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Hi A/T! This thread is about the  GLORIOUS UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS, PARADISE OF THE OPPRESSED PROLETARIATFeel free to both ask and tell about the USSR: its history, the commissars, the Great Patriotic War, the KGB, Putin's rise to power, anything and everything behind the Iron Curtain. I have a good bit of knowledge about how the Red Army operated during WW2, as well as knowledge of the Soviet secret weapons programs (Biopreparat, the Dead Hand system outside of Moscow, etc), so if you have questions on those feel free to ask me. Let me tell you about the Soviets' biological weapons program, Biopreparat: From the 1970s onward, Biopreparat was the USSR's biowarfare agency. Its entire purpose was to create pathogens for use in warfare, and employed upwards of 30,000 people in laboratories across the entire Soviet Union. It was founded by Yuri Ovchinnikov, who convinced General-Secretary Eyebrows (Leonid Brezhnev) of the necessity to develop bioweapons. Upon hearing that the capitalist pigdogs would fall en masse to germs, Brezhnev sanctioned Biopreparat and weaponization of pathogens began. Ovchinnikov's scientists managed to weaponize the following: Smallpox Bubonic Plague Anthrax Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis Tularemia The flu Brucellosis Marburg virus (holy loving Christ)  Ebola and the scariest thing: EBOLAPOX  - a weaponized, water/fluid borne hybrid of the Ebola virus and the Smallpox virus. Not only were you covered in pustules, they provided an easy escape route for your blood when it decides to vacate your body as you lie on the ground twitching uncontrollably as disease ravages your poor husk of a barely-living corpse.Post the most USSRest poo poo you got or ask questions if that's your thing
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Dec 13, 2014 00:02
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Who's your favourite General Secretary of the CP of the USSR and why? Also, tell about the Deadhand.
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Dec 13, 2014 04:48
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Hogge Wild posted:Who's your favourite General Secretary of the CP of the USSR and why? My favorite Secretary General would be Khrushchev, or Gorbachev. Khrushchev because of his efforts at de-Stalinization and Gorbachev for his perestroika and glasnost programs. They were the two most progressive leaders in the entirety of the USSR, in my opinion. The Deadhand system... The Deadhand is a system called "Perimeter" in Russian. It is an underground nuclear arsenal command and control center outside of Moscow. It is designed to automatically launch the Russian ICBM fleets at pre-determined targets in the event of a nuclear strike on Moscow, or a sufficiently powerful seismic event that is consistent with the level of seismic activity typically seen in a nuclear explosion. The idea behind the system's design was that, if one of the monitors detects this kind of activity, it is to be assumed that Moscow has been destroyed in a first-strike by the United States or NATO and that the Moscow leadership has been killed or otherwise put into a position where they cannot order a retaliatory strike. In this case, the Deadhand system will automatically trigger and the West becomes radioactive dust. The system still receives regular system updates, and it is rumored that it cannot be deactivated.
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Dec 13, 2014 06:49
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So... Doctor Strangelove had some basis in reality?
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Dec 14, 2014 00:23
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Not at the time, Deadhand was a late 70s/early 80s response to improvements in US first strike capabilities that the Soviets could not match, so instead they ensured that if the US/NATO managed to pull off a headshot strike there would be consequences.
Geoj fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Dec 14, 2014 |
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Dec 14, 2014 01:17
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I think that a form of government that has killed millions and millions of its own people through starvation and execution programs that were developed from murdering millions and millions of people in other countries (holodomor) in a relentless quest of money and power despite being a form of government which beleive that money and power is evil is awesome - big fat gay op Which leader of the ussr murdered its citizens in the most agreeable way, op?
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Dec 14, 2014 13:13
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Interesting history but lol if anyone likes the ussr (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 14, 2014 13:15
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Slurin posted:I think that a form of government that has killed millions and millions of its own people through starvation and execution programs that were developed from murdering millions and millions of people in other countries (holodomor) in a relentless quest of money and power despite being a form of government which beleive that money and power is evil is awesome - big fat gay op Please tell us more about your custom title Slurin.
