Richard Wolff summarizes the history of the USSR (1917-1975)

[@tigerstyle4505]

As a socialist that doesn't ascribe to the red scare propaganda positions (or the Soviet propaganda positions) and someone who really appreciates the work ya do, it worries me a lot when I see such broad and simplistic (and in some ways incorrect) analysis of situations like this. It paints a picture that I fear may lead many to have a very warped view of what actually took place in Russia, the Bolsheviks, their role in it all, what can/should be done today, etc. While I do find it of the utmost importance that we look at and analyze the "February Revolution", "October Revolution" and USSR, as well as all other revolutions, movements and alternatives, I don't know if it's a great idea to waste much energy or time trying to rehab and apologize for them but feel it's far more effective to take an honest, critical, unbiased look at them (not from the perspective of the US or USSR governments) and see what failures and atrocities can and should be avoided while picking out the successes and innovations that may still apply today. I want to win! But there are so many ways to go about it, we have to be careful in chosing which one. No matter how we look at it everything that's come before has failed, and often cost a lot of people everything in the process. It's past time to find new ways and ideas to go along with the successes and positive aspects of the victories of yesterday. We need a new vision or we're doomed to continue living in the past, losing this war.

[@patrickholt2270]

Agreed. We have to learn from the mistakes to avoid repeating them.

[@MrDXRamirez]

RR conditions shows two factions could agree on a common aim for a transformation of society.

[@DavidSanchez-vx4bv]

How ver, you HAVE to take into consideration ALL the circumstances that surrounded them. Because some of those mistakes really are due to those specifics circumstances. Perhaps they removed all the individual liberties (as speech freedom, political freedoms) and do it for one reason: too many enemies surrounded them, too many conspirators and too little time to build what was needed to protect them. I don't justify morally what they did, but I do understand the reason behind and if I were in that position, perhaps I would do the same. It's simple say: hey their mistake was the repression, freedom abolition... but why? is it because Stalin was a dark soul and wanted to repress all? Or is it because, at least at the beginning the emergency state didn't allow too many room for those liberties? Anyway, it's important to know deeper all the details of that History, it may be useful in the future, when, sooner or later, Capitalism falls down...

[@MrDXRamirez]

@@DavidSanchez-vx4bv Did not allow for too much room for those liberties is more like it. Great observation David.

[@PoliticalEconomy101]

The Soviet Union collapsed because they took the Marxist false belief about economic evolution as a religion. After the USSR built up the country to be a superpower they should have started creating more consumption goods and housing and raising the standard of living for the average Joe. Instead they though that they were ready for the next stage of economic evolution: communism. In thinking the economy was ready for communism the politburo dismantled the state and the society imploded. Its really dumb and naive for anyone over the age of 30 to believe in the Marxist fantasy of a stateless, classless, moneyless, marketless, borderless, lawlessness society because the state is the glue that holds society together. Communism is not a feasable or realistic goal. The people didnt know what to do or how to govern themselves so capitalism reasserted itself. There is nothing beyond socialism and the state. So lets return again to a type of Soviet Socialism, this time without the blind commitment to a false Marxist communism and rather than central planning, how about centralized democratic coordination?

[@jan_kisan]

by the way, the bolsheviks didn't overthrow the tsar. in 1917 there were two revolutions, the tsar lost power in february, to a bourgeois government. in parallel with this government, soviets were taking more and more power, but they were mostly controlled by the mensheviks and socialist-revolutionaries (not only the left ones). it's only after the summer of 1917 when the bolsheviks and left s.-r. started gaining enough influence to organise the october revolution.

[@planetarynonproletary]

super brief, some facts have been changed to reduce the length of the story (although some of them were worth expanding a little and noting, they are important). For the first easy acquaintance of an unprepared viewer - good

[@Hussain_Eidani]

Thank you, Richard 🌹

[@abqmalenurse]

Damn that was a great 7 minutes!!!

[@maxmeggeneder8935]

No,it wasn't only 4 countries that invaded but 12 to 20,I'm not sure without checking. Poland for example invaded. The Soviets still did not only survive but under Stalin,through the years of the WW2-the great patriotic war to the Soviets,built to become a real threat to all of Capitalism! Socialism in one country meant permanent world revolution to the Bolsheviks back than whose leader was Joseph Stalin for such a long time because he always has the majority of the party behind him and not because he was such a sociopathic autocratic dictator! Anyone still believing this cold war propaganda than even prof.wolff still pushes,go and read the Soviet constitution of the time Einsteins(and yes he was a real socialist too,not a berniecrat or socdem)!

