Thanks for watching, and please consider supporting the channel by buying merch: teespring.com/stores/the-cynical-historian Or by donating to my Patreon: www.patreon.com/CynicalHistorian See following replies for corrections and additional info, but first, here are some related videos to check out: Cody's (AlternateHistoryHub) video: ua-cam.com/video/o6T7tzrriUk/v-deo.html 2:30 - Marxist historian EP Thompson: ua-cam.com/video/Igb9f_cSRBk/v-deo.html 5:10 - the Russian Intervention of 1918-20: ua-cam.com/video/1mC1bmzbgxY/v-deo.html 8:30 - Cody's (AlternateHistoryHub) video: ua-cam.com/video/o6T7tzrriUk/v-deo.html 15:15 - Death of Stalin: ua-cam.com/video/KiOsPpvuYuk/v-deo.html
*References* Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, _Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference_ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). amzn.to/33BTIMT Donald Davis and Eugene Trany, _The First Cold War: The Legacy of Woodrow Wilson in U.S.-Soviet Relations_ (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002). amzn.to/2OpXxwg Jochen Hellbeck, _Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich_ (New York: Public Affairs, 2015). amzn.to/2H7US9w David L Hoffmann, ed. _Stalinism: The Essential Reader_ (New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2003). amzn.to/2udigeo Terry Martin, _The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939_ (Ithaca, N.York: Cornell University Press, 2001). amzn.to/31xUBV8 Andrzej Paczkowski, “The Storm over the Black Book,” _The Wilson Quarterly_ 25, iss. 2 (2001): 28-34. A good database of primary sources and simplified histories: soviethistory.msu.edu Quick info: www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/your-guide-to-karl-marx-who-was-he-what-was-the-communist-manifesto-and-why-is-he-important/ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Soviet_Union en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_repression_in_the_Soviet_Union
only thing is Reagan with his neo-libralism might made capitalism too extreme so could be in 50-60 years from now we would say "It was Reagan and Thatcher that saw the seeds that led to the communist revolution in the west, good riddance capitalism!"
It's really, really lovely to watch a video like this where history is respected as something complicated, rather than the flurry of videos that take one side or the other in historical events in order to benefit modern political narratives.
@@kakyointhemilfhunter4273 It's been uncommon for much longer than that, probably since the first humans walked the earth. The human brain evolved to dislike nuance for survival purposes.
Everyone knows that McDonald's won the Cold War. They put a McDonald's in Red Square in 1989. The USSR collapses in 1991. Coincidence? I think not. Checkmate.
@@uhohhotdog Perhaps one could blame the USSR for their problems because their form of government didn't prevent excesses by those at the pinnacle of power? I agree that the worse of humanity seem attracted to power, but some systems try to minimize their effectiveness. With more or less success, I admit.
The most common myth I run into (in the US) is even more basic: The Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar. I suspect most Americans have never even heard of Kerensky's provisional government. Even historically literate people need to be reminded on that point, in my experience.
That one I usually chuck up to people not knowing of provisional government due to how short lived it was and how little it achieved. I learned of it in highschool and I still forget it regularly
Yeah, the russian revolution and subsequent civil war was a lot more complicated. People are most likely mixing up the february and the october revolutions and completely forgetting about the russian civil war between the reds and the white.
@Ornate Orator Center Left. I'm hardly "pro communism," or "rabidly anti capitalism" for that matter. Besides, that wasn't my only comment that I posted here, and it wasn't even my first one. My first one was mentioning how annoying this one Stalin apologist was. By the way, a video on myths and misconceptions about America in the 1950s could include both positive and negative things that people believe about the decade that are wrong, so it would hardly have to be a hyper nationalistic defense of America, or a condemnation of it. I just think that the fifties is an interesting decade, and outside of the wars that Americas has fought, its arguably one of the most popular subjects when disusing US history. It was an interesting time in the county's history.
@Ornate Orator "I bet I can guess your political ideology if that’s your comment to this video" I bet you are one of those people that loves to make unsubstantiated assumptions about others!
Are there any genuine myths about that time? Like, maybe a few specific cases about cia coups, but I don't think you could make a 10 point list about that time?
@@hanneswiggenhorn2023, Yes. There are a lot of myths about how good the average person had it back than, along with some myths that deny some of the bad things like how harmful Jim Crow was.
Fun fact: Tankie is a mild pejorative handed out to Stalin apologists or authoritarian Communists in general, but the name comes from the Hungarian uprising of 1956. This is important because Stalin was dead at this point. Nikita Khrushchev rolled the tanks into Budapest.
@@IgnoredAdviceProductions Actually no, the failure of Operation Typhoon (which was the best shot of any kind of Axis Eastern victory) happened well before US AID of any meaning arrived, & during the Stalingrad siege only about 10% of what the US-UK would contribute happened. However the war would have hit a stoppage point & just been a continuing cycle of trading area in the Pontic steppe, when historically some cities changed hands 4+ times prior to Kursk. Would the USSR have lost if the Western Allied powers were never in a position to mount a strong Continental invasion? its plausible, but Axis shortage of fuel makes that a miniscule prospect.
Nitpick: the definition of private property is different under Marx than is used. Personal property is stuff like your house, car and if a crafts person, their tools. Private property is property where the labor of others is extracted, ie a factory. It’s a very different sense. Marx cared about the social relation of exploitation and its mechanics.
George H. W. Bush should get more credit for the end of Communism than Regan, he kept his mouth shut during the fall of Communism, rather than dancing on there graves. If he had done that there could have been a coup by the hardliners.
Nothing against learning history 😅 I was just giving a compliment to The Cynical Historian, because I think it must be very hard to study history and not get incredibly frustrated because of the nature of history as a very complex subject. 😅
@@DrAnarchy69 What about when informal hierarchies appear? IMO just saying "let's get rid of hierarchies" ignores the stability that can come from them, and the problems of a disorganized mess of a system. I think distributing power as equally as possible is the only way forward, though. Being anti-hierarchy doesn't seem like a silver bullet to achieve that, not that you said it was. I like the model of co-ownership personally, like distributing stock and capital ownership. And then making sure decisions have the input of workers in a company, or citizens can be part of the budgeting process for example.
I used to have a coworker with nearly identical eyebrows. I joked that she was Brezhnev's lovechild. Then I realised that would be an awesome name for a rock band
Well no Marx believed that there was to be a transitionary period between capitalism and stateless communism, Lenin acknowledges this in The State and Revoltion.
Can't wait to see the tankies and far-right make accusations of you being Fascist/Communist respectively. Actual nuance and context tends to piss off the extremists.
Come to think of it, I have heard it pronounced that way. Hilariously enough, the translater for one of the clips I used during that sequence used my pronunciation, so it's obviously a common mistake
@@jindrichdolejs623 It's a common feature of slavic speakers (and Germans like me, too) speaking English - in our accents, those sounds are different because we devoice the end of syllables. That's probably not the reason for this misunderstanding, but it made me think of it :)
@@vinylpowell7600 The Crusades have an overall death toll from 1m to 3m but they lasted from 1095 to 1291 so the comparison is kind of retarded since it's a 200 year period. The period of state murder discussed goes from 1917 to 1939.
