[Transcript]
There’s plenty you can criticise about the Soviet Union, but it’s patently false to claim it was worse than the Tsarist era that preceeded it.
Personally, I don’t like the tsarist era either for the Jewish pogroms and huge wealth inequality, but there were steps to industrialise and reform (albeit too little too late). However, to then claim the Soviet Union was an improvement when it arbitrarily imprisoned kulaks, and to a certain point just three people into prison and accused them of being kulaks, committed the mass genocide of Ukrainians in the Holodomor and overthrew a democratic government and replaced it with a one-party dictatorship that didn’t even tolerate difference of opinion within itself just rubs off wrong on me. Thoughts?
[Transcript]
I think the Russians were hungry under the Tsar, and very hungry under the Soviets.
[Transcript]
It was worse than the tsars
[Transcript for my favorite reply]
Did the Tsar have gulags?
Did the Tsar have a surveillance state?
Did the Tsar enforce a man-made famine that killed hundreds of thousands of people?
(Spotted here.)
Tbh I heard talks from quite bourgeois history professors regarding the October Revolution and the first step was always to highlight how bad tsarist Russia was. They shitted on the Soviet Union and the October Revolution a lot, but I never heard something like that tsarist Russia was somehow better than the soviet union regarding the quality of life for the population.