As a rule: If it’s in the news, it’s already too late to make money from it.
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was written by Anatoly Karlin for Russian Reaction on January 27, 2021
Apart from writing books, reviews, travel writing, and sundry blogging, Karlin Tweets at @powerfultakes and runs a Substack newsletter.
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Who would have guessed that reddit could be useful?
Trying to earn money by buying in the middle of an ongoing frenzied price surge is usually not a good idea. But these price surges often happen after years of hype. Tesla for example. Bitcoin too, it was in the news back in late 2013 when it quickly rose to over $1k and then crashed after that.
I haven’t entirely understood the GameStop situation. Something about a hedge fund doing massive short selling on the stock. The mainstream articles I’ve read about it have been lacking and I don’t see any good explanations on r/wallstreetsbets. Is there any proper overview anywhere?
I decided not to overthink things, go with the flow, and just buy. It was a good decision, made more the past day than the prior 6 months bull market.
https://melmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Screen-Shot-2019-07-31-at-5.47.12-PM.png
https://media.giphy.com/media/1AjFk7MzJBT2UPYKLB/giphy.gif
Wallstreetbets discord banned and the subreddit is private. What’s going on?
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1354582803971764224
https://media.tenor.com/images/c8524c0b709172361e3c07742df5ce79/tenor.png
It’s back to public again.
Buy high, sell low baby! Buying GME is a great investment at $350 (it can only go up).
Basically a couple of hedge funds made massive bets that GameStop stock (GME) would fall, shorting each time it went up. At some point GME was the most massively shorted stock in terms of % of float shorted.
A group on Reddit in r/wallstreetbets with a user u/DeepFuckingValue aka DFV seeming to be the hero who bought GME at 14.9 (he publicly posted his positions for weeks), and also on Discord, started – and/or encouraged others – to buy the stock at whatever price and not sell driving the price up sharply over a couple of days essentially forcing the hedge funds to exit their positions liquidating other stocks they owned to cover GME they had to buy to cover.
Beyond hedge fund losses, the forced liquidations also impacted other stocks.
Meanwhile DFV invested around $755K ($774,991.37 to be exact on screenshots he posted daily) in both equity and call options. As of the last trading day his unrealized gains were at $33.4 million and his realized gains at $13.8 million.
Whether users like DFV – others claimed equally impressive returns with smaller investments – bamboozeled the massesis still up for discussion (there’s a thread that seems to show Wall Street firms were in on the pile on using Reddit as cover) but there was certainly a determined mass mentality to take down the hedge fund and show the power of the “little guy”.
On a broader level it showed the total hollowness of the market where previously it was well connected hedge fund managers who effectively manipulated prices to their profit who are now (seemingly) aghast that the plebs have essentially figured out how to do this via mass action.
Incidentally it was not GME but a few other stocks as well like AMC, KOSS (480% rise in one day), NOK (Nokia), BB (BlackBerry). And some hedge funds apparently have had to declare bankruptcy (which is just a means for them to restructure their debts, not go into abject poverty).
It looks like GameStop was (and still is?) extraordinarily shorted. Supposedly to a degree which is very rare. There was a somewhat similar case in 2008 when Volkswagen was shorted to a very high degree. This resulted in a short squeeze that made Volkswagen’s stock rise so high that Volkswagen became the most valued company in the world for a very brief moment before it crashed.
A big difference is that Volkswagen is one of the largest automotive companies in the world while GameStop is just a video game retailer that’s been running on losses for several years while having to continually close more and more of their stores.
I’ve read that it’s a common practice by hedge funds to finance “research” which makes the conclusion that the stock value of companies that the hedge fund has short positions in is going to fall. I don’t know how true this but if it’s true is certainly adds to the hollowness of the stock markets.
A retard hedge fund decided to short… Except they wanted to short more stock than there is – 140% to be exact. So everyone saw an opportunity to fuck them over definitely. They hold the price and when they’re forced to buy millions of stock because they were greedy retards, the price shoots up even more into the stratosphere. This literally never happened. It’s also blatantly illegal – on the hedge fund side. They weren’t supposed to do that.
I’d say it ain’t too late to get in on it tho.
No, it wasn’t just one hedge fund that was caught short (the largest one that was blown up was not retarded in any sense of the word), yes, it’s happened before, and no, it’s not illegal. The large short interest over and above the entire free float of the stock was due to massive options exposure. This should probably be regulated, but currently it is not. Oh, and, yes, it’s too late to get in on it, except from the short side. Unfortunately, puts are prohibitively expensive, and shares for borrow are, of course, unavailable.
Amazing how Americans are still into “Wall Street” and the “stock market”, it still has heroic status over there. In Britain the City of London is increasingly hated, bankers and their worshipping hangers on (as many Yanks seem to be) are seen as Rothschild supporting, imperialist lackey scumbags.
Announcing one is a “banker” or a “trader” is a sure way to risk a punch in the mouth over here. It’s probably no coincidence that “merchant banker” is Cockney rhyming slang for “wanker”.
You seem to missing the whole point of what is happening in the US: Wall Street is not much liked by many on the right or left either precisely because they are seen as corrupt insiders who are making insane amounts of money by manipulating the market for themselves.
Retail investors, many with little more too lose in times when inequality keeps increasing, have banded together to try and beat the bankers at their own game disrupting the markets. Long term they will probably lose – the system will protect itself and they have too much firepower. But blowing up a hedge fund or two and the transfer of at least some of the wealth to guerilla day traders in the short term is celebrated as a victory, however ephemeral, over The System.
It was shorted over 130% which is insane but is allowed thanks to daisy chaining via options. Not sure of the current positions. But this session seems to be shaping up as another loss for the shorts. With extortions in Reddit, KOSS is already up 40% in pre-market (after 480% in the prior session) and GME 25%. While NOK dropped in after market, it’s also rising from -25% to -15%.
To see how long the mania lasts beside capitulation.
Young people in my family told me about this weeks ago, I should have bought more and earlier than the tiny amount I did. One of the young right out of university made an easy 60k from single 4 digit savings. And it’s opening at 450.
I didn’t get in until yesterday morning when it dipped to $280 and sold a few hours later at $350 with a stop on it. Should have held on but that was still a good percentage.
Market manipulation is only good when we, the chosen ones, do it!
https://thumbsnap.com/i/xEMK1fCt.mp4
The same thing happened to me with TSLA, but years ago. Not only did I not go long, but got burned heavily being short. Said young person is now a millionaire, and I’m not broke from the short, so all’s well.
Really, TSLA was a great example of Soros’ theory of Reflexivity (he did some really interesting stuff in finance before devoting all of his attention to the full time job of being Dr. Evil). Basically, an entire reality is created from expectations. So you have this garbage company, poorly run, with an overpriced, low quality product. But a whole group of people believes it in so strongly that its market cap soars and now it has the resources to actually become the quality company its believers thought it would become.
Momo investing is something I’d happily take part in working on a trading desk, where the upside is a bigger bonus, the downside no bonus or losing my job. But, I’d never trade that way with my own money.
I treated it like going to a casino – just some throwaway money, a few shares. The kids OTOH had made $10,000s last night alone. They plan to sell right away this thing might be over.
I actually bought TSLA as a long term investment when it was split-adjusted below 80 because I thought (and still think) that beyond the Musk-cult the brand/product/concept/infrastructure had promise.
Having said that, what’s happened to TSLA is beyond all rational valuation of the company it represents. To be fair to Musk he himself has said the stock is too high and seems as bemused as anyone. It is not just over-the-top expectations: even if you use rational valuation tools, no way is TSLA worth more than perhaps a couple of 100 if one is generous (despite so-called analysts calling for some huge numbers).
The remaining price is the speculative component. People want the stock more than the car both because it’s associated with Musk – the biggest billionaire showman since Jobs and thanks to social media, even a bigger one – and because other people want it. It’s almost become a store of value disassociated from the company.
This is part of a bigger picture of everything from the Fed effectively printing money blowing up the mother of all asset bubbles, to trading platforms offering zero commission trades (with some hidden charges of course), late stage capitalism where more money is made off financial markets than creating products with institutional investors playing the system, growing YOLO/anarchist/contrary retail investors who feel they have little to lose trying to play the same game since the economy is rigged anyway, and going all in.
Next step in the markets will be to just skip everything and directly IPO a meme. And I’m only partially joking. You really don’t need a company, an asset, or even crypto math geekery. All you need is attention, eyeballs.
Also, DOGE coin will replace USD as the world reserve currency. That puppy is cuter than what’s on dollar bills.
OT: ‘Independence means WAR’: China threatens Taiwan and steps up military drills near the island as US pledges ‘to stand with Southeast Asian countries in face of Beijing pressure’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9196921/China-warns-Taiwan-Independence-means-WAR.html
“…entire reality is created from expectations…” – This has always been known. Only naive speculators and investors think that the so called fundamentals determine the stock prices.
But in a long run people’s beliefs and psychology reflect the fundamental, thus:
Gonna be labeled “dissent” and “treason” soon.
Once they get Tubman on the twenty, how long will it take before black trannies appear on trillion dollar bills?
https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1354598266051186688
Mexican drug cartels will file a class action lawsuit against US Bureau of Printing and Engraving, for psychological abuse.
I mean, they have to stare at that face day in and day out as they count stacks of those paper bills. Mexican gangbangers are tough, but not that tough.
Harriet Tubman: Who be di black woman wey Biden goment wan revive effort to put her face for $20 bill
LOL. I used to look for pidgin versions of pozzed mainstream news stories, when the BBC premiered that service, but I quickly gave up on it because they don’t seem to be that many, for whatever reason.
Some say that it is difficult to carry subversions into a simpler language – it might be so. In that context, perhaps, Esperanto wasn’t such a bad idea, as it was originally conceived to be a simple language, with rather limited vocabulary.
https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1354729226738561029
He calls himself a “disinformation specialist”.
Don’t know if this is real, but I have been seeing this on another forum
https://i.ibb.co/5hKwJND/Robin-Hood.png
Seems the app that people were using to trade has decided to take matters into its own hands and sell people’s stock of GME without the stockholder’s consent.
https://i.ibb.co/0KF58Ts/GME.png
Wow. I wonder what did it take to force them to do it.
The great free market
Real Capitalism has never been tried!
This is real capitalism. This is what capitalism is and always will be: the good, the bad, and the corrupt. This is what “market” looks like, this is what everyone-optimize-one’s-own-benefit will always be like.
It is human nature, as it was human nature to engage in minimal work and nepotistic self-promotion under socialism (or communism, if you wish). No ideology can change the human nature. It sometimes works better, sometimes worse – we are clearly in the phase when capitalism in the West works rather poorly.
If you look at the amount of debt issued in the West in the last generation, it exceeds the “GNP growth” in the same time. The stagnation of the real economy has been going on for a long time covered up with virtual money creation and endless debt. Debt is nothing else than two parties having a claim on the same asset or goods. (These days, often three, four or more parties are keeping the same asset as their “wealth” thanks to beauty of leveraging.) You don’t have to be above kindergarden level math genius to see that is not sustainable. But it has been fun.
http://isthesqueezesquoze.com/
Time to take the doge pill, might double in the next few hours.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1354924057825837060
DOGE for the world reserve currency! Once the cuteness of that puppy hits mainstream press, nobody will be able to resist it!
WOW.
That’s some major jewy jewy lawyer man going on there.
So disgusting.
I shared it to my friends.
It looks like GME is back up over $300 after hours and per your link short interest is still strong.
