Holy kek. The Soviet Union was a fucking comedy show

> both Lenin and Trotsky were high-ranking freemasons, obeying the International Masonic Council

> socialist revolutionaries who ran underground conspiracy in Tsarist Russia for decades
> nah, they must be the members of another conspiracy that has better market penetration

>Some yiddish speaking Jew in New York can move to Russia and be placed at the head of an army. This is completely normal, and only a tinfoiled (buzzworded) nutjob could ever suggest conspiracy

You have to be JIDF false-flagging that hard to prove that your work is relevant and get funding for the next period.

Trotsky was a notable member of the party that would end up on some top position anyway.

Also, the WHOLE Bolshevik state was army, the army to win in planetary revolution and make way for global communism. That defines the whole history of the USSR later.

Solzhenitsyn was a repulsive little Tsarist rodent who should've been shot.

Aren't you cool.

>taking Solzhenitsyn and his books seriously
jej

I actually started reading The Red Wheel based on that article.

That issue of New Criterion got me like 10 recommendations. Its my favorite monthly publication.

> rapid leftists getting BTFO by moderate leftism
And this is bad exactly why?

>pride yourself on being the literary magazine for conservatives
>your output is still the average youtube rant about communism except it's in a fancy font

thanks for the recommendation OP, good way to check out what the "classic liberals" equipped with a thesaurus are thinking

I immediately write off anyone who can sincerely defend or apologize for mid-century communism after 1921/NEP as an ignoramus.

>Lenin was a good guy.
Keep telling yourself that your imbecile. Just like every Soviet defender, you probably reverse engineered your idealized opinions of the Soviet Union and the revolutionaries after seeing aesthetic imagery of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and other cool soviet lore that are so attractive to the bugmen of the far-left.

Lenin was an evil cunt and the millions who supported his revolution got massively fucked over by him and realised none of their original goals.

good thing the guy you're replying to isn't doing that

The Russian people got peace, land, and bread. They didn't get worker control, because Lenin decided to subordinate the soviets to party officials installed in each factory and collective farm. With the exception of the Ukrainian famine, when agriculture was still being conducted using primitive techniques and the lives of the peasant farmers were still at the mercy of the weather, and the shortages of the late 1980s after Gorbachev's disastrous market reforms and decades of massive military investment, the people of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries had a moderate level of prosperity, certainly much less than Western Europe or the United States, but better than contemporary Africa or Latin America. It was, of course, a repressive, dictatorial society, but there is no point in exaggerating things in order to make it into some sort of obscene morality tale.

>The Russian people got peace, land, and bread.
Peace? Hell no.

Land? What is the difference between serfdom and USSR land "rights"?

Bread? They had bread before. Under the glorious Soviet rule you could have cucumbers for a month and then tomatoes for the next month. The food quality and production was a joke.

>Land
The abuses of the bureaucratic class were not nearly so egregious as under the aristocracy. The working class kept more of what it produced.
>Peace
Are you really going to blame the Soviets for being invaded by a dozen different armies? Are you going to blame them for Hitler's attack? They had a war in Afghanistan, but so did the British and the Americans.
>Bread
>food quality and production was a joke
"no"

Trotsky had a significant presence and following even before the 1905 revolution, you seriously think he was some nobody?

Yiddish was not Trotsky's first language btw, it's pretty well documented that he grew up speaking a mix of Russian and Ukrainian

Solzhenitsyn BTFO

marxists.org/archive/mandel/1974/05/solzhenitsyn-gulag.html

You're going to need some arguments to back those claims. Otherwise no one is going to take you seriously. Besides, the screenshot you took is just an opening paragraph. You can't write off an article just based on that.

The New Criterion is actually one of the few literary magazines that is not 100% flavor-of-the-week SJW horseshit. If you would actually read it, you'd also quickly learn that there are indeed some occasional contributors who write for the New Criterion who lean left of the political fence. However, it is indeed true that they have no sympathy for radical politics.

