“Anyone who doesn’t uncritically swallow US State Department propaganda against China is a “CCP” troll”. Why the need for the homophobia though?

MWAHAHAHA, I live in fucking Russia

Yes, you live in Russia, not in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately for you I’m afraid.

Were it a feature it would match the social adverts and state propaganda

You surely don’t expect the material limitations of an industrializing, isolated and besieged economy to appear in propaganda? It was a feature in the sense that it was a known effect of “socialism in one country”, not in the sense that it’s the desired goal. You surely understand that, no matter how good the policy, there are limitations to material reality?

Oh yes, better distribution via acquaintances and relations

Corruption DID happen, unsurprisingly, it’s something that happens in all systems. It’s just that, when it happens under socialism, it’s a scandal, but when it happens in capitalism it’s normalized. In my country there’s a 6 month waiting list for going to a specialist doctor many times in public healthcare, and I could skip that by paying a sum of money to a private physician and getting examined in their private clinic legally. It’s essentially the same concept, except that for some reason it’s normalized and even praised under capitalism (which leads to it being much more prevalent than in socialism), whereas socialism fought against it. Speaking of corruption and propaganda: Surely the state with active anti-corruption propaganda and regular purges of its party and social systems was less corrupt than the capitalist states that normalize corruption in economic activity under the guise of “free contracts between individuals”?

parts of USSR far from anything with a sea port people would see something like oranges or bananas extremely rarely

Wait, you’re telling me that an economically isolated country focusing on a self-reliant economy which is located in one of the northernmost regions of the planet, had difficulties with the availability of certain fruits? (bananas are tropical and can’t be grown in the USSR for the most part). This just proves how to you, the default-normal is the availability of produce with origin in exploited regions of the world. Please, go check where the bananas at your supermarket are coming from, and how the workers in the plantation are treated. That’s the problem with Russian libs: you guys don’t understand that NOW your country engages in exploitation of the global south, just like any other developed capitalist country. THAT’s why you have fucking bananas.

Housing wasn’t bought, it was assigned and sometimes given, so talking about cost is useless.

“People had universal, guaranteed access to free or affordable housing, so talking about housing is useless”. Truly a big-brain take. You probably are lucky enough that you don’t have to spend half of your salary in housing as most people are forced to do, otherwise you wouldn’t be making that point.

There were people still living in communal apartments

Yes, a few people after the 70s still were living in such communal apartments, but it was a minority. Most housing by the time the USSR was industrialized were Khruschyovki and Brezhnevki, famously non-communal. I’d love it if you brought me a source telling me how many people lived in communal housing by the 80s, I’ll respond to you with data of 2024 Spain (my homeland) of how many people have to share a flat with one kitchen and one bathroom (and pay 1/3rd of their income in the process instead of 3% of their income).

It was a miserable society requiring more bootlicking than you can possibly imagine to do something you consider a given in your land

Poor Soviets, having the highest unionization rates in the world and being able to actually bargain through their union at work instead of having to bootlick their corporate overlord 8h a day 5 days a week. Wait, we don’t count that right? Being a wage-slave in a capitalist company isn’t bootlicking, we call it “networking” and “corporate culture” it’s actually cool. Fucking hell give me a break.

Building so many tanks that most of them just slowly turned into rust after 1991 is a useless direction of resources in your book?

Are you really Russian? Don’t you understand the absolute fear of another invasion that the Great Patriotic War (after WW1 and after the civil war) installed in Soviet people and leadership? There’s a reason why even many opposition supporters in the modern Russian Federation go to parades in the Victory Day, it’s not because they support Russian Nationalism and the status-quo. It’s because they understand the immense sacrifice of 20+mn lives that the Soviet Union undertook to SAVE EUROPE FROM NAZISM AND FASCISM. If you don’t understand that the USSR was under constant attack by the USA in the cold war, you don’t understand Soviet history. It fucking sucks spending 10-15% of your GDP in military, but siege socialism is what it is, the USSR tried to de-escalate and was met with nuclear weapons in Turkey. You’ve listened to too much “Radio Svoboda” I think.