I wonder if it is possible for short interest to ever decrease in the age of algorithmic trading. Because to a trading robot, the higher the price the more rational to short. So short interest will increase exponentially. But if you collapse old short positions and force them to buy to cover, won’t this start a chain reaction and drive the price to like infinity? You will be using shorts’ own money against them, so as long as momentum is going, it’ll be a self sustaining process without much investment need from the longs’ point of view.
GME will become a black hole singularity sucking in infinite short money and growing bigger and bigger. And then Gamestop will buy Amazon, Facebook, Google, Tesla, Microsoft, and US Navy (because why not), and establish stores throughout the solar system.
Its great, ain’t it?
It’ll absorb so much money, it’ll actually do something useful with it. I do find it entertaining that Gamestop’s CEO is smart enough not to comment on this run of vastly good luck.
“…vastly good luck…” – I am sure there are already conspiracy theories that do not have room for luck.
Meanwhile you have an interesting confluence of voices in the US speaking out against this naked robbery by Citadel: from the pro-Trump crowd including Don Trump Jr to the Democratic Left like the so-called Squad (AOC et al).
Citadel also has ties with newly minted (in all senses of the word) Treasury Secretary, Yellen. When asked this is what the ever memable Jen Psaki had to say, with comments by Greenwald that I concur with.
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1354912679786409984?s=20
There are rumours Psaki’s husband works for Citadel.
Though I would not count on anybody who was close to Trump including Trump himself, a populist movement must be left-right or right-left. The populist Right must drop the race and the Jew issue and use banks and banksters as their sole target and find a common ground with the Bernie Bros. The Right and teh Left agains the elite in the center. The movement must be about economic justice. If you push it hard the Left will drop some of its obsessions about the social justice.
In England, the excess money is typically invested into property. As a result, property is an investment that converted the majority of the English bourgeoisie into multi millionaires (in dollar currency), without exposing themselves to any risks. London house owners, have a system of investment to risk, in the sense of being the casino owners, as opposed to a casino player.
However, this has an extremely negative side for the ordinary people of the United Kingdom, of creating unaffordable housing. London property is valued at $2,5 trillion and constantly rising, but this rising valuation can be viewed partly as a transfer of wealth from the wage earning people, to the bourgeoisie investors.
In contrast, in America, property usually almost does not function as a safe investment, that will constantly increase in value. (A positive side is that housing is very cheap in America, but often not useful as an investment.) One of the results of this, is that it’s more mainstream for American people to invest their excess money into Wall Street, other things equal.
Buying stocks is more mainstream for the ordinary people in America, compared to in Western Europe, where it operates more through pension funds.
Of course, the too much involvement of American people in the stock market has its own problems, as the famous example of the losses for them in the Wall Street Crash 1929, and with idiotic things like this Gamestop bubble being obviously another symptom of American dysfunction. But at least in the American system, there is affordable housing, while the riskless English property casino has made housing expensive for ordinary people.
Stock market rewards herd behaviours that would be considered a form of stupidity in most other contexts.
It’s not just the hypebeast that is rewarded, but also the early victims of the hypebeast, which are usually those people with unusual sensitivity to hypebeasting (i.e. “fashion victims”).
Note that in a Ponzi Scheme, it’s not just Mr Ponzi who is the beneficiary, but also the earliest “victims” of the Ponzi Scheme. I.e. If you have an unusual susceptibility to being a victim of early fashion trends, then you will likely be not just able to succeed in the stock market, but can become wealthy even from as a victim of Ponzi.
–
It’s normal for skeptical people to laugh about fashion victims. But in the context of activities that reward herding, the trend followers are probably the most successful personalities.
The most obvious example of fashion victims, are the people who queue all night to buy special edition new sneakers, literally looking like an animal stampede outside the Nike shop. Of course these, are one of the world’s safest investments, which are often increasing in value by multiple times in a month. We would probably be richer if we queued for sneakers, than going to the office in the morning.
But the same is seen on a less extreme level with many of the most successful stocks – they are simply the most superficially mass fashionable ones like Apple, Facebook and now Tesla. I remember when I was at university, we were talked in class skeptically about how Facebook seemed to be overvalued and was a fashion stock. Of course, the animal stampede known as a stock market, doesn’t favour the instincts of a rational personality type, and Facebook stocks are predictably more than 5-6 times more than it was then.
This sounds like a promising business model, if true.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought that the short interest was only the shorted shares. And none of it was naked, or at least it didn’t have to be.
The issue is that once you short a stock and borrow it, someone will buy the borrowed stock from you. Nothing stops him from lending it out again, and in theory this could go on forever, enabling a covered short interest of 140 or even 1,000 or 10,000,000%. In practice it’s difficult to reach (let alone go above) 100%, but perhaps it should be limited how much of your stocks you should be allowed to lend out to shorts. Or shorting should not be possible above a certain short interest, say, 30%.
In a normal world BBC Pidgin would be a work of satire. If modernity continues accelerating – there will be a day when I cant leave my house, without permanent and confused smirk on my face. Everything would seem like a satire or parody of normal/past reality.
It’d be hilarious if we had a world war while everyone was distracted by Melvin blowing up or some similar shit. During the July crisis (up until the actual declaration of war) the French papers paid way more attention to some scandal involving some government minister’s wife having shot a newspaper editor over some trivial issue.
Sneakers
It’s all gravy until:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-death-of-zappos-tony-hsieh-a-spiral-of-alcohol-drugs-and-extreme-behavior-11607264719
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/GiVE0eXZKvU/maxresdefault.jpg
Things like BBC Pidgin make me wonder if native Western European languages will survive long term, especially the more localised ones without a large colonial heritage like say Swedish or German.
I mean the only reason third world immigrants speak Swedish and German is because for the moment they are still the native languages of the majority population, and even then many speak them imperfectly and in some cases hardly at all, but it’s inevitable that native Swedes and Germans will be the minority in the not so distant future, what then for their languages?
English and French are in a stronger position as most of the immigrants in Britain and France are from former colonies where there is a tradition of speaking English and French and the use of those languages administratively so those immigrants have some level of cultural attachment to the languages, also English is obviously the de facto global lingua franca so that puts it in an especially strong position and even still English is not immune to things like “BBC Pidgin”.
Yet in the case of Swedish and German, etc, I can’t see much incentive for immigrants to maintain those languages long term when they are the demographic majority. I can’t see that they’d have any sentimental or cultural attachment to them.
I guess ultimately the question comes down to can there be a Sweden and a Germany without native Swedes and Germans?
Well, I don’t know about sneakers, but for concert tickets, people would buy them up and resell for high profits.
I generally agree: nationalism has to be combined with strong social policies for that nation. Otherwise why even bother? A collection of libertarian individuals would need a nation only as entertainment, an emotional crutch, or to obsessively worship their own identities. Nationalism without social policies is nothing, as Trump at the end demonstrated. Trump’s incipient libertarianism, his celebration of business and capitalism of any kind, made him unable to fulfil his promises – the migration issue was deprioritised for cheap labor for business.
But economic justice systems are extremely hard to build. In an atomised society where everyone can be bought, the highest bidders are the ones with most money. 100 to 50 years ago the economic justice thrived because the conditions were so horrible that the natural control by moneyed classes was for 2-3 generations impossible. We are not there yet. Still, the successful countries going forward will embrace their own nation building with a strong social state. The ones stuck in borderless, capitalism-uber-alles nonsense will not thrive. But they are more likely to slowly collapse than to embrace social programs for their own nations. US is unfortunately in that camp. EU, as it is today, too.
I also doubt the current Left will drop its toxic identity politics – for most of them there is their own identity involved or some pathology. Is is a disease based on Third World resentments and Western mental collapse into absurdity. Hard to get rid off.
Identity politics in the US at least is not so much based on “Third World Resentments” as opportunistic politics taking advantage of genuine economic and class based grievances including those of a long standing underclass within the US.
Thus many recent immigrants from the developing world, like China, South East Asia, South Asia, Latin America, Africa don’t get sucked into the identity politics hysteria as much as white liberals with a savior complex and a section of the historic underclass within the US who see this as a means of advancing their cause along with a whole retinue of grifters who see an opportunity to virtue-signal and make money. Identity politics is homegrown – or shared between other countries in the West – and not imported from the “Third World”.
Conversely identity politics in many developing countries – which already exists in various forms – has been boosted and encouraged by the politics of the West thanks to the West’s cultural influence via Corporations, Hollywood, Academia, Media over the rest of the World. So for example, a branch office in a developing country of a Western corporate entity will have a Diversity office with metrics to track various categories as they apply in that country, sensitivity trainings with the latest trends in the West (eg pronouns) being rolled out.
It starts with the great replacement then the great pandemic/lockdown.
Followed by the great crackdown (the so called memewar)
Then the great market restructuring/recession.
Then the great hack.
Then the great reset.
If all this fails to get the plebs in complete order finally there will be the great war.
Smells like Deus Ex Spirit.
Deus Ex girls were a lot less ugly.
I would still worry more about French and British, your working class youngsters speak surprisingly often Caribbean influenced vernacular, even when they still are the majority, what else that is than degradation of your language? Even though Germans have gone liberal like other westerners, there is still vestigial remnants of German national consciousness left among them. As an example its perfectly okay or normal for governmental authorities and media to say that Pakistanis or Jamaicans are British, or in France that their Algerians or Senegalese are French, but in Germany they almost never call their Turks, Albanians or Arabs German. So even under hard circumstances, the German spirit lives on some collective level, same cant be said of French or Britons.
As someone that’s been on wallstreetbets for a few years now, going private (and banning some new members) is something that’s regularly done every few months. What happens is that wallstreetbets makes it into the news for a meme stock like Gamestop and thousands of random redditors come pouring in thinking this is were you find out how to get rich quick.
The mods would cleanse the sub from annoying newbies posting stupid questions and would make it private to stop the inflow. The sub would reopen after the hysteria died down. This time the sub membership went from under 2 million just a week ago to 6.5 million, so we’ll see how many get kicked after the gme squeeze dies.
Correct. This indeed happened but only to those people who bought GME shares using margin (where you contribute to only part of the share cost, the rest being covered by the broker). Any shares bought with 100% cash on robinhood were not affected. Sill, very despicable of robinhood for forcing sales and restricting purchases yesterday and today.
Is this the answer?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Widerstand.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/7d/Ernst_J%C3%BCnger.tiff/lossy-page1-1280px-Ernst_J%C3%BCnger.tiff.jpg
You have his approval.
Top Chinese banker is executed for soliciting $300m in bribes and starting a secret second family while married to ‘loyal wife’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9204601/Former-head-Chinese-state-asset-firm-Lai-Xiaomin-executed.html
His concept of anarch and sovereign individual is too modern and heh, hyperindividualist or libertarian, Jünger is a false prophet, by the way that Ukrainian witch adores him.
Jüngers line of thought is nothing else than egoism dressed in the clothes of tradition. There were other more genuine thinkers among German NazBols or Strasserists, Jünger was just a fellow traveler on the fringes of right.
基于
Junger was among the first NazBols along Niekisch
https://niekischtranslationproject.wordpress.com/tag/ernst-junger-and-national-bolshevism/
This is how you treat corruption.
And this is what Stalin did to purge the Bolshevik’s of the corrupt. And yet you all over here fellate each other over the Tsar LOL
Imagine in RF all the corrupt bureaucrats being lined up and shot in the Red Square and had it televised on national television. That would be a popular policy
Your second sentence reveals your own corruption and thus suitability to be shot as a corrupt.
Jünger was a brilliant creative writer,* and not very clever about politics, and the two things are probably not co-incidental, but often causally interrelated for creative professionals.