It is worth pointing out that, while WW2 was absolutely, unquestionably won on the Eastern front first and foremost, the USSR still got a lot of help there. Not to say that they would’ve definitely failed without, but between so much fuel and bombs being consumed by the Battle of Britain (not to mention the codebreaking of the British Colossus), and the utterly incomprehensibly massive aid sent from the USA via Lend-Lease, Russia’s victory in the East was made considerably easier. It’s much easier, after all, to just make a metric fuckton of tanks if you’re not also having to make the metric fuckton of trucks, trains and other vehicles that a well-mobilized army needs to fight. And fielding that massive army is considerably easier when the USA is sending literally millions of tons of food over too. It really was a team effort, and just as the “USA saved the world!” narrative is tiring and inaccurate, so is the frequent counter-narrative of “the USSR could’ve easily won the whole thing by themselves!”
"People say that the allies didn't help us. But it cannot be denied that the Americans sent us materiel without which we could not have formed our reserves or continued the war. The Americans provided vital explosives and gunpowder. And how much steel! Could we really have set up the production of our tanks without American steel? And now they are saying that we had plenty of everything on our own." -General Georgy Zhukov
Even though he was a mass murdering forkhead, I do think Stalin had the right of it as to how the Axis were defeated, "The British gave time, the Americans gave money, and we gave blood." Probably more than necessary because, as stated, Stalin was a massive tool, but it would have been ugly no matter who was in charge of the USSR at the time, because the Nazis went into the Soviet Union with a "Burn, Kill, Maim!" mentality.
@NaCl3 Something also important to consider is the food situation. One has to remember almost to the entirety of Ukraine was under German occupation for a decent amount of time during the german-soviet war. That being the breadbasket for the union would have assisted in beating the Soviets, if not American canned good deliveries. I've heard claims that American canned goods were served in the soviet union till the 70's because of how much aid the USA sent. So while I totally stand by the claim the soviet union could have kicked the Germans out of the soviet union, I'm not sure if they would be able to get to Berlin. Overall though I agree with the tremendous amount of blood the Russians sacrificed in the Second World War.
Hey! Fellow historian from Greece here. It is really brave of you to make this video. Keep up the good work, academic history made public is really tough and it seems that today it's absolutely necessary.
Karl Marx was a contemporary of Abraham Lincoln, Joseph Stalin was a contemporary of Walt Disney. That's usually how I explain the era difference we're talking about whenever people try to hold Marx responsible for the Soviet Union.
@@owenmitchell1469 A Libertarian who happens to make military history videos on specific battles/campaigns of WW2. Dude has a massive blindspot on the economic side of things. His videos provide a ton of context and so are very long. He really can't check his ideology at the door though and it shows when he stops focusing on the military battle.
UA-cam should bring back comment size limits just for TIK honestly, tell this man he's wrong and he'll give you a doctoral thesis on why he's right while still being wrong.
"Marx's ideas were more akin to anarchy." Mikhail Bakunin: Am I a joke to you? Edit: I just realized the guy I meant to talk about was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 🤦🏻♂️
Even the term "soviet" (Council) doesn't assume any state above village level and assumes that sharing resources would work globally with minimal oversight... History isn't kind to optimist ideas.
They stand on the side of profit, as does any company that big. The only agenda you can pursue if you want to be a billionaire is ruthless profiteering and market dominance.
@@bellorusso PragerU always talks about how much life got worse due to him, but barely mentioned his theories and frameworks of how capitalism exploits people. I don't agree with all that Marx said, but after I read a bit of him I understood why PragerU smack talked him that much. Because his theories do critiscise very similar systems and groups as the ones that keep PragerU PragerU alive.
@@frocco7125 its because PragurU is literally funded by the Koch brother lol. They dont care about nuance. Just about fooling their 15 year old viewers into unknowingly supporting corporate cronyism
@@frocco7125 Its also worth noting that people often forget the context of the time Marx lived. Marx lived in a society dominated by Monarchies and Imperialism. The reasons he called for Violent revolution is because he was living in a society dominated by autocrats whom couldn't be voted out of office, and the only two democracies of the time that existed (US and France), had to win their Democracy through violent Revolution.
I mean, the phrase "communism has never been tried" is often used in lieu of "communism has never been achieved". Especially when the definition of most communists of communism is "a stateless, classless, money-less society". It is an oxymoron to call a state communist. More accurate, the Soviet world was "communist aligned". Their ideology was in favor of communism, and their political parties were named to announce their goals. In the same way that a republican party in a constitutional monarchy doesn't necessarily exist within a republic. The Soviet Union refereed to itself, and its fellow aligned nations as socialist. It's in the name, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. And the rhetoric often refereed to the state ideology as socialist. The references of the USSR and PRC being communist come from a particularly western perspective. One influenced by language barriers, propaganda of both sides muddying the water of socialist and communist definitions, and disagreements within the left questioning the legitimacy of variants of socialist and communist ideology.
@Albert Whisker A Soviet is a regional assembly. They grew out of the worker's councils of the Russian Revolution. They were at the time local government. As the Soviet Union changed, so did the role of these local assemblies. Generally a "Soviet Republic" means a constitutional state with a Russian style assembly.
As for the "the US saved the USSR in WWII" thing, while our fighting didn't seem to save them, they still relied heavily on US aid, whether it be weapons, resources, trucks, etc.
Both Stalin and Georgy Zhukov said that they would have lost the war if it weren't for US materiel aid. To what extent that's accurate is debatable, but if the head of state and most decorated soviet general of the war each said that on multuple occasions, then there must be something to it.
There have been efforts to overstate both sides of this issue. There are people, Tankies as Cypher calls them, who have tried to claim that Soviets would have carried through to ultimate victory without a single piece of US equipment if they had had to. They're every bit as wrong as the people claiming that the US beat the NAZIs militarily practically single handedly. I'm generally skeptical of "both sides-ism", but this is a case where it's actually accurate.
@@jesseberg3271 I agree however you can kinda make the claim that the us beat the Japanese navy single handily However I completely disagree we had a lot of help from our allies navies as well and on the ground the Australians and New Zealand and the Indians were immensely helpful in the ground war
Find that hard to believe, tho I want to give credit where credit is due. If the soviets we're willing to lose 27M fighting the Reich alone, to our 400K overall, sounds to me like they were doing just fine on their own. I don't want to over credit or under credit anyone, but I don't think the ussr needed anyone's help in WW2. That doesn't mean our people didn't make crucial wins and didn't show great bravery both in the Pacific and Europe.
I think the “no one achieved communism” thing is just weird semantics. I think what modern leftist refer to “communism” is just the new term for what Marx called “high phase communism” as opposed to low phase which modern leftist now call socialist. Idk the description of the difference between the two has changed through history for some reason and it’s confusing. Good vid overall though
The main problem leftists have is people pointing to the ussr or china and saying "THIS IS communism, this is what communists want" when those were communist states (countries under the communist party). In the video when he says something along the lines of leftists saying it isn't Communism because it didn't work is mostly correct, because the guidelines for it are the stateless classless society based on blah blah blah, but that isn't to say that it hasn't actually been tried. Just being tried really, really slowly, sometimes to the point of regression
@@smallman9787 are you sure, those aren't Faschists who stuck to their talking points, performing lips service but little else? I much rather own cute, culty communes that falter without the leaders or recruiting younger.
