Re:Things I Learned in the Gulag
by pnathan on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @02:59PM
(#17306003)
> I don't know that much about the Soviet Union.
> I have been following some leftist stuff and saw this article recently by Trotsky.
so Trotsky has a better reputation than most leadership from the early USSR; he didn't last long in power.
It's worth studying the USSR as an example of how a revolution can simultaneously fail and succeed; how leftists fail, sort of, how ordinary people survive.
A lot of blinders were on people in the early years of the USSR - much of what was said positive was wrong; much of what was said negative later on wasn't really too right either. Again, blinders. What's incontrovertible is that the violence was endemic to the system for decades; Stalin's time was really bad. How that affected people... that's debated.
I've read some about the USSR and Russian history; there's libraries written on it by now. Recent scholarship seems to be better IMO; less emotionally charged and tainted by Cold War attitudes.
I thought these authors' work was well done - it captures a lot of the pre-1937 mode of the USSR in a relatively humorous way.
> I have been following some leftist stuff and saw this article recently by Trotsky.
so Trotsky has a better reputation than most leadership from the early USSR; he didn't last long in power.
It's worth studying the USSR as an example of how a revolution can simultaneously fail and succeed; how leftists fail, sort of, how ordinary people survive.
A lot of blinders were on people in the early years of the USSR - much of what was said positive was wrong; much of what was said negative later on wasn't really too right either. Again, blinders. What's incontrovertible is that the violence was endemic to the system for decades; Stalin's time was really bad. How that affected people... that's debated.
I've read some about the USSR and Russian history; there's libraries written on it by now. Recent scholarship seems to be better IMO; less emotionally charged and tainted by Cold War attitudes.
I thought these authors' work was well done - it captures a lot of the pre-1937 mode of the USSR in a relatively humorous way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilf_and_Petrov