I don’t think a case can be sustained that the gulags, however terrible they may have been – and they certainly were terrible, were designed or operated to kill millions of people in anything like the way Nazi extermination camps operated. The gualags had more in common with the penal system that operated in parts of America at the same time. It’s a matter of choice whether one condemns both systems, as I would, as brutal and unconscionable by today’s standards or whether one wants to view the gulags as being not that bad after all because if America was doing much the same as the USSR in the gulags then it had to be alright.
Mate, it doesn’t matter what I want to discuss. I’ll do that in my posts. Everyone can have a go at what they want to discuss in their posts.
I’ve just thrown the first post out there to stimulate discussion. It hasn’t gone too real bad so far. People can respond to it, and subsequent, posts as they wish.
What I’m interested in here is challenging Western perceptions about the USSR and seeing if there’s any evidentiary basis for them.
Have a look at my last post and you should get an idea of how I’m trying to challenge those perceptions.
Rising Sun* I
Rex Australis 
Thanks, mate.
That’s exactly what I’m on about.
Rising Sun,
These are some very sensible post you wrote there! You come along nicely. A little push and we can accept you in to the lines of out comrads working for our couse in the capitalist wasp nests! 
Egorka, your comedy attempts get better all the time.:mrgreen: Keep it up cobber.
Thanks for the posting on the Gulag system Rising Sun. Excellent stuff. As an off shoot have you read “His Natural Life” It backs up a lot of what you’re talking about.
Regards digger.
Marcus Clarke?
A long, long time ago.
I haven’t made a study of it, but I suspect that penal systems generally didn’t change much between most Western countries in a given era, except in questions of degree and severity.
Mate, I’ll try to break this to you as gently as I can , but the Comintern sort of disappeared a while back and the biggest capitalist wasps’ nests are now run by the oligarchs in the FSR and China, where laissez faire capitalism is powering both economies along free of the sort of worker protection rubbish that the capitalist West has, like occupational health and safety. Which is why the West is busily exporting as many jobs as it can back to those countries, and especially China.
I last read it in high school, but recently picked up a copy in a Red Cross store for 50 cents. When I get the chance I intend to fully study it.
Yes I agree, these penal systems have a familiarity about them. And perhaps in some aspects the British system of the time was the most brutal of all.
Regards digger.
Off topic, but I have the proud heritage of an early Irish ancestor in Australia, when the Irish convicts were being transported to Australia in droves.
Unfortunately my ancestor was a sergeant in the British army in the penal colony in Tasmania. Although the family folklore is that he ended up doing a spell himself due to some injudicious comments to British officers about a sensitive matter relating to the Pope.
Oh my! Do you suppose the pot is calling the kettle black? We can now announce that the Soviets/Russians, on the advice of Sneaksie, have never distorted history or misunderstood the west. This is the Potemkin Village argument in all its glory!
It’s an odd factoid of history that many revolutions aren’t really revolutions at all - they are the replacement of one group of oppressors by another. This definitely happened in the Soviet Union. It happened in France in a particularly virulent form after its revolution, and it happened again when Napoleon showed up and crowned himself emperor - some revolution! I suppose we could call Hitler a German revolution, when the scum of its society took control and put on pretty uniforms while slaughtering their opponents in a back room. Although Lenin was no saint himself, I doubt that he would have approved of what Stalin after him. Certainly, Trotsky developed a splitting headache as a result.
I leave out the American Revolution from this picture because instead of developing a class of oppressors, it was led by people who were unusually aware of how a new government should be run and the human weaknesses that needed to be dealt with in an institutional manner.
Yes, you might think I am all starry-eyed about this, but I am not. Here we have George Washington being offered, surreptitiously, the kingship of America flatly turning it down. We have Thomas Jefferson in all his imperfections writing the finest declaration of independence anyone has ever penned before or since. Yes, it would be a fair statement to say that relatively wealthy planters and farmers constituted a sort of nobility that led the country in its original stages, but that was certainly not true of all the leaders who emerged.
The Russian Revolution was not what I would call a raving success. If it had been, it would be still be in power instead of relegated to the rubbish heap of history as yet another failed experiment. Plus ca change, plus les choses restent les memes.
It is not “Potemkin Village argument” at all! I lhave been living in Europe for the last 9 years and I can only confirm this statement. You hear either bad or nothing of USSR/Russia. There are really tiny seldomg bits of neutral or positive information.
The thing is that USSR lost the information war against the USA and Europe. But ironicaly enough (actually it is not aronic but rather natural) we were tought the hard way. But you as winners in this phsycologigal war were not forced to think about these issues. So as the result the wast majority of the USA/Europe public still live in the Cold War cultural clishes.
Why I find what you say sounds true…seems to me that USSR lost because they failed to promote their ideas to the west on the benefits of their lifestlye. Would appear that the Soviet government didnt take world opinion very seriously. Even today it seems that info that comes out of Russia is not much or bad.
On the other hand we Americans seem to skip around the world making friends or annoying the shit out of ppl. Less friends lately. :roll: Just about everywhere ive been in Europe at least … ppl have opinions about the US. Just like assholes … if you get the expression. Now Ive meet many Russians/Former Soviets in the last couple of years. Very nice ppl. Not much different then their former enemies the Americans (General Sense). Anyhow to make a long story short…
Of all the major countries in the world, Russia is the country I know the least about. And its not due to lack of interest. So I ask you: Whats the problem?