While it's true that the Normandy Invasion didn't suddenly turn the tide for Soviet Russia on the Eastern Front (Operation Barabarossa was an abject failure by that time), it did present the Third Reich with what Hitler most dreaded: A two front war waged on both fronts by competent foes. This kept Hitler from regrouping and making another run at the "lebensraum" that the Soviet Union had, and to which Hitler felt entitled. So, I wouldn't say the Normandy Invasion "saved" the Soviet Union, but it sure altered the equation firmly in the Allies favor... Good video; nicely done
True, but it turns out that 84% of the Wehrmacht had deployed to the Eastern Front, including the most seasoned soldiers. Ths is according to the National Review, vol CXIX
Also the USA supplied a lot of the tanks, trucks, ammunition, food, clothing, etc. that the soviets used to defeat the Germans. But you are correct in that the west likes to take more credit than they deserve for stopping Hitler. The Soviets fought twice as many Nazi divisions as the west did, so Normandy would have been a lot more hellish if not for the Russian front.
@@noahedelson3618. Your figures are not quite on it. 80% of Germany's military casualties were suffered fighting the Soviets. By late 44. 33% approx of Germany's Divisions were fighting the Western Allies. (104 Divisions) While 198 German Divisions were fighting the Soviets. After the failure of the Ardennes offensive. More German Divisions went east.
@@WJV9. Lend Lease was critical in that it meant that Soviet production could focus on weapons production as much raw materials and other essential goods were being sent to the Soviets including food, fuel and even socks and boots. The British also sent plenty of essential goods. US supplied many logistical items. tens of thousands of Studebaker trucks. Rolling Stock, railway rails, locomotives as well as lumber for telegraph poles. This helped greatly in the huge Soviet offensives of 44-45 but it was ultimately the sacrifice and sweat of the Soviet peoples that won through in the end.
As another myth worth debunking: The Soviets single handheld defeated Nazi Germany. While the Soviets were utterly indispensable to the defeat of Nazi Germany, they were part of a broader effort with the western allies and European resistance movements. Stalin was literally calling for D-day and a second front from the start of 1943 until it happened in 1944. As you said, it was a united effort of various nations and peoples to defeat fascism, hints the name "Allies".
Soviets would have sucked nuts without Britain and America helping them. For example before British radios, Soviets had to use flag signals for their tanks. It's safe to say that Soviets couldn't have succeeded without west, while the same isn't true for west because they had A-bombs
@@PennyAfNorberg Eeeeh, the Nazis managed to push all the way to the capital and held basically continental Europe. Combine that with Stalin's extremely defensive style of foreign policy and I don't think that would have happened. Though if WWI taught us anything it's that wars can waffle dramatically so I'm leery about making any sort of definite statement.
The Berlin wall came down in 1989, two years after Ronald Reagan said ''Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!'' However, neither Reagan nor Gorbachev tore down that wall. That was East Germans, and some could even say Helmut Kohl did this when he promised that ''Deutschland wird wieder vereinigt.'' But it is true that Reagan did not bring down the Berlin Wall. But I give him and Gorbachev all the credit for ending the Cold War.
@Reno Figaro True, but even though Reagan did encourage the Soviet Union to end hostilities, he should not be credited with ending the Cold War. If it wasn't for Gorbachev, the Cold War might never have ended. And we are still fighting a Cold War, this time against Putin.
@Reno Figaro The thawing did begin with the conversations Kennedy and Khrushchev had, but it didn't end the Cold War. Khrushchev was too much of a hardliner when compared to later Soviet Leaders. Sure, he was not as bad as Stalin or Malenkov, but it was Khrushchev's relationship with JFK that led to his downfall in 1964. Brezhnev was far more open to change, even if he was a bigot. Andropov and Chernenko would never have listened to Reagan, but Gorbachev was willing to tear down the wall between Communism and Capitalism. Reagan may not be responsible for bringing down the Berlin Wall, but it was thanks to him and to Gorbachev that the Cold War ended.
But they didn't end the cold war did they! The USA wanted to break up and impoverish Russia and when that failed the thaw - never a full melt - resumed in earnest. The period 1989-1991 was just a lull in the USA's desire to dominate the world. The same with China from 1982-2001. And now the USA wants to talky on both China and Russia, just like it did in the first cold war. Will they succeed a second time? Only time will tell.
Apparently,it was torn down due to an accident.Someone gave the wrong date,so when thousands of people lined up at the wall,the officers decided "We could either tell them the truth & have them wait 24 hours,OR we could take a few hammers right now & break the wall."...
Socialist (though not leninist) here, while I do have some small disagreements with some points, overall, this is one of the most fair looks at Soviet history I've seen from a non-socialist/non-leftist channel, keep it up!
@@stanleyrogouski Whether it would have been better or not for the Soviets to collapse is a different point than the one discussed in the video and by the original poster. It was the question of whether the Soviet actions in the Cold War could be called imperialism. Hopefully we agree on that. I'd also like to imagine there was a way for Hungary and Poland to avoid far right regimes without Soviet tanks in their countries. And at any rate, suggesting there wasn't is basically paternalism, the forefather of imperialism.
I like how this video isn't just "WELL ACKTUALLYY" retorts to standard statements, and isn't just anti-Soviet but gives a fair shake when it comes to WW2 and some anti-Soviet misconceptions too . That's some good evaluation.
I got ads too. It's both heartening (to know that they're not attempting to silence you down at the moment) and annoying (because, well, they are ads right in the middle of the flippin' video!) at the same time.
@@JackClockerinos I saw a mix of debunking both right and left myths. He gave a decent defense of Marx himself, tried to show that Stalin was the very worst of the Soviet GenSecs rather than the norm (but correctly emphasized the norm was bad and went all the way back to Lenin,) gave credit where credit is due with the Soviets being responsible for whooping Hitler's butt, and also pointing out if the US did imperialisms (and we did) then the Soviets did imperialisms too (and they did.) And rightly pointed out the Cultural Marxism thing is nonsense. Any reactionaries about to say: "But the Frankfurt School was real" So was the Illuminati, they still aren't controlling the world. They're a defunct inconsequential Bavarian freethought group that would have been forgotten if not for the same scarmongering over democracy back in the late 18th/early 19th centuries that reactionaries do today over socialism. And the Frankfurt School are a bunch of sociology dorks that tried to make Marxist ideas more popular to the general 'Murican public without having a revolution and failed miserably.
