How can we solve this problem?

Polls across Hungary show that they miss Soviet Socialism.

What did you family tell you exactly?

Baltic states (as in Ex Yugoslavia) are even more nostalgic about socialism than the ex Warsaw Pact. Titoism was far more successful than Marxism Leninism tbh. Yugoslavia was the only country that didn't have to forcibly keep their citizens from fleeing.

This. Yugoslavia was pretty freaking great. Imagine what could've happened if it had more cooperation with the bigger nations, or at the very least, it didn't have both sides actively trying to mess with it.

Polan here, explaining why we're a fascist shithole right now would take a whole history lesson, but long story short many of the old people miss the old regime, while the youngsters are fed too much propaganda to know better. Not that they care, they're too busy being pissed at corrupt neoliberal (or neoliberal in socdem clothing) assholes that ran the country for the vast majority of the last 30 years. And since there was no functional left-wing opposition, people turned to the nationalist religious right.

As far as I understand, it's the same in Hungary. The difference being - Orban is mostly competent, while our current fascist government will probably destroy itself pretty soon.

They're all really old so the story's a bit hazy. I can tell you what I remember from all of them but of course I don't know exactly what happened. I get little bits of info here and there on this but we don't talk about Communist Poland much. They're too old and they don't like talking about it. My aunt still gets visibly flustered when she hears people talk about the Russians.

My great-grandparents owned land up in the countryside outside of Vilnus and lived there wth much of the extended family. Many of them, as I understand, were disappeared.

The surviving family lived in Gdansk. I've visited them there. They showed me the bloc apartments they used to live in outside of Gdansk. Very large families living in very small single rooms, often multiple families to a room, while the higher-ups lived down town in the big houses of Old Gdansk.

My grandmother escaped the eastern bloc on the back of a fruit truck traveling across the border between Hungary and Austria which for a time was relatively lax as far as border security along the East-West line went.

My uncle has some stories about narrowly escaping the draft and how his father used his extra petrol rations to bribe uncle's way out or something. I don't remember the particulars. He's been very paranoid and ardently anti-communist since.

Decentralized locally planned mixed syndicalist/market socialist economy when?

I use it more as an affectionate nickname tbh. There's at least two anarchoposters here btw.

I'm not entirely close off to the idea that life in some parts of the Eastern Bloc were better for some people at certain points in time and I'm interested in learning more about what happened in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. All I'm saying is that all the accounts I've heard so far from relatives have been of a corrupt, authoritarian, and impoverished society that they jumped at the chance to escape from.

my grandmother never went back to Poland. Even after the USSR collapsed, she was scared something would happen again she said. My aunt expressed similar fears when the Russians invaded Crimea recently.

build a great wall and make them pay for it.

srsly, though, do you speak any of the languages involved? a lot of their neofascism and liberal anti-communism got imported by the radio from the united states. of course there is a fair share of those who instead stick to tankie narratives and, sometimes, commies win elections but tbs they are not something i'd regard for better than their fascists. they have fascist leftists (agrarian and makhno symbols on the maidan shouting your usual slogans) and they have tankie fascists (pic related). The commie/anti-commie thing in eastern europe is tribal, just as there are republican trade unions and democrat billionaires in the united states.

I wonder what Stalinstache would say about this.

I'm feeling you guys, we really should take up that 'socialism=supercapitalism' idea. I guarantee more of those class cucks will listen to you than ever before.

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nobody will listen to trotskyist bullshit. what you could do is to study your shit beyond slogans and express it words not marred by their interbellum dictatorships. too much to ask?

Or maybe because it was shit.

Of course it was shit. Unter the Germans you could take part in killing the minorities and taking their property but then came the Russians and put you in prison for that.

I'm from Romania and my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and older kin all grew up and lived a large part of their lives under M-L rule. I grew up in a little apartment in a huge commie block that we shared with 10 other people (I went back for a visit about 10 years ago and it struck me how tiny it seemed to me now as an adult) and I spent my childhood playing in piles of rubble and getting chased by stray dogs and gypsies. Everyone remembers the fear, the corruption, the lack of food and hot water, the casual brutality and the rampant distrust that comes with knowing that anyone could be an informer and that anything you say or write could be snooped on. In Romania's case, there's also the disastrous consequences of Ceaușescu's anti-birth-control laws.