>Lenin invented the police state

Best analysis itt

/leftypol/ here, sorry for the tankie

Yes, they are this retarded.

>Are you really going to blame the Soviets for being invaded by a dozen different armies? Are you going to blame them for Hitler's attack? They had a war in Afghanistan, but so did the British and the Americans.
Oh, you think of peace as being free from foreign invaders. I was thinking of living in a police state, gulags, etc.

>The abuses of the bureaucratic class were not nearly so egregious as under the aristocracy. The working class kept more of what it produced.
This is merely conjecture.

Also, you should actually look into pre- and post-Sovietization agriculture productivity numbers. Considering they had some of the best soil around and a large land mass supporting a relatively small population, they were incredibly inefficient and should not have had such poor food security. Not to mention the major issues with mycotoxins, which come from poor pre-harvest and post-harvest practices.

tankies are the only good /leftypol/ posters

why is lit so full of leftist scum? is literature just the pseudointellectual's hobby?

6/10 book desu
try reading some avant literature next time

People who read more books actually understand socialism

No arguments at all, as usual.

American colleges will indoctrinate you into acquiring a left-wing view of the world, and this is well-known. Similar things are happening throughout Europe and also here in Latin America.

Curiously enough, once you go up the intellectual ladder and find the people who truly know their literature - who read Latin, Greek, German, Italian and Spanish with ease - the percentage of leftists tends to decrease.

Also, most of these left-wing students tend to prefer contemporary literature. Most of them don't even have the English to read Chaucer and need a dictionary to understand even the simplest of his passages, which is pretty much a giant joke for anyone who grew up in a bilingual environment.

>American colleges will indoctrinate you into acquiring a left-wing view of the world, and this is well-known. Similar things are happening throughout Europe and also here in Latin America.

Sad, isn't it, how bad things have gone? I had a class on British Modernism where an indignant Chicana indicated, "has anyone noticed that, like, every character in the Good Soldier has blond hair and blue eyes?" Oh, a spa in turn of the century Germany with British and Anglo-Americans couldn't possibly have any blond, blue-eyed patrons, now could it?

When will this chicanery cease?

Yeah, understand how bad it is.

I was in a class where we read The Old House at Home by Joseph Mitchell and a girl who looked exactly like you would imagine her to look and talked exactly how you would expect her to talk repeatedly made it known to the class that she was disgusted with the piece because there weren't any women in it and it was written strictly from a male point of view and it was dangerous because it would make male readers nostalgic for the past. Well, if it didn't make me nostalgic for the past before she spoke, it sure did after.

> known as the Gulag archipelago

Heh.

Beria comes to Stalin:
— Based on reports of our agents, here's a list of artists who don't seem to wholly support each and every decision of our government. How will we deal with them?
— We'll send them to… (Stalin becomes teary-eyed) Gulag archipelago!
(Evil laughter.)

Why does every USSR defender act like there was no potential for growth and progress in the Russian Empire? You don't think modern education, technology, reforms would have ever come?

/lefty/pol/ took over this board when kicked out of /pol/.

Lurk more newfag Veeky Forums has been a Marxist board for a long time

...

As long as you're being a silly leftist, can you give me some lefty literature recommendations
I've already read the Communist Manifesto and it honestly hasn't got me convinced

(((Ascher)))

it hasn't been translated to english in full has it?

(((Mandel)))

reminder this wasn't """""""""""real communism"""""""""""

even solzhenitsyn's own wife knew he was full of shit
nytimes.com/2003/06/06/world/natalya-reshetovskaya-84-is-dead-solzhenitsyn-s-wife-questioned-gulag.html
>In her 1974 memoir, ''Sanya: My Life with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn'' (Bobbs-Merrill), she wrote that she was ''perplexed'' that the West had accepted ''The Gulag Archipelago'' as ''the solemn, ultimate truth,'' saying its significance had been ''overestimated and wrongly appraised.''
>Pointing out that the book's subtitle is ''An Experiment in Literary Investigation,'' she said that her husband did not regard the work as ''historical research, or scientific research.'' She contended that it was, rather, a collection of ''camp folklore,'' containing ''raw material'' which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.