What I feel a lot of people miss is that the disaster in Russia, Stalinism, was a consequence of the failure of the international revolutionary wave in Europe, most importantly in Germany. Lenin was under no delusions about Russia alone not being able to go from a feudal backwater into anything resembling socialism, and knew he needed the support of the international communist movement. Because, if they tried to build "socialism in one country" they'd be alone in this quest and would be starved for resources. In order to survive, they'd need to conduct trade with capitalist powers, make compromises with them, which means participation on the global market and the accumulation of capital, and oh, look where we are now.
it was not without trying, tho. Trotskii (the non-Latin Romanisation of that name) was eager to foment revolution. If it would not spark on its own, he was more than happy to carry it forward at the point of Krasnii Armiya (Red Army) bayonets. Interestingly enough, there were Communist mini-revolutions throughout central and eastern Europe shortly after the Great War - Munich; Bavaria as a whole; the Soviet Republic of Hungary under Bela Kun... It was only after the Poles were finally able to no-sell the Red Army at Warsaw and see them off that Staling figured it would be better to strengthen his forces at home before sending them out again - thus "Socialism in one State/Country" (This was sourced from "The Age of Social Catastrophe" by Robert Gellately) Lenin's New Economic Policy was actually viewed as a treason against Marxist ideology, but he knew it had to be done in order to balance the Union's books and get some hard currency in the treasury. Once it accomplished those modest goals, it went out with the bath water and the Terror could begin in earnest
This is also following the revolution and fighting the (foreign-backed) White Army in the Russian civil war, which probably played a part in a lot of later decisions.
@@shannonstrobel6727 "Trotskii was more than happy to carry it forward at the point of Red Army bayonets" That's completely wrong though. What Trotsky actually said about the prospect of 'spreading revolution' by the soviet military was that it would be totally opposed to his position and that of the Bolsheviks. Quoting Trotsky himself in the Dewey commission: "A revolution by the Red Army would be the worst adventurism. To try to impose revolution on other people by the Red Army would be adventurism."
@@shannonstrobel6727 Non-latin romanisation is an oxymoron, given that romanisation explicitly is the conversion from a non-latin to a latin alphabet. More than that, the final letter in Trotsky's cyrilic spelling more closely resembles a "y" or "j", not an "i"
While that is true, I think we all should agree that Lenin is to blame for selling the global revolution scenario as "historically inevitable" when in fact it was a HUGE gamble with a very low chance of success.
Great video:) But what you said at 15:09 seems to me to need attention. Not all Gulags were abolished right after Stalin's death; just the majority of them - the Gulag of Perm-36 remained open and functional until 1987. Krushchev's destalinization didn't happen over night, instead 'taking three steps forward and two steps back'. By the time he was ousted, Gulags had yet to be wiped off the face of the Earth. If I'm wrong, please correct me.
Whether you are right or not depends on how you use the term "Gulag". If you are referring to the "Chief Administration of Camps", that was dissolved in 1960, during destalinization. If you are referring to the camps themselves (and considering the context, and how the English-speaking world in general uses the term "Gulag", you certainly are), then yes, you are correct: there were still gulags _(plural)_ operating into the late-1980s. For more information: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
14:46 - a small correction. The third term (or first, rather, as it was the first to be announced) was ускоре́ние (acceleration), cf. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uskoreniye Democratisation was only added later and was not that central. Perestroika and glasnost were the big ones (after uskoreniye failed and was phased out in 1987 in favor of the more ambitious perestroika).
Yuri Andropov targeted corruption that had flourished under Leonid Brezhnev, implemented economic and social reforms, and elevated Mikhail Gorbachev within the ranks of government knowing Gorbachev wanted reform. To say he was "essentially the same" as Brezhnev is misleading and not covering his time in power is a real missed opportunity.
Honestly, I don't think this guy is as good as he and his subscribers think he is. Your point on Andropov is an excellent one. Some others are the massive amount of aid that the US supplied to the Soviets. Millions of tons of grain and crude oil, refined petroleum products, gunpowder, millions of pairs of boots, anti-tank weapons, medicine, and hundreds of thousands of jeeps and heavy trucks. These allowed the Soviets to free up millions of men for the war effort and allowed them to reduce famine and allowed them to focus on weapon production. I mean, anyone who has read about World War Two in any detail knows that the Eastern Front was far more bloody than the Western Front.
@@libertatemadvocatus1797 The way I see it, if it weren't for the western allies the Soviet Union would have had a far higher casualty rate. Looking at post-ww2 Europe, the Russians kept Europe from speaking German and the United States kept Europe from speaking Russian
A really good video and meticulously even-handed. I have spent countless hours debating these points with a lot of folks, both my fellow leftists and with those to my right. I feel like I lose brain cells whenever i hear either a leftist say "communism has never been tried" because even if we go by the Marxist definition, they still tried, they just didn't accomplish it. Rosa Luxemburg was literally criticizing Lenin's purges in 1918 in her pamphlet on the Russian Revolution, which led to her famous quote "Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently". The idea Stalin has been "besmirched" is the one I've probably spent the most time having to argue about because even if Stalin's atrocities were exaggerated by anti-communists, you can't exaggerate something if it didn't happen. As you said, the most reliable estimates we have right now say 6.5 million deaths. While it's not as high as the older estimates of 20 million deaths, that's still a huge number of deaths Stalin was responsible for. Ive probably spent just as much time on the imperialism issue as I have on Stalin. I mean come on! Soviet imperialism literally split the global communist movement not once, but twice! First with Mao, and then with the western communists after the Prague Spring leading to the development of Eurocommunism! I mean Czechoslovakia was trying to chart a new course for socialism for their own country and this was seen as a threat not to socialism, but to Soviet Hegemony! The Soviets were literally prepared to go to war with Yugoslavia to bring it back into the Soviet sphere of influence in the 1950s!
Oh, you lost American kids... You'd have to learn history first but you can't because you have stand up comedians, not historians there in the US. "Rosa Luxemburg was literally criticizing Lenin's purges in 1918 in her pamphlet on the Russian Revolution..." And how it ended up on Rosa? Do you know when the so called Red terror started? Was it maybe after the White terror and the attempted assassination of Lenin? "the most reliable estimates we have right now say 6.5 million deaths" Reliable? On what bases? On the Holodomor myth? Why the biggest US ally, Britain is not recognizing that myth? Why Kazakhstan that very probably suffered more from that famine is not recognizing that myth?
I still believe Tito had Stalin whacked. "Stop sending people to kill me. We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle... if you don't stop sending killers, I'll send one to Moscow and I won't have to send another."
@@simplicius11 1) I have a degree in history and cypher is getting his PhD 2) Please read Rosa’s writings. Also I’m not sure how that has any relevance to her murder given she didn’t have state power, while Lenin did 3) Accoridng to the Soviet archives 4) Britain recognizes the Holomodor happened, it just doesn’t call it a genocide, because that classification is disputed.
@@SunflowerSocialist te autopsy said it was a stroke. Though the timing of the message was so close, also I reàd somewhere that Stalin was about to send another Assassin before his stroke. It was funny to think about
The US did not save the USSR. Chiang Kai Shek did, a fact now acknowledged by the PRC. How did he save the USSR? Because without his determination to defeat the Japanese, China would have collapsed before Barbarossa even began. With China out of the war Japan would have been in a position to fulfill her obligations under the Tripartite Pact and strike the Soviet Union in the East. The Soviets would have lost a two front war in the summer of 1941. Japan also played an indirect role. The Army wanted to go North in 1941 but instead the US embargo forced the decision to go South. This was communicated to Stalin by Richard Sorge in the fall of 1941. Stalin was able to move troops from the far east to Moscow front in late 1941 for the counterattack that threw the Germans back from the gates of Moscow. WWII was a global war in which events in one theater had tremendous influence in other theaters.