Stereotypical attributes which are helpful for, and typical in, the creative writer:
* Strong fantasy life
* Privilege given to subjectivity over objectivity
* Tendency to put events together into exciting narratives that will match emotions they want to create
* Overlap between conscious and unconscious worlds (with symbols, myths, legends, in the latter, intruding into conscious perspectives)
* Naivete and immaturity – ability to remain in the creative world we had in our childhood.
* Lack of skepticism (and don’t allow facts to prevent a good story)
Attributes which are helpful for, and typical in, a good historian or documentary writer:
* Weak fantasy life
* Privilege given to objectivity over subjectivity
* Resistance to matching events into narratives, for the purpose of creative emotions in the reader
* Tries to separate conscious world, from the collective unconscious of symbols, legends, etc.
* Lack of naivete, and generally boring adult persona
* Extremely skeptical, and happy to allow facts to disrupt a good story.
We all know in our childhood, in our schooldays, that there are classmates which provide entertaining stories and are interesting to listen to, and other kids who were boring and rigidly attached to prosaic reality.
When teacher has to go to the bathroom, and returns to see a fight in the classroom, then they will not ask the entertaining storytelling student, but the boring one, what happened.
On the other hand, if you want entertain ourselves, or feel exciting emotions, we will listen to the creative storytelling kid. And most adults are not so different from how we were in our classroom at school, especially creative professionals.
–
*I’ve only read “in steel storms”, but it was persuasive and beautiful enough make a teenager safely in their bed, almost wish to be lying in a trench in the First World War.
Overnight queues outside the Nike shop can be partly people working for sneaker barons, which are stereotypically some 16 year schoolboys. Then they store a lot of the supply in their apartment, while hyping the sneakers for resale online – the beauty of capitalism.
He changed with the age.
Says the guy who’s never been to Russia and is the descendent of Nazi Collaborators.
The point is by most objective measures the USSR was better than Tsarist Russia or even modern RF.
As discussed in another thread, within 30 years of its existence the USSR had wide ranging reforms that were beneficial for most people and had already made an impact on the world positioning itself as a power, rather than a middling power as the RF is now.
You manage to be wrong twice in one sentence. But not as funny as this:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/leviathan-2014/#comment-4407890
Within 30 years of its existence USSR managed to starve about 10 million of its own citizens (1920s + 1930s+ 1940s) and botched a victory against a much-smaller opponent that cost another unnecessary millions of loses. Its victorious peoples would enjoy a much lower standard of living than its defeated opponent and the whole thing would fall apart in 2 generations. Chinese and Western rivals who benefit from a defeated Russia should be grateful for the USSR. Peoples under its rule, not so much.
The almost complete pointlessness of the product is the finishing touch.
I think that your point about China is too simplistic.
For China the existence of USSR was extremely beneficial, during the WW2 Chinese got lots of arms from Soviets, both Nationalists and Communists, there would be no united PRC without the Soviet Union, nor China would had developed nuclear weapons so quickly without Soviet knowhow and help, which only stopped in 1961, if I recall correctly.
In the future when we can see things more dispassionately, people will understand the true contribution of USSR to the world history, which is how crucial the Soviet Union was for the new nations of the developing world. With Soviet help they could truly establish their independence and sever ties with their former colonial masters.
Actually Bashibuzuk Russians are really POC, they are the Grand POC, the godfather POC of the POCs, because they helped other POCs to break their colonial shackles. If such people of borderlands as Anatolian turks and Israelis can be nonwhite, why then not Russians? Its all about branding, where there is will, there is possibilities. And Russia is a borderland, and borderlands are naturally mixed, its time for Russia to reinvent themselves in a Kemalist sense, but now in a reverse Kemalist sense, if that makes sense. Okay this is half irony, but theres some truth in it, as a political weapon against American liberals, but maybe I have drank too much.
LOL. This is false. This is based on data by Robert Conquest who is known to be associated with the CIA and frequently writes disinformation. He also worked in the Foreign Office, which also ran disinformation campaigns, much like the NED in modern times.
Also, how exactly is famine in the 1920’s and 1940’s the Communists fault when two wars were just ended and everything had been destroyed?
“who had previously published several books on communism at the request of the CIA”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Conquest
You mean they won a war against an opponent that had all of Europe feeding them troops, industry and resources and as I’ve shown you before, 80% of troops where on the Eastern Front, so the Soviets took the brunt of this offensive and still came out on top.
You know nothing of Soviet history. I suggest you’d stay away from it, as commenting on it makes you look stupid.
Depends on how you define ‘standard of living’. Everyone got free healthcare, housing and world class education and had everything they needed to live a good life. This is in stark contrast to both the Tsarist times, modern Russia where 20 million people live below the poverty line and even the USA where 20% of its population is in poverty.
Finally, its hilarious you propound to speak authoritatively when you (until I showed you) did not know that China does Five Year Plans haha, or think that Mao caused famines in China when they were the result of failed KMT policies that echoed many years later.
http://su90.ru/
You where saying? On most indices the USSR did shockingly well.
Also, I suggest you read Isayev and Drabkin. They wrote alot about the war and famine and you’ll find out what feats of organization the Soviet leadership had to conduct to see the war through and win.
What a horrible ad, and what a horrible vodka. Same with the Absolut. Nordics have Brännvin, which is better than their Vodka, though it often has little bit less alcohol content than vodka. Some people say that brännvin and vodka are the same, but to me it seems that the more traditional and older brands are always brännvins, and newer ones are vodkas, I mean the hard liquors that are produced in Nordic countries.
Think by the way how hard hangovers are for Muslims? Of course they have a desire to drink from time to time, but when they drink, and when they get hangover, theres a religious dimension to it.
I used to like the Nemiroff brand of “Honey Pepper”. For export now, they export something less natural and chemically tasting without the little red pepper at the bottom of the bottle. Stolichnaya used to make the best Pertsovka of all, and they stopped making it about 20 years ago. You’re right that the older brands are always better. Do you know of any good recipes for making pertsovka brand vodkas, perhaps with a little honey infusion?
Oh yes I remember that Nemiroff, it was quite good, its been years when I last drank it. Ive never made alcohol myself. I dont see reason, theres no prohibition, thankfullt we dont live in Saudi Arabia.
Should have spared him for high tfr.
How does that contradict AP’s point? Without the USSR, China would indeed be worse off. It might not even own Dongbei.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/Stielers_Handatlas_1891_62_NE.jpg
Clearly the USSR was good for Chinese, but it does not follow it was good for Russians.
How did that benefit Russians? Why should Russians give a shit about the “developing world”?
First good point here. Russia massively overpaid for that brand, but it might as well exploit it now.
One of the vilest concoctions I have ever had the displeasure of degustating.
This link shows USSR production in almost every category and it outproduced the USA in many metrics, from wheat production, to potato prdocution, to washing machines. In fact those “inept sovoks” outproduced the RF (theres also a comparison with RF too) in almost every metric thats relevant.
You like graphs and tables, theres plenty for your viewing pleasure.
http://su90.ru/
The point is this – for some reason you are all obsessed over one part of soviet history that has many lies currently surrounding it (many interested parties exist in propogating them) and you guys keep repeating them like parrots, believing them to be true.
If we are going to talk abt the famine, lets talk about how many people the government of the RF killed or forced to flee due to their policies and how it still cant produce anything of note. I guarentee you, the population lost snd the demographic decline that happened in the last 30 years is about the same that was lost during WW2.
Its funny, the link above also present data from Tsarist Russia, and Tsarist Russia was behind Europe in almost every metric (except wheat production) and here you are building a loony narratives about how “the evil sovoks stopped russias progress” lol
The only Tsar’s mistake was not publicly executing sovoks like you.
LOL. Read the link I posted. USSR was objectively better than Tsarist Russia by every measure. It also surpassed the RF in many measures too – and the level of worldwide technological development was lower. LOL. It’s not even a contest. Take infant deaths (Russian Empire 23,7* (1911)), that was higher by almost 2.5 than in the USA in the same period (10). The life expectancy in Imperial Russia was 35 whereas in the USA it was about 50. Stop masturbating to the Tsar – Russia was NOT better off under the Tsar as many of you here believe.
http://ricw.ru/
If you don’t support the USSR, you are a traitor to your motherland (assuming you aren’t some ukrop).
Modern RF has the GDP of Guangdong Province. That wasn’t the case for the USSR
My casual drink is the simple and unoriginal rhum:
https://rondiplomatico.com/
Neat.
And for more special occasions:
https://www.calvados-dupont.com/en/calvados-hors-age.htm
https://www.bienmanger.com/2F23855_Bas_Armagnac_Hors_Age.html
https://www.thewhiskyexchange.com/p/19992/eagle-rare-10-year-old
https://whiskeyreviewer.com/2015/05/talisker-10-year-old-scotch-review_052015/
I don’t drink Vodka except when offered.
And although I am fortunate enough to have an ex-barmaid as wife, I don’t really like cocktails.
Okay time to pour myself a couple Oz of something good.
The “time would have stopped in 1917 if not for the Bolsheviks” fallacy is one of the more moronic ones even in this genre.
Not wasting time on this.
It’s not a fallacy. It’s a common statement said by you, bashibuzuk and others.
Fact of the matter is – the link that I posted (and the purpose of posting it) was to disprove the claim that the ‘sovoks’ where ‘inept’ when they were ahead of the RF (even the RFSR was ahead in terms of the amount of grad students than the RF for example) in almost every measure.
Here’s another: Russian is currently producing about 35k patents per year, when in the late 80’s it was producing more than 80k per year.
http://su90.ru/research.html
You are someone who claims to take a ‘stats’/’fact’ based approach to the entire conversation. I am presenting stats and facts. And yet all I see is “I’m not wasting time on this”.
So much for being about “facts”, eh Anatoly? Or am I wrong?
Given this – everytime you use the word ‘sovok’ from hereon out demonstrates that you have a personal bias towards the USSR and it has nothing to do with percieved ‘soviet ineptness’ as you claim.
Fact is USSR purposefully starving its own population to increase exports and extract gold and prerevolutionary currency through Torgsin. Read the link I provided in my comment above and weep.
Even in the article you presented, the author makes the statement that she does not believe the USSR intentionally starved the population. In fact, she said it was caused by droughts and therefore low crop yields between 1931-1932. She said she disagrees with the people who claim it was intentional.
From your link:
” Хотя у мнения, что голод 1932–1933 годов был организован сознательно, чтобы сокрушить сопротивление крестьян или национализм украинцев…я придерживаюсь другой точки зрения. Голод не был намеренным геноцидом крестьян или людей определенной национальности.
The rate of taxes by the government were low in that period (read the link I posted) and it needed money from industrialization, Torgsin was one of many methods of achieving that. However, the impact of Torgsin is VASTLY overstated. Sure it happened, but not at the scale the author claims.
Also, I find it strange how the USSR government is blamed for taxing its citizens, when the US government for example was taxing its own citizens in the midst of the Great Depression and providing no relief.
Reread your own link – you clearly didn’t read it carefully LOL
Also, that’s one part of Soviet history. why are you making a judgement of the soviet epoch on one part of history – that makes no sense.
I don’t need to understanding anything more about Bolcheviks to know that they were an evil cult.
https://sputnikipogrom.com/history/39422/bolsheviki-i-ugolovniki/
It’s funny how you don’t see the irony of the article – that the thieves are the ones currently in power and are putting Russia’s production level and QoL below that of Vietnam (in many cases).
Guangdong province has the same GDP as all of RF. The same Guangdong that is beholden to the CCP that the ‘evil’ Bolshevik’s put into power.
