The soviets absolutely respected their anti-colonial stance, not only did they free Russia’s colonies but they also contributed to anti-colonial movements. Regarding religious freedom, it was actually quite high. Atheism was pushed by the state, but protections on nationalities also protected right to religion. Political freedom was also much, much higher for the majority of society, who remain disenfranchised by capitalist systems.
As for queer rights, penalties for being gay were often lower than in capitalist countries, and usually gay rights were at the forefront for capitalist countries. They were severely lacking compared to today, but compared to their peers, they were progressive.
I don’t see how referencing post-socialist states, where reactionaries took power, indicates anything of meaning when it comes to human rights under socialism.
Don’t forget how the West rewarded Alan Turing for his contributions during WW2 by castrating him for being gay. Or how the west linked homosexuality with pedophilia.
Or a bigger example being Ronald Reagan letting AIDS run rampant in the LGBTQ+ community.
Yep, even with the homophobia of the early Soviet Union, they were generally at or near the top when it comes to queer rights in their peer countries. That’s both depressing to think about, and also indicative of their own progressive nature as they sit in their historical context.
A case of Homosexuality. Feifer, George. Justice in Moscow. Simon and Schuster, 1964. pp 207–8
To return to the cases behind closed doors: There is an article in the code that I would have thought unnecessary; it deals with homosexuality.* Muscovites are so strongly heterosexual—so little titillating talk, so much real activity. One never sees obvious homosexuals in public places, and I had assumed that I would never see them in court. Russians seemed too healthy for that.
The exception proved the rule. Late one afternoon I came across it in a wretchedly damp, low-ceilinged basement room in the form of two elderly men, fifty-five and sixty-one, the first with a full eighteenth-century peasant beard, the other in high boots and a tunic. Insensibly drunk, they had exposed themselves on a bitter November day in a park and made some sort of contact with each other. They listened in deep embarrassment while the court found them guilty; but “considering their ages, their families, their honest confessions, and their promises of future good behavior,” it decided not to deprive them of freedom but merely to fine them 20 per cent of their salaries for a year.
The men sputtered thanks to the judge and left separately without exchanging a glance. A once-very-pretty, fortyish woman who heard the sentence with me shook her head incredulously. “I just don’t believe it. You mean they . . .? The two of them? Good God, what for?”
* Article 121: Homosexuality.
Sexual relations of a man with a man (homosexuality) is punishable by deprivation of freedom for a period of up to five years.
Homosexuality committed by means of application of physical force, threat, or in relation to a minor, or by taking advantage of a dependent position of the victim, is punishable by deprivation of freedom for a period of up to eight years.
Yep, they weren’t great by any stretch, but the cartoonish idea that queer people were executed in the streets is horrendously false. Meanwhile, Turing was chemically castrated and driven to suicide despite being a hero, simply because he was gay.
The Soviet union literally occupied parts of central and eastern europe? They crushed uprisings in Hungray and Czechoslovakia that still impact how those countries exist today. They even deported Tartars and Chechens. That’s some pretty colonial stances. Their funding for anti-colonial movements was really just anti-western colonialism so it kinda became a “which flavor of colonialism do you want” game. That’s literally what was the basis of the Cold War.
No religions were not protected. They nationalized most church property from the get-go, they abolished muslim schools and actively forced people to stop learning Arabic and Hebrew which was pretty necessary for them to engage in their religion.
As for queer rights, penalties for being gay were often lower than in capitalist countries.
I don’t see how referencing post-socialist states, where reactionaries took power, indicates anything of meaning when it comes to human rights under socialism.
Because it is reflective of the culture that was pushed. You’re basically saying being queer was free and everyone was cool with it, today the sentiment in post-soviet countries is extremely negative, some of the worst on the planet. You don’t get that shift overnight, that is a cultural standard that has been reinforced by a legal system for decades.
On the flip side, even though the US went through the lavender scare and the AIDs crisis it was far better. It still is far better because of the cultural impact of those experiences, there is massive queer support in the US because of events like the Stonewall Riots. A plethora of people famous and rich in the US are openly queer, I can see queer couples when I look out my window and pride flags on most streets.
Just wait until you find out about what the US was doing in East and Southeast Asia at the time. There isn’t a single criticism you can make of the USSR that the West wasn’t doing bigger and more savagely.
That is what you said. I’m saying human rights were weak globally. You are playing a this or that game, I am speaking broadly of the world at the time but your focus on the USSR and trying to champion it is what has dialed in the conversation to that topic.
