Black people fled to USSR from US bigotry and linch mobs

[Ifor Bach]

Your point is ?

That you are talking b$llocks.

[gaius hippingo]

The idea that the USSR was a bastion of reason, tolerance and inclusion is a rather bizarre idea, perhaps the OP might enlighten us to the glorious religious diversity enjoyed during the rule of the khmer rouge during the time of Pol Pot or perhaps the advanced 'conflict resolution' strategies employed by Chairman Mao during his period of mass slaughter AKA the cultural revolution.

I always wonder if the tendency to murder your own is a reflection of the self loathing that seem to afflict hard leftist regimes?

[sandar]

Also East Germany and the Czech Republic. Russia under Stalin, as I said, treated the peripheral Eastern European states as a buffer zone. If you look at the historic maps, you'll see the Tzars did pretty much the same.

Stalinism was a retrograde, parasitic tendency, that did enormous damage. It was not however colonialist in the same sense as Britain, France and the United States, which all in predatory fashion occupied and robbed territory all over the world. An example of the difference would be the Soviet backed democratic regime in Afghanistan, that in its clumsy way was trying to secularise and modernise the state, with education for women as a norm, as compared to Karzai, with his corrupt drug funded colleagues, putting through laws that make it legal to rape and starve your wife.

The economic drive of capitalism is to extend into new territories to extract profit from their labour forces and raw materials. The workers state economy, although mixed in character, did not have that same drive.

I deliberately didnt condemn the soviet invasion of afghanisatn for the deliberate reaosn that I think there might be a debate about the merits of it.
However invading finland for the sole purpose of conquering it, and invading hungary to iaintain in power the puppet regime they wanted are just as bad as any actions of the west.....

and the




thwe socviedt union

[IvoShandor]

Also East Germany and the Czech Republic. Russia under Stalin, as I said, treated the peripheral Eastern European states as a buffer zone. If you look at the historic maps, you'll see the Tzars did pretty much the same..

Indeed.The Imperial policies of the Tsars and the hard-headed realpolitik were reborn under Stalin

Stalinism was a retrograde, parasitic tendency, that did enormous damage. It was not however colonialist in the same sense as Britain, France and the United States, which all in predatory fashion occupied and robbed territory all over the world. An example of the difference would be the Soviet backed democratic regime in Afghanistan, that in its clumsy way was trying to secularise and modernise the state, with education for women as a norm, as compared to Karzai, with his corrupt drug funded colleagues, putting through laws that make it legal to rape and starve your wife.

The economic drive of capitalism is to extend into new territories to extract profit from their labour forces and raw materials. The workers state economy, although mixed in character, did not have that same drive.

True to a degree. The Soviet policies were unlike classical colonialism in important respects,in that they did not have the same relationship betwen the centre and the periphery. They were indeed a "clumsy" or it could be described as a rather crude and schematic attempt at modernisation and equalisation. But the effects sometimes paralelled colonial practices. Elites connected to the central regime were privileged over the rest of the hostile population and in the Soviet Union itself, there was an equation of Russian cultural superiority with Soviet power which involved the transfer of large numbers of Russians to the Republics with the objective of 'sovietizing' (in other colonial regimes it would be called 'civilizing') the natives. This objective of creating a common Soviet culture could not-given the overwhelming influence of Russia in the Union-but have the effect of diluting the other nationalities cultures, and probably eventually of eradicating the weaker (as in the Baltic states) ones.