Hilarious
I think we’ve established you are an unscientific shill
Arguably helped China, not the people of the USSR.
But here we have the fallacy that China would have been stuck in time if not for the Communists. Taiwan was a China that was not under Communists. It is more realistic to assume that a Commie-less China would be somewhat like a giant Taiwan than to assume that a Commie-less China would be eternally in ~1950.
This helped the colonial powers, because the separation probably made a flood of denizens from those lands less intense. The socialist governments OTOH brought misery to their peoples. The disappearance of Soviet-supported governments has seen dramatic improvement in wealth and health.
Zimbabwe did great under Mugabe, the Marxist ally of Soviets and Red China. Ethiopia under the Soviet Derg suffered a famine that killed about a million people.
I guess, as in the case of Russia – those for whom it was advantageous to see a bunch of starved and dead Ethiopians benefited from Soviet influence. Maybe if all of sub-Saharan Africa were a giant Stalinist USSR there would never be a population boom on that continent – bad for Africans, but white racists could rejoice. Just as Russophobes’ world was much better thanks to Russia being under the Soviets.
But whatever the merits or not of Soviet influence, as AK pointed out – this stuff didn’t help the Soviet people.
Those who rule today’s Russia are the toxic byproduct of the Soviet system. Without Bolchevik USSR there would be Putin’s Russia. Putin is a Sovok.
No kidding. It was probably objectively better than medieval England on every measure. Certainly in the case of electrification and literacy. I’ll bet there were more cars per capita in the USSR than in the USA..in 1910.
No it’s not. If you knew anything about Robert Conquest you would know that he did not have access to archival data and inflated the numbers; his estimate would be double or more than what I provided.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1946%E2%80%9347
“For example, during the crisis, the USSR continued with export obligations under the fourth five-year plan,[1] with the majority of it going to the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia to consolidate the new Eastern Bloc.”
Thanks for pointing out that not only was this much-smaller nation also busy occupying most of Europe, it was only devoting 80% of its forces against the huge USSR. And yet the incompetent Soviets still managed to allow this much smaller nation, not using 1/5 of its forces, occupying tens of millions of enemies, to kill almost 30 million of its citizens.
Americans in poverty are richer than Soviet “middle class” people were, materially.
In 1980 Soviet life expectancy for Soviets was 67.57. In that same year for African-Americans it was 68. For white people it was 74.4.
How many famines did KMT-dominated Taiwan experience?
And yet without Sovok there was still widespread corruption in Imperial Russia and Russia was way behind the rest of Europe/America in every metric (as I have shown in the links I provided above). So that is a moot point.
Yes it is. Most data on the ‘starvations’ and ‘holodomor’ are based on Robert Conquests books. And his estimations are about 4x higher than the actual numbers.
Easy. Spain was already far ahead in industrailization than Russia at the time and had more access to imports Soviet Russia. Also the growing climate is superior.
False. I’ve already explained to you numerous times that Civil war was inevitable and would have happened regardless of the Bolshevik’s (in fact they were caught unawares).
Next, every historian unanimously agrees that the Soviets were far more competent than German high command. And as I’ve explained to you before – the USSR was facing the combined industrial and military might of all of Europe, not just Germany.
LOL. It seems you missed the most important part of the entire article:
“The conditions were caused by drought, the effects of which were exacerbated by the devastation caused by World War II.”
“With the war, there was a significant decrease in the number of able-bodied men in the rural population…”
Right the Communists must have been magical shamans who performed evil rituals to prevent rain from happening. Is that what you are saying?
Also, if the Communists were used to starving their own populations, why then did they “The Soviet government with its grain reserves provided relief to rural areas and appealed to the United Nations for relief”
Providing relief to starving population and appealing to the UN for relief is NOT the action of a government used to starving their own people.
Damn you got a thick skull. I’ve told you before, Germany had 80% of its forces on the Eastern Front, together with its Italian and Romanian Allies. And was not facing the entire might of the USSR due to its reserves in the Far East guarding against a possible Japanese invasion.
Total: 3,767,000 in the east (80% of the German Army) (Not including the Romanians or Italians)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II)
By what measure?
Дедвейт морского торгового флота под национальным флагом, млн. т
Deadweight of the merchant marine fleet under the national flag, million tonnes (USSR vs USA) USSR 29,2 USA 23
In 1990, the USSR produced 96 Radios/100 families vs
France 98
Germany 84
Italy 92
Netherlands 97
UK 90
Sweden 93
In 1990, the USSR produced 75 washing machines/100 families vs
USA 76
In 1985, the USSR produced 97 televisions/100 families vs
USA 93 (1987)
http://su90.ru/
http://su90.ru/good.html
Clearly you’re wrong again
And the USSR had the lowest cancer rates in Europe too
http://su90.ru/health.html
It was famine after famine under the KMT in mainland China.
KMT took power in 1912 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_China_(1912%E2%80%931949))
Here is a list of famines under their rule:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China
the KMT caused 4 famines with more than 10 million deaths.
There was only one famine when the Communists took power (that can be attributed to KMT policies – mainly lack of food stores, total destruction of agricultural production, banditry, etc) and after that they put an end to them. Seems like the Communists where far more able than the KMT.
LOL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%9333#Estimation_of_the_loss_of_life
Davies and Wheatcroft, and Russian Duma, did not use Conquest as a source.
The only time you are right is when you agree with me. I wrote ” his estimate would be double or more than what I provided..” But wiki shows his figures were close to double the real ones.
Spain and Russia were at a comparable level of industrialization.
Spain has arid conditions for agriculture while Russia and Ukraine have black Earth.
According to the same historians that taught you that Russians were defeated at Gallipoli?
The same historians that taught you that Russians were defeated at Gallipoli?
Translation: much-smaller Germany was busy occupying most of Europe in order to extract industrial production, and still managed to kill almost 30 millions Soviets before it was barely defeated.
Just think – if Germany had invaded with 90% rather than 80% of its military, Soviets would have lost. Epic incompetence.
You also forget that the Soviets were getting the products of America’s industrial might, they weren’t alone either.
Yes, and despite this drought they sent grain to the Germans while a million Soviets starved to death. The Soviets didn’t cause the drought, they caused the deaths of Soviets. While they were feeding Germans.
Romanians switched sides. Soviets received massive US help.
Germany fighting with British and Americans in the West was much more significant than Soviets having a few reserves against the Japanese in the East.
Better to compare consumption not production to see how people lived.
From your link:
http://su90.ru/good.html
1982, thus before perestroika started to further impoverish the USSR:
Retail sale of some durable goods in the USSR and the USA in 1982 according to the CIA [S.66], million pieces
Name USSR USA Note
Cars 1.4 8 For USSR – new and used (new – 80%), for USA – only new
TV sets 7 16.4 For the USA – production
Radios 6 44.1 For the USA – production
Refrig. 4.6 4.4 For the USA – factory sales
Wash 3.7 6.4 For the USA – factory sales
Vacuums 2.9 7.6 For the USA – factory sales
Tape recorders 3.2 28.9 For the USA – factory sales
The reason refrigerators were bought less per capita in the USA is because they had been around longer so fewer people wanted new ones.
Telephones per capita, mid 1980s:
http://su90.ru/go4.jpg
USSR closer to Africa.
Per capita car ownership, 1987:
http://su90.ru/go1.jpg
Cancer is more common in elderly populations. Low life expectancy will produce lower rates of cancer, as it produces lower rates of Alzheimer’s disease. Soviets were dying before more of them could get cancer.
You are too dumb to realize that you are advertising Soviet low life expectancy.
But from your link we see higher rates of infectious diseases such as TB and Hepatitis.
Occurring decades earlier, total death toll perhaps 6 million (1942 was not after a war but literally during a war).
Commies starved to death 15-55 million.
No starvation in Taiwan.
You don’t know basic dates. Communists took over China by 1950. They completed its first 5-year plan in 1957.
They starved to death 15-55 million Chinese in 1959-1961.
Ordinary people take out loans to buy a house and spend decades repaying it, such folk do not borrow huge sums in order to invest in stocks in any country that I am aware of. There are banks massively leveraging loans to speculators, who are getting extremely cheap money. This is not a recipe for a safe investment, unless you are investing in China rather than America.
Soviet Union (and most of the Warsaw Pact) did a respectable job in raising life expectancy after WW2 up until the 70s. In 1970 Russia+Ukraine+Belarus had basically Western level life expectancy. But then it stagnated for 20 years while Western life expectancy continued increasing on good pace.
I didnt try to contradict him, he has his points, I just thought that his small side argument about China was too narrow and simplistic. China benefited more from Soviet strength than weakness.
Thats true, there was little benefit for Russians, but theres still surprisingly much good will towards the Russia, because of the Soviets, in the developing world, I believe that when developing countries continue rise(mainly in Asia), their soft power and view of history will become more dominant, educated and even many common Indians, Vietnamese and Chinese all know how much they are in debt of gratitude towards the Russia. In the third world there is no bitterness towards Russia, like in Anglo countries.
What is past, is past, we have little choice with the past, but we can always try to benefit from it, or we can just cry and whine about it, which to me seems pointless.
Eh, thanks? Thats precisely what I meant. Russia has an excellent case, both as a victim and as a hero. As a victim of economic exploitation by the west and as a hero of the colonial struggle.
I had and have no interest to join to your debate with Xi, Im more on your side in regards with the Soviet legacy for the people of Russia, but I tried to be impartial, because I also understand Xis viewpoint and have some sympathy for it, to me view of past should be holistic, and not good-evil dualistic, societies, and the causes which have led to their existence, are more complex than individual human beings, if you just deny something completely, then you become rootless.
But you cant understand how angry this argument makes me, how much I want to insult you now. How immense levels of historical illiteracy in regards of China you are showing now. But I try to be civil, heres few points why you are in this question decisively and utterly wrong.
-Taiwan was for 50 years a colony, and not just any colony, but a model colony under Japan
-Taiwan had same educational system as Japan, for 50 fucking years!
-Taiwan suffered from WW2, but on a smaller scale than heartland of China, the Central Plain, or Japan proper from the allied bombing
-Nationalist regime moved all their gold reserves and treasuries to Taiwan
-Many of those who escaped to Taiwan were businessmen and industrialists, highly skilled and talented people, or top cadres of Kuomintang
-Communists were before 1945 a minor power in China, ruling just a minor and poor area in Northern China in the borderlands of China proper or Shaanxi and and Inner Mongolia. Only after Stalin conquered Manchuria, they got hold of industrial and urban areas.
-Kuomingtang, when they were ruling Mainland, were notorious of their corruption and they were highly fragmented, most of the country was not under a direct control of Chiang Kai Shek, but under warlords who were loosely affiliated with the Nationalist regime, Communists never delegated power in such way.
-Tibet was practically independent
-Western areas like Xinjiang and Qinghai and such mostly Han areas like Gansu were under Muslim warlords, though they were nominally under Kuomintang, in practice they were kings or tyrants in their lands.
-Huge swathes of countryside were not even under control of Kuomintang affiliated warlords, but controlled by bandits and vagabonds.
Okay now Im not angry anymore. Soviet anti-imperialism forced Americans to be more anti-imperialist and anti-colonial, so that they would not lose the hearts and minds of developing world. I dont accept any arguments about Africa, I dont care about Sub-Saharan Africa. Chinas, Vietnams, Indias, Syrias and North Koreas governments or political systens are still standing, I have heard only good from Latin Americans about Russia, there Soviets have an excellent image, especially when contrasted to USA which supported economically rightist dictatorships there.