Also, you’re all over this thread bud relax. Nobody will take the USSR from you, it’ll still be there later.
Human rights can only be measured against their historical context with any degree of validity. Our human rights today across the globe will be considered horrendously barbaric compared to a century from now. Placing the soviet union in its historical context makes it unambiguously an enormously progressive project.
As for being all over the thread, that’s neither here nor there. The points are the points.
The Soviet Union did not “occupy” the other countries in the socialist bloc or otherwise. They had favorable trade relations, but were not colonial. Ethnic deportations were wrong, and did happen, but their peers were worse, for example see how Churchill treated Bengal. Their funding for anti-colonial movements was tremendously freeing, it wasn’t a “parallel colonialism” but genuine anti-imperialism. You can only make this “parallel colonialism” argument if you ignore any and all hard evidence and numbers comparing interactions between western countries and their colonies, and the Soviet Union and formerly colonized countries.
Regarding Hungary and Czechoslovakia, both had counterrevolutionary uprisings that were dealt with as any country would. Far-right elements took up arms against the left wing states, and as such these were contested by the Warsaw Pact countries. This isn’t colonialism.
As for queer rights, I specifically said their penalties were often more lax than capitalist countries at the time. Alan Turing was castrated and pushed to suicide, homosexuality was strongly punished in the west. In the Soviet Union, the 5 year mark was a maximum sentence, one that was rarely carried out. Hence it was more lax, and in some socialist countries like the GDR eventually free gender affirming care began to be rolled out, far ahead of trans acceptance in the west.
As for comparing post-socialist countries to contemporary capitalist countries, you are not making an honest comparison of socialism to capitalism. This already throws out your point, but again, we were comparing the Soviet Union over its whole existence to their western peers over their whole existence, as peers. This is not a comparison of reactionary regimes, but socialist countries vs. their capitalist peers.
You’re just not gonna budge it doesn’t matter believe what you want. Thousands of queers were imprisoned. Millions lost their cultural and religious identity. The Soviet Union did not have favorable trade deals, they had full scale occupations. We can sit here all day and say who was worse but the bigger thing is NOBODY WAS SAFE so it’s completely irrelevant it isn’t even a light slap vs a death penalty, it is straight up government-funded harassment campaigns everywhere. There is no “lax” when it comes to government repression dude.
And then you look at today and the West has absolutely come out far ahead for the LGBTQIA+ community by a long shot because it actually was better in the West.
As for comparing post-socialist countries to contemporary capitalist countries, you are not making an honest comparison of socialism to capitalism.
I don’t have to because fortunately human rights don’t apply directly to those structures, they’re different across each nation that embraces those ideals. Socialists governments want to pretend they champion for human rights but they don’t if anyone is oppressed, they’re just choosing which demographics to support which is exactly how the rest of the world does it too. You’re being completely disingenuous trying to frame it as a this or that argument, there are not two sides to human rights.
But you’re not interested in being fair, you just want the soviet union to be some rainbow paradise or something when it was not. It constricted so hard on the queer community that the identity was completely shadowed and still to this day is goes largely unidentified and unrecorded except for a few like Gennady Trifonov who barely managed to get his story out. Whatever man.
The claim I gave was that the Soviet Union was historically progressive compared to peer capitalist countries. I never said they were progressive compared to modern western countries when it comes to queer rights, and when it comes to women’s rights, worker’s rights, and more, the Soviet Union was more progressive than the US is today. You are shifting the goalpost to the idea that I said the Soviet Union was flawless even by modern standards, which I never said.
Further, you again try to draw a direct line from a socialist federation of countries to the horrendously reactionary states that replaced them. There is no material basis for this, otherwise the Tsarist system would have continued culturally into the Soviet system. They clearly did not, the Soviet Union was enormously progressive compared to the Tsarist system, just like the modern reactionary states are far more reactionary than the Soviet Union was.
Human rights were also quite strong in the USSR, especially compared to capitalist countries.
This is what you said. You’re having ESPECIALLY do a lot of leg work in that sentence. They really weren’t strong at all which is evident in the culture today. The actual sentence should be:
Human rights were existent in the USSR that capitalist countries hadn’t embraced, and vice versa.