Her comments are discredited bullshit. How ironic. His EX wife, who was persuaded by the Soviet authorities to discredit him and his accounts - the shit he describes in literally the first chapters of the book.

Did you even read the fucking article?
>In 1974, when Mr. Solzhenitsyn was living in exile in the United States and preparing to publish ''The Gulag Archipelago,'' the Soviet authorities persuaded Miss Reshetovskaya to intervene with her former husband to try to get him to stop publication.

Just image how INSANE it would be to think that she was under any pressure whatsoever to discredit her EX husband! Fucking idiot. This is the stuff Solzhenitsyn describes in the book.

But it was the path to real communism, and if it wasn't, then the leaders of the revolution and the early soviet leaders so idolized by communist groups today are fucking morons, because they're idolizing people who aren't even communists. Soviet apologists are literally the dumbest cunts on earth.

What's The Red Wheel like? Is it in a similar style to The Gulag Archipelago, except about the revolution? I might read it soon.

>Noone wanted to stop first
Fucking materialists lol

Yes it's nonsensical: the Soviet Union regressed during the civil war after the revolution and wouldn't be set back on track again until the implementation of NEP which was basically a major liberalization of the economy.

>marxists.org

there's an unoficially translation on 8pol

how can you laugh at this? I understand if it was a work of fiction, but this happened to real people. Imagine if you were in that situation. It wouldn't be so funny then, I can assure you.

I thought the Soviet Union was pretty bad. Then I started to read "The Court of the Red Tsar" and now I recognize that Nazi Germany was pretty tame and that Hitler was a, kind hearted and reasonable person.

I had no idea. The stuff in the OP pages is NOTHING. Stalin would have the secret police arrest and torture the wives of his closest comrades and if they would try to intercede the whole family would go to hell. The reason for these arrests was that these men loved their wife very much, and that was suspicious behaviour.

as they should have done, those gentlemen needed to check their loyalty!

This is why it's important to educate people about the evils of communism. It's a historical tragedy that too few people know about, especially in the west.

The number of communists that still exist among the intelligentsia is just disturbing. 17% of social science instructors consider themselves marxists. If there were that many Nazis in academia, people would go ballistic... it's a real danger.

Time + Horrible event = comedy

If you do not place the party (Stalin) first in your life, then what kind of bolshevik revolutionary are you? Probably a rightist wrecker, or, Lenin forgive me for uttering this name, a Trotzkyist.

the most interesting thing as a person who just wants to learn history is that soviet history & chinese history post-communist is marred by disagreement after disagreement, and the disagreement is marked by what ideological background you exist within. realistically though, people are eventually going to have to stop quoting solzhenitsyn because near his death he started blaming the jews for the gulags.

i'm glad people parroting JP qualifies for a post nowadays.

Indeed, under real communism people like Solzhenitsyn would've got the firing squad they deserved.

Not an argument

>Marxists.org
>Wants to discredit Solzhenitsyn
>Is unironically pro-Soviet

COLOUR ME SURPRISED!

The USSR has its origins in the Munster Rebellion and Cain and Abel.

>marxism
>in lime with the activities of the ussr

>both Lenin and Trotsky were high-ranking freemasons, obeying the International Masonic Council

That's a pile of horse shit. First off all they were atheists, you can't be a Freemason unless you believe in god. Secondary freemasonry was banned in Tsarist Russia and continued being banned in USSR.

Ivan Denisovich is my favorite novel because it's so funny and comfy.
Will I like Solzhenitsyn's other works?

