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Comment by Squarex | Hacker News Reader

I can only speak of Czechoslovakia, but from 1968 to 1989 there was no ideology. After the soviet occupation, there was normalization era, that was explicitly about compliance with the regime, not about believe in communism.

I agree though that it is more complex, but for some reason, Czechoslovakia wanted to keep all the people and exploit their work, while Venezuela and Iran seems to let the people go in exchange for the regime stability.

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Would that be possibly because while Venezuela and Iran have oil to extract and sell on the international market to enrich the coffers of the oligarchs in power, the only resources Czechoslovakia had was labour. The oligarchs could only enrich themselves by exporting manufactured goods like shoes and buses, mostly made from imported materials, extracting the excess wealth from the labour of others the way Venezuela and Iran extract oil from the ground?

No, the whole USSR had exit visas but it was resource rich. Russia still is. It's not the case that the USSR's only resource was labor.

First, of course I am talking about Socialist Dictatorships of the XX Century in an academic way, from what I have read, So I really don't know as much as what I have lived through in Venezuela.

When I talk about Ideology, I am not referring to the people, but the regime hiercachy. I would guess in the case of Czechoslovakia the regime had some Ideology alignment with the Soviets, but I truly don't know. But yes, they modern approach seems to favor the exile instead of the reclusion or so it seems

No communist ideology? What was the regime demanding compliance with, do you think? The normalization era was a return to Marxism-Leninism, not a departure from it.

Czechoslovakia in that period had one party politics, justified because multiparty democracy was "bourgeois deviation". It was a state run centrally planned economy, because the left wing don't believe in capitalism or free markets. Officially unemployment didn't exist, because only imperialist capitalist right wing economies had unemployment. Party membership and associated ideological compliance was required for any important role. Culture was censored, people were imprisoned by ideology police.

It is bizarre to claim that the USSR was not ideological. It collapsed because it was pure ideology in defiance of reality.

The reason the USSR kept people behind a wall is because they were able to mentally justify it to themselves within the framework of their far left ideology. They viewed the west as corrupt and, more importantly, full of corrupting ideas. They were just much more committed to winning the propaganda war than a place like Venezuela is because their worldview was formed at the end of the Victorian era when travel and communication was much more easily restricted. Maduro's socialist worldview was formed much later, when the idea of preventing Venezuelans having access to capitalist ideas would have seemed much more ridiculous.

Of course there was a state ideology. Just the majority of the society and even the party did not actually believe it. There was a saying that there was more communists at a western university than in the whole Czechoslovakia

Are you Czech or Slovak to be able to speak with this much confidence?

I have spent 13 years in Czech Republic, admittedly after the curtain fell, and I can tell you for a fact that they were “communist” because otherwise tanks.

You can see the relationship they had with the ideology in pretty much any sliver of cultural material from the period and after.

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