Funnily enough, absolutely nobody in my family had any idea of the basic tenets of socialism or elementary Marxist theory, despite three generations of living under a so-called socialist country. There was "theory" taught in school, but most of that was on the teachings of the leader, the primacy of the vanguard party and how the next five-year plan was going to make everything great - it was indoctrination into the cult of the state rather than actual discussion of theory. Not that it was probably much better than the Orthodox indoctrination I had growing up.

Authoritarian vanguardism is absolute trash.

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Every person who lived in the butt-hurt belt during that time period and didn't like the system usually just go on about how the Soviet system didn't have hardcore consumerism, for example shittier TVs compared to West, meat was only available in the weekend, didn't get 'exotic fruits' (exotic fruits obtained by slave labour by the west in third world countries,) shit like that. Then go on how the new """""freedom""""" changed their lives since they got access to Western consumerism.

A Polish man who lived on the border with Russia during 1970-90s once told me that "Since the collapse, people thought they were free and so on. But in reality all they can do now is just buy more consumer goods."

I remember a short talk with a Polish woman who said that old people missed the old days, while the young people don't care or don't want it back as they were taught in schools how the "Soviets were oppressors and communism is bad."

I know there is still many support by the old population throughout Eastern Europe who want the return of Soviet system as they only became worse off after the collapse.

I mean it was a shame that those in the Communist Parties in respective countries made themselves live in better areas compared to normal workers, but it was guaranteed you had a job, a roof over your head, you can get to work and you were never starving and had access to healthcare. If it wasn't for the Cold War, more production resources could have gone to bettering the lives of workers and maybe many problems would be fixed.

Yes, he broke with the USSR and rightly talked shit on them on several occasions, but that doesn't change the fact that Romania was a textbook M-L shithole.

In many cases this is because old people got the shit end of the stick with liberalization, since services that they rely on like healthcare often got cut back and pensions are usually the first things to go in pursuit of accumulation.

Just because of that doesn't mean we should take a rosy and nostalgic view of Marxism-Leninism ourselves. If we want to move past it and achieve something we have to admit when our own shit smells.

me too tbh. I'm actually a lot less staunchly anti-tankie than I used to be, mostly because I recognize that there are some smart ones out there. I just have trouble reconciling what I've heard from my family with what tankies say is necessary.

shit, I left my shitposting flag on

Yes, yes. and if we go by the official press there also was no crime, no drugs and, most certainly, no sex.
perestroika era press revealing how terrible things still could actually be in the remote parts of the country played a major part in the collapse.

what did he mean by this?

is just that 1st world countries were benign enough to not accept them.

Stop circle jerking over state capitalist regimes.

Stop the authority worship of brutal dictators.

Refer to ourselves as communists less, as we don't want to associated with the stains on the fabric of our thought that European totalitarianism was, until we revive the terms original meaning.

I mean I hate to play tankie's advocate here but I think some of them at least acknowledge that the Cold-War era states were state-capitalist but believed that was a short-term setup until various industries could be properly reorganized (?). ML's, stalinstashes? how'd I do?

some people are nostalgic because things were less uncertain and more was taken care of for you without having to worry about it (education, training, employment, retirement)

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Doesn't help that Poland's far-right gov. is spinning fear mongering tales of commies and left-leaners in Poland are colluding with Russian commies and the like. It's pretty bad.

What you're missing from the picture are the times after the regime's collapse. What your relatives are telling you is probably factually correct (if missing the context of poor war-destroyed country rebuilding itself in parts literally from scratch). What you didn't hear about is the poverty and social degradation after a third of the country, mostly in rural areas, lost their jobs to the "free market" and people realized the previous system at least cared that they don't starve.

All the while the old dignitaries and now-ruling former resistance heroes cozied up to each another and used their muh privileged positions to enrich themselves, Animal Farm ending style. (Though, again, in context, they don't seem that bad, they at least didn't outright steal and got us into EU, which gave us millions of jobs and pays for our infrastructure. i hear Ukraine got the short end of the stick and still looks like Poland did in the early 90s.)

You're talking about Syberia, while the thread is about Central Europe. I can assure you that all he said was true about People's Republic of Poland.