If you ask me, Lenin and the Soviet Union betrayed their ideals when they violently put down the Krondstadt sailors. The men of the Baltic Fleet had been some of the most devoted Bolsheviks and served the party since the February Revolution, and Lenin stabbed them in the back when they became unsatisfied with how Lenin was handling the revolution.
Another Myth: "In the USSR, everything was free." Actually, they did not have a Welfare state as understood in the Capitalist West. If you were Unemployed and you weren't a Pensioneer or Disabled, you were left to die starving. All the "free stuff" were actually in payment of your Labor. The higher your Job Post, the more perks you got. What they did have was a Job Guarantee for all who seek to have one.
I mean yeah, if you're able and are looking for work, you get provided, and vice versa, that why i hate it when american said communist are lazy and get thing for free And also, soviet actually have programs to help the disable tho
I don’t get why nuance regarding the USSR is so hard. Like in America, most of us acknowledge the good ideas and successes that came out of American society without denying all the atrocities committed in America’s past and present. Many social democrats admire much of what FDR did, but they don’t pretend things like Japanese Internment, Redlining or the Dresden bombings are justified/didn’t happen.
"without denying all the atrocities commited by America's past and present" - I (not an American) got the impression that people who praise America, usually, exactly don't do that, sadly
@Lynnix Varjo People who praise America definitely don’t have that nuance. A lot of America’s past and current atrocities are filtered out, so many Americans are unaware of a lot of it. Younger Americans are generally more aware of it, although even among young people, the full extent of what America does is often not completely grasped. So it’s not denialism or justification as much as it is just complete ignorance.
Our problem is we tend to see history as a binary, either "good stuff" or "bad stuff" committed by "heros" or "villains". Until we take off that filter we'll never be able to truly objectively look at what happened.
@Randall Briggs The USSR was responsible for significant economic, technological, medical, political, scientific and cultural progress both within the USSR and also in other parts of the world. I can’t possibly go through all of them, but a few examples that come to mind are the massive expansions to women’s rights (especially compared to the West), ending homelessness, massive expansions to worker’s rights and huge increases in educational attainment. The USSR was a noble attempt at achieving economic democracy and while it fell short in a lot of ways, soviet democracy on the local level offered more opportunities for democratic participation than what is seen almost anywhere else in the modern world.
@Randall Briggs Also Hitler was going to invade either way. Stalin was just ensuring they had a buffer zone since Britain and France had already refused to form a pact with the Soviet Union in opposition to Germany.
@Kayoshie Flametail I am not sure if there was ever an era that was truly all around "good", just as I do not believe that about the United States. I do, however, believe that there were certain things that the USSR did that were worthy of praise, namely the immense reduction of poverty and improvement of living conditions over the course of its existence, improved women's rights over the west, free housing, free education, a guaranteed job, quality public transport, support for anti-colonialism (even if merely ostensible), many new scientific and technological advancements like the cell-phone, etc. My general opinion on the USSR is that it was a flawed experiment that did some things poorly but other things well. However, the fact that it was able to achieve such a level of development despite instant and fierce opposition from the west, as well as the enormous toll of WWII, is nothing short of remarkable.
Wow. I expected some bashing to anyone who claims to be communist in the comment section. When I saw all the civil responses and even curious questions my humanity restored just a little bit. Even if I disagree with some economical themes associated with communism, .... It makes me think that ultimately it is an effort to make people to be more close together and to be more at peace (just one of many, I don't imply it is the only one please don't censor me current government lol). Humanity should work together to accomplish peace and prosperity and not just kill each other because of labels (just labels, choose any color any text font whatever, it is not like peoples have not committed atrocities without any justification).
@@CynicalHistorian Ian Kershaw, writes in his Hitler bio it was his choice to divert troops from attacking Moscow and Leningrad "Operation Typhoon" To attack Stalingrad instead, Which destabilised and broke the momentum of the German assault and led to stagnation and eventual retreat.
The turning point was when Germany invaded the USSR (I know that there are scenarios where the Soviets may have collapsed, but the German's lack of oil pretty much doomed them from the start).
6:40 The constituent assembly was a redundant body, sort of just a vestigial organ left over from the dual power (provisional government of the state Duma and the Petrograd soviet) government formed after the February revolution. Really from the October revolution onwards the Soviet was in control. It consisted of other parties besides the bolsheviks too, that being the Left SRs, the Mezhrainosty, and some elements of the mensheviks. Of course, the left SRs would end up being opposed to the policies of the bolsheviks, but that stems from the bolsheviks signing brest-litovsk, not from the constituent assembly being dissolved.
This is interesting. Maybe it's because I had better teachers in high school or maybe it's because I've heard about them from other sources, but some of these myths I've either never heard of or I knew they were myths in the first place. Also, bigots and conspiracy theorists will never rest, will they? The further they "argue" the more entertaining it becomes to see how flat they fall at the first hurdle... if they can make it that far! Haha!
@@CynicalHistorian I'd hate to imagine the worst of them, man. It's understandable if previous myths have been established and are holdovers from the Red Scare eras (a handful of holdouts isn't too alarming; we're all raised to believe certain things), but to view them as absolute fact without considering origin, context and the like is quite ridiculous. Stay safe, Cypher.
@@CynicalHistorian Honestly the internet is filled with idiots on both sides of the spectrum shouting at each other while extremists on both sides who make idiotic statements.
@@unkown686 The internet is like the world. If you randomly select a number of people from anywhere in the world (let's say a number bigger than 1000), you will always get a certain % of criminals, extremists ect. And the most extreme an least knowledgable are always the loudest...
I would argue that the Western and Eastern fronts worked in tandem., rather than competitors as is so often portrayed. Any German forces and materiel deployed to one front will be too far to be able to help the other. In this way, by splitting the German's ability to fight in two, a sort of domino effect was created. When everything was deployed to the soviet front, Italy was left wide open. And when more material and men had to be sent to normandy, it made things easier for the soviets. TLDR: The western front helped the eastern one, and the eastern front helped the west.
That's true. But the two front war was much less of an issue in WW2 than WW1. Most of the fighting was done in the East and without the Western front, the nazis would still loose, although a bit later.
@@Yezu666 This is questionable. The African and Italian theaters of war tied down a lot of German manpower, over half the Luftwaffe, and knocked Italy out of the war. Hardly an insignificant achievement.
Leshy the ussr was very close to collapsing, if Hitler was able to capture the caucuses and continue the war machine longer the soviet regime could have disintegrated.
Already Black Nazi Germany would lose the war regardless if the Soviets regime collapsed, which was a possibility if they captured Moscow and the caucuses. I’m just saying what likely could have happened. What do you mean cry some more, why would I cry for the nazis?
The disbanding of the Constituent Assembly is kinda differently potrayed. Bolsheviks at the time were in a coalition with a larger section of the Social Revolitionaries, the left SRs, who split from the Right SRs a few days or weeks ( I forgot exactly ) before the elections, so this split was not manifested in the election results. The first goverment that the Bolsheviks entered was a coalition government with the Left SRs that lasted all up until end of February/March of 1918 and the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty.