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Dec 14, 2014 19:55
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The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is THE book to read for anyone who wants to find out about Stalin's rule over Russia.
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Dec 14, 2014 21:46
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Were there any Soviet porno?
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Dec 14, 2014 21:50
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Fish of hemp posted:Were there any Soviet porno? Pornography was strictly forbidden, actually. A few things were smuggled in (I own a samizdat copy of a 60s American nudie calendar, made by photographing the calendar pages and printing them on cardstock and gluing them into a scrapbook, then adding a Russian translation of the text on the opposite page) but basically it was illegal. High officials had their own stash, of course. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 01:21
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Fish of hemp posted:Were there any Soviet porno? Porno was strictly forbidden under the Soviet system. There is a somewhat apocryphal story that once Yakov Smirnoff came to the U.S. He locked himself in his room for 'bating purposes.
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Dec 15, 2014 10:28
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Actually I was always curious about how did the commies perceive alcohol consumption? Did they think that the rampart alcohol consumption in USSR was affecting the general population in a negative way or it was tolerated or even encouraged pretty much like how drugs are viewed in North Korea: as a debouch or a way to make people more docile.
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Dec 15, 2014 12:34
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Opposite posted:Actually I was always curious about how did the commies perceive alcohol consumption? Did they think that the rampart alcohol consumption in USSR was affecting the general population in a negative way or it was tolerated or even encouraged pretty much like how drugs are viewed in North Korea: as a debouch or a way to make people more docile. Gorbachev at least recognized that the rampant alcoholism that was decimating the USSR's life expectancy and productivity was a bad thing. He introduced massively unpopular legislation limiting alcohol purchases to certain times of day, ABV, where it could be sold, and a bunch of other things. It was so unpopular that there was some minor talk of overthrowing Gorbachev just to get rid of the alcohol laws.
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Dec 15, 2014 18:55
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The only pictures in that article are book spines 
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Dec 15, 2014 19:30
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Slurin posted:I think that a form of government that has killed millions and millions of its own people through starvation and execution programs that were developed from murdering millions and millions of people in other countries (holodomor) in a relentless quest of money and power despite being a form of government which beleive that money and power is evil is awesome - big fat gay op Finding something interesting =/= agreeing with that something. I mean OP may be sympathetic to the USSR but I have no reason to believe that he would be. I'm very interested in the early history of the USSR. I still find it mildly shocking that Lenin was able to resist the white army and establish a socialist regime....what was the key to his and the red army's success?
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Dec 15, 2014 19:45
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Radio Talmudist posted:Finding something interesting =/= agreeing with that something. I mean OP may be sympathetic to the USSR but I have no reason to believe that he would be. I'm sympathetic to the USSR only to the degree that I agree that the tsarist regime was ruinous to the Russian Empire and that World War One was tanking things further, so I sympathize with the feeling that a revolution was needed. I disagree with what the Soviets ended up doing, but I think that, had Trotsky been able to come to power like Lenin intended, things would have gone much differently. Lenin's definitely guilty of major transgressions (attempting to further the Bolsheviks' popularity with the workers at the expense of the peasants, forced industrialization at the cost of many lives and livelihoods, purges of his own) but his revolutionary success could be attributed to several things: 1. WW1. The first World War was a complete meat grinder for the Russian Empire. Russia was still a rural, mostly unindustrialized empire with little in the way of modern technology, roads (beyond dirt tracks), and education. WW1 was the catalyst that allowed Lenin to even make his arguments heard: - The bourgeoisie were throwing away Russian lives for nothing - Capitalists were profiting off of Russian blood - The tsar (Nicholas II) was completely out of touch with the war and what it was doing to his Empire The war was so unpopular within Russia that Lenin's promise to bring Russia out of it gained him a lot of popularity in the major cities and in the countryside. And when the Revolution actually began, it was fought primarily by people on the bottom tiers of society who wanted to bring the nation out of the war before they were drafted and sent to fight the Germans. Once Lenin's Bolsheviks took control of the government, he was true to what he said and negotiated a separate peace with Germany. This gave Lenin an air of trustworthiness that he built off of to create the Red Army and began conscripting people. The opposition, the White Russians, were determined to restore the tsarist government, and the Russian Civil War began in earnest. To answer your question a bit better, one of the deciding factors in the Civil War was Lenin basically turning the Cheka loose on White sympathizers (courtesy of Felix Dzherzinsky) while bringing revolution east across the country. He established a power base by going into major towns and cities across the east and ordering the creation of local Soviets (worker/peasant/citizen) and turning over control of local governments to the people living there, which then reported to the regional authority or directly to Moscow. There was also forcible redistribution of wealth and land, with land reform happening rapidly, which endeared him to the local peasants that had their own land for the first time in history. Not that Lenin cared anything about peasants (he actually considered them ignorant and worthless, but there was a charade to maintain in order to solidify his base with the people he thought were the real future of the USSR - the factory workers and tradesmen). Again, this isn't glowing praise for Lenin or the USSR. He was only able to win the Civil War by being incredibly brutal - do some reading on Felix Dzherzinsky's Cheka, Lavrentiy Beria, and some of the original Bolsheviks. Some of their atrocities are astounding, and wouldn't be surpassed until Stalin's Terror in the 1930s.