And my point to this is how these are viewed today. In post soviet countries LGBTIA+ is completely repressed, it is literally dangerous to be queer in some places not even openly queer, just queer. Racism runs rampant. Cultures are completely broken from these actions. Which is why I bring up looking at today because Cause and Effect is real and it is how historians help understand the evolution of a culture. If the Soviet Union had such progressive stances they’d have impacted today’s culture, and in many ways they do not. Abuse against women is still rampant with even less support from the government than it had before, LGBTQIA+ individuals are in extreme danger in some of these post soviet countries. It just doesn’t add up and I don’t understand why you want to defend that so aggressively that you won’t even budge or support those truths.
And my point to this is how these are viewed today. In post soviet countries LGBTIA+ is completely repressed, it is literally dangerous to be queer in some places not even openly queer, just queer.
lol, lmao even
How is a state that is now capitalist and reactionary the fault of USSR? This happened because of the absence of it! Do you liberals not have object permanence??
Nobody said the USSR shifted to be pro-queer. What was stated was that the USSR was consistently less anti-queer than the west, which is thanks to their overall higher levels of social progressivism. You either misread unintentionally, or are deliberately taking a bad-faith stance. I like to think it’s the former, but only you can answer that.
Using modern day culture in reactionary states as evidence for human rights in entirely different socialist states is, as I already said, horrendously wrong. Again, social rights dramatically expanded compared to Tsardom, and dramatically shrank after the dissolution of socialism. The idea that the modern reaction is evidence of a lack of human rights in an entirely different socioeconomic system lends itself more to biological determinism than to a materialist analysis.
Further, you are again stating that you do not care about placing your analysis within historical context. You deem the present to be the bar to judge against, despite the fact that even the most progressive states today will be considered horribly reactionary in the future. This is why I stressed the importance of comparing to contemporary peers, because I am indisputably correct in that statement.
You are trying to argue 2 falsehoods:
There is no meaningful change in the human rights in society when the entire social form reverses.
The Soviet Union should be measured against the arbitrary levels of present day human rights, not placed in its historical context.
You don’t have truths to defend, your entire argument rests on believing there to have been no meaningful change in social relations when the move from socialism to capitalism happened, and that these changes could be compared to modern capitalist countries.
I did not make the argument that modern Russia is more socially progressive than the modern US. I made the argument that the historical Soviet Union was more socially progressive than the historical west, which is indisputably true. You cannot argue with my actual claim, so you have to move the goalpost.
It feels like you are struggling to understand historical events and entities as parts of historical processes. Yes the USSR did stuff we look back at and go, wow that was fucked up huh. That’s to be expected as we have historically progressed from the point they were at. The USSR wasn’t gonna undo centuries of social conditioning in a decade, that was not feasible. You can’t thanos snap homophobia from existence by royal decree. I would have loved if the Soviet Union spawned into existence with all the values I have today but it didn’t. It was birthed with all the prejudices of working people in Czarist Russia and had to eat away at them over time. Not only this, it came about in a world of prejudices and was consistently surrounded by them. They weren’t going to have an ideological epiphany that severely broke from their tradition and world culture for no reason.
The soviets absolutely respected their anti-colonial stance, not only did they free Russia’s colonies but they also contributed to anti-colonial movements. Regarding religious freedom, it was actually quite high. Atheism was pushed by the state, but protections on nationalities also protected right to religion. Political freedom was also much, much higher for the majority of society, who remain disenfranchised by capitalist systems.
As for queer rights, penalties for being gay were often lower than in capitalist countries, and usually gay rights were at the forefront for capitalist countries. They were severely lacking compared to today, but compared to their peers, they were progressive.
I don’t see how referencing post-socialist states, where reactionaries took power, indicates anything of meaning when it comes to human rights under socialism.
Don’t forget how the West rewarded Alan Turing for his contributions during WW2 by castrating him for being gay. Or how the west linked homosexuality with pedophilia.
Or a bigger example being Ronald Reagan letting AIDS run rampant in the LGBTQ+ community.
Yep, even with the homophobia of the early Soviet Union, they were generally at or near the top when it comes to queer rights in their peer countries. That’s both depressing to think about, and also indicative of their own progressive nature as they sit in their historical context.
A case of Homosexuality. Feifer, George. Justice in Moscow. Simon and Schuster, 1964. pp 207–8
Yep, they weren’t great by any stretch, but the cartoonish idea that queer people were executed in the streets is horrendously false. Meanwhile, Turing was chemically castrated and driven to suicide despite being a hero, simply because he was gay.