Any way this is a horrible argument, “the disappearance of Soviet-supported governments has seen dramatic improvement in wealth and health,” just horrible. You as an Ukrainian should understand that people dont always choose the most economically optimal choice, but what feels right, even if that “right” choice brings them hardships.
Sub-Saharan Africa was and is a ****hole, no matter were they under a western supported dictator or under a Soviet supported dictator. Only help what would really help them, is a paternalistic colonism, either direct or economic, what China is doing now, they give resources and China builds infrastructure.
Mass immigration to the west started precisely because western former imperialistic powers wanted to keep their connections with their former colonies, without Soviet Union, they would have had less such pressure, though another reason was the post war boom and lack of manpower.
Sorry for grammar mistakes, Im in hurry and I tried to write as quickly as I could.
Some good commentary, sir, with one disagreement. Housing IS often useful as an investment in most US urban and suburban areas, and housing is DEFINITELY NOT “very cheap” relative to post-tax income in many US metro areas. This includes the metro areas where a large percentage of our people attempt to live:
Los Angeles, where my wife and I live
San Francisco
New York / Northern New Jersey / Connecticut, in all of which we have relatives and friends
DC / NoVa (“Northern Virginia”) / Maryland
Chicago
Even smaller metro areas like Salt Lake City, Utah and the farther suburbs / “ex-urbs” of Reno, Nevada are becoming expensive relative to incomes, partly because more people are fleeing bigger cities due to the officially permitted violence and disorder and the increasingly alien balkanized unfriendly culture. It is getting difficult to get by, and for many families pretty scary — not just low-income families but middle to upper-middle-income families like ours.
It’s past time to take down the big banks and bigtime landlords and spend all this borrowed and invented money directly on affordable housing and medical/dental care for the American people, useful transit, and durable infrastructure, rather than wars, occupations, corporate and bank subsidies and privileges, and government bureaucracy.
https://i.redd.it/zl9a1louni921.jpg
Once life expectancy numbers get high, changes differences become smaller. But:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_past_life_expectancy
In Czechoslovakia life expectancy was higher than in neighboring Austria from 1950 (thus probably before that time also, therefore it’s a pre-Communist phenomenon) up through 1960-1965 but lower in 1970-1975. It actually decreased over time.
In terms of quality of life, GDP per capita PPP Eastern Europe, Portugal and Spain were tied in 1950, but by 1970 Spain and Portugal had tripled but Eastern Europe had only doubled:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_past_life_expectancy
So from the same low base Portugal and Spain caught up a little with wealthy Western Europe, while Eastern Europe fell further behind. During this time, Spain and Portugal also surpassed Eastern Europe’s life expectancy.
So the people of Eastern Europe would have been better off under right-wing authoritarian governments as in Spain or Portugal (the type of governments that all of them other than Czechoslovakia actually had before World War II), than under the Communist governments that were forced upon them.
Eastern Europe was catching up in terms of life expectancy between 1945 to 1970. Czechia is the exception which already had high life expectancy. It would’ve happened without communism so I’m not really trying to make pro-communism point but Warsaw Pact countries did do respectably well in terms of increasing life expectancy up until about 1970.
Wiki shows about 3-4x….
“Soviet historian, professor Ronald Grigor Suny of the University of Michigan, heavily criticises Conquest’s extraordinarily high death tolls, noting that Conquest’s estimation for famine deaths is almost quadruple”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Conquest
Wrong again!
No the weren’t. Spain was ahead. Plus Spain was (and still is) a net food importer and the USSR was MOSTLY self sufficient.
Take a look at these stats, that are blamed on the ‘evil commies’. The tsarist government was so inept that Russia had one of the highest death tolls in Europe from the War and it started forceful grain and horse requisition (that again is blamed on Stalin but not on the Tsar)
It doesn’t let me copy paste from the pdf (and I don’t know how to insert pictures in this forum) – so read section 7.4
https://imgur.com/LLfxdvg
In fact the grain and horse requisition by the Tsar was so bad that even the strongest agricultural sectors where affected:
https://imgur.com/fq2pGKA
https://imgur.com/JhySZd3
So with that said, thanks to the incompetence and maliciousness of the Tsar, a famine started that the young Soviet Government had to deal with leading to it being blamed for being ‘incompetent commies’ that started a famine
https://imgur.com/iEDAjhy
Next, as we see here Russia had significantly fallen behind the rest of europe in industry and only began to rapidly recover when the ‘sovoks’ took power.
https://imgur.com/dNzOebM
In basically every category the incompetence of the Tsar caused the Soviets to inherit a country in ruins with the USA being significantly ahead in every measure.
How could the Soviets have been incompetent or a negative for Russia when they started with this:
https://imgur.com/ZSbwQ2d
And ended with this in 1990 (USSR vs USA):
https://imgur.com/a/Kfkai8n
The result of Tsarist requisition policies led to the fall of exports and inflation of currency by the time the USSR took over. The famine of the 1920’s can be laid at the feet of the Tsarist government.
https://imgur.com/UqDstDC
http://su90.ru/pwar.pdf
The evil ‘sovoks’ were able to return to prewar levels of industrialization only by 1926, 4 years after the USSR was founded. If it returned to only pre-war levels of GDP, it was still behind Europe even during Tsarist times. Russia was even behind Japan in 1929.
https://imgur.com/cTYUa5F
It needed to catch up
https://imgur.com/7ZNZOiT
Even in the 30’s – before the war – the West restricted Soviet gold export, severly limiting their ability to get cash for industrialization:
https://imgur.com/hUHW53D
This was especially the case post-war too.
In the first two five-year plans many factories that still exist (or got closed by the incompetence of the RF) were produced:
https://imgur.com/8XmjF3G
In fact the ‘sovoks’ rebuilt most of what was lost during the imperial era and added more too:
https://imgur.com/QQnBfha
In almost every sector of agricultural production, Soviet collectivization yielded greater gains than the greatest production of imperial russia in 1913:
https://imgur.com/j0EKzK4
And that’s with fewer people working in agriculture than in Tsarist times:
https://imgur.com/bVSd56p
Now we can get to a discussion of what happened to the USSR post-WW2 and why Spain did not suffer a post-war famine and the USSR did.
All data will be derived from here:
http://su90.ru/pwar2.pdf
WW2 caused a loss of about 30% of total wealth of the nation whereas in Europe it was 1000 cities.
http://su90.ru/ind25.pdf
This explains why the USSR had some deficits in the production of consumer goods, but on the whole it did well:
https://imgur.com/undefined
What you claim is ‘sovok’ incompetence in dealing with the Germans which resulted in many losses was partially because of executions of civilian populations such as children:
https://imgur.com/3etKJQu
https://imgur.com/d03MnbH
The reason why Spain did not suffer the same hunger after the war(as was stated in the Wikipedia link you posted as well as all the above data) indicates that it had more access to food imports (which the USSR did not have as it was limited by Western countries), it did not lose most of its male workforce in the war and its rural areas was not populated by children and women. Also, it did not suffer any droughts and is a net food importer (though under Franco Spain did have a famine)
LOL that was a stupid mistake on my part but I already showed you above and in previous posts that war was inevitable due to the utter incompetence of the tsar (and even sources say so). I’m right again it seems. Why do you keep arguing when you can’t win?
If you go through my history, I provide links and sources for the statement that war was inevitable regardless of what the Tsar did. Russia joining the war in 1914 was the kiss of death for Imperial Russia. It didn’t matter if the Bolshevik’s won, because the Petrograd Soviet would still have replaced the provisional government (as it had more support amongst the village soviets) and another revolutionary group would have taken over.
And its not even me saying that the Tsar was worthless, the sources say it too:
https://imgur.com/a/3qgC7Bi
I’ve already addressed this in previous posts. Go through them and come back to me when you have. You’re just being a wehraboo that masturbates to post-WW2 Nazi/American propaganda.
See even sources support my statement that all of Europe was working for Germany, and Germany did not need to feed or house them or even pay them meaning that it could focus its entire effort on war! This was not the case for the USSR as US Land Lease was not significant to feed the entire population of the USSR. You were wrong again:
https://imgur.com/a/ms8f29w
https://imgur.com/b4KK4XH/img>
Despite this drought, the Soviet Union had international obligations (if you read the link you posted) that it could not break and the amount of grain sent to Germany was not a significant amount that it would have helped alleviate shortages. Your argument would have made sense if they did NOT provide relief to the population because they were sending it all to Germany, but that wasn’t the case. Again from your link (as you seem to be stupid unless you have the quote right in front of you):
“The Soviet government with its grain reserves provided relief to rural areas and appealed to the United Nations for relief”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1946%E2%80%9347
“Romania switched sides on 24 August 1944”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romania_in_World_War_II#:~:text=Like%20Finland%2C%20Romania%20had%20to,of%20all%20the%20United%20Nations%22.
LOL Romania switched sides in 1944, less than a year of the War remained. It switching sides was irrelevant to the course of the war. What mattered is that in the beginning of the war, Romanian troops where on Germans side making it so that more than >85% of axis forces where on the Eastern Front.
The amount of reserves the USSR had in the East against Japan was equivalent to the number of reserves the Germans had in the West to defend against American and British invasion.
Americans could barely do a successful D-Day landing and win on the western front against 15% of the total Wehrmacht (which was all recently conscripted boys not the crack troops seen in the East).
15% of German forces where in the East and that was all recent conscripts. These conscripts would have made no difference to the outcome of the war, considering that in most offensives (at the beginning of the war) the Germans had numerical superiority.
So? Tsarist Russia was far more behind the USA. So is RF in terms of consumption and production. What is your point?
The USSR ate better (and had more calories) than all of Europe and USA:
https://imgur.com/WD0vd3J
And they had better quality food.
In fact people in the late 80’s ate more meat than people in the RF do now:
https://imgur.com/aLGR6NN
And the crimes rates of the USSR where some of the lowest in the world whereas in the USA they where some of the highest:
https://imgur.com/undefined
So “QoL” is not just measured in the amount of cars or jeans someone wears lol. And this is definitely better than the crime rates in the RF currently.
Sounds like a bunch of excuses. Other posters above explained that the KMT was corrupt to the core and caused numerous famines.
And no, the commies did not cause 50 million deaths LOL. It was mostly from multiple natural catastrophes (it even says it in the link i posted) like typhoons, locusts, drought, etc. Under Mao, the first Chinese grain reserves were established and helped significantly alleviate hunger. These did not exist under the KMT.
For some reason some images did not appear – a quick edit:
https://imgur.com/obeyGym
https://imgur.com/a/lIbYeBV
https://imgur.com/a/5JzMiZW
PS: A quick addition. If the WW2 never happened the levels of consumer production in 1940 outweighed military production. The USSR would have looked like modern China in terms of GDP/production if it never had to deal with either WW2 and the Cold War – as we can see that the WW2 trend continued. It is safe to assume that the same trend would have continued if no WW2 occurred.
