this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2026
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For the people who these houses were built for, absolute poverty, devastation, and squalor preceded mass-produced housing. World War II was incredibly devastating in Europe, leaving millions without a home at all. The communists took on the enormous task of meeting this monumental need, and did so enormously well.
For the unhoused, a solid apartment with basic necessities and the ability to keep out the rain and cold is often the difference between life and death. Communism saved millions of lives.
I think broadly, the life-saving and pro-human efforts are simultaneously so important to our cause as communists but also difficult to articulate. A death statistic is easy; you just count the bodies. A life statistic is harder. There's rising life expectancies and lowered child mortality, but fundamentally it's really difficult to find people and point them out and say "in the alternate timeline where communists weren't there, this person would be dead."
One example that's really clear, for instance, is communism's opposition to fascism. Without this opposition, Eastern Europe, China, and likely the rest of the world would have been enslaved/genocide by the nazis and imperial Japan, at least for an extended period. The USSR's opposition to nazism was so life-saving that Western Europe almost went communist, if not for the Marshall Plan. But this one is very transparent. Pointing out the importance of having an apartment vs being homeless from war and poverty, as you have highlighted, are all much subtler.
Yep! Like you said, the death statistics are, even if often manipulated, fairly easy to see. What's far more difficult to elaborate on is the impact of housing, of free healthcare. There's also the quality of life improvements, like free education and mass literacy programs. Literate people take literacy for granted, the sheer way life opens up with the written word is not to be made light of, and sometimes literacy rates multiplied by as much as ten times in some regions of the USSR.