The Soviet union literally occupied parts of central and eastern europe? They crushed uprisings in Hungray and Czechoslovakia that still impact how those countries exist today. They even deported Tartars and Chechens. That’s some pretty colonial stances. Their funding for anti-colonial movements was really just anti-western colonialism so it kinda became a “which flavor of colonialism do you want” game. That’s literally what was the basis of the Cold War.
No religions were not protected. They nationalized most church property from the get-go, they abolished muslim schools and actively forced people to stop learning Arabic and Hebrew which was pretty necessary for them to engage in their religion.
They were not progressive at all, 7 years in prison is nowhere near progressive. You can literally just look up Article 121 Soviet Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_history_in_the_Soviet_Union what are you talking about?
Because it is reflective of the culture that was pushed. You’re basically saying being queer was free and everyone was cool with it, today the sentiment in post-soviet countries is extremely negative, some of the worst on the planet. You don’t get that shift overnight, that is a cultural standard that has been reinforced by a legal system for decades.
On the flip side, even though the US went through the lavender scare and the AIDs crisis it was far better. It still is far better because of the cultural impact of those experiences, there is massive queer support in the US because of events like the Stonewall Riots. A plethora of people famous and rich in the US are openly queer, I can see queer couples when I look out my window and pride flags on most streets.
Just wait until you find out about what the US was doing in East and Southeast Asia at the time. There isn’t a single criticism you can make of the USSR that the West wasn’t doing bigger and more savagely.
I 10000% agree and that is my entire point.
Is it? Because it’s the same point I made, yet you seem to be arguing against it.
It’s not
That is what you said. I’m saying human rights were weak globally. You are playing a this or that game, I am speaking broadly of the world at the time but your focus on the USSR and trying to champion it is what has dialed in the conversation to that topic.
Also, you’re all over this thread bud relax. Nobody will take the USSR from you, it’ll still be there later.
Human rights can only be measured against their historical context with any degree of validity. Our human rights today across the globe will be considered horrendously barbaric compared to a century from now. Placing the soviet union in its historical context makes it unambiguously an enormously progressive project.
As for being all over the thread, that’s neither here nor there. The points are the points.
The Soviet Union did not “occupy” the other countries in the socialist bloc or otherwise. They had favorable trade relations, but were not colonial. Ethnic deportations were wrong, and did happen, but their peers were worse, for example see how Churchill treated Bengal. Their funding for anti-colonial movements was tremendously freeing, it wasn’t a “parallel colonialism” but genuine anti-imperialism. You can only make this “parallel colonialism” argument if you ignore any and all hard evidence and numbers comparing interactions between western countries and their colonies, and the Soviet Union and formerly colonized countries.
Regarding Hungary and Czechoslovakia, both had counterrevolutionary uprisings that were dealt with as any country would. Far-right elements took up arms against the left wing states, and as such these were contested by the Warsaw Pact countries. This isn’t colonialism.
As for queer rights, I specifically said their penalties were often more lax than capitalist countries at the time. Alan Turing was castrated and pushed to suicide, homosexuality was strongly punished in the west. In the Soviet Union, the 5 year mark was a maximum sentence, one that was rarely carried out. Hence it was more lax, and in some socialist countries like the GDR eventually free gender affirming care began to be rolled out, far ahead of trans acceptance in the west.
As for comparing post-socialist countries to contemporary capitalist countries, you are not making an honest comparison of socialism to capitalism. This already throws out your point, but again, we were comparing the Soviet Union over its whole existence to their western peers over their whole existence, as peers. This is not a comparison of reactionary regimes, but socialist countries vs. their capitalist peers.
You’re just not gonna budge it doesn’t matter believe what you want. Thousands of queers were imprisoned. Millions lost their cultural and religious identity. The Soviet Union did not have favorable trade deals, they had full scale occupations. We can sit here all day and say who was worse but the bigger thing is NOBODY WAS SAFE so it’s completely irrelevant it isn’t even a light slap vs a death penalty, it is straight up government-funded harassment campaigns everywhere. There is no “lax” when it comes to government repression dude.
And then you look at today and the West has absolutely come out far ahead for the LGBTQIA+ community by a long shot because it actually was better in the West.
I don’t have to because fortunately human rights don’t apply directly to those structures, they’re different across each nation that embraces those ideals. Socialists governments want to pretend they champion for human rights but they don’t if anyone is oppressed, they’re just choosing which demographics to support which is exactly how the rest of the world does it too. You’re being completely disingenuous trying to frame it as a this or that argument, there are not two sides to human rights.