You can scream "tankie" all you want, but practically all post-Soviet states (and most of Warsaw pact) don't "just hate Russia". Local governments and local Bourgeoisie hate Socialism (in any form, be it Stalinism or Anarchism) because it will take power away from them. Which is why they flood mass-media with Neo-Nazi propaganda to keep proles distracted whenever things get rough.

Cause and effect.

Is 99% bullshit whenever I have a chance to double-check things.

Recently some moron even tried peddling the idea of Yan Sten being Stalin's tutor in the 20s (Bukharinite! teaching philosophy to Stalin! in 20s! screaming and shaking him whenever Stalin misunderstood something!), because of some article of "perestroika era press" - the one and only source of this nonsense.

we don't hate Russians, we're not even Nato, FInlandization has served us well and in the 19th century when we were a part of them they gave us sweet autonomy

Leftypol would rather make itself obscure or very hated than to admit that the Soviet Union was a brutal, savage failure of the communist experiment. If anything, tankies deserve to be killed by fascists.

Russian here, the Fins are nice guys, the rest it depends.

Hungary got the good stuff during socialism, eg. their communist government was tasked with getting as much western currency and hi-tech merchandise as they could for the USSR
other countries, like Poland were significantly more shitty.
considering the breakdown of social services and a rise of intolerant stormfags as well as ghettos and segregation, no wonder that Hungarians want they stuff back both from Soviets and from the West.

Relations has pretty much been good except for ww2 and the period of Russification at the start of the 20th century

I never said those things never happened.

Ever heard of the term near-abroad? Russia's leaders, dating back to Stalin at least, probably back to the Czars, consider the minor countries of Eastern Europe to be the playthings of greater powers rather than truly independent states. So if it's not them dominating the scene, it's someone else; someone threatening. So the fear is mutual. Russia has the longest land border in the world. It's the kind of geography that would make anyone a bit paranoid.

Things are usually terrible in the remote parts of a country, and, by comparison, Detroit in the US is a hellhole despite hosting the headquarters of GM.

We've got to embrace the mistakes as well as the successes.

FTFY

FTFY

Now we need an Anarchist to say the same about Marxism, and then polack to - about Socialism.

Just because Russia's deranged strongman leaders think something doesn't make it right.

Frankly, if NATO wants to extend right up to the Russian border, they have no right to complain, they shouldn't have been such shitty neighbours for hundreds of years.

foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/11/03/better-red-than-unfed-a-survey-of-post-communism/

Should have figured you wouldn't care for Russian history with that flag.

Czechia doesn't as far as I know. Communist party there is p big iirc.

The joke is that all those people in Poland who say communism was better vote for catholic welfarists and hate social liberalism

Boo hoo.

there was a polish guy on Holla Forums saying poland was terrible because "its still run by the old communists"

i knew what he said was retarded, because poland isn't communist, but i didn't know enough about poland to shit on him

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He was probably from one of our local brands of libertards or ultra-nationalists who call everyone to the left of them "communist" (the former because they're literally monarchist ancaps, the latter because they're paranoid). They're exactly the kind of people who'd browse Holla Forums unironically.

As for our "communists", they rebranded themselves soc-dems and even governed for a while, but they adopted standard "third way" neolib policies and decisively lost power in 2005 after a corruption scandal. We're run by right-wingers ever since.

After the Jews were purged, Soviet Communism was transformed into a variation of Russian nationalist imperialism. The Soviet government acted in the interests of the Russian people at the expense of subject peoples, these policies had little to do with communism.

Did anyone mention to her that Crimeans wanted to be annexed by Russia and that most Crimeans are ethnic Russians? There isn't anything similar in Poland.

You forgot to mention that those beautiful Polish buildings were built during communist era, which left lasting marks on every country that was part of the "iron bloc", whereas Café Kranzler and Sony Center are both the creations of capitalism. Berlin also wasn't destroyed by Hitler, but by his enemies.

In other words, stay delusional and ignorant, leftyfags.

t. Eastern European with Social Democrat government with several former communists in it which is choked to death by corruption, debt and organized crime directly supported by top-level government officials.

In a few years the death toll of modern capital will be much higher than anything the tankies did.

Except Poland is now very capitalist and it's still a shithole because it cannot exploit others–it is the nation being exploited economically by Germany and the UK.

t. putin

Look, tankie moron, Nazism failed, and they still have every right to be angry about being forced into a shitty regime.