Financial support for this research was provided by a number of foundations and organizations, including the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER), the Archives and Library of the Hoover Institution for War and Peace at Stanford University, the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Open Society Archive (Budapest). His first book was Inventing a Soviet Countryside: State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia, 1917-1929 (2004).
There’s a concerted effort within western academia to keep demonizing socialism, and funding is one of the ways the state keeps that going. I provided more than plenty sources given an alternative view. None of this is about me trying to “out-socialist” you, nor virtue signal nor purity test. It’s about trying to come to a consistent understanding grounded in reality, from a proletarian point of view, rather than accepting liberal framing of socialism.
Seem like he’s a typical academic. I get it…you prefer to muddy the waters and shoot the messenger then engage with the content. Alternate view to…something you didn’t read? I assure you it doesn’t “demonize socialism”…it just chronicles events according to disclosure/a “data dump” of declassified files. It’s not ideological…it’s for eggheads who don’t want to read thousands of documents. When I read it it just helped me understand the playing field better.
The problems with the USSR weren’t with socialism, you’re missing my message. They were with capitalists corrupting it from within. There’s certainly an argument to be made that too much control was allocated to regional bureaucrats - when targeted positive/idealistic authoritarianism was more appropriate while socialism was in its infancy. But this in the context of just Russia, because I don’t agree with the expansion that created the USSR: my opinion is it created an unmanageably large state with too many “distracting” regional issues that were ripe for capitalists to exploit. Those faithful to the cause were simply stretched too thin and they couldn’t deliver a meaningful improvement to enough people, largely because the guilty regional bureaucrats weren’t loyal to the cause and they created systematic exploitation of the people they were tasked to help. Obviously I’m being unrealistic…just trying to get closer to 20/20 hindsight.
You haven’t read the sources I linked either. We have a western academic, state funded, and based on your arguments here there’s what you believe evidence that causes you to describe the USSR not as socialism, but a kleptocracy. This is why I’m heavily skeptical, because I have read on the structure of the USSR, I know how it functioned, and it was unquestionably socialist. I’m not saying no corruption ever existed, I’m saying that corruption was nowhere near relevant enough to be the base mode of production, because that’s an absurd statement to begin with.
The advent of socialism in Russia democratized the economy, doubled life expectancy, dramatically reduced poverty, provided free, high quality healthcare and education, had assured jobs and free or low cost housing, over tripled literacy rates, and turned a feudal backwater into a spacefaring nation in just a few short decades. Wealth disparity, which you seem to place an over-emphasis on, was dramatically lowered as compared to the Tsarist era and the capitalist era. The economy was based on collectivized production and distribution, and fulfilling the needs of everyone.
When you have all of that undeniably true, then statements like “Russia wasn’t socialist, it was a kleptocracy” become silly. Of course there was some degree of corruption, every country has some level of corruption. The USSR wasn’t a perfect utopia, as the first socialist state there were missteps and struggles. However, it was absolutely socialist, and because of that it delivered incredible results for the working classes.
Not just any public university employee:
There’s a concerted effort within western academia to keep demonizing socialism, and funding is one of the ways the state keeps that going. I provided more than plenty sources given an alternative view. None of this is about me trying to “out-socialist” you, nor virtue signal nor purity test. It’s about trying to come to a consistent understanding grounded in reality, from a proletarian point of view, rather than accepting liberal framing of socialism.
Seem like he’s a typical academic. I get it…you prefer to muddy the waters and shoot the messenger then engage with the content. Alternate view to…something you didn’t read? I assure you it doesn’t “demonize socialism”…it just chronicles events according to disclosure/a “data dump” of declassified files. It’s not ideological…it’s for eggheads who don’t want to read thousands of documents. When I read it it just helped me understand the playing field better.
The problems with the USSR weren’t with socialism, you’re missing my message. They were with capitalists corrupting it from within. There’s certainly an argument to be made that too much control was allocated to regional bureaucrats - when targeted positive/idealistic authoritarianism was more appropriate while socialism was in its infancy. But this in the context of just Russia, because I don’t agree with the expansion that created the USSR: my opinion is it created an unmanageably large state with too many “distracting” regional issues that were ripe for capitalists to exploit. Those faithful to the cause were simply stretched too thin and they couldn’t deliver a meaningful improvement to enough people, largely because the guilty regional bureaucrats weren’t loyal to the cause and they created systematic exploitation of the people they were tasked to help. Obviously I’m being unrealistic…just trying to get closer to 20/20 hindsight.
You haven’t read the sources I linked either. We have a western academic, state funded, and based on your arguments here there’s what you believe evidence that causes you to describe the USSR not as socialism, but a kleptocracy. This is why I’m heavily skeptical, because I have read on the structure of the USSR, I know how it functioned, and it was unquestionably socialist. I’m not saying no corruption ever existed, I’m saying that corruption was nowhere near relevant enough to be the base mode of production, because that’s an absurd statement to begin with.
The advent of socialism in Russia democratized the economy, doubled life expectancy, dramatically reduced poverty, provided free, high quality healthcare and education, had assured jobs and free or low cost housing, over tripled literacy rates, and turned a feudal backwater into a spacefaring nation in just a few short decades. Wealth disparity, which you seem to place an over-emphasis on, was dramatically lowered as compared to the Tsarist era and the capitalist era. The economy was based on collectivized production and distribution, and fulfilling the needs of everyone.
When you have all of that undeniably true, then statements like “Russia wasn’t socialist, it was a kleptocracy” become silly. Of course there was some degree of corruption, every country has some level of corruption. The USSR wasn’t a perfect utopia, as the first socialist state there were missteps and struggles. However, it was absolutely socialist, and because of that it delivered incredible results for the working classes.