I didn’t express any political positions, just informed you of history

“My vision of history isn’t attached to a political ideology” is a telltale of libs. Tell me, are you a russian oppositionist or not?

The possible alternative to USSR is some other development, not no development at all

That’s the problem with libs: you truly don’t understand the nature of imperialism. Ask Iran under Mosaddeq how much they were allowed to develop. Ask Chile under Allende. Ask Guatemala, or Argentina, or Haiti how much they were allowed to develop. Ask Vietnam whether US interference did anything to their country. Go ask Korea how many people died in the struggle against imperialism. For fuck’s sake, I’m Spanish, my own country had a US-adjacent fascist coup in the 1930s under a liberal government and while Nazis and Italian Fascists bombed the antifascists, the rest of the world stood to the side because a fascist regime is better than the possibility of socialism. Well, the rest of the world except your brave ancestors of the USSR, the ONLY country in the world that supplied weapons, tanks and planes to the anti-fascists. Sadly it wasn’t enough, and instead of enjoying a socialist state, my country fell into fascism. Seriously, Russia was under-industrialised (on par with Argentina at the time of 1917). There’s no country of such characteristics that industrialized under a capitalist liberal-democratic government, with only a few exceptions such as Japan (US-subsidized colony). There is NO POSSIBILITY of an alternate history in which Russia miraculously rid itself of French/English capitalists and industrialised by itself instead of becoming a source of cheap labour and natural resources for western Europe.

even politically reforming (that’s how Bolsheviks were a legitimate party)

That’s an insane thing to say. The fact that the February revolution even happened is due to the decades of agitation, propaganda, unionization and struggle for the rights of the workers that the Bolsheviks carried out. Without that, there wouldn’t have been a possibility of mutiny against the Tsar. It’s not a few smartasses like Kerensky who did nothing in their entire lives for the people except somehow enter a liberal-bourgeois government representing the interests of the rich and the russian nationalists who wanted to continue WW1. It’s the decades of agitation, of death sentences, of exile in Siberia, and of deportation, that Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries suffered out in Russia.

the revolution I blame on both these sides, Bolsheviks and proto-fascists. Neither is better than the other.

“The fascists who kept people enslaved under the Kulaks and the nobles were just as bad as the people that freed the people from them”. Truly one hell of a take. Your country is now starting to suffer the consequences of actual fascism, how’s your healthcare going? How’s education? How are the rights of women and of minorities? How’s inflation? How’s the price of housing? How are salaries going? Wonderfully aren’t they?

You simply don’t know what you are talking about

Surely you know better, Mr. “I believe that through the power of love, Russia would have been allowed to industrialize unlike any other underdeveloped country in the world. After all, we’re white, not like those browns in the global south, we’d have done better”.

Finland wasn’t.

Finland was precisely allowed to be a western developed and industrialized country BECAUSE of the existence of the Soviet Union. It was this beacon of worker rights, of antifascism and anti-imperialism, and of improving living conditions, that forced the rest of Europe to give their citizens the rights that the USSR pioneered: 40h week, universal healthcare and education, state-subsidized pensions, and the entire welfare-state apparatus. All of that is historically developed by the Soviet Union, and then mimicked by the West in order to prevent possibilities of socialist revolutions in those countries. The USA being not in Europe and relatively far away from the reach of socialism is exactly the reason why they have extremely shitty welfare state, healthcare, education, pensions and worker rights. It’s the red scare that repressed workers and unions against the possibility of carrying out such improvements. Europe was FORCED by the USSR to have such good quality of life to prevent internal stress and revolution.

Those troops were there to defend their economic interests, like Odessa port, Far East ports

That’s EXACTLY what I meant. You see? The economic interests of the “allied western countries” in Russia were AGAINST the industrial development of the region. That’s why they wanted to control the ports: for exports of cheap raw materials and grain, at misery wages for Russians. The whites were willing to defend those interests of the west. Thank you for acknowledging it.

USSR did just that, only its colonies were called Central Asian republics

That’s insultingly ignorant, not gonna lie. The Central Asian republics were republics of their own right: people got to study in their own language (unseen before and still unbelievable in many modern colonies and post-colonies, I have Moroccan and Tunisian coworkers and they studied in French), the number of hospital beds per capita was the same all over the Union, as was the number of teachers per capita; these regions were industrialized to a degree never seen before, and the Soviet Union liberated them from the yoke of Russian Imperialism under Tsarism. There’s a reason why these Central-Asian regions were overwhelmingly in support of the Union, as seen for example in the 1991 referendum to maintain the Soviet Union: : these regions were LIBERATED by the Soviet Union, and developed to levels not seen anywhere else in Central Asia. For reference, compare the Human Development Index of Central-Asian Soviet Republics such as Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan to those of non-Soviet countries like Afghanistan or Pakistan: . If it wasn’t for the Soviet Union, people like Alexandra Elbakyan, the Kazakh scholar behind the SciHub project (and proud communist), simply wouldn’t have had access to an education AT ALL, let alone in their own language. Again, proving once more that you have not the slightest idea of what you’re talking about.

I’ve roasted you enough with actual knowledge, rather than your vibes-based analysis whose entire premise is “we could have been an exploitative capitalist imperialist country like those of western Europe, trust me bro, somehow without the centralized industrialization drive and the redistribution of wealth that made the country the most egalitarian of history up to that point, we would have defeated western imperialism and Nazism”. You made no mention to my point on Nazism because you simply can’t: the USSR saved you, your ancestors, and the rest of Europe from Nazism; and liberals will never forgive it for that. I’ll now extract myself away from the conversation. I’ll save these two comments to respond similarly to other Russian libs (that I may encounter) in the future.