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[Owlbread]

Not quite as bad as that, that's a bit hyperbolic. I would recommend reading a book called "A Mountain of Crumbs" to help you see what life was like. In some ways people don't need democracy to be happy, it's not like the sky will fall if you live under a totalitarian regime... well, it will eventually, as we've seen in the last 20 years. The sky is falling in Syria literally as we speak. But it is possible to live under a regime like that in the USSR quite comfortably. Whether or not that's a life worth living is another matter.

[PatriotSaint]

There are plenty of original sources; interviews with refugees, among many other sources.

What I can glean is that life in the USSR was at least as horrifying as NK.

At the very least, Kimmie doesn't execute every government official that looks at him the wrong way, stops clapping first, etc.

And by that I mean he probably does.   >_>

[Owlbread]

There are plenty of interviews with refugees, among many other sources.

What I can glean is that life in the USSR was at least as horrifying as NK.

At the very least, Kimmie doesn't execute every government official that looks at him the wrong way, stops clapping first, etc.

And by that I mean he probably does.   >_>

No, he does exactly that and worse. He allegedly blew one up with a mortar (literal "go and stand on that big red cross over there" stuff).

But please give some evidence there, you've referred to some interviews. What interviews did you see? Before I forget, "Tsoy zhiv!" There, I've gotten it out of my system.

[Guardian G.I.]

So, assuming that you've already figured out how messed up NK is without the help of the media, I'm not sure why it matters what the media says.

After all, there are living primary sources. I seriously doubt any of them are exaggerating anything, considering the consistency of the various accounts.

At the very least, they all agree that life in NK was bleak and horrific.

------

Life in the USSR was bleak. People were assassinated by KGB agents and people were sent to camps, masses of the USSR's own citizens were executed.

Millions died.

...during the times of Stalin.
I'm talking about the post-Stalin Soviet Union, the Soviet Union in which my parents lived and which they remember, more specifically late Brezhnev's Soviet Union.
My grandparents lived during the time of Stalin. They don't describe life during those times as horrible as Western media does, though it might be also nostalgia.  From their accounts, the Nazi occupation during WW2 was much worse.

[Owlbread]

The lazy, warm and cozy period of stagnation and corruption that can be surprisingly pleasant/tholable. You're still cwtching down into your blankets while the curtains downstairs are catching fire, though.

[Aseaheru]

True.

[PatriotSaint]

Well, you could always just do a quick search.

http://hcl.harvard.edu/collections/hpsss/

http://museum.gulagmemories.eu/en/salle/purges-territories-annexed-ussr-1939-1941

[Aseaheru]

Under Stalin it was shit, yes. But not all of the USSR was always under Stalin, was it?

[Owlbread]

So... you've just given us two sources about life under Stalin and the early USSR and stuff. We've already established that that was the "bad time", we're talking about another period.

[PatriotSaint]

I didn't see new posts until I posted myself.

Either way, after Stalin's death, the USSR was still a socialist single-party state and was until the fall.

[Owlbread]

And we've just described how living in a socialist single-party state isn't so terrible that you can't live comfortably. Again, I'm repeating myself, but whether or not the life you'd have in that state is worth living is another matter.

[Aseaheru]

And socialist states arent all dictatorships.
case in point (to a limited extent) all industrialized nations.

[Owlbread]

To be honest, of all the types of single-party states I could live in I'd rather live in a socialist one anyway.

[Aseaheru]

Same here.

[Descan]

Can we define socialist? Is it Scandinavian-style socialist or is it "Conservative Image of Hell" socialist that's been bandied about so much in political discourse?