I'm not a user who normally likes videos, I'm more of a sharer. But after the shenanigans you told us about recently, from now on I will start liking your videos too. That is whenever I remember and when I'm not too distracted by the great content in your videos. If I wasn't a poor student I'd do more. For now it's liking and sharing. For all its failures and flaws, I do appreciate the rigorous accessibility to great content UA-cam provides for anyone with decent internet access. Which is mindboggeling when you really think about it. Evidently when pulled into a historical perspective. Please stay with us. You have so much potential to grow. Ah, so. There you go. Like. My first one in what must be a relatively long time (not in a historical perspective).
The Empire of Japan let American merchant vessels send lend-lease to the Soviet Union even after 1941 because of the battle of Khalkin Gol (or the Nomonhan incident) and its redirection of Japan's ambitions towards naval dominance in the Pacific. They chose fighting the USA over committing to fighting the Republic of China and the USSR both at once.
@@jacobbeitner8796 Lend-lease wasn't the only factor, of course, but it was an indispensable one. Here are a few choice quotes for all to consider: "'I want to tell you what, from the Russian point of view, the president and the United States have done for victory in this war,' Stalin said. 'The most important things in this war are the machines.... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war.'" "Nikita Khrushchev, future premier of the USSR, admitted in his memoirs that Lend-Lease was vital: 'Just imagine how we would have advanced from Stalingrad to Berlin without [American transport]. Our losses would have been colossal because we would have had no manoeuvrability . . . Without [US food supplies] we wouldn’t have been able to feed our army. We had lost our most fertile lands - the Ukraine and the northern Caucasus.' "Khrushchev went further and admitted: 'Several times I heard Stalin acknowledge [Lend-Lease] within the small circle of people around him. He said that . . . if we had had to deal with Germany one-to-one we would not have been able to cope because we lost so much of our country.'" "'If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war,' he wrote in his memoirs. 'One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me.'" "In 1963, KGB monitoring recorded Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov saying: 'People say that the allies didn't help us. But it cannot be denied that the Americans sent us materiel without which we could not have formed our reserves or continued the war. The Americans provided vital explosives and gunpowder. And how much steel! Could we really have set up the production of our tanks without American steel? And now they are saying that we had plenty of everything on our own.'"
My great-grandfather was a member of the CPSU from 1948 until 1992, and he said that Communism had never been fully implemented. In the Soviet Union, Communism was the idealized version spoken of by Marx, Engels, and to a lesser extent, Lenin. However, even being a member of the party was something he resented. He knew that the collapse of the Soviet Union was inevitable after Stalin's death. He was forced to stay after Malenkov was removed from power in 1954, but he left the party only a week after Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet Union officially ceased to exist.
Marx hoped for a proletariat revolution in advanced nations such as Germany, England, or America; countries with developed economies and a fairly well-educated population and trained work force. He did not view the Russian Empire of his time suitable for such a revolution as it represented the opposite of what he thought necessary for successful communism.
Really? This is the sort of thing that gets demonetized? What on Earth could be considered controversial in this video? The lack of Cold War jingoism? There were no "pro-Soviet" statements in it, nor were there any "anti-Western" statements. Still a threat? Wow! And of course Ronald Reagan didn't destroy the Berlin wall. We all know that was Helmut Kohl! *giggle giggle*
It wasn't demonitized, he just foresaw the possibility. Also youtube isn't good, but it's not mccarthyist, no one is looking for antiwestern videos to take down. It's more like it's bad for advertisers to be associated with fascism/racism so it's in youtubes interest to prevent that, but they want to do it efficiently so rather than evaluating modern fascist content, which is rampant on the site, they just pull adds from things with too many bad words like Hitler. Kind of like when they tried to keep adult content from kids and a lot of non-adult lgbt content got flagged as well. UA-cam as a whole doesn't care about anything but revenue, for better and for worse.
Game idea: every time he says 'Bretsneff' instead of Brezhnev, take a shot of Stolichnaya in the name of the glorious motherland. For the 'Ahhhhndropov' and 'Neechie' bonus rounds, take three shots for each.
Wisconsin guy here. You might have some fun introducing some of your hangers-on to the history of the Wisconsin socialist party, who ran the city of Milwaukee for a big chunk of the early 20th Century. Wisconsin sent a socialist to Congress, sent quite a few to the State legislature, and did it all fair and square -by winning elections. The socialists were clean as a whistle, and were responsible many ideas that were adopted in many other states. All this is lost, even to many citizens of Milwaukee. This history is fading...
The only possibly justifiable argument for the US 'saving' the Soviet Union in WW2 would be based on the industrial materials sent their in the first two years following Barbarosa. This consisted of things like railroad cars, trucks and fuel that acted to jump-start the ability of the USSR to extract it's own resources and make it's own weapons on a mass scale. While that scaling up would still have occurred without the aid the delay might have been fatal if it had allowed the Nazis to take the Caucuses and it's oil.
I think it's important to think about the different communist ideologies, before saying it was tried. The communism tankies advocate for was tried many times. The communism anarchocommunists fight for, wasn't tried so far.
@Red Baron Well yeah, it was tried, but it didn't fail cuz it wasnt a good system, it failed cuz for example the fascists in spain invaded the communes and killed them all. Anarchocommunism ''failed'' cuz outside powers forced themselves onto them
My cat prescribed to the communist ideology. She started dressing like Lenin and raised the hammer and sickle in our living room. She learned and only spoke Russian. I drew the line when she set up a Gulag in our spare bedroom and forced me to work in it. I took down her "iron curtain" she set up dividing our living room and sent her packing. She took her manifesto but returned three days later with the stars and stripes flag in her paw and vowed to stop her forced ideology and I took her back in. We've gotten along just fine since.
On point 10 about Reagan, from what I've heard, the Soviets were obsessed with matching the US militarily to maintain M.A.D. but Reagan's massive ramp up of military spending meant the Soviets effectively grinded their economies down trying to keep up which slowly lead to the Soviet Union disbanding from the pressure.
That is, indeed, a major contributor. It had generally gone the opposite direction in the '70s with the US military stagnating and the Soviet military expanding and updating at a greater pace. Reagan stoked the arms race so much it panicked the Soviet leadership and their military spending became so high it became even more crippling. With the already faulty top-down planned economy of the USSR, it was the last straw.
The Soviet Economy was already stagnating and becoming enormously dysfunctional by the time Reagan became President. The reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Economy is far more nuanced than high military spending
Is this something that people repeated so much it became truth because almost everybody says it or is there some real evidence that supports this? As far as i know the Soviets were heavy on military spending throughout whole cold war so if they went even more crazy with it, it should be very easy to verify yet i never saw any signs that this is the case.
@@robertkalinic335 I don't know about the Soviets going "even more crazy with it", but I do know the world was nearly destroyed during the Able Archer 83 incident, much of it a result from the total alarm in the Soviet Union over Reagan's "Star Wars" plan. The ramp up in US military spending caused the Soviets to effective give up resulting in the INF Treaty. The point was that the Soviets were obsessed with keeping up with the US military, which meant a disproportionate amount of funding went into military spending instead of the economy resulting in a economy that would steadily shrink. Reagan's massive ramp up is supposedly the death blow where the Soviets officially couldn't keep up and their economies ground down.