USSR’s economy since early 70s was built on selling oil and gas for everything it needed

Uh… If you check the trade balances of the USSR with other countries, you’ll find out that that wasn’t the case. The USSR traded mostly with COMECON countries, and yes, it exported natural resources like fossil fuels or minerals at international prices to COMECON countries and bought manufactured products. Again, it’s a consequence of siege socialism and of not engaging in imperialism. The USSR could have profited massively from exporting manufactured goods and importing raw materials with the global south, engaging in unequal exchange. But it didn’t do so because it understood that that’s immoral, and the exploitation of the global south goes against the very nature of socialism. I’m sorry that your ancestors didn’t pillage and loot the rest of the world as mine did. For a detailed discussion on this, you may wanna check Robert C Allen’s book “Farm to Factory”, or “Is the Red Flag Flying” by Albert Szymanski. I would bet my ass though, that you haven’t read a single book on soviet economic history, otherwise you wouldn’t be saying the nonsense you’re claiming.

All other areas of its economy had negative margin, one can say, and were intended to keep production of strategic goods, like weapons, in place, and the whole system of society.

Wow, an economy oriented towards the necessities of the people and the state rather than the profit of a few capitalist overlords? Disgusting, isn’t it? There’s a fucking reason the entire rural Russia is being depopulated: the state stopped investing in rural areas and people are suffering the consequences. Enjoy your free market.

You live in a post-industrial society where cars are really something one can live without

The Russian Federation, famous for building more public transit than the USSR? I really don’t get your point. If there’s a part of the world that excelled in building public transit, that’s the Eastern Bloc, out of socialist ideals, of intelligent central planning, and of economic necessity (public transit being more efficient than private combustion engine vehicles).

You should have met some of those people whose parents were Soviet hereditary elite

Ugh… really, you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. Hereditary wealth was incredibly less important in the USSR than in essentially any other country on Earth at the time, possibly with the exception of Sweden during some years. I’ll show you a Russian lib source you’ll love claiming as much, hopefully you won’t accuse them of being biased towards communism: As you can see, wealth distribution has never been more equitative in Russia than it was during Soviet times. Please, PLEASE, read a book before repeating anticommunist mantra.

It’s “serfs can go fuck themselves” instead of “poors can go fuck themselves”.

The Soviet Union lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty without engaging in economic imperialism or unequal exchange. Life expectancy was below 30 years-old in the 1910s, most people couldn’t read, and most people were essentially feudal serfs under the rule of Kulak and noble landowners. Education became free for everyone to the highest level, medicine was universal and free, men retired at 60 years old and women at 55 with guaranteed pensions, the 45h working week was standardized and people got holidays every year, economic standards rose massively, access to housing became universal, unemployment was eliminated legally and in practice, life expectancy rose above the 60 years of age and kept growing progressively, there were at some point more female engineers in the USSR than in the rest of the world combined… Really, that’s not “serfs can go fuck themselves”, that’s one of the most successful emancipatory experiences in the history of mankind. And the fact that you’re here on Lemmy, instead of breaking your back for your local exploitative English/French/German company that didn’t allow your country to industrialize and develop (or, worse, your bloodline exterminated by Nazis as they openly intended to do), is all thanks to the Bolsheviks.

Oh wow, a Russian lib in Lemmy, that’s a rare sight. I’ll answer your comment later, but know this: it is thanks to the USSR that you LIVE. If it wasn’t for the Bolsheviks, your country would either be a colony of France, England and Japan and wouldn’t have been allowed to industrialise. That is, if it would have survived Nazism in the 40s. Nazis had the express objective of eliminating the “Asiatic hordes” and the “Slavic Untermenschen”. You can thank your sorry ass that Lenin existed and set in motion what allowed your life to be that of a developed country and not a western colony or a genocided barren German slave field.

Kerensky’s provisional government would either have been ousted by the whites (there were attempts already), or would have become colonised by western powers. Seeing as the whites received half a million troops from western countries to destroy bolshevism, most likely a combination of the two, Allende style minus the socialism. There is no alternative timeline where Russia was allowed to develop along with Western Europe in peace and to exploit the profits of imperialism in the rest of the world.