this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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I think you should use your experiences in Azerbaijan as a push to confront some of your biases, and re-examine your understanding of Socialism in the Soviet Union. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't "totalitarian" by any stretch either. The benefits of the Socialist economic structure are pined for precisely because they worked, and did so for the common people. There are improvements that can and have been made in other Socialist countries, but these improvements would not have been possible without the brave Soviet people pioneering Socialism as it exists in the real world.
Not totalitarian you say?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purges_of_the_Communist_Party_of_the_Soviet_Union
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
My experience in Azerbaijan also included tales of when they were children passing curds to starving prisoners through chain fences in Kazakh gulags. The Soviet Union did more harm than good to the leftist movement and is used as the scary example every single time someone begins to think twice about the capitalist system they live under. Socialism is forever tainted by the USSR and severely struggles to remove that image. Fuck the USSR.
Things were different in the periphral nations, than in the center. Those who read your comments with heritage from the peripheral will understand you, and the others will not.