Ah, I misinterpreted you. Sorry about that. But it's hard to tell exactly what you're talking about without more details. Afghanistan, maybe? I get if you don't want to dox yourself, as someone privacy minded, but it's hard to know how to respond without more context.

[–] FluffyPotato@lemm.ee -2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Estonia but it's not like that was not the case elsewhere in the occupied areas. Russia mostly exported resources out of there to benefit itself which is a large reason how it raised quality of life in Russia itself.

[–] Shyfer@ttrpg.network 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Oh ya, I should have guessed. There are a couple Baltic states that did increase in living standards and make some rapid industrialization improvements, but they also made some definite mistakes with handling some things there and trying to do some Russia centralization. It made some of those places very right leaning, which is unfortunate.

At least it generally shared technologies improvements and such with those places. It doesn't make the USSR worse than the US, for example, which ruined basically all of South and Central America even worse than the USSR did for its neighbors. I want to emphasize that it made some big mistakes, but for some reason people contribute those mistakes to communism, when the US and other capitalist countries had even worse occupations with even worse exploitation, but for some reason that never leads to people saying capitalism is terrible and awful, etc. The world is just too propagandized by the West. The difference is that imperialism and exploitation is basically required by the capitalist system, while it's a side effect of militarization under a siege mindset for communism. It happened, and will probably continue to happen as long as communism requires capitalism characteristics to jumpstart production, but it's not a constant requirement of the system like capitalism's necessity for the line to go up leading to always finding new markets and resources to take.

[–] FluffyPotato@lemm.ee 0 points 6 months ago

I never said the US was better than the USSR, I don't really give a shit about the US. One shit country being slightly better than another one does not make it good.

I like how you characterised it as "some mistakes" . The whole famine business that ravaged the USSR was caused by sheer incompetence. A guy appointed by Stalin to manage agriculture came up with a fun idea of "communist crops won't compete for resources" and forcing farmers to plant crops way too close. I'd say that was one of the greatest mistakes. There was also some killing the gays and some ethnic minorities but I think those were intentional.

I also don't attribute anything to communism, only the USSR, communism hasn't existed. I also attribute being the worst advertisement imaginable for communist to the USSR. They kinda ruined it for everyone else by calling themselves that.