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Dec 15, 2014 20:41
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Trotsky was nearly as authortarian and sociopathic as Stalin, and was 100% in favor of the same kind of collectivization that Stalin pursued IRL. Nothing would have changed except maybe the USSR would have started WW2 earlier
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Dec 15, 2014 22:11
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icantfindaname posted:Trotsky was nearly as authortarian and sociopathic as Stalin, and was 100% in favor of the same kind of collectivization that Stalin pursued IRL. Nothing would have changed except maybe the USSR would have started WW2 earlier I looked this up, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I was wrong about what I said: Paul Mattick posted:The dictatorship of the party state, masquerading as the dictatorship of the proletariat, was a sustitutionism personified by Trotsky. Trotsky saw no contradiction between the dictatorship of a party leadership supported by the authoritarian rule of managers, army officers, specialists, and the transition to a post capitalist society. He was the champion of a top down bureaucratic centralism : ” Reporting to the sixth Congress of Soviets in 1918, Trotsky complained that not all soviets and workers have understood that our administration has been centralised and that all orders issues from above must be final ” Source: Paul Mattick, (2007), Anti Bolshevik Communism, p66, Merlin Press, Monmouth. However, I think that the paranoia and the Terror would not have been as severe as it was under Stalinism, albeit still present.
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Dec 15, 2014 22:21
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Who would you say were the five greatest commissars of all time?
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Dec 15, 2014 23:43
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Earwicker posted:Who would you say were the five greatest commissars of all time? There were probably lots of decent fellows executed by the Nazis under the Commissar Order, so I'll go with five of them chosen at random.
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Dec 16, 2014 03:37
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:There were probably lots of decent fellows executed by the Nazis under the Commissar Order, so I'll go with five of them chosen at random. Ok that sounds reasonable, let's see your five random commissars please.
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Dec 16, 2014 04:39
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What did the Soviet "upper class" look like, outside of the political elite? e.g. if you were a prestigious doctor, engineer, scientist etc. what sort of impact would that have on your standard of living?
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Dec 16, 2014 19:21
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Gabriel Pope posted:What did the Soviet "upper class" look like, outside of the political elite? e.g. if you were a prestigious doctor, engineer, scientist etc. what sort of impact would that have on your standard of living? Well, if you were living during Stalinism, you were probably executed or deported to a Gulag where you would practice your profession under the closest scrutiny. Post-Stalin, you were given a nicer apartment, you had access to special grocery stores that were only available to the elite (which had such luxurious items as oranges and limes), and your extended family didn't have to share an apartment with 2-3 other families.
