Russia is not ethnically cleansing Ukraine. It is engaging in a conventional war and being far less inhumane than NATO countries’ engagements in war, particularly relative to civilians. At least, for now.

Ukraine was trying to de-Russify Donbas since 2014, however. Banning language, cultural references, etc.

I can sort of understand being pro-Ukraine in this war given you probably don’t know the context from before 2022 and have been thoroughly propagandized by western media portraying these fascists as freedom fighters.

But calling this war a genocide? I genuinely don’t understand how anyone could come to that conclusion while we’re watching an actual genocide unfold in Palestine. Russia could have immediately and relentlessly terror bombed Ukrainian civilians and civilian infrastructure back into the stone age like the US and NATO typically do. But they didn’t. Clearly they intend for Ukrainians to still exist at the end of this. In order to call this a genocide, you’d need to say essentially every war ever fought was also a genocide.

There is no racial prejudice or settler designs in Russia’s motivation here. They’ve made themselves very clear since the fall of the Soviet Union that Ukraine joining NATO is their red line. But even after the US orchestrated the 2014 Maidan coup to install a fascist, rabidly anti-Russian government, even after Ukraine violated the Minsk agreements by continuing to ethnically cleanse Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, Russia still attempted diplomacy until there were no other options left when NATO had Ukraine shut down all talk of peace.

You can’t goad someone into a war for literal decades and then start crying when, on their own terms rather than yours, they join the existing civil war on the side of the people you are trying to erase.

As do we; the issue where these beliefs seem to diverge is when looking at ongoing or past conflicts and identifying the instigator. There’s also significant disagreement in other areas where people are dying due to the actions of an oppressive class like lack of housing, healthcare, or nutritious food, not to mention the general living conditions of the poor worldwide while a select few do everything they can to maintain their position at the top

I can’t tell if you’re doing “both sides”, “all lives matter”, or “whataboutism”. Other people care about things outside of meaningless platitudes.

Citation needed for both.

I think our friend will be perfectly capable of providing their own citations, but since I happen to have some familiarity with this topic: Here’s an article discussing the data on nostalgia for the USSR and here’s a study that shows the spike in mortality caused by capitalist restoration.

Citation needed for both.

If you have any follow-up questions for GarbageShoot’s links I would be happy to discuss them + add more. You may be interested to review the shock therapy doctrine as applied to the former USSR during capitalist restoration. People usually talk about it as being directed at Russia, but Ukraine also bore the brunt and had its social safety net dismantled, its industries sold to foreign interests for pennies, etc. It suffered just as much as Russia from this process and this treatment is a big part of the reason that those who were adults before and after, say, adults in the 1970s, believe times were better before. Ukraine has never fully recovered.

Do you have any idea what enforced collectivization was like? Everybody owned nothing, nobody felt the sense of ownership about anything.

This is nonsense. Everyone had personal property. People worked jobs, participated in clubs, did sports, etc.

Party officials were the folks with power, not the “common laborer”.

The two were confluent. The party ran the state and having influence over the state meant joining the party and working through it. They were not divorced, separate things.

If one was educated and energetic, able to build a better life for themselves, that person would be labeled “kulak”, property was taken away, and the person imprisoned or banished.

1. Bullshit.

2. “Able to build a better life” is not very concrete. Perhaps you could share what your source is and examples of what this means.

Happened to my great-great-grandfather.

If you were a child in the 80s (the only way you would have grown up just before capitalist restoration) then this would make your great grandfather someone born around 60-90 years prior, i.e. 1890-1920. Anti-Kulak sentiments were only made relevant in the late 1920s/early 1930s and meant basically nothing after 1960.

Assuming any of this is true, it sounds like you may be describing actual Kulak actions re: private landlordism (which would explain using euphemisms rather than saying what actually happened). Please elaborate on what your great granddather did, particularly if it was during a famine.

I know 2 elderly ladies who were children when their parents got deported to Siberia. Not sure why, back then officials didn’t need much of a reason. The older one cared for their homestead while also trying to go to school. The younger one mostly remembers how much she cried, nothing much else.

I don’t understand how this is a response to millions getting killed by capitalist restoration.

I don’t know the best way to arrange economy. It feels like capitalism isn’t one. But Soviet Union was not something I’d set as an example. Soviet Union was “OK” at best, “nightmare” at worst.

The Soviet Union developed from a semi-feudal regional monarchy to an industrialized global superpower in about 20-30 years, raising millions from serfdom, ending famine, and dramatically increasing quality of life. It did this without the Imperialism used by Western Europe and the US, without slavery. This experience is not what happens to those excluded from the imperial pie, or often, even those who are in imperialist countries but are of the (larger) lower classes. Were it not for the Soviet Union your ancestors would likely have starved, died of treatable disease, or died young. See Sub-Saharan Africa. See how it is intentionally prevented from development and how kt s economies are structured around material exports for which the people never see the profits. They don’t get the healthcare. They don’t get the industry. They don’t get the housing.

You do not have a choice to simply be a capitalist country enjoying the fruits of being on top (achieved at the dear coat to others). That is not how the system works. Your option is to overthrow that system or be dictated to by it and more likely than not when dictated to you will not only be voiceless, you will be dispossed, just like Ukraine was in the 90s, just how most of the world that has not directly confronted capitalism has suffered. Compare the stories and state of India to those of the USSR and China. Ukraine got the India treatment and has now been used as a pawn to fight another capitalist power in Russia.

To be clear I am not saying all of this just to get the point across that capitalism is bad or simply worse than the Soviet System (which I am saying was a fantastic achievement, for all its faults). My real point is that it has never been in the cards for Ukraine to be both capitalist and well-to-do. The prospect for prosperity from the 1900s to the foreseeable future came and went with the USSR. Now, the real, actual situation is a capitalist autocracy pretending to be liberal democracy laden with huge foreign debts due to the capitalist powers using Ukraine as a pawn to poke Russia. This will mean very, very bad things for the common Ukrainians not forced into disability or death through conscription. If Russia doesn’t end up bombing away electricity and clean water and food, the incoming capitalist disposession to “pay the debts” will do something horribly similar, only rather than the infrastructure being gone, it will simply be so expensive compared to the work a person is lucky enough to find that most things a person would want to do will be unachievable. If you spend all your money on electricity and food and renting an apartment you will have none for children or a health emergency. The current trajectory will have Ukraine will experience a continued diaspora, one that actually accelerates, as it becomes all but impossible to have a desirable life without leaving. Excluded from the EU due to poverty, Ukrainians may also find immigration difficult in many places as the rest of Europe experiences a contraction due to the US siphoning off its industries bit by bit via the imposed energy crisis.

I should say that there is room for experimentation in socialist state projects, in how to organize and defend revolutions, but the revolution and control of the state are both absolutely essential to leave the current global political economic system. The USSR was the first project to do so and look at what they accomplished being virtually alone outside of the global anti-colonial movements they supported.