smoking ππ£π¦πΎπ with 'iluMore from my crappy history prof:
I don't think I could disagree more with this! IMO the biggest failure of the USSR was forcing a nationalist Russification over its borders, rather than acting as a true Union of multiple Republics
Great-Russian chauvinism replacing korenizatsiia under Stalin was probably the biggest mistake the Soviets made in the long run
Hegelian Princess@jake2 like it shouldn't even be a controversial position if you don't have an axe to grind about the USSR! it's concretely what made the country collapse
@julieofthespirits I haven't read nearly enough historical analyses of the USSR as I would like (it can be difficult to find sources that aren't either ardently anti-communist or too loyal to the USSR's memory to criticize it properly), but I would be very happy to find out that my position is uncontroversial among serious historians! Glad you agree also
@jake2 I mean just like...the declarations of independence of the USSR's different constituent republics being what concretely led to its dissolution in the most immediate sense. The extent to which Stalin backtracking on Lenin's nationality policies was responsible for Georgian, Ukrainian, Baltic, etc. nationalisms gaining strength I suppose is more debatable but I would say the case here is also still pretty "strong"
@jake2 (On my list of things to read but Dzyuba's Internationalism or Russification? seems to be a major historical document here, if you're looking for sources)
@julieofthespirits oh, looks very interesting! I'll have to check it out.
@jake2 yeah! I haven't read the book myself so I don't know if I'll agree with its arguments or not, but at least it's an important document within these debates, apparently written in response to the debates over Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, which rips
@julieofthespirits yeah at the very least it's notable that contemporary thinkers were noticing the same thing
@jake2 and even if you don't agree with what they say, reading sources from within the USSR is always 100% better than reading sources from outside the USSR, which never seem to move past "is communism good/bad"
@julieofthespirits oh for sure. Unfortunate we don't have that option when looking for histories written after the fall, lol
@jake2 whenever I dip into soviet dissident lit, it's always striking just how much it's less "do we want capitalism/communism" that's the focus and more just specific points of agitation like the treatment of the Crimean Tatars that occupied their energies
@julieofthespirits diversity of thought among different communists? But the Stalinists and the capitalists both told me that actually all soviet citizens followed the party line strictly!
@jake2 turns out that the world's biggest country was also extremely diverse and complex and couldn't be reduced to an undergraduate level ideological question. Who would've guessed!
@julieofthespirits honestly I think this guy just has a really weird and inconsistent definition of what "nationalism" and "multiculturalism" are. Seems to refer to ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism with the same term, and pose them both as oppositional to multiculturalism. Makes this weird contradiction where he's calling the USSR multiculturalist, but at the same time talking about its suppression of minority cultures in favor of a national hegemony, which doesn't sound very multicultural!