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Dec 16, 2014 19:39
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Gabriel Pope posted:What did the Soviet "upper class" look like, outside of the political elite? e.g. if you were a prestigious doctor, engineer, scientist etc. what sort of impact would that have on your standard of living? There was very little distinction between the political elite and 'other' elites. If you wanted to be a prestigious doctor, engineer, or scientist you had to work within the political system. This is why most areas of Soviet academia aside from physics and math were so atrophied, there was more concern with politics than research. As for standard of living, you would have access to better housing, cars, get to travel / vacation, etc. You would get to skip the line for a lot of stuff that was theoretically available to everyone but in practice wasn't.
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Dec 16, 2014 19:40
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Do you know how marriages were conducted in the USSR for non-Christians? Were there civil ceremonies?
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Dec 16, 2014 21:56
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Radio Talmudist posted:Do you know how marriages were conducted in the USSR for non-Christians? Were there civil ceremonies? The USSR was legally atheist, so there were only civil ceremonies in front of a judge, as far as I know.
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Dec 16, 2014 22:12
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What happened to my list of five commissars?
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Dec 16, 2014 22:20
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Earwicker posted:What happened to my list of five commissars? 1. Commissar Ciaphas Cain 2. Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt 3. Commissar Holt 4. Commissar Sebastian Yarrick 5. Commissar Fucklaw
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Dec 17, 2014 00:06
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Tell me about the evolution from Lenin inwards of soviet policy towards its ethnic minorities.
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Dec 17, 2014 00:26
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Do you have any knowledge as to what degree were the other Warsaw pact countries included in the USSR's battle plans, in case a land war erupted in Europe? Did the WarPac have an effective command structure, akin to NATO, and were their armies capable of working together, or were the Soviets just banking on using their allies as cannon fodder until the Red Army came in to do the heavy lifting?
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Dec 17, 2014 00:56
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Zak2k12 posted:Do you have any knowledge as to what degree were the other Warsaw pact countries included in the USSR's battle plans, in case a land war erupted in Europe? Did the WarPac have an effective command structure, akin to NATO, and were their armies capable of working together, or were the Soviets just banking on using their allies as cannon fodder until the Red Army came in to do the heavy lifting? I can find more information on this later, but the USSR's plan was basically: 1. Use up satellite countries as fodder, 2. Deploy Red Army, 3. If Red Army can't do it, nuke at the slightest chance of it going south and it looks like NATO will invade the Soviet Union.
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Dec 17, 2014 01:54
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Zak2k12 posted:Do you have any knowledge as to what degree were the other Warsaw pact countries included in the USSR's battle plans, in case a land war erupted in Europe? Did the WarPac have an effective command structure, akin to NATO, and were their armies capable of working together, or were the Soviets just banking on using their allies as cannon fodder until the Red Army came in to do the heavy lifting? Corollary to this question, since the entire point of the Warsaw Pact was to give Russia proper some breathing room in the case of NATO aggression: To what degree did the actual Russians think we had the same plan? Give some European ground, to give the USA time to reinforce the UK? Also how did ordinary Russians view the rest of the USSR/Warsaw Pact in that sense? Did they view Eastern Europe as comrades in arms, or as useful bumpkins to be sacrificed, or somewhere in the middle? goatsestretchgoals fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Dec 17, 2014 |
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Dec 17, 2014 01:56
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Zak2k12 posted:Do you have any knowledge as to what degree were the other Warsaw pact countries included in the USSR's battle plans, in case a land war erupted in Europe? Did the WarPac have an effective command structure, akin to NATO, and were their armies capable of working together, or were the Soviets just banking on using their allies as cannon fodder until the Red Army came in to do the heavy lifting? Short story: Have the East German NVA seize West Berlin and hold off a conventional land assault from West Germany by NATO until the Red Army arrived or the hundreds of poorly guided Russian nuclear missiles glassed Rammstein/Normandy/most of Great Britain. Then hopefully the Workers of the World would rise up and overthrow their capitalist oppressors before the Americans launched their precision-guided Atlas missiles at every single Warsaw Pact installation. As for the command structure, the East German NVA and to a much lesser extent the Romanian Army were able to stand on their own probably against a conventional NATO assault. The other nations, especially Czechoslovakia and Hungary due to their prior unpleasantness, were heavily dependent on the Red Army for "protection" and "guidance" from the decadent West. So yeah basically cannon fodder and Moscow called the shots, at least until the early 1980's.