I've seen estimates of Soviet military spending, in the 1980s, of between 12 and 30 percent of GNP. Of course, it's a lot of estimation as the USSR leadership was never forthcoming about such details of the state. Their absolutely massive military of the time was rather obvious, however. It made the US military look quite small in comparison. Yet the USSR didn't quite have the economic power of the US to back up such a huge arsenal. The estimates do have a solid basis.
One thing regarding Lenin: His idea of Vanguard Party did not come because they thought they were the most advanced theorist, but because of two things: 1st - The lack of practical theory regarding the way to get to power 2nd - The absolute lack of industrialisation of the Russian Empire Not unlike Blanquism or even some Jacobinist ideas during the French Revolution, the idea was that a temporary authoritarian phase was necessary to ready the social and political conditions for actual socialist and then later communist political organisation. It's also quite unfair to put all the problem on the pure theoretical dimension when it comes to what happened with the October Revolution when the thing that was probably the most impactful on future policies was the civil war, not unlike the French Revolution. The plan was to create a vanguard party made and led by workers, democratically organized, that would conduct industrialisation, what they called "socialist primitive accumulation of capital", basically doing the same step of industrialisation the capitalist world did but in an organized, planned and faster fashion. Increasing agricultural productivity, then investing these gains in productivity in industrialisation to develop an actual working class that would directly be organized around socialism and so could directly transition to communism. But, of course, civil war, political repression, old tsarist administration, a lot of factors come into play when we consider what happened.
Wasnt there the whole split between the anarchists and marxists where the anarchists ended up telling Marx "if you create this authoritarian state to manage things after the revolution then it will just hold onto power and never go away", or something like that?
@@Loregamorl Yes, and they were right. Leninism and the idea of a vanguard party is nothing more than a front for the establishment of a permanent autocracy.
@@DonHaka Don’t make me laugh. In every M-L state its been a bunch of elitist oligarchs that have been in power, just like any other fascist state. And yes, one person has often controlled these states; see prominent Nazi sympathizer Stalin for more details.
@@Loregamorl Sort of, It was the Hague congress in 1872 Though it should be mentioned that they were anarchists so any government was defined as authoritarian automatically and Marx was advocating a democracy not a totalitarian dictatorship.
For number 6, I want to stress that I do not believe that one side alone could have won ww2, east or west. It was the combination of both sides' indomitable will that eventually broke Germany, and being stretched INCREDIBLY thin didnt hurt, either.
The Soviets had the rare metal known as Stalinium forged from Stalin's sweat, vodka, and Lenin's toenails, which made every bullet and missile bounce off. The Germans have been reported to lose so hard that they started praying to a god named "Gaijin" to nerf the metal.
I disagree Soviet industry was supprior to German industry and the Soviets had vast swaths of man power not to mention the Germans lacked oil, were invading an extremely resilient army, and was dealing with poor supply in poor temperatures, the only real disadvantage the Soviets had was tech, and lacking some more special natural resources, Germany had no real chance at defeating the Soviets the only reason they did so well in the first place was because Stalin was caught off guard. The allies certainly hastened the end of world war 2, but they did not win it, the Soviets did.
@@sparrow6604 alright, we shall address these in the order you placed them. Firstly, I dont know where you heard soviet industry was superior to german industry, but it is simply not true. The soviets, or russians at the time, did not start truly industrializing until the 1900s, whereas germany had been near fully industrialized by its unification in 1871, the only holdouts being cities where the guilds held power, preventing industialization in those areas entirely. The germans did lack oil, but they absolutely knew this, making strides in coal liquefaction technology, and making a trade agreement giving them near exclusive rights to the Baku oil fields, a stipulation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Also, most soviet industry cut so many corners, that vehicles would simply break down on the way to the front. The soviets, I'll grant you, were extremely resilient, but they were mostly untrained conscripts, and russia has had a crippling alcohol addiction since the 1500s, an addiction stalin only fueled to keep the masses complacent. Soviet tech was surprisingly up to date for the time, as they heavily cooperated with research with the allies and even the germans before the war. They were only truly behind in air technology, a disadvantage that would shaft them and lose them more than they should have. I will grant you, supply was poor in the east, but that is because the best equipment was saved for the western front. Hitler knew the allies would attempt an invasion, so he kept the atlantikwall needlessly stacked. I say that the soviets could not have won alone, not because I dont like the soviets, but because I genuinely believe it. To say the soviets could have won alone is to downplay the stunning effectiveness of allied bombing raids on both morale and industry, and SEVERELY undersells the genuinely fierce and violent resistance that French, Dutch, Polish, and Yugoslav armies took part in. Not to mention in heavily masks the utter incompetence of Stalin's USSR.
@@texo456 in difference in industrialization was overtook by Stalin’s industrialization programs as deadly as they were they were effective by 1943 the Soviets were out producing the Germans in 3-1 and were out producing aircraft by over 10000, granted your right in saying Soviet equipment was inferior but it also didn’t matter even before the war Soviet industry was superior so allied bombing didn’t have that much of an effect, also morale bombing did not do much to stop the Germans from fighting, like what do soldiers say on the eastern front care if a city hundreds of miles away was bombed . Also supply in the east was bad because of how much land they had to supply, also what equipment was being saved for the west? France fell in 1940, and didn’t land again properly until 1944, (unless maybe Italy was eating up equipment? Also what does equipment have to do with supply? Did better tanks magically mean better supply? Or am I misunderstanding what your saying? As for oil that’s fair the Germans had made a lot of progress in synthetics. The partisans also did alot of stuff but it wasent like they won the war, heavy industry won the war and the Soviets simply had more.
@@CynicalHistorian Xi Thought: Here, have some honey. It's local. Chinese Citizens and The World: The bees! Not the bees! They're in my eyes! Aaagggghhhh!
Alright, as a communist, speaking for my cadre of like 4 people, we gotta own up to 2. It's technically true that we haven't seen the end goal of communism, but by any common definition, it's an unhelpful argument.