[@Luvenia48]

"The constitution repealed restrictions on voting and added universal direct suffrage and the right to work to rights guaranteed by the previous constitution. In addition, the constitution recognized collective social and economic rights including the rights to work, rest and leisure, health protection, care in old age and sickness, housing, education and cultural benefits. The constitution also provided for the direct election of all government bodies and their reorganization into a single, uniform system. It was written by a special commission of 31 members which Stalin chaired. Those who participated included (among others) Andrey Vyshinsky, Andrei Zhdanov, Maxim Litvinov, Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Nikolai Bukharin, and Karl Radek, though the latter two had less active input.[3]"

[@patrickholt2270]

I'm not sure I understand the purpose of this line, as with praising post-1979 China for its prodigious economic growth. The equation of growth with socialism smacks of crass materialism to me, and de facto advocates for those models, neither of which is what we are actually seeking to create. Your own work advocates for a different kind of socialism based on co-operatives and distributed decision-making and ownership (control of the appropriation and distribution of surplus more than merely legal title over means of production). We don't need the USSR to demonstrate the utility under particular circumstances of centralisation and nationalisation: that's been known since the Pharaohs, that if the state/god-king/emperor takes over the economy, then huge investment can be directed in particular directions in a short time, which utility declines over time and only applies to certain kinds of big project type activities. That isn't in itself socialism, or the goal of a socialist society, which is combining equality with prosperity and democracy, the latter as direct as possible. The amount of stuff isn't a moral metric, and replicates the obsessions of capitalism with growth and acquisition. We are facing a different stage of develoment, when scarcity is albut removed from more and more product markets, especially for relatively basic standard of living goods like clothing and furniture, and where profits and poverty are only maintained artificially, by monopolies and austerity policies, and indeed, where we have reached the limits of what we can appropriate from nature without triggering our own extinction. The dash for growth and development of productive capacities is not our struggle.

[@umayr2935]

wadr, The Professor uses the word "they" for Stalin is surprising, and having accepted that civil liberties pushed aside, its quite obvious, a country built like this will eventually tear apart, because by the time it has developed what it has, the amount control taken away from the workers would lead to the very consequences it faced, as the USSR never achieved that "level where it felt that now is the right time to hand back control to the workers"

[@nthperson]

What is also true that most people are totally unaware of is that Leo Tolstoy did all he could to prevent the revolution by bringing about peaceful reform. Tolstoy had come to fully embrace the reform proposals of Henry George. In 1928, Tolstoy's son Ilya wrote about his father's devotion to Henry George's proposed solution to poverty. This article appeared in the U.S. journal Land and Freedom. Here is a link for those who might find this of interest: www.cooperative-individualism.org/tolstoy-ilya_leo-tolstoy-and-henry-george-1928-sep-oct.htm

[@MrDXRamirez]

Conditions in America would have to get worse for a social revolution. Usually, a revolution involves a change in how, why and way, we as a society produce. We may be at that point closer than everyone thinks in 2020!

[@mns8732]

DXR : that's a broad brush.

[@TheDarkIllumination]

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

[@DavidSanchez-vx4bv]

In my personal opinion is very important to understand ALL the USSR History. It was an experiment, based in some theories and forcing some shortcut in the History (as the one that Lenin said moving from Feudalism directly to Socialism without passing through Capitalism, that didn't worked well...) BUT it's the Bolsheviks never considered how the other countries could react... how the other royal families would react (after all, the killed the Czar) . In our current World with Global Capitalism it's fair to say that kind of experiment hardly will happen again... however, if we learn how much different groups from society resist this change, the next (I hope soon) Socialism wave will have more success to be implemented...

[@DanBurgaud]

excellent video. My time was well spent!

[@Idnskwndkk818]

The repression of stalin wasnt against civilians, only politicians who oppoused.

[@eidorianeagle5806]

Okey thats just not true. Dont spread lies.

[@morningstararun6278]

@@eidorianeagle5806 You should say that to the western media.

[@HABACHI617]

5:41 thats a nice way of saying anybody that didnt work fast enough was shot

[@Alfyannn]

Red scare propaganda

[@fruitoftruth1723]

"They weren't against private property, they gave out private property." Sure - they were just against anyone keeping their private property once they had done something useful with it.

[@raymondhartmeijer9300]

Wolff is kinda wrong here. The land was nationalised, so it was not private property in the capitalist sense, but the idea was that farmers would control the land and have a say in the operations. So in a sense they 'gave' land to the peasants and took it from big landowners as promised, but it was the state who ultimatly owned it.