But you’re not interested in being fair, you just want the soviet union to be some rainbow paradise or something when it was not. It constricted so hard on the queer community that the identity was completely shadowed and still to this day is goes largely unidentified and unrecorded except for a few like Gennady Trifonov who barely managed to get his story out. Whatever man.
The claim I gave was that the Soviet Union was historically progressive compared to peer capitalist countries. I never said they were progressive compared to modern western countries when it comes to queer rights, and when it comes to women’s rights, worker’s rights, and more, the Soviet Union was more progressive than the US is today. You are shifting the goalpost to the idea that I said the Soviet Union was flawless even by modern standards, which I never said.
Further, you again try to draw a direct line from a socialist federation of countries to the horrendously reactionary states that replaced them. There is no material basis for this, otherwise the Tsarist system would have continued culturally into the Soviet system. They clearly did not, the Soviet Union was enormously progressive compared to the Tsarist system, just like the modern reactionary states are far more reactionary than the Soviet Union was.
You have no leg to stand on.
This is what you said. You’re having ESPECIALLY do a lot of leg work in that sentence. They really weren’t strong at all which is evident in the culture today. The actual sentence should be:
And my point to this is how these are viewed today. In post soviet countries LGBTIA+ is completely repressed, it is literally dangerous to be queer in some places not even openly queer, just queer. Racism runs rampant. Cultures are completely broken from these actions. Which is why I bring up looking at today because Cause and Effect is real and it is how historians help understand the evolution of a culture. If the Soviet Union had such progressive stances they’d have impacted today’s culture, and in many ways they do not. Abuse against women is still rampant with even less support from the government than it had before, LGBTQIA+ individuals are in extreme danger in some of these post soviet countries. It just doesn’t add up and I don’t understand why you want to defend that so aggressively that you won’t even budge or support those truths.
lol, lmao even
How is a state that is now capitalist and reactionary the fault of USSR? This happened because of the absence of it! Do you liberals not have object permanence??
Because there was never a shift ever to be pro-queer. That is a complete lie many people in this thread are trying to push.
Okay.
Nobody said the USSR shifted to be pro-queer. What was stated was that the USSR was consistently less anti-queer than the west, which is thanks to their overall higher levels of social progressivism. You either misread unintentionally, or are deliberately taking a bad-faith stance. I like to think it’s the former, but only you can answer that.
Using modern day culture in reactionary states as evidence for human rights in entirely different socialist states is, as I already said, horrendously wrong. Again, social rights dramatically expanded compared to Tsardom, and dramatically shrank after the dissolution of socialism. The idea that the modern reaction is evidence of a lack of human rights in an entirely different socioeconomic system lends itself more to biological determinism than to a materialist analysis.
Further, you are again stating that you do not care about placing your analysis within historical context. You deem the present to be the bar to judge against, despite the fact that even the most progressive states today will be considered horribly reactionary in the future. This is why I stressed the importance of comparing to contemporary peers, because I am indisputably correct in that statement.
You are trying to argue 2 falsehoods:
There is no meaningful change in the human rights in society when the entire social form reverses.
The Soviet Union should be measured against the arbitrary levels of present day human rights, not placed in its historical context.
You don’t have truths to defend, your entire argument rests on believing there to have been no meaningful change in social relations when the move from socialism to capitalism happened, and that these changes could be compared to modern capitalist countries.
I did not make the argument that modern Russia is more socially progressive than the modern US. I made the argument that the historical Soviet Union was more socially progressive than the historical west, which is indisputably true. You cannot argue with my actual claim, so you have to move the goalpost.
It feels like you are struggling to understand historical events and entities as parts of historical processes. Yes the USSR did stuff we look back at and go, wow that was fucked up huh. That’s to be expected as we have historically progressed from the point they were at. The USSR wasn’t gonna undo centuries of social conditioning in a decade, that was not feasible. You can’t thanos snap homophobia from existence by royal decree. I would have loved if the Soviet Union spawned into existence with all the values I have today but it didn’t. It was birthed with all the prejudices of working people in Czarist Russia and had to eat away at them over time. Not only this, it came about in a world of prejudices and was consistently surrounded by them. They weren’t going to have an ideological epiphany that severely broke from their tradition and world culture for no reason.
You’re doing historical anachronism
Five years.