I'm almost finished reading Blackshirts and Reds. Do y'all have any recommendations of books or essays that respond? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by pearable@lemmy.ml to c/anarchism@lemmy.ml

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Basically what the title says. I tend to lean anarchist but I'm not opposed to reading some Soviet sympathetic literature since I like to expand my horizons.

Edit: to be more specific. Parenti describes life in the Soviet Union as largely comfortable, perhaps too comfortable. People's needs are largely met. They have economic security. Most folks are quite skeptical of the news, "I know of all these disasters happening around the world but I don't know anything that's happening in my own country" and a general disbelief in the true news about the problems in capitalist countries. This results in a disatisfaction, particularly among the intelligencia and beauracracy, that results in the top down disollution of the USSR. From there he describes shock therapy and the deprevation that resulted.

How good is his research? How good are his sources? I believe quite strongly that we live in the most sophisticated propoganda machine ever devised. That makes me skeptical of a lot of the common narratives about the USSR but more than just the US is capable of lying and I'm curious how willing Parenti is to believe in obvious falsehood.

It should be noted he does criticize the USSR but at the end of the day believes in the project of state communism.

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[-] knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 9 months ago

I'm not aware of material which responds and critiques in good faith, but I can point you to Anna Louise Strong's writing on her lived experience in both the USSR and PRC. It confirms Parenti's writing and discusses the challenges of building a socialist state.

Another interesting thing to consider is the fact that the Soviet government archives were all opened post-coup. If the USSR was indeed a horrible country, we'd have all kinds of academic material going over findings in these primary source documents. We don't. Western historians rushed to Moscow in the 90s only to find nothing that would support their anti-Soviet narratives. Instead there's ML literature discussing the successes and struggles of the Soviet people based on these documents.

[-] pearable@lemmy.ml 3 points 9 months ago

I'm interested in first hand accounts. I'll check out Strong's writing.

My only reservation is that internal reports can also be falsified. The incentive to do so would be massaging numbers in order to meet quotas and paint a better picture than is accurate. I think that's probably an overly skeptical narrative. I'd like an honest, if ideologically opposed, attempt to find flaws.

[-] knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 9 months ago

Strong's This Soviet World (1936) mentions a sort of that internal falsification.

Today the chief fight of the dictatorship [of the proletariat] is against corruption and bureaucracy. The workers, in other words, struggle with their own government, not to overthrow it but to improve it by weeding out inefficiency. A vivid example of this was given by a letter from three railway-workers published in Pravda. They told how the workers of their station, hearing that Sizran station was considered a model, chose three delegates to go and study it. “The election fell on us. However, to our great regret, we convinced ourselves that Sizran is no model.” The letter proceeds to expose fictitious bookkeeping which compelled engineers to list repeated repairs as new in order to protect the reputation of the repair shops, and other false entries which hid inefficiencies. They noted employees who had been demoted for calling too open attention to troubles. They did a thorough and technically accurate job of debunking Sizran, a station on a different railroad to which they had gone in search of good methods. Imagine workers from a station on the Erie giving this attention to study, analyze and reform a station on the Pennsylvania! Imagine their securing ready access to all the records of an alien line! Imagine this as routine news in a metropolitan daily paper, leading to check-up and reprimands of railway superintendents for inaccuracy in reporting their work!

this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024

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