I’ve spent the last few years devouring Soviet history. Books, papers, blog posts, podcasts, all of it. I can’t get enough. Not to brag, but I do feel as though I’ve achieved a certain level of understanding about the USSR, its history, and eventual collapse. But I’ve also put the work in.
And yet, whenever I engage people I know IRL or online, I’m amazed by how doggedly people will defend what they just inherently “know”: that the Soviet Union was an evil totalitarian authority dictatorship that killed 100 million of its own people and eventually collapsed because communism never works. None of these people (at least the people I know IRL) have learned anything about Soviet history beyond maybe a couple days of lectures and a textbook chapter in high school history classes. Like, I get that this is the narrative that nearly every American holds in their heads. The fact that people believe this isn’t surprising. But what is a little surprising to me is that, when confronted with a challenge to that narrative from someone they know has always loved history and has bothered to learn more, they dig their heels in and insist they are right and I am wrong.
This isn’t about me, I’m just sharing my experience with this. I’m just amazed at how Americans will be completely ignorant about a topic (not just the USSR) but will be utterly convinced their views on that topic are correct, despite their own lack of investigation into that topic. This is the same country where tens of millions of people think dinosaurs and humans walked around together and will not listen to what any “scientist” has to say about it, after all.
Because Gorby was all about ‘admitting Soviet mistakes’ which mostly meant accepting Western narratives (which were not accepted by mainstream Soviet Russian historians, and were incredibly controversial) with the idea of ‘bridging the gap’ between East and West. Like when you read Gorbachev, you get the idea that he was a liberal western-style communist, who saw inefficient parts of a system that did have aspects of Russian chauvinism and said, ‘Well we can do better, look at those Nordic social democracies, let’s transition to be more like them.’ And then proceeded to unintentionally set the stage for the entire thing to get blown up by the vastly empowered criminal class.
Also, his entire legitimacy kinda rested on being reactionarily anti-Stalin.
Thanks. I’ll have to look deeper into the whole thing but yall have given me some good points of consideration.
I mean, it’s been awhile since I read his biography, so I don’t think he was stupid, it was a symptom of both forced errors on Stalin’s part, his whole ‘man of steel’ imagery is very powerful in Russia still. But it’s really reflective of where Russian ideology around communism was at, one of constant struggle against alien forces not by.your own design, unrecognizable and strange. A never-coming promise. Communication or lack of it is a huge theme in late Soviet early Federation artwork. Idk, I should really get back into reading this stuff myself. Post about what you find!