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Dec 17, 2014 02:06
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bitcoin bastard posted:Also how did ordinary Russians view the rest of the USSR/Warsaw Pact in that sense? Did they view Eastern Europe as comrades in arms, or as useful bumpkins to be sacrificed, or somewhere in the middle? As a Romanian I can assure you that my country was basically viewed pretty much like a colony, something like Siberia. Good only to retrieve basic materials from. After WW2 the political echelon was infested with Russians, mainly of Jewish origin, whose sole purpose was to spoil the country of as much industry and prime materials as possible. The story is a bit more complex than that (and things got increasingly complex as Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej died and Nicolae Ceausescu came in his place) but basically every single economic endeavor was nationalized and assigned a Russian-Romanian (by the name only) management that practically moved everything of use abroad. I know that's not what you've asked but it sets the picture of how the Russians view the satellite states. Edit: The Romanian defector Nicolae Pacepa gave a wonderful insight in his two books about the Russian-Romanian relationship viewed from the upper echelon of the Romanian Intelligence Agency.
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Dec 17, 2014 08:40
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Opposite posted:As a Romanian I can assure you that my country was basically viewed pretty much like a colony, something like Siberia. Good only to retrieve basic materials from. After WW2 the political echelon was infested with Russians, mainly of Jewish origin, whose sole purpose was to spoil the country of as much industry and prime materials as possible. The story is a bit more complex than that (and things got increasingly complex as Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej died and Nicolae Ceausescu came in his place) but basically every single economic endeavor was nationalized and assigned a Russian-Romanian (by the name only) management that practically moved everything of use abroad. Would you be willing to give the Jews a break, since they got a pretty raw deal under Stalin, since Stalin really didn't like the Jews much more than Hitler. thrakkorzog fucked around with this message at 11:10 on Dec 17, 2014 |
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Dec 17, 2014 11:06
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Yeah, meant to post a disclaimer for that since I really didn't want it to sound racist and I don't want to derail the discussion towards myself but the unofficial leader of the Romanian communist party after the war was Ana Pauker, a Stalin's favorite for the leadership of the satellite. Even tho the number of Jewish personalities in the communist party was thinned out during Gherghe Gheorghiu Dej's second purging (that includes Ana Pauker - in a historical coup on the hallways of Kremlin) based on his nationalist and antisemitic propaganda, Dej had in his entourage plenty of personalities of Jewish origins. The relationship between communism and the Hebrew minority was very ambivalent and it remains a mystery to me, an amateur in his own country's contemporary history. Enough said that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dedicates plenty of space in his books to it. Again, sorry to have offended someone, I don't mean it and the historical facts I'm basing my claims on do not lead me to be prejudiced or have a negative view toward the Jewish community. If I sound too blunt about some historical facts I believe in, must be because English is not my native language and my vocabulary is not developed enough to put things mildly. Opposite fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Dec 17, 2014 |
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Dec 17, 2014 12:22
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Tell me about the actual Communist Party within the Soviet Union. From what I've heard, Party membership was purely voluntary and only a relatively small percentage of Soviet citizens were actual Party members at any given time. What sorts of advantages and risks came with Party membership, and what was the process of joining the Party like? Basically, how different was the life of a Party member versus that of a non-member?
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Dec 18, 2014 08:07
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A lot of it depends on the time in which you're talking about and none of it is quite black and white. Party members would on the one hand enjoy access to special stores that not only had things like meat, but also cheap wines from the Caucasus, imported products that would be impossible to find other places and stuff like that. On the other hand, during the Stalin purges, Party members were often the most targeted. In one of the books I read it talks about a joke that went around at the time -- the secret police knocked on someone's door at four a.m. and everyone knew what that meant, arrest. As the man opens the door, he exclaims: "But comrades! You have the wrong apartment! The Communists live upstairs!"
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Dec 18, 2014 20:27
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how many people did stalin actually kill? Looking for facts that aren't based on western capitalist propoganda.
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Dec 21, 2014 02:58
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