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“Every single person I have I [sic] asked in Central Asia (and Eastern Europe) over the past decade and a half has said life was better under the Soviets -- 100 percent,” O’Dell tweeted on Tuesday."
I guess one would have to go to Romania or such to find out....I can't say I know....and, remember, they are talking Soviets....so what are they saying?
Are they saying that life under the Soviets was better than life under "just some Putin influence" as is not the case in some of those places???
One would need a lot more information to suss out such a tweet.
It is fact that Putin and MANY Russians look to the Soviet Era as what they want to see reborn....and Stalin is becoming popular again. So Putin and the majority of Russians that support him are definitely not big into the Western Enlightenment or our style of capitalism.
I use to live in Central Asia, a lot of my family does, I can assure you hardly anyone thinks life was better under the Soviets.
A lot of people have a nostalgia about the Brezhnev and early Gorbachev era, because that is also considered the "golden age" of the USSR, and a lot of people alive now were either kids or young adults then.
The USSR collapse greatly impacted standards of living, and it varies greatly for people now. A person can say yes, one issue was better under the Soviets, while another issue is not. Crime for example, it was pretty damn safe relatively to now, but any sort of luxuries were laughably ridiculous to get compared to now days.
Gorbachev was a good man trying to reform his country. No doubt life was better under him than it is under Putin. . However when we talk about the Soviets we are largely talking about the leaders previous to him. Right up until Gorbachev took power in the mid 80s the Soviet leaders were brutal hard liners who imprisoned their opponents, restricted basic freedoms and enforced an economic system that only provided a near subsistence existence for most soviet citizens. Of course then there was the whole cloud of nuclear destruction hanging over us. I grew up during the Cold War, the idea of nukes falling out of the sky was ever present. The movie Red Dawn was not just entertainment, people really feared that kind of thing would happen, really the plot of that movie was tame compared to what a full scale war with the Soviets would have looked like.
Those who think the Soviets were ok are not old enough to remember AND they have not read enough history books. President Reagan was right when he called the Soviet Union an evil empire.
The last Soviet hardliners was Stalin, about every reference to Soviet brutalities occurred under Stalin and before. Khrushchev started the destalinization of the USSR, Brezhnev came into power and under him, it was considered the golden age of the USSR, and you can see this in the culture and media at the time. Gorbachev continued the trend.
No doubt.....but you had some idea that (most) everyone was suffering with you and you thought that once things fleshed out they might be better, etc. etc.
Free education if you qualified - at the highest levels (doctors, scientists)......
Now the people in the villages see the Benz and Rolls Royces and the private jets and read all the same stuff we do about the Oligarchs.
One would have to be in both shoes to wonder which is perceived in which way.
Remember, they lost about 1/2 of their population....so that's a shock to the soul...thinking you have an Empire that you sacrificed 20-30 Million citizens for and then it goes away.
People are not just based around money. Today the world IS smaller and most people know what is going on.
If we take the average person, would they be happier if they were lower-middle class and everyone else was also (say, like S. Philly where my family was).....or, would they prefer to be solid middle class and see vast numbers of others in private jets and mansions, knowing that those people stole it because of who they know?
Hard to answer - never the less, the OP shows bias and a lack of understanding of history, culture and current events. The Prof - idiot for even using Twitter. Complex ideas cannot be communicated that way.
Good post. When people say a time was "better," they're generally not using some objective metric like GDP. They're saying they were happier or more fulfilled, or in the case of young people, that they would have been happier or more fulfilled.
The last Soviet hardliners was Stalin, about every reference to Soviet brutalities occurred under Stalin and before. Khrushchev started the destalinization of the USSR, Brezhnev came into power and under him, it was considered the golden age of the USSR, and you can see this in the culture and media at the time. Gorbachev continued the trend.
It is true that no Soviet leader compares to Stalin when it comes to brutal behavior, I will give you that. That does not mean the others were not brutal simply because they were not as bad.
Khrushchev is responsible for threatening us with the Cuban missile crisis. Brezhnev....was he still in power when the Soviets butchered all those people on that airliner? He certainly was in power in 1968 when he crushed the Prague Spring. He also helped squash the solidarity movement in Poland. Any of those incidents could have escalated to war and they certainly had a tinge of brutality to them. I remember video of Soviet citizens waiting in lines for food and basic goods when I was young. I remember all the defectors who hated it so bad they escaped it. The Soviet Union was a bad place to be, I cannot believe people are white washing how bad it was. Again most of them are not old enough to remember.
It is true that no Soviet leader compares to Stalin when it comes to brutal behavior, I will give you that. That does not mean the others were not brutal simply because they were not as bad.
Khrushchev is responsible for threatening us with the Cuban missile crisis. Brezhnev....was he still in power when the Soviets butchered all those people on that airliner? He certainly was in power in 1968 when he crushed the Prague Spring. He also helped squash the solidarity movement in Poland. Any of those incidents could have escalated to war and they certainly had a tinge of brutality to them. I remember video of Soviet citizens waiting in lines for food and basic goods when I was young. I remember all the defectors who hated it so bad they escaped it. The Soviet Union was a bad place to be, I cannot believe people are white washing how bad it was. Again most of them are not old enough to remember.
The Cuban Missile Crisis is an incident created by the US, not the Soviets. Stationing missiles on a sovereign territory is the right of such country, just as the US stationed missiles in Turkey (which the crisis was a response) JFK was just butt hurt after the Bay of Pigs.
What "butchering of people on an airliner" are you talking about?
No one is white washing anything, the incidents of course were not nice, and did cross into brutality, but that hardly defines living in Soviet society, just as the brutality the US inflicted in its history hardly reflects living in the US. As for people escaping, yea, we got people risking their lives to get out of Mexico, India, etc, but I would not describe those places as a brutal society.
Russia went straight from an all-powerful king who literally had full control of all Russian lives to communism, the most radical socialism of all. They had absolutely no experience with any kind of government but total control from the top, so that's what the Soviet became.
Democracy in Russia didn't last a full year under the Soviets before it became a dictatorship. But for most Russians, a dictator that came from the common people was still better than one who got his powers from straight from God Almighty.
Democracy in Russia didn't last a full year under the Soviets before it became a dictatorship. But for most Russians, a dictator that came from the common people was still better than one who got his powers from straight from God Almighty.
OK
Under Lenin and Stalin between 60M-150M "common people" were slaughtered. I'm positive those people much preferred the Czars.
I've just been re-reading Death of a Nation by Dinesh D'Souza. He says that many ex-slaves after the Civil War believed that life had been better for them before the demise of slavery. Freedom for some was a rude-awakening.
D'Souza gives several quotes from interviews of ex-slaves in the 19th century that confirm this.
More tuition dollars hard at work and indoctrination of the youths even harder at work. This time at Yale. About $53K annually to attend this higher "education" institution.
Emily Jane O’Dell is a Yale Law School professor and her specialty area is in Islamic law and civilization. O'Dell said on Twitter that, "Life was better under the Soviets.”
O'Dell is also very unsurprisingly highly critical of white males. O’Dell has made claims that white men lack “humanity,” “culture,” “insight,” “wisdom,” “strength,” and “love.” O'Dell even suggested that white men are privileged and selfish and “can’t jump or dance.” Details are in the article linked below:
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