So Ronald Suny agrees with my original statement but the article about the Soviet famine provides summary by others with les than twice exaggeration by conquest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%9333#Estimation_of_the_loss_of_life
The 2004 book The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–33 by R.W. Davies and S.G. Wheatcroft, gives an estimate of 5.5 to 6.5 million deaths.[50]
Encyclopædia Britannica estimates that 6 to 8 million people died from hunger in the Soviet Union during this period, of whom 4 to 5 million were Ukrainians.[51] According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, “Some 4 to 5 million died in Ukraine, and another 2 to 3 million in the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga area.”[52]
Robert Conquest estimated at least 7 million peasants’ deaths from hunger in the European part of the Soviet Union in 1932–33 (5 million in Ukraine, 1 million in the North Caucasus, and 1 million elsewhere), and an additional 1 million deaths from hunger as a result of collectivization in Kazakh ASSR.[53]
Another study, by Michael Ellman using data given by Davies and Wheatcroft, estimates “‘about eight and a half million’ victims of famine and repression”, combined, in the period 1930–33.[33]
In his 2010 book Stalin’s Genocides, Norman Naimark estimates that 3 to 5 million Ukrainians died in the famine.[18]
In 2008, Russian state Duma issued a statement about the famine, stating that within territories of Povolzhe, Central Black Earth Region, Northern Caucasus, Ural, Crimea, Western Siberia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus the estimated death toll is about 7 million people.[54]
::::::::::::::::::::
So you were wrong when you stated I was using Conquest as a source.
And yet Commies starved 2 million of their people in the 1920s, 7 million in the 1930s (according to Russian Duma), and another million or so in the 1940s. Spain didn’t starve any significant numbers.
War death toll was much worse under Communists.
As for forced grain requisition, millions were not starved to death due to this requisition under the Tsars. Unlike under the Communists.
The worst recent famine was under the Tsars in 1891-1892. 375,000-500,000 people starved the death.
In comparison, under the Soviets 9who were in a modern more industrialized time):
2 million dead 1921-1922
7 million 1932-1933
1 million 1946-1947
1921 famine began about 4 years after the Tsar was deposed, it cannot be blamed on his government.
The only time you are ever right in your life is when you agree with me.
In 1946 it sent aid all over Eastern Europe while a million of its own people starved to death.
The numbers I provided was consumption though. It indicated the percentage of families that had TV’s, Radios, Washing machines, watches, etc. They were equal to USA in most metrics.
Yes, Tsarist Russia was behind TV consumption in 1917. LOL.
You make the fallacy of assuming Tsarist Russia would have always been in 1917.
They ate more calories from poor foods, but consumed 1/6 of the cars. 1/2 the TVs, 1/6 the radios, 1/2 vacuums, etc. This pattern is true of consumer goods in general. Soviets also had much less living space per person despite living in a huge land.
As I wrote, middle class Soviets lived materially worse than American poor people like inner city blacks.
Sure, all just happened to occur under Mao, so many more people died in his one famine than in numerous other previous famines combined. How “unlucky.”
Don’t lie. Your original statement was that Robert Conquest overestimated his numbers by 2x when in reality it was by 4x. Wrong again!
https://imgur.com/a/9qNs8Oi
Wrong again! It was 2 million deaths over the entire course of the famine.
LOL yes they were. I showed you that already in the previous post. But I’ll show you again since you seem dense.
https://imgur.com/a/FINznP1
You seem unable to read in Russian, so i’ll translate briefly: millions of Russians died due to Tsarist policies from hunger and disease. And in 1914 a Revolution became inevitable (Oh look I’m right again!)
https://imgur.com/a/QFXJTcl
Most farms ended up with about half of their workforce missing
https://imgur.com/a/0VdjQvs
Tsarist grain requisitions left millions to starve. And that it was the Tsarist government that was worse in terms of grain requisition than the Bolshevik’s ever where.
(direct Translation).
https://imgur.com/a/t4KcKTU
Tsarist requisition policies where leading to catastrophe amongst the peasant population.
This link describes the living conditions and constant hunger amongst peasants:
http://ricw.ru/riul.pdf
https://imgur.com/a/NrDWmPV
“In Imperial Russia Peasants have no food at all. They are not subsisting. They are dying”
Everything literally indicates you are wrong LOL
Yes it can. It’s literally in the screenshot I posted in my previous post. 1921 was when the Soviet Union was formed and the Soviet govenrment consolidated power. Before that it was either under Tsarist or Provisional government. So yes it can be laid at the feet of the Tsarist government. It’s not even me saying that its the source.
LOL but you are always wrong as I keep showing you. So why would I want to agree with someone who is always wrong?
That’s literally a direct quote. Not even me saying it. Take it up with the author.
https://imgur.com/a/aYnU2ir
LOL you’re moving the goal posts. You said it was Germany, now you’re saying all of Eastern Europe. Which is it?
No you idiot LOL. Tsarist Russia was behind the USA in every relevant metric at the time. And judging by the fact that it was way behind the rest of Europe in industrialization (as I have shown you) it would have remained far behind based on the rates of development.
You make the fallacy in assuming that Tsarist Russia in 1913 (when it was already behind everyone in every metric) would have magically caught up and surpassed Europe.
LOL. From my screenshot i posted in previous posts it says you’re wrong and that they ate better and had more nutritious food.
That’s your assumption. I offered actual numbers.
Yes it coincided with Mao’s regieme. It was rather unlucky. I’m glad you agree.
That’s correct, ofc, but OTOH it’s far from clear that China wouldn’t have gone Communist in the absence of the USSR.
Otherwise agreed, great points on Africa.
It’s actually somewhat worse since although Germany was indeed using 80% of army manpower on the USSR, it was also only using half the Luftwaffe, only a small percentage of the navy, and something like 30-40% of its gross industrial production. I doubt upping manpower to 90% from 75-80% would have been critical, but if the war industries had been allowed to focus exclusively on the Eastern Front, there would have been no doubt about the outcome.
Essentially, what happened after 1965 is that:
Hence, the post-1965 divergence just after many of them had finished converging.
You got it completely backwards, without Soviet Union its likely that Nationalists would never gained control over China, but CCP would be impossibility without Soviets.
I need to tell you guys one of the most important stories of the 20th century.
In the beginning of the 1920s China was completely without working central authority, divided between warlords and cliques. Soviets and Kuomintang made an alliance, which began in 1921, Soviets armed Kuomintangs army and educated Nationalist military officers in the legendary Whampoa academy, which was established in the 1924. In that time Nationalists controlled only some southern regions, their main base was Canton, by the way many officers of the top military leadership of CCP and Kuomintang were educated in Whampoa. Even Ho Chi Minh studied there. With Soviet support Nationalists started their Northern Expedition in which they beat the Beiyang government who were in control of North Central China, Beijing and Nanjing, so the most important part of the China later Chiang Kai Shek started to suspect Commies and cut relations with the Soviet Union and co operation with the CCP, but it was too late, Whampoa was fully infiltrated by the Communists, there were many officers in the Nationalist Army who were agents of the CCP.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun%E2%80%93Joffe_Manifesto
Oh I should add that Nationalist army was packed with Soviet advisers, men like Blyukher and Borodin, and countless others.
I dunno where you are getting your data from, because as I have shown above, Germany had all of Europe working to feed it and clothe it. Wherever you are getting this info from, it is wrong. Not only factually but logically. 85% of German forces didn’t just include ground forces, but aviation, and tanks. Like LOL karlin, way to be biased. And of course most of the Greman fleet was not directly attacking the USSR as it was mainly a landlocked power, so attacking the USSR with its fleet would make no sense.
Futthermore, if we’re going to shit on the “commies” because more deaths occurred during WW2 than during WW1 in Russia, why aren’t we shitting on the Germans for more deaths as well. I thought only commies have alot of deaths and not the superior capitalist aryans…..
No, a lot of German aviation was tied up fighting the American and British air forces and bombers.
I hope you are starting to realize that just as Nazis were bad for Germany, Commies were bad for Russia and Ukraine. Although the Commies were deliberately bad to Russians and Ukrainians. Nazis starved others, not their own people, on purpose.
Also keep in mind that German deaths are often underreported their casualty counts because anything that was considered a ‘casualty’ to them was anyone who was killed. If they were wounded and then sent back to the front, they were not considered as a ‘casualty’ by german high command.
Soviets on the other hand counted a casualty as anyone who was even lightly wounded and went to get patched up. So that means their numbers were actually over inflated (ie if a soldier got wounded on three seperate occassions, he’d be counted three times).
Also, German numbers are HEAVILY manipulated
Here’s what Truman had to say about Stalin and his war effort:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/07/17/he-is-honest-but-smart-as-hell-when-truman-met-stalin/
LOL that’s blatantly false.
Here is a book by David Glantz that should clear up your misconceptions about the War (and you seem to have many).
http://libgen.gs/ads.php?md5=8c6e61c8c4b600bfd43e5b72ada04534
And if reading is too difficult
Here’s the correct death tolls for the German Army:
https://imgur.com/a/jIRLQsq which is about what the Soviets lost too (in terms of just soldiers.
The Luftwaffe was massed on the Eastern Front and pounding the Soviets. Only a small detachment was holding off the bombings. By the end of the war (when America came into the war), Germany was unprotected from its bombing runs because there remained only 425 units in the Luftwaffe because they got mostly destroyed by the Soviets
LOL no. “Commies” were much better than the Tsar (as I showed you) that kept his peasants in constant starvation. They were much better than modern RF too in most parameters. Why is this not mentioned
Here is an open source link on Soviet Operational Art
https://dl-web.dropbox.com/get/Soviet%20Military%20Operational%20Art%20In%20Pursuit%20of%20Deep%20Battle.pdf?_subject_uid=39034557&w=AAAM1kGOJm0do6QE2GDvN-s0V_FEY44tVTGFZkrq_S0tAA
Sorry for this part of my comment, very childish of me, but your argument felt like someone claiming that without French revolution there would not have been American revolution, or something like that. When its very likely that Chiang Kai Shek would have never gotten in power without the Soviets. Kuomintangs and Russias history were intertwined from the very beginning…
Without British inspired Franc-maçonnerie there would have been neither of these revolutions. Arguably, there wouldn’t have been any revolution in Europe, with the notable exception of the English Revolution. The Eternal Anglo is such a trailblazer for all of us feeble humans…
My original statement was “his estimate would be double or more than what I provided.”
Reading is hard for you. The wiki article on the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 provides numbers that are generally not even twice lower than Conquest’s. According to that article, Conquest claimed 8 million victims while “R.W. Davies and S.G. Wheatcroft, gives an estimate of 5.5 to 6.5 million deaths”
According to a Sovok website. Maybe the same one that taught you about Gallipoli? Or that lower rate of cancer is something to brag about (when it just means people die too early to get cancer)
Even Russian Duma estimates it at 7 million.
According to a Sovok website.
Meanwhile:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_and_famines_in_Russia_and_the_Soviet_Union
Nothing in 1914.
Last major peacetime famine under the Tsars was in 1891-1892. 375,000-500,00 dead.
Now let’s look at civilian deaths due to the war from famine and disease:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties
In Russia, total wartime civilian losses in 1914-1917 due to hunger and disease (typhoid epidemic) ranged from 730,000 to 1.5 million. Not “millions.”
This number on per capita terms was fairly low. Germany had 424,000 to 763,000. France had 500,000 civilian deaths from privations and epidemic during this time. Italy – 589,000. Little Romania – 200,000.
Civilian deaths as % off population:
Russian Empire – 1.6% to 1.9%
Italy – 3% to 5%
Germany – 3.4% to 4.3%
France – 4.3% to 4.4%
Romania – 7.7% to 8.9%
Ottoman Empire – 13.3% to 15.4%
You display your ignorance about basic historical facts when you bring up civilian deaths from famine and disease in World War I as an example of Russian government incompetence.
If the Tsarist government is responsible for famine and disease deaths it should be praised for keeping per capita deaths lower than in Germany, France, Italy, Romania, etc.
They died at rates lower than in 1921-1922 and lower than did French, Germans, Italians, and Turks (see above).
You mean Russia was controlled by the Tsars in 1920? 1919? LOL.