No Hitler was not a revolution. He was elected in democratic elections and enjoyed VERY broad support in the German publi c right until the coffins started to come in. This is an other odd factoid of history. Just like the fact that the people that make revolution normally are consumed by it’s own creation.
It is difficult to say for certain about what Lenin whould do, but he was a ruthless in acheving his goal like any revolution leader. And Trotsky was just like Lenin.
Actually chances are very high that the West had it better with Stalin than with Lenin. The reason for this saying is that Lenin was in reality for world revolution, wheras Stalin was for building communism in one specific state. These are 2 differences between them. So Lenin might have been even worse than Stalin.
I leave out the American Revolution from this picture because instead of developing a class of oppressors, it was led by people who were unusually aware of how a new government should be run and the human weaknesses that needed to be dealt with in an institutional manner.
Well the lack of oppession in USA since it’s creation is not so obvious at all. I agree it is of different nature, but existent nontheless.
And please do not mistake oppression with a political system other than modern democracy. A monarchy does not have to be oppressive by definition. Just like some democraticaly elected leaders can be pain in the ass for million of other people.
Yes, you might think I am all starry-eyed about this, but I am not. Here we have George Washington being offered, surreptitiously, the kingship of America flatly turning it down. We have Thomas Jefferson in all his imperfections writing the finest declaration of independence anyone has ever penned before or since. Yes, it would be a fair statement to say that relatively wealthy planters and farmers constituted a sort of nobility that led the country in its original stages, but that was certainly not true of all the leaders who emerged.
Yes, American history has many exhiting and great moments. I was actually very facinated by the scale of the rapid colonisation of the West when I read about it. It was very dramatic and interesting.
The Russian Revolution was not what I would call a raving success. If it had been, it would be still be in power instead of relegated to the rubbish heap of history as yet another failed experiment. Plus ca change, plus les choses restent les memes.
In my opinion the revolutions as such are not ment to be successful as their nature is to brake the old system without keeping the good from the old days. This blindness towards the heritage of the previous epoch is what makes revolutions fail, IMHO. Plus they always based on boundless violent measures which lead to the showball of cruelty and destruction.
My bold.
That’s the biggest problem with them
The violent expression of resentment towards the oppressor generally turns into one or another form of civil war and or state sanctioned terror when the organs of the previous government have been overthrown. Might becomes right. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. For example: Revolutionary France. Revolutionary Russia. Revolutionary Iran.
I think it’s a mistake to regard what was properly called the American War of Independence from Britain as a revolution, although Americans like to think of it as one.
Wars of national liberation don’t necessarily involve the overthrow of everything that went before, leaving a vacuum for the terrors in a revolution. Rather, if successful and if an expression of the dominant will of the people, they allow the liberated nation to continue with whatever it elects to keep from the past and to change whatever it wants to change for the future. Unlike true national revolutions, there is no need to keep rooting out the remnants of the old regime whenever they seem to pop up in some individual or collective form, because the old regime has been defeated and ejected from the colonial nation as a necessary part of the liberation process.
That doesn’t mean that vicious and protracted civil wars and terrors won’t follow wars of national liberation as various elements jockey for control, but I’m struggling to think of any in developed nations to rival those following the French and Russian revolutions.
Yes, the French and Russian ones were the biggest during the last 200 years. France actually had more than one!
But the European history is full of civil wars. For example in Germany during the reformation was VERY bloody.
I guess the problem is twofold.
One is that general public thinks that they actually know about Russia/USSR. The reason for it is that western people were not forced to criticaly assess their view because they won the Cold war. So there was no need to criticaly approach the common picture.
Secondly Russians are maybe not as much interested and able of waging this “information war”. Or call it a “spin”. For ecxample China is even more extrim example, IMHO, that how much little a country would think of it’s external image. Well, they do until it hurts they interests.
I might add that one of the reasons I dont know alot about Russia is because it wasnt untill later in life that I found out the majority of things I learned as a kid were bullshit. So kinda starting all over again.
Truthfully, Egorka, the US has been doing a horrible job on its own lately. I think this is mostly fueled by having a President and an administration that has been so completely arrogant and thoughtless, not to mention shameless, in promoted its own narrow view of the world that ther US went from being an admired country under Bill Clinton, to being one of the mkost hated on the planet under George Bush. I can only hope that we will do better once we throw these scoundrels out of office and replace them with reasonable people! This would be hard for you to say, but as an American, frankly, I am only too glad to say it here.
I’ll take issue with that a little bit Rising Sun. The first of the modern movements to replace monarchies with a democracy, albeit a republican (little “r”) surely has to figure among the fundamental sea changes to sweep the world. Considering it involved the removal of the predominant world power at the time - the British Empire - it would seem to be a rather large event. It is sobering to reflect, however, that without French assistance, this probably would not have succeeded, or at least would have taken far longer to accomplish. There were many interests in France at the time that were greatly troubled by the overthrow of a monarchy, even an enemy one, but nevertheless, it happened. And, Rising Sun, lest we forget, the elimination of the United States as a place to harbor prisoners of the British, contributed to the settlement of Australia.
Revolutions do not necessarily need to be followed by or accompanied by tyrranies or bloody aftermaths to be called revolutions.