition is a fetus, not a unique human life? They have their own unique DNA, brain, circulatory system, fingerprints, etc, etc.

In my understanding, any definition that discounts there individuality is primarily there to depersonalize them and thus justify their killing.

To justify their killing and assuage the conscience of any who have had one/had their wife/girlfriend have one.

That's a philosophical discussion, not scientific fact. (The scientific facts of fetal development are of course important for the discussion) I'm sure we would entirely disagree when a fetus gets qualia or becomes a human being, but that doesn't necessarily mean one of us is ignoring science.

Unique DNA is irrelevant (a clone would be a person), lacking a viable circulatory system or fingerprints doesn't mean lack of personhood. Someone completely braindead a person or closer to a cadaver? Not everybody agrees on the same.

>In my understanding, any definition that discounts there individuality is primarily there to depersonalize them and thus justify their killing.

That's bad faith. Let me try one myself, all anti-choice people are just useful fools in the ultra-conservative campaign to maintain authoritarian control of the relationships and bodies of the people. In my country divorce was illegal until 2004, the same party that maligned it's legalization took condoms out of UN care packages after an earthquake. They would absolutely prohibit Plan B, limit condoms to married couples and make homosexuality illegal if they in had the power.

In the US, the poor will be kept barefoot and pregnant, while the Republican senator and the megapastor will get an abortion for their mistress.

Well, that's easy. Just think everyone else is evil and stupid :^)

Depersonalizing a fetus is necessary to maintain the legality of abortion.

There are already plenty of conflicts in western laws- killing a pregnant woman in some jurisdictions will get you two counts of murder. Stillbirths can qualify for bereavement leave. Despite things like this, legalizing abortion means what would have gotten one person a murder charge is perfectly fine for another person to do.

The fact that you cannot even see how ridiculuous this piece of propaganda is, says also about your ability to reason. The great demographic drop in the Soviet Union happened after the WWII (you remember that Soviet Union defeated the nazis, right?), but even that was not "170 million people" and was due to the war started by the nazis (whatever your propaganda claims about that).

> The fact that you cannot even see how ridiculuous this piece of propaganda is, says also about your ability to reason.

TBH, i don't believe he/she does not have the ability to reason, i think that HN has become a main place for state propaganda. Almost a third of articles are either bashing of US adversaries or "exploded but success, terrahertz transistor, could, may be, etc". The next third are AI propaganda.

> was due to the war started by the nazis

Soviet ally, nonetheless! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...

Yes, cherrypicking the pact when the relevant part is the international context back then.. Soviet Union had to defend itself not only from nazi Germany.

To remind you of western capitalists helping the nazis? Of the British royal family ties to the nazis?

Yes, yes, the "defense" where you occupy parts of Poland, attack Finland. And of course, providing resources and training facilities to the dear ally in Berlin. There is a reason why soviets always talked about "BoB" and never about WWII - they've entered the latter as allies of Hitler, which does not fit to the soviet victim narrative.

Here are some documents about american capitalists financing the nazis

https://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Article=WallStHitler&C=...

The USA had their share of nazi-related business (IBM, e.g.), but no amount of whataboutism will save you from the simple fact that soviets entered the war as active allies of nazi germany.

You wrote above that Soviet Union was helping the nazis before 22 june 1945. I just told you that those who really helped to build the nazi war machine, were you (the american and other capitalists), and not the Soviet Union. Also the motives were quite clear, to "fight the judeo bolshevism".

I am not denying the existence of Molotov Ribbentrop pact, only the emphasis western propaganda puts on it (for obvious reasons) is misleading, and deliberately does not take into account parts of the historical context.

> I just told you that those who really helped to build the nazi war machine, were you (the american and other capitalists), and not the Soviet Union.

Oh, this is not a point of blaming and finger pointing, looking for excuses why the communists are not to blame(are they ever?). It is to illustrate the very simple fact that the soviet union was an imperialist, expansive and warmongering state and one of the direct initiators of WWII - contrary to the usual soviet-russian victim narrative. Not that we would not know it in the retrospective looking at the soviet occupation of half of europe.

Half of Europe is nothing compared to what the US owns (de facto) now or what the British empire had. And they are (were) imperialist, expansive, and war mongering. Actually Soviet Union, compared to them, is an amateur.

As to who started the war, the basic fact is that the nazis attacked Soviet Union on 22 june 1941, that it was an immense tragedy, and that saying that the victim was the aggressor is a very unjust and evil thing to say.

You forget that the Soviet Union's sphere of influence was a lot more than just half of Europe.

For the families who left, there is gratitude every day that the Soviet Union lacked the power to control more than it did - certainly not for lack of will.

The fact that Germany was some days earlier to start the planned attack on the other, didn't change that the plans were mutually. This was known by western leaders, which is why the support for the UdSSR was controversial. For example it lead to Churchill concluding that "we slaughtered the wrong pig.".

Lost lives and lost potential is how I read it.

You can play with the scope to tell the story you want. If you scope in WW2 losses as well, about 30M Soviets died. Some other number were injured or disabled. If you look at fertility rates at the time, you can project how many children would have been born, and I’m sure you could be at that number.

Additionally, the after effects of the war and Stalin persisted - the loss of men resulted in higher numbers of childless women.

I lack the information to assess whether 170M is a meaningful number, but on a relative basis, the United States and even China didn’t contend with the sheer destruction and oppression that Soviet people did, and had higher fertility rates. It’s not a “pro” or “anti” Soviet/Russian discussion - the nation’s people suffered in various ways, which had an end result.

No, the CIA just counted the lost sperm.

The 170MM figure is referring to all losses of life like the purges, man-made famines (Holodomor), inept ww ii strategies, as well as “unborn” children. This last one has no reference so it’s impossible to know what that means or how many people they attribute to that.

That said, the problem is a cultural one. The communists poured gas on the tendencies of the Tsars and modern Russia suffers from that legacy still. The legacy is a peasant (serf) : master way of thinking.

Culture is hard to cure and the change has to come from within. Japan had a similar problem but most of the sharp edges were dulled when they made a deal (surrender) with the Americans.

You also see this tendency to cling to bad cultural habits by some enclaves of immigrants. It can take decades of new generations to wipe some of those bad tendencies away. Some people see that as erasure of culture as a bad thing but it can also bring good.

I don't know who is downvoting this comment, but the comment is correct. Russia is a state, not a nation. The Kremlin, in all incarnations - the Tsars, Stalin, the Communist Party, Putin, even the Mongols that used to run it before Moscow, have always been perceived more like an alien force that has landed onto this land, and now one has to submit to it, without questions. This is a lesson that parents pass onto their children, implicitly or explicitly. It could become a nation-state in a relatively short order, though that's certainly going to be bloody. And nukes could be on the table as well - this is why the US was actually opposed to the USSR collapse, a fact that's not widely known today.

It’s a bold and unsubstantiated claim. In English language there’s a lot of confusion because the same word Russian is used both for citizenship and ethnicity, but in Russian they are different and such confusion doesn’t exist. If you run polls in Russia, ethnic minorities won’t say that they are Russians using the word for ethnicity, but they will certainly confirm that they are Russian citizens belonging to the same cultural space (and in that sense some may even use the word for ethnicity, e.g. “I’m Tatar, but I’m Russian too”). Nation is defined not by the government but by shared history and culture and may cross ethnic boundaries. Russia is big, but its people have developed the shared culture, the pride, the sense of belonging which qualify it for a nation. This comes on top of all geographical and ethnic identities, which make the picture more diverse and complex, but those identities are rarely stronger (even in regions like Chechnya).

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