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Comment by Mikhail_Edoshin | Hacker News Reader

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> You do not know what you are talking about.

It breaks the site guidelines to attack others like this, regardless of how wrong they are are you feel they are. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If you could please review them and stick to the rules when posting, we'd appreciate it.

> Soviet Union was one of last countries with true art.

There was no art, only pro-government communist propaganda. In Soviet Union there was even popular saying regardless culture, that Stalin took over a Russia of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, and left it with the Union of Soviet Writers.

After one of updates my MS Edge decided to start showing me the MSN page on a new tab. I had EN/US settings at the time so I received a page in English, either US or international.

So once it did that I glanced around the page and noticed that of top stories was about a model or actress of some fame, presumably. The heading told us that it could be that the actress appeared on stage or somewhere with little or no underwear.

Now, that kind of "news" would be impossible in USSR. Due to state censorship, of course. It did limit what you could watch or read. For example, C. S. Lewis was rather underrepresented. But at the same time it edified the whole field, protecting it from underwear news. (And that is a mildest example of what pollutes the cultural atmosphere of the West.) So while few Soviet people read Lewis, many were ready for that because they were raised in an environment where Lewis's topics and questions were important and serious. I remember Graham Green said that some of his most deep critics were "marxists", that is, came from the Soviet block; the West wasn't that interested.

I really doubt you've read much of Soviet writers.

About propaganda. When I was learning English, I watched movies. There were few, so I re-watched what I had several times. (Turned out to be an excellent method, by the way.) One of them was "Philadelphia", I've watched it six or seven times. Very well done. Now, tell me: isn't it a gay propaganda movie? I think it is. I see the whole set of talking points straight from political debates, masterfully dramatized and carefully curated not to reveal anything that might work against the desired goal.

> There was no art, only pro-government communist propaganda

You’re conflating the Stalinist period with the whole history of the USSR.

Before there was Lenin, after there was Khrushchev, both explicitly considered art that is not pro-government communist propaganda as thing that should not exist.

By that standard, you would then need to conclude that all medieval artworks and renaissance artworks were not art but Catholic or royal propaganda.

During the medieval period and the Renaissance you totally could do art that had nothing to do with church and royals. In the Soviet Union you could not.

There is a famous quote of the judge on the Brodsky trial (1964): "Who have appointed you to be a Poet?". Аfter he sad that Soviet Government did no appointed him to be a Poet, he was sent in the gulag for 5 years. That is how "art" worked in the USSR.

The guilds regulated art in cities, and most of it was commissioned by the church or aristocracy. The Soviet Union might have been more severe but, like in the Soviet Union, you would have to do it privately unless you had support of the guilds, aristocracy or church. The comparison still holds.

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