The problem is also tankies who themselves arent really even lefitists. They'll champion china and north korea for instance simply because they "call" themselves communists and they stand up to the west but thats literally just that. One is an absolute monarchy that doesnt care about the needs of workers while the other is a capitalist dictatorship with zero regulations on government sponsored big business
There are so many different leftist ideologies and takes on what communism is that any "achkually, gobunism was tried, you leftists are just deranged" is like going to every single different christian church with their own take on christianity and saying "you are all the same, and your ideology is this definition i will make that only some of you have in common or slightly agree with"
@not Shane kid you've never seen 2 leftists debate each other and it shows. also, marx has his own definition, and the dictionary he used isnt really a good mirror of it
Thanks for watching, and please consider supporting the channel by buying merch: teespring.com/stores/the-cynical-historian
Or by donating to my Patreon: www.patreon.com/CynicalHistorian
See following replies for corrections and additional info, but first, here are some related videos to check out:
Cody's (AlternateHistoryHub) video: ua-cam.com/video/o6T7tzrriUk/v-deo.html
2:30 - Marxist historian EP Thompson: ua-cam.com/video/Igb9f_cSRBk/v-deo.html
5:10 - the Russian Intervention of 1918-20: ua-cam.com/video/1mC1bmzbgxY/v-deo.html
8:30 - Cody's (AlternateHistoryHub) video: ua-cam.com/video/o6T7tzrriUk/v-deo.html
15:15 - Death of Stalin: ua-cam.com/video/KiOsPpvuYuk/v-deo.html
*errata*
19:58 - Greensboro *North* Carolina (thx
jelongva)
*References*
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, _Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference_ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). amzn.to/33BTIMT
Donald Davis and Eugene Trany, _The First Cold War: The Legacy of Woodrow Wilson in U.S.-Soviet Relations_ (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002). amzn.to/2OpXxwg
Jochen Hellbeck, _Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich_ (New York: Public Affairs, 2015). amzn.to/2H7US9w
David L Hoffmann, ed. _Stalinism: The Essential Reader_ (New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2003). amzn.to/2udigeo
Terry Martin, _The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939_ (Ithaca, N.York: Cornell University Press, 2001). amzn.to/31xUBV8
Andrzej Paczkowski, “The Storm over the Black Book,” _The Wilson Quarterly_ 25, iss. 2 (2001): 28-34.
A good database of primary sources and simplified histories: soviethistory.msu.edu
Quick info:
www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/your-guide-to-karl-marx-who-was-he-what-was-the-communist-manifesto-and-why-is-he-important/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Soviet_Union
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_repression_in_the_Soviet_Union
@@CynicalHistorian
I appreciate your showing that Marx was not a mass murderer
@@CynicalHistorian
Also Prageru is funding by oil tycoons and has a yearly budget of 10 billion dollars.
Might influence their hatred of Leftism.
@@CynicalHistorian
How influential would you say Pat Buchanan was
And
Can we get a video on the Benghal Famine?
Oh no not the comments. Back into my bunker I shall go.
Joking aside great video!
Eh, if it ain't about Palestinian/isreal it would not be too bad.
@@taptiotrevizo9415 the Yugoslav civil war would be *much worse*
TeutonicCross bruh what about the troubles ?
Hi guy
Nice to see you again or Cody
Are you telling me Reagan didn't punch the berlin wall down with his bare hands before his afternoon nap?
Nope. I was there. I did watch Spandau Prison come down in three days, though.
Nah, He had a Bald Eagle crash through it.
He just made it Crack if you know what I mean.
It was definitely when he woke up from it
No hands required; he used his mighty Freedom Boner!
Americans: we all know who won the cold war for us!
*Pizza Hut stands up*
Americans: Ronald Reagan! Come on down!
*Pizza Hut sits down embarrassed*
PELLFLOST TZAPPLORT FOR SURE ! ! !
👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
But in its heart, Pizza Hut know the only thing that matter is that Gorbatchev know who really did it.
Gorbachev did it.
only thing is Reagan with his neo-libralism might made capitalism too extreme so could be in 50-60 years from now we would say "It was Reagan and Thatcher that saw the seeds that led to the communist revolution in the west, good riddance capitalism!"
@@LillyP-xs5qe Supply side economics is really just progressivism for conservatives.
What is this? Nuance? It seems so foreign and unfamiliar in today's world.
It's really, really lovely to watch a video like this where history is respected as something complicated, rather than the flurry of videos that take one side or the other in historical events in order to benefit modern political narratives.
It's been uncommon for around 100 years
@@kakyointhemilfhunter4273 It's never been common.
@@kakyointhemilfhunter4273 It's been uncommon for much longer than that, probably since the first humans walked the earth. The human brain evolved to dislike nuance for survival purposes.
@@rangergxi You're both right, my bad
It seems this video was just an excuse to show footage of Red Army troops marching set to different rock songs
and Korean pop...but who's complaining?
And that’s bad?
As if you would need an excuse for that?
EmperorJuliusCaesar Thai?
I particularly enjoyed the irony of using the old German disco song "Moskau" for the first montage...
Everyone knows that McDonald's won the Cold War. They put a McDonald's in Red Square in 1989. The USSR collapses in 1991. Coincidence? I think not.
Checkmate.
Checkmate!
Um, Pushkin Square actually. It was the biggest McDonald's in the world (27 cash registers) until they opened one in Beijing a few years later.
@@jlrva3864 Interesting. I had always heard it was Red Square, but I suppose I never really looked that much into it.
DAMN YOU CLOWN and your overly greasy but delicious burgers with way over salted fries!
Ronald is Ronald, be it Reagan or McDonald -)
Alright! I got my vodka, my ice pick, and an AK. I'm ready to learn about glorious Soviet Union that had no problems whatsoever.......
*guffaws in Stalin*
@@itsblitz4437 propaganda is not inherently a lie
*laughing in "Economic Problems of the USSR" by Joseph Stalin*
@@uhohhotdog Perhaps one could blame the USSR for their problems because their form of government didn't prevent excesses by those at the pinnacle of power? I agree that the worse of humanity seem attracted to power, but some systems try to minimize their effectiveness.
With more or less success, I admit.
@@benbowerman1582 propaganda is however, inherently mistrue.
Say what you will about the Soviet Union but their national anthem sure was epic.
Even bootlickers will hum it
Especially the Paul Robeson English version, where the Soviet Victory Parade includes contemptuously tossing captured nazi battle standards in a heap.
@Real Human Bean The working class has already provided you several remixes available on YT for your audio enjoyment.
No. Farewell of Slavianka is so much better.
@@wisemankugelmemicus1701 I used to love the GDR anthem. Miss it.
The most common myth I run into (in the US) is even more basic: The Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar. I suspect most Americans have never even heard of Kerensky's provisional government. Even historically literate people need to be reminded on that point, in my experience.
come to think of it, I have heard folks say that
That one I usually chuck up to people not knowing of provisional government due to how short lived it was and how little it achieved.
I learned of it in highschool and I still forget it regularly
We have the same myth taught in Russia
Yeah, the russian revolution and subsequent civil war was a lot more complicated. People are most likely mixing up the february and the october revolutions and completely forgetting about the russian civil war between the reds and the white.
@@linkesocke4533 And there also was green
In soviet russia, nuance nuance you
@David Ouimet The "In soviet russia" joke was the "that's what she said" joke of the 1980s.
Context is a dirty word.
“Nuance nuance you” isn’t that a therapist?
Give proper credit: Yakov Smirnoff brought that joke and meme to us.
Hahah
And in America, you nuance the nuance?
The Cynical Historian,
Do an episode on myths and misconceptions about America in the 1950s next
@Ornate Orator
Center Left. I'm hardly "pro communism," or "rabidly anti capitalism" for that matter. Besides, that wasn't my only comment that I posted here, and it wasn't even my first one. My first one was mentioning how annoying this one Stalin apologist was.
By the way, a video on myths and misconceptions about America in the 1950s could include both positive and negative things that people believe about the decade that are wrong, so it would hardly have to be a hyper nationalistic defense of America, or