The shortages were, I'm sure, entirely real. The wealth of party members was comparative and not a patch on the average executive in the West.Brian wrote:The other thing I remember hearing about a lot is that there were shortages of everything, because the high-ranking party members were taking everything, and leaving very little for the people.
Barmaley wrote:Wow - I put a BIG post here about shortages - (whey are a big misconception) but it is not hereIt is specially sad consider that for me typing in English is a torture. Brian - can you try to recover it? I will kill myself if I need to retype it!
sledge wrote:What was the difference of the Soviet Union(the Communists) and Nazis? one party one dictators but only reason Hitler and Nazism(to some degree) perished is everyone was against him and his Reich was blown to pieces. The 2 biggest rivals were Communists and Fascists so two could not have flourished which communism won.
Everything was in short supply in communist countries except corruption and still is today.
Brian wrote:sledge wrote:What was the difference of the Soviet Union(the Communists) and Nazis? one party one dictators but only reason Hitler and Nazism(to some degree) perished is everyone was against him and his Reich was blown to pieces. The 2 biggest rivals were Communists and Fascists so two could not have flourished which communism won.
Everything was in short supply in communist countries except corruption and still is today.
The big difference is that Nazism is far right, and Communism is far left. That's the reason all the big corporations in Germany supported Hitler. The "Socialism" in "National Socialism" was just for show. It's also the reason that I don't think Nazism wouldn't've collapsed on its own. It wasn't much different (economically) from our capitalist system. To my knowledge, Hitler didn't try to nationalize production. To be certain, businesses could have their goods commandeered by the Nazis for the war effort, but the right to own private property was, itself, still respected.
The other difference is that communism still had the skeleton of a representative government -- even if it's not what we in the West would recognize as "democracy". Those old enough to remember the Cold War will remember that the USSR ended bloodlessly, ultimately, because the people in charge had the ability to vote it out of existence. The coup against Gorbachev failed, in my view, because the hardliners didn't have the stomach to go against the people. There was no enthusiasm for the equivalent for the equivalent of a Tiananmen Square. In a true dictatorship, where it's really one guy running the show (e.g., North Korea), such piddling concerns as the will of the people aren't taken into account. If the people piss you off, you just smash them.
That's not to say that the USSR was a paragon of democratic thinking, but it was more of a representative government than people now give it credit for. It collapsed in an avalanche of referendums with the various republics declaring independence, rather than with armed conflict (such as what happened with the United States vs. Great Britain, for example).
sledge wrote:Yep left and Right they would not be able to exist side by side because they hated each other and there was a rivalry between Stalin and Hitler. The true ideals of Communism is not really bad as Lenin envision but Stalin grabbed power after Lenin's death through murder and mayhem. Stalin became the Tyrant and twisted communism for his own gain and killed more people than Hitler mostly his own people. He was very paranoid.
The leaders that followed him ran in what Stalin had built but not extreme until the 1980's when Gorbachev became president the new wave of communism leadership that caused the attempted overflow by the hardliners which marked the end of the Soviet Russia. But Corruption is still business as usual like in any other government.
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