>It's not Marxist because they changed a few things
Btw Hitler was a Marxist. Right down to the extermination of the Hungarians, which he instead killed Jews and Gypsies.
Stalin decided it was better to kill the Ukrainians. I wonder who Venezuela is going to genocide? Hmm.

>btw Hitler was a Marxist

You don't understand the russian mindset.

>Are you really going to blame the Soviets for being invaded by a dozen different armies? Are you going to blame them for Hitler's attack?
For teaming up with Hitler in 1939 to invade Poland, hell yes I am going to blame them.

People don't actually believe this do they? This is the Stalinist equivalent of the Holocoaster.

Reminder that the USSR was destroyed by one random supermarket in Iowa

contributing one post toward bump limit

imagine spending every second of your entire life flooding the literature board of an anime forum with boring youtube threads that barely even get any replies

>yeltsin fell for the zogchow meme

>Stalin only killed 150 bazillion people, its not even a big deal.
>I'm a materialist; there is no inherent value in human life, therefore Stalin's crimes are morally justified.
>The holocaust happened, but the millions who perished under Stalin are made-up wester propaganda. In reality only about 150 traitors were killed, not tens of millions *shows stats that come from Soviet sources*

In over eighty hours, his thread has received slightly more than eighty posts. Likely, the other thing that will end this charade is the bump limit, 310. This man will spend 230 more hours of his life preserving this thread, and this post will almost certainly be the final response he receives for his trouble.

>the holomodor was caused by bad weather

Should I read the entire The Gulag Archipelago or just the abridged version?

>Seeing cool pictures of Lenin and Stalin, and reverse-engineering favourable opinions of them and communism.
>Engaging in sophistry to defend a ridiculous ideology and unattainable political system.

bad weather and laziness

Why would you ever read an abridged version of anything?

Yup, you simply do not. Check some Stalin WW2 stories. Guy was bonkers, but had great taste of humour.

>17% of social science instructors consider themselves marxists
you honestly think that is threatening?

Isn't this the guy who claimed that 100 million people died in the gulags and that Vietnam was keeping millions of American POWs in slave labor camps? All of that alongside of the whole "communism was a Jewish plot to enslave the world" thing makes me think Solzhenitsyn may not be a 100% credible witness.

Cloud Castle Lake by Nabokov is a good short story of the kind.
Master and Margarita by Bulgakov is another fiction portrayal but obviously longer.

Reagan used tell most of these
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_political_jokes
because he figured it was the most effective way to bring down communism, and sent spies to work out what jokes people had been arrested for telling.

Ilf and Petrov are great fun too but more about the criminal side than the victimized necessarily.

The criminal was chosen as a hero who is not required to follow Socialist Realism rules. They managed to mock the hell out of post-revolutionary Soviet institutions and customs that way, and even got to be one of the most read books for all Soviet period with multiple film adaptations.

are you talking about Ilf and Petrov? i'm not just thinking of Bender in their need for the criminal, but also their other criminal characters, which is a different set up to OP's setting. some of the good people of the revolution stories are captured by them, but often as a foil to Bender, whereas the other recs are not so much about the criminal element than the mainstream element that OP is after. I mention it because OP might be wondering what happened to the original building super and not seeking to retrain as one.

>"The Court of the Red Tsar"
>The stuff in the OP pages is NOTHING.

(((Montefiore))) is entertaining, but he tries to pin most of the Soviet Union's insanity on Stalin.

It's disingenuous.

>Stalin
>Lenin
>Trotsky

They were all monsters in their own way.

Stalin probably inadvertently saved the Soviet Union by killing off all the original party members.

Lenny and Trot only wanted freedom from the Tsarist feudal state, and a better life for the average peasant. Can't condemn them for not being afraid to use ruthless methods against the Romanov regime.

>Lenny and Trot only wanted freedom from the Tsarist feudal state, and a better life for the average peasant.

That worked out well.

It's even better because in Russian standing ovations, usually everyone is clapping in unison. So imagine that going on for ten minutes.