Here is a map of Soviet-controlled territory in October 1919:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0a/83/6f/0a836f786c80e8760120b8f2bc1157d5.jpg
Here is a map of the area where about a million Russians starved in 1921:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5d/1921-Famine-map.jpg/330px-1921-Famine-map.jpg
As you can see, most of the area where the 1921-1922 famine occurred had already been controlled by Bolsheviks for more than a year by the time the million or so people starved. It was precisely in areas controlled by the Bolsheviks for a long period of time where the people starved. Regions that the Bolsheviks did not control for a long time did not experience famine. Consolidation of Red rule led to mass starvation. Areas where Bolsheviks didn’t rule for along time such as Ukraine did not starve in 1921-1922. These areas would starve later in the 1930s, after Bolsheviks consolidated their rule.
Your claim is the opposite of reality, as usual.
See above how you are “showing me.”
I posted numbers, from your own pro-Soviet source, that showed that Soviets consumed 1/6 of the cars, 1/2 the TVs, 1/6 the radios, 1/2 vacuums, etc. of Americans. So average Soviet was about as poor if not poorer than poor Americans.
Moreover, not only did Soviets have fewer goods but the ones they did have were of poorer quality. Americans had twice as many televisions and they had color televisions sooner. Americans had six times more cars, and this was a typical Soviet car from 1980:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e6/Lada_2107_aka_Lada_Riva_October_1995_1452cc.jpg/1920px-Lada_2107_aka_Lada_Riva_October_1995_1452cc.jpg
This was the most commonly purchased American car in 1980, Oldsmobile cutlass:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/86/92/e9/8692e958a9aa5aa1456548eec4441088.jpg
I’m not offended. You know much more about China than I do and I appreciate your comment.
But if we go further my friend, it was the Dutch bankers who financed and made possible the Glorious revolution in England.
So maybe its der ewige Holländer, who we must thank for all this madness?
https://twitter.com/CarlZha/status/1347566657930108930?s=20
This is absolutely correct. And that is why Peter the Great fascination with Netherlands is so interesting.
Also:
https://www.hadassahmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Portraitofyoungjew.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/Rembrandt_-_Portrait_of_an_Old_Jew_-_WGA19181.jpg
Judeo-Capitalism basically started there with the Stock Exchange etc.
Our expert on this stuff:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/top-10-militaries-2015/#comment-1205954
To be fair, Glantz has made valuable contributions to the field. But, and this is my impression, he, as a leading analyst of Soviet military forces during the Cold War, had a tendency, incentive perhaps, to overestimate Soviet capabilities (just as American military experts on China today often exaggerate Chinese military capabilities). Furthermore, Glantz, as a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Science, enjoys access, let’s say, less-Russophilic researchers are often denied, and, as the saying goes, access requires quid-pro-quo or at least “friendliness.” (In DC, it’s pretty well-known that foreign governments, for example, the Russians, the Chinese, and the Saudis to name but a few spread money around American researchers and analysts via think thanks and foundations to advance friendly policy advocacy).
He is not exactly an unbiased, neutral observer.
::::::::::::::
You failed to post evidence contradicting Karlin’s statement that about 30% of the Luftwaffe was fighting in the West.
BTW this is what the Americans supplied to the Soviets:
58% of the USSR’s high octane aviation fuel
33% of their motor vehicles
53% of USSR domestic production of expended ordnance (artillery shells, mines, assorted explosives)
30% of fighters and bombers
93% of railway equipment (locomotives, freight cars, wide gauge rails, etc.)
50–80% of rolled steel, cable, lead, and aluminium
43% of garage facilities (building materials & blueprints)
12% of tanks and SPGs
50% of TNT (1942–1944) and 33% of ammunition powder (in 1944)[52]
16% of all explosives (from 1941 to 1945, the USSR produced 505,000 tons of explosives and received 105,000 tons of Lend-Lease imports
So despite this massive assistance, Soviets still bungled the war and let almost 30 million of their people die.
Death toll for Tsar’s peacetime famine:
375,000-500,000
Death toll from Soviet peacetime famines:
9 million
Latter occurred in the 20th century, moreover, after world improvement in agriculture.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/ChiangChingkuo_photo.jpg
This man went by the name of Nikolay Vladimirovitch Elizarov.
That’s according to Wiki which is full of cold war propaganda.
The real number as I said is closer to 2 million. And the Russian duma just says things to give themselves ‘more legitimacy’ over the soviet regieme.
For exmaple, China said that Mao’s era was 70% good and more people died at that time than in the USSR. So that means the USSR was 80% good.
https://www.ips-journal.eu/in-focus/the-politics-of-memory/70-per-cent-good-30-per-cent-bad-2216/
All of his information is cited. Check for yourself if you don’t believe ‘sovok websites’ LOL
God damn you’re one of the densest people i’ve ever met. Sounds like you have an emotional fantasy of “evil commies” that your Banderite ancestors taught you, eh
Cold war propaganda. Plus when the war was happening there was no ability to take a census. So of course there wasn’t any knowledge of famines. I have have given you data from the world bank on that time period, where the ‘sovok website’ draws its info.
Guess you’re wrong again eh.
This is not including those that were under constant starvation as the tsar requisitioned all the grain and cattle.
The Imperial government did not fight on its territory so no shit they had fewer deaths than the other great powers. But the fact that the had more than 1 million deaths on their territory and they weren’t even fighting in Russia proper indicates that the Tsar was incompetent lol
False you gave data from 1917, deaths from tsarist mismanagement which led to revolution and civil war led to higher rates of death than anywhere in europe.
False. As I’ve shown you in my previous posts, these places where hardest hit by Tsarist grain requisitions (remember I even quoted saying that ‘the productive agricultural sectors where hardest hit’) because they had the most grain to requisition. Tsarist requisition policies led to utter destruction of agriculture in those areas and it takes more than one year to rebuild agriculture as I have shown you in previous charts.
Do you not know what an “average” means? Just because an “average” american had that does not mean that a “poor” american had it LOL.
It turns out that not only can you not read you also have trouble with basic math. It must be a zapadenic thing
That’s your opinion
So what? Americans also had more crime and worse education.
so what?
America also had 4000x the amount of cars Tsarist Russia had…what’s your point exactly?
One can say the same of any anti-Soviet researcher that they ‘undersestimate’ Soviet capabilities due to Cold War bias or their own political bias.
That means nothing.
LOL Glantz debunks it in the books I posted. He says that lend lease did not make a siginficant contribution to the war effort and that the USSR would have still won regardless
https://imgur.com/a/d0WHUVF
Nice try there wehraboo
Here is a breakdown on the amount of Luftwaffe in different theatres. Karlin’s assertion is wrong.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dda4o7/ww2_what_was_the_proportion_of_luftwaffe/
It was 2 million in the 1930’s. And next, all the dead (as was stated in screenshots previously could be attributed to Tsarist policies and laid at the feet of the Tsar.
So “commie” famine deaths are still less than Tsarist famine deaths.
Even your favorite Wikipedia says so
And the “allies” would not send food aid
It was only Bolshevik action in seizing Church property and profits that allowed them to put an end to the famine
Translation – only decisive action by the “commies” (when no help was forthcoming) put an end to the famines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921%E2%80%9322
Guess my ‘sovok website’ is right again
But nice try pretending like you aren’t a Banderite ukranian nationalist LOL
LOL. You don’t even know who was fighting where.
Look at a map:
https://msnikkijones.weebly.com/uploads/2/6/8/9/26890513/europe-world-war-1-1914-1918-wereldoorlog-in-kaarten-maps-of-and-map-orig_orig.jpg
Nobody was fighting on German territory (except for a few villages on the French border).
Incursions in Italy were minimal. Incursions in France were not much more than on Russian territory.
Let’s review how Russian civilians under the Tsars fared vs. those in Germany, Austria-Hungary, France and Italy, and Ottoman Empires:
Percentage of civilians dead from famine or disease during the war:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties
Russian Empire – 1.6% to 1.9%
Italy – 3% to 5%
Germany – 3.4% to 4.3%
Austria-Hungary – 3.5% to 4%
France – 4.3% to 4.4%
Ottoman Empire – 13.3% to 15.4%
Of all the major continental powers, the Russian Empire lost the fewest percentage of people to famine and disease during World War I.
People have experienced food shortages due to grain requisitions, but they were dying in far smaller numbers than anyone else in Europe.
Tsarist grain requisition in 1914-1917 did not produce the famine of 1921-1922. Soviet grain requisitions combined with drought that Soviet incompetent government couldn’t deal with, did that.
I was wrong about death toll – it was about 5 million in 1921-1922. So Soviet peacetime famines killed 5+7+1 million Soviet people n the 20th century – 13 million.
Only 10 years after 5 million Soviets starved to death, another 7 million starved to death.
The Soviets were brilliant at population removal of Slavs.
Your empty assertions doesn’t make it so. Again, the hardest hit places of the 1921-1922 famine were those with the longest Bolshevik control of the countryside:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0a/83/6f/0a836f786c80e8760120b8f2bc1157d5.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5d/1921-Famine-map.jpg/330px-1921-Famine-map.jpg
You don’t know basic statistics either.
For example with height:
https://www.usablestats.com/images/men_women_height.jpg
Men are on average taller than women. This means that short men would be as tall as average women.
Similarly, Americans on average had 6 times more cars than Soviets on average. Assuming a more or less normal curve, this means that poor Americans would have more cars than average Russians.
Indeed, if you go to a poor neighborhood, even in the 70s, you would see lots of cars driven by those poor people. And the cars driven by those poor people would be much larger and more comfortable than the Zhigulis driven by middle class Soviets 🙂
Homicide rate in 1988 was 9.6 in the USSR and 8.4 in the USA.
Did you know that 8.4 is lower than 9.6?
Another failure of the Soviet system – despite high education, people were poor, had shorter life expectancy, and lived in a violent place.
Even a Soviet-biased historian admits that without Lend Lease, the Soviets would have taken 12-18 months longer to defeat the Germans.
But you can’t read. He wrote: “while the Red Army shed the bulk of Allied blood, it would have shed more blood for longer if not for Allied assistance.”
So if not for Western allies, how many Soviets would much-smaller Germany have killed due to Soviet incompetence? 40 million? 45 million?
Your source proves that you are wrong as usual:
“while the Eastern Front provides the majority of aircraft losses during late 1942 (p. 114), the eastern casualties start flattening off by 1943, when more and more Luftwaffe units are needed against western air defenses. After May 1943, when Western Air Defense, Eastern Front and Mediterranean theater are almost an an equilibrium (333, 331, 331 losses respectively), the Eastern theater falls behind in all months but July and August, when it is barely ahead of West Defense and Mediterranean respectively. In October, the Luftwaffe loses 530 aircraft in the west, 285 in the Mediterranean, and 279 in the east. In November, the losses are 529, 194 and 180 respectively, again with the eastern front at the very back.”
If anything, Karlin overestimates the % of Luftwaffe losses in the East throughout the war.
