Everything that stuck, Knit. We had our share of propaganda too - Radio Free Europe, I think, is the prime example - but nobody paid attention to that stuff. But the stories of economic hardship, of waste, of repression, of the various purges?
I'm sorry, Helgo, but I would never say that western - British, in my case, and I admit I cannot speak for the other peoples with the same certainty - believe a lot of lies about the USSR if I didn't bear witness to it myself, many times over, during my stay in Scotland. Let me say first that I am not talking about the works of serious historians here, or about the opinions of well-researched people, but rather about the mass culture and the popular image of the USSR, the one that the majority of people around here, in the UK, have.
The overall image of everything Soviet in the public mind here is very simplistic and tendentious, with every narrative revolving around "evil communists" and never straying far from this path, and as a consequence many things about the former eastern superstate are quite often simply ignored, and even more are misinterpreted and exagerrated. The Soviet Union had much more to it than Stalin's repressions and purges, and the retrograde stagnation of the late USSR sharply contrasted with the progressiveness, despite many hardships, of the early USSR - one of the examples of that is "Likbez", or "liquidation of illiteracy", a highly successful social program that was responsible for giving the absolute majority of then-medieval-level Tsarist peasants primary education and sharply reducing the levels of said illiteracy in the entire USSR to almost zero. When talking about the pre-WW2 USSR, to illustrate what I am talking about, most British pundits focus on the famine of 1032-33, which is all fine and well, but then they tend to repeatedly state that such famines, and repressions as well, were unique to the USSR and that the Russian Empire was a halcyon time of glory and prosperity, which is wrong, as the Emperors were ruthless autocrats who run extensive repressive apparati to quell the uprisings of, for example, hungry Ukrainian peasants, who were enraged by the fact that famine hit their mismanaged, underdeveloped, primitively-tilled lands, on average, every generation. Said pundits also fail to mention that the "unanimously loathed" collectivisation was readily accepted, and benefited to no small degree, by about one third of the USSR's peasants, the ones that were dirt-poor in the Imperial era - most of the problems with it came from when it reached already prosperous territories, where most people were well-to-do farmers extremely unwilling to hand over their hard-earned posessions to the state. Likewise, the USSR gave equal constitutional rights to women, including the ability to vote, much earlier than the USA did, and the Soviet social wellfare system was, overall, excellent, with the current Russian one worse in almost all regards. And the enemies of the Communist state were not always angels either - while the deportation of Crimean Tatars to the Central Asia, for example, was a thoroughly excessive and condemnable measure, it wasn't unprovoked: in the days of Axis occupation of the Crimea, the Tatars, as a people, actively collaborated with the Nazi forces and happily conducted many pogroms and ethnic cleansings of non-Tatars for them, with many Russian and other Slavic villages getting the Lidice treatment.
Now, this is not to say that all the bad things about the USSR are false - they aren't - and shouldn't be mentioned - they should. I am in no way trying to be a repression, stagnation, totlitarism or deportation apologist here, those happenings are getting well-deserved condemnation nowadays and I have no problems with that. But basing every USSR narrative around them, or, more often, around the oversimplified and exagerrated version of them is, I believe, erroneous and unfair. After all, when people talk about the days of the British Empire, they rarely focus exclusively on its checkered colonial past and the more questionable sides of the its Victorian period, preferring instead to charge their words with neither strong praise nor indignant condemnation, and I do believe that all former empires, USSR included, deserve the same treatment.
PSEUDOEDIT: holy crap so many ninjas.
@Erkki: I am not arguing about how much anti-Soviet or pro-Soviet propaganda was there in Finland, I am talking about the western, Anglo-American, public image of the Soviet union, the set of beliefs that is treated as intuitively obvious by the unitnitiated people.
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Topic: Ukrainian Crisis Discussion Thread №3: Love your Country (Read 74154 times)