I'm sure the Ukrainian free soviets where happy to be liberated, or the sailors of Kronstadt. I'm sure the Spanish workers were glad to be shot in the back in the name of the party. The people of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were without a doubt thrilled to be occupied. The land grab in Finland liberated plenty of people, they were welcomed with open arms, yes? Communists leaders around the world felt so liberated, in fact, they bonded together in third-worldism to escape the influence of the СССР.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

There's a lot of complexity tossed aside here, and it hurts your point, more than helps it. When pulling the Krondstadt "trap card" out of your deck and using it as evidence of Soviet Imperialism, for example, you are making several unstated approvals that demand interrogation:

The Krondstadt Revolt was led by Stepan Petrichenko, an "anarcho-syndicalist" that tried to join the Tsarist White Army a year prior to the revolt. He did not care for progress, he would have rather reinstated the Tsar than help the Soviets establish a Socialist State.
The Krondstadt Rebels carried a critical port in the midst of an extremely chaotic civil war. Their demands could not be met without drawing away too many resources in war time, they used their privledged position in order to seak favorable treatment.
If we assume that you call the Bolsheviks traitors for crushing the Krondstadt Revolt, this implies you wish they conceded. What would have happened? In all likelihood, the Soviets would have lost the Civil War and the Tsarists would have reinstated the Tsar. This would mean you support the Tsar over the real popular working class movement.

This general obfuscation of the real struggles for quick "gotchas" applies to all of your examples, such as the Spanish Anarchists who were supported by the Soviets alone, or when you uphold Makhno, who was targeted by the Soviets after raiding them:

The Makhnovists were one of several guerrilla bands that had allied with the Bolsheviks and became units of the Ukrainian Soviet Army in 1919. “Makhno’s forces were assigned a strategically vital section of the Red Army’s Southern Front facing the counter-revolutionary White Army of the former Tsarist general Denikin.” [18] But even during his time as a commander of the Ukrainian Soviet Army, Makhno deliberately stole from and undermined his Bolshevik allies. The historian Arthur Adams writes that “Makhno supplied himself, sometimes by commandeering entire Bolshevik supply trains meant for the Southern Front... Soviet food collectors and political institutions found it impossible to function in the region under his domination.” [19]

Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia all have unique histories with nationalism that would be even more oversimplified than what I had to do for the others to drive a point, so I won't waste time doing so and simply say you can't just state a country and claim it was Imperialized. Perhaps @PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml would like to weigh in.

Further, you erase the liberatory role the USSR played in Cuba, China, Korea, Angola, Algeria, Palestine, and numerous other countries. Each would also need its own deep investigation, but your one-sided comment erased them entirely.

Even further, occupation is not Imperialism. Imperialism is a mechanism of extraction, the USSR drove its economy internally, rather than externally as the Western Powers did. That was my original point to begin with.

Really, you need to do more multi-sided research.

[–] itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone -2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Whether their occupations and annexations where extractive or expansionist in nature, and whether they qualify for the definition of imperialism, is discussion that can be had, although I have neither the time nor energy to have it here. What stays unchanged past this talk of semantics is the fact that they were an authoritarian and expansionist state. To quote Rosa Luxemburg:

When all this is eliminated, what really remains? In place of the representative bodies created by general, popular elections, Lenin and Trotsky have laid down the soviets as the only true representation of political life in the land as a whole, life in the soviets must also become more and more crippled. Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously – at bottom, then, a clique affair – a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins (the postponement of the Soviet Congress from three-month periods to six-month periods!) Yes, we can go even further: such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc. (Lenin’s speech on discipline and corruption.)

Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, 1918.

1918, this was written well before Stalin's reign of terror, in a time when general sentiment towards the revolution was full of hope. Even anarchists where quick to support the revolutionaries, but quickly became disillusioned from what they saw. To quote Trotsky, the man himself:

The working class [...] cannot be left wandering all over Russia. They must be thrown here and there, appointed, commanded, just like soldiers [...] Compulsion of labour will reach the highest degree of intensity during the transition from capitalism to socialism [...] Deserters from labour ought to be formed into punitive battalions or put into concentration camps.”

Then later in the year, as the workers were becoming angered at their treatment:

the militarization of labour...is the indispensable basic method for the organization of our labour forces

And

Is it true that compulsory labour is always unproductive? [...] This is the most wretched and miserable liberal prejudice: chattel slavery too was productive. Compulsory slave labour [...] was in its time a progressive phenomenon. Labour [...] obligatory for the whole country, compulsory for every worker, is the basis of socialism.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 week ago

First of all, all governments are authoritarian, what matters is which class is the one exerting its authority, the Proletariat or Bourgeoisie. States are material things. Further, it isn't quite accurate to refer to the USSR as "expansionist." It certainly grew, but it wasn't a gang of conquesting warlords.

Regardless of what Rosa Luxemburg predicted in 1918, or what the ultimately traitorous Trotsky believed, the Soviet society ultimately was fairly democratic. It wasn't some Utopia, but Pat Sloan described it quite well in Soviet Democracy, as did Anna Louis Strong in This Soviet World, written well into the 1930s.

Ultimately, the comment I took issue with was your description of the USSR as Imperialist, when in most definitions of the word it was quite the opposite. There are a number of valid critiques to make of it, don't misread me, but it also played a progressive role in the 20th century and came with dramatic improvements for the Working Class, and the struggles it faced both internal and external can be learned from all the same as many will be universal for anyone building Socialism.

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