Reality of estimates:
The 2004 book The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–33 by R.W. Davies and S.G. Wheatcroft, gives an estimate of 5.5 to 6.5 million deaths.[50]
Encyclopædia Britannica estimates that 6 to 8 million people died from hunger in the Soviet Union during this period, of whom 4 to 5 million were Ukrainians.[51] According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, “Some 4 to 5 million died in Ukraine, and another 2 to 3 million in the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga area.”[52]
Robert Conquest estimated at least 7 million peasants’ deaths from hunger in the European part of the Soviet Union in 1932–33 (5 million in Ukraine, 1 million in the North Caucasus, and 1 million elsewhere), and an additional 1 million deaths from hunger as a result of collectivization in Kazakh ASSR.[53]
Another study, by Michael Ellman using data given by Davies and Wheatcroft, estimates “‘about eight and a half million’ victims of famine and repression”, combined, in the period 1930–33.[33]
In his 2010 book Stalin’s Genocides, Norman Naimark estimates that 3 to 5 million Ukrainians died in the famine.[18]
In 2008, Russian state Duma issued a statement about the famine, stating that within territories of Povolzhe, Central Black Earth Region, Northern Caucasus, Ural, Crimea, Western Siberia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus the estimated death toll is about 7 million people.[54]
It is convenient to pretend that the dead from 1921-1922 and 1932-1933 can be blamed on the Tsar who lost power in 1917.
Yes, years before the famine began.
But you “forgot” to post this part:
The Bolshevik government had requisitioned supplies from the peasantry for little or nothing in exchange. This led peasants to drastically reduce their crop production. The rich peasants (kulaks) withheld their surplus grain to sell on the black market.[7][8][9] In 1920, Lenin ordered increased emphasis on food requisitioning from the peasantry.
Bolded part is more relevant to famine in 1921-1922 than Tsar’s policies of 1914-1917.
Yes, exactly. The Soviet government initially refused aid from the West to save the lives the starving peasants. West offered help, Lenin refused it.
Only in 1922 when millions had starved to death did the Soviets use the famine as an excuse to loot Church property.
If I were a Banderite Ukrainian nationalist I would be happy with the Soviet efforts to rid the world of 5 million Russians in 1921-1922. I would only complain about the Ukrainians killed in 1932-1933.
Interestingly, UPA’s successful efforts to limit grain requisitions in western Ukraine resulted in those regions not experiencing much of a famine in 1946-1947, unlike other Soviet lands. So Banderists did at least one thing good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1946%E2%80%9347
he 1946–47 famine in Ukraine affected most of the country, except for areas in a few western provinces where the resistance to the forced food requisitions helped to save the people from starvation
This amount of extrapolation is absurd.
Some of the most absurd aspects of our existence are patently true despite all their absurdity.
https://moa.byu.edu/wp-content/uploads/escher-relativity.jpg
? 🙂
That’s pretty awesome tbh
The short squeeze on GameStop seems to be making money mainly for other hedgefunds.
It has earned $2,6 billion for Blackrock and $3,9 billion for Fidelity Investments.
So is nobody wondering who might be operating the bots responsible for hypebeasting the stock on Reddit. (Reddit is one of the least resistant sites to use of bots). Are Reddit netizens really so gullible to mass herding behaviour?
https://i.imgur.com/payXN42.jpg
I thought that it was a perfect resounder to Bashibuzuk’s observation:
I don’t know what to make of his “LOL” reposte?
You can view more of Mr. Escher’s mind blowing artwork here: https://mcescher.com/product-category/posters/
I’ve always been rather partial to this one:
https://mcescher.com/product-category/posters/
https://cdn7.bigcommerce.com/s-do0ookap9x/images/stencil/1280×1280/products/340/658/apivpq36z__87056.1504207768.jpg?c=2&imbypass=on
I have always found Escher’s paintings quite amusing. In general I have a type of humor that is strongly stimulated by the absurd and the paradoxical.
That’s precisely why I paired his work reprinted in comment #143 with your interesting comment. I think that I was successful? Perhaps the work actually tries to refute your idea? In either case it somehow figures into your thought………
The absurd aspect of our existence is mostly due to our limited knowledge of reality. We are limited in oir cognitive ability both in time and space: we only personally witness our immediate surroundings in a fleeting present moment. But it is also limited by our inability to express anything without using a web (or cliud) of interlinked concepts. Each of these concepts beung a product of human thought, not the phenomenon to which it refers itself. We basically carry our own personal virtual reality with us everywhere we go. We call it consciousness. A lot of funny stuff happens because of that. Of course some of this stuff is also sad. A tragicomedy really with absurd elements. Death is one of these more tragic aspects, suffering is another, but the most tragic and absurd is ignorance.
It may only seem absurd and I may add meaningless if we disregard the true reason for our existence and the reasons that we were put here in this dimension in the first place. We can actually come into close contact with the Infinite here and now, expand the “fleeting moment” and expand our consciousness to include aspects of the immortal nature of our being. I’ve only truly felt this experience, in an expanded and pronounced form once for three days, and it was the most liberating and beautiful feeling that I’ve ever experienced. Imagine living in eternity with the Creator in a peaceful and all loving environment? Imagine being able to perhaps see trillions of new primary colors?
“Theosis is personal communion with God “face to face.”2 To the Western mind, this idea may seem incomprehensible, even sacrilegious, but it derives unquestionably from Christ’s teachings. Jesus Christ was the fulfillment of the messianic dream of the Jewish race; His mission to connect us with the Kingdom of God – a Kingdom not of this world.5 When Jesus said, “You are gods,”“be perfect, just as your Father in Heaven is perfect,” or “the righteous will shine like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father,” this is to be taken literally.”
The ‘Kingdom of God”, is now playing within the theater of your mind, your consciousness, and within your spirit, it’s for real, don’t miss it! 🙂
Have I been able to nudge you slightly back to the path of Theosis? Nothing would give me greater pleasure than knowing that I have.
A good friend of mine, an Orthodox Christian, once lamented that he felt some sorrow in his being, because he didn’t feel that he had “sewn enough good seed” in this world…..
I also have this feeling sometimes. But at the same time I know that I didn’t do anything too evil. An in between situation.
You write beautifully Mr Hack
Thanks, but it’s not about me and my abilities to write, Bashibuzuk, it’s about you and the rest of the human race too. How good am I really as a writer, if I haven’t been able to get you to even admit that I’ve prompted you to indulge a small amount of your time in revisiting the concept of Theosis?
Your abilities to deal with human pain and suffering (such as the possibility of losing a child) and put things into a higher context is admirable and no small thing and shows the experience of a mature mind. I’ve learned some interesting things about Buddhism from you too, though I’m not sure that there is a genuine “patch through” between Samsara and Theosis (if it’s even possible)?
Im sorry to spoil the fun, but I hope that you dont have case of Prelest. One must go through Katharsis and other various stages of spiritual realisation, before attaining Theosis, and once one has attained Theosis, its permanent, its for Orthodox same as salvation, most Orthodox Christians attain it only after death.
Seraphim if you are anywhere I hope that you manifest and explain this more thoroughly.
As I already wrote, I don’t like writing about truly important things. Zen is one of them. Also, comparing differences spiritual traditions is like compared apples and oranges. I agree that Theosis is a beautiful teaching. I also agree that it was present in the earliest Christian texts. It is a very important insight : that our human nature is perfectible beyond the limitations of our earthly existence.
There are certainly different stages of Theosis, and our aim as pilgrims should always be to try and raise ourselves in our walk with the Lord (grace), continually to a higher level. But the very most important thing to consider, is not where you are on the path to total Theosis, but that you’re actually on the path, not straying from it. The whole often slow but liberating path, is to be experienced with a humble and thankful heart, wherever you are within the continuum.
https://www.amazon.com/Desert-Wisdom-Sayings-Fathers/dp/1570753717
https://wp-media.patheos.com/blogs/sites/81/2016/06/DesertFathersNewBeginning.jpg
https://3psbyseeker.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/2013-apr-21-desert-wisdom.jpg
https://orthodoxinmalaysia.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/dfathers1.png
And yet a much smaller Germany fighting on three fronts still managed to destroy the Russians at the Battle of Tannenberg LOL
And despite that were still losing a Germany fighting on three fronts.
LOL Russia lost 2,840,000 to 3,394,369 people (against a much smaller Germany that was fighting on three fronts) and had 3,749,000[51] to 4,950,000[33] wounded so in total 6 589 000 to 8344369 people. Which is more than any other allied power and even more than a much smaller Germany.
Talk about Tsarist incompetence LOL
LOL it wasn’t civilian casualties you idiot. It was talking about military casualties. That link makes no mention of civilian deaths. Stop lieing.
LOL yes it was Tsarist grain requisitions. It was even in your own link that you sent.
Not only did famines under the Tsar occur every 10-13 years (link below) but
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_and_famines_in_Russia_and_the_Soviet_Union#Pre-1900_droughts_and_famines
Which further proves the Tsar was incompetent.
Also from your own link:
“Before the famine began, Russia had suffered six and a half years of World War I ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921%E2%80%9322#Origins
So no it wasn’t the Soviets that caused the 1921-22 famines. Also I have provided evidence to that in other posts in Russian.
In other words you are a liar and don’t know what you are talking about LOL.
It’s not my empty assertions though. Its supported by sources which you conveniently ignore because it doesn’t support your narrative.
And the famine occurred because those were the most agriculturally rich areas that where hit hardest by Tsarist requisitions for WW1 and coincided with Western Russia/Ukraine that was controlled by Bolshevik’s. You are confusing cause and effect LOL. Not surprising because you aren’t very smart but like to pretend you are.
LOL. Do you even statistics? Can you point out the mean on the graphs you posted above? Do you know what a ‘standard deviation is’ (without using wikipedia)? I don’t think you do. Because womens and mens mean heights fall within one standard deviation from the chart above. But nice try.
Ok. And? They had more cars because US cities where constructed to not be compact (ie have more sprawl) with the automobile industry in mind. This is not the case for Europe (at that time) which had a better developed public transport system. In the USSR specifically people didn’t need cars because of the way that housing complexes where constructed (to have grocery store, school, work, etc within walking distance). LOL you are so stupid you don’t even know these things and are making totally irrelevant comparisons.
LOL where are you getting that data from? Clearly the USA has more homicides than the USSR
https://imgur.com/a/8t1ZdRJ
Oh look the USA does more rapes too. Is it because people in the US couldn’t get laid so they had to resort to rapes?
https://imgur.com/a/ffqrRQK
Nope. But the Soviets where winning almost every mathematical olympiad. The USA barely made top 20 lol. Not only does the US rape more, but their education system is trash
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Mathematical_Olympiads
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/russia-homicides/
Yes. But they would’ve defeated them anyways.
Again, which part of “all of Europe was supplying Germany with industry and troops” do you not understand?
Right but Karlin’s thesis is that if most of the Luftwaffe was concentrated on the Eastern Front, the USSR would’ve lost.
And we see that until 1943 most of the Luftwaffe was concentrated on the Eastern Front. Also coinciding with the time when the Germans were strongest. And the Soviets did not lose. Which means that Karlin is wrong again.
LOL citing a CIA propagandist as an actual source. Only proves how little history you actually know.
So are you telling me that recruiting an army of about 16 million people (with 3 million seeing action) by the Tsar did not have an effect on grain in later years? Or that the Tsarist policies led to his own downfall in 1917? Or that a combination of droughts and Tsarist policies did not echo down to the 1921 and cause famine?
LOL I’m pretty sure you think history all consists of discrete events that have no effects on each other.
So you’re telling me that 6 years of war from 1914-1920 did not strain the weakened peasant class (die to conscription and requisitions) and that 6 years of war had NO effect on the famine. If you think that’s the case, you’re an even bigger idiot than I thought.
Nope. Reread the quote again. Lenin asked for help and it was initially refused by the west. Also, would you rather that Lenin gave up control of all rail networks to a foreign power? LOL
Church was rich and didn’t want to pay to help feed the peasants (as was common for the Church to run relief programs for starving peasantry in Western Europe).
You are a banderite nationalist though. You support an independent Ukraine.
Everything I posted is cited. And that also has citations. So read for yourself and draw your own conclusions.