[@jirotomiyama5589]

What we need to remember about the major socialist movements of the twentieth century is that with very few exceptions, the people who became the governing bodies of those movements were brutal and ruthless in the excercise of absolute power once they attained it. The real achievements of those movements were accomplished at a cost in human life and suffering which Richard Wolfe doesn't talk much about.

[@leosammallahti239]

So why did Finland, that also suffered a civil war and in the world war, end up richer than its former colonizer, Russia? Because Finland did not adopt the insanely inefficient soviet economic system.

[@Alfyannn]

Embargo

[@Alfyannn]

Finland wasn't sanctioned.

[@Alfyannn]

Plus it was not invaded by the nazis

[@Alfyannn]

Sanctions are devastating to the economy and frankly what to Soviets achieved even so sanctioned was really great.

[@HABACHI617]

no mention of the gulags huh

[@christiangudmundsson8390]

Dear Professor Wolff, I have greatly enjoyed watching these clips on the USSR as well as those on the CCP, I feel like I've learned a lot, and I was wondering if maybe you might be interested (or maybe it's not exactly in your wheelhouse) to do similar histories of communist Vietnam (from my uninformed outside perspective they seem like a pretty decent example of a socialist society), and especially Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge, to what extent were they communists (they certainly seem to have considered themselves as such), what really happened during their short reign and such. To me (and again this is a layman's perspective) they seem like possibly the worst government in recent history, even rivalling Nazi Germany, and if so, to what extent, if any, is marxism to blame? (Me personally I always take comfort in that it was Vietnam who rid the world of the Khmer Rouge.) Either way thank you for sharing your insights in these clips.

[@Twinruler334]

The US Soldiers, and other US Military personnel, who fought and died in The Second World War did so on behalf of The Soviet Union!

[@caballosinnombre3981]

Easy, trigger...

[@ProleCenter]

I'm done with this guy. At times he sounds like a SocDem, other times a Trotskyist, other times Anarchist.

[@jamescelliers3195]

But never a Marxist-Leninist.

[@ProleCenter]

@@jamescelliers3195 And that's the problem.

[@alexivanov7567]

@@jamescelliers3195 quite opposite!

[@PoliticalEconomy101]

What do you want him to say?

[@ProleCenter]

@@PoliticalEconomy101 The truth, the whole truth, with complete historical context.

[@alexivanov7567]

Dr. Wolff history IS NOT your strong leg!

[@ReddoFreddo]

Didn't the industrialization cause a famine that killed millions? How did that happen?

[@matthewhernandez5365]

www.reddit.com/r/communism/wiki/debunk

[@FratFerno]

You're lacking in specifics again. An analysis of the gulag system is important, as about 20 million people were incarcerated in the decades during Stalin's tenure and about 2 million died. This is something I found just by checking Wikipedia, with a few sources cited from there.

[@richardthecowardlylion5289]

AND??... That doesn't change anything about what he explained. Where in the video did he say those things didn't happen? Explaining HOW a civilization got to an extreme condition doesn't "Justify" it as your insinuating.

[@richardthecowardlylion5289]

Psych 101 goes through the submission to authority mentality that allowed the slow progression of Nazi's to go from "Detention Facilities" of refugees and "undesirables" (official def of Concentration Camps), to Death camp (8 yrs later). Atrocities don't START at the extremes, they build to slowly with groveling bootlickers making excuses and calling anyone who questions them "unpatriotic". Sound familiar??

[@ProleCenter]

Wikipedia alone is not a good place to do research.

[@davidotness6199]

First of all, Wikipedia is not a quality source for all things. Way too-connected to Brit Intel. Check out Craig Murray.uk.com for requisite particulars.

[@ProleCenter]

@@davidotness6199 US intelligence, certainly.

[@fallenangel2123]

There are ONLY 2 ways to deal with your enemy: destroyed from outside destroyed from inside = revolution THIS IS WHAT THE GERMANY DID IT "GAVE" RUSSIANS A REVOLUTION

[@DavidSanchez-vx4bv]

By 1917, Germany was defeated and had none influence... so let's stop that silly argument that Germany caused the Russian revolution because that didn't happen.

[@fallenangel2123]

@@DavidSanchez-vx4bv do your homework

[@DavidSanchez-vx4bv]

@@fallenangel2123 I know more real History than you'll ever know... Better don't believe in fake historians or you'll end believing Aliens came and help Hitler to start WWII.. that is how silly you sound...

[@fallenangel2123]

@@DavidSanchez-vx4bv Ok, "smart" guy Was Russia @ the Big table in Versailles ?

[@DavidSanchez-vx4bv]

@@fallenangel2123 Russia was in a middle of a Civil war byt then. You can find it in the History. The WWI winners were France UK and US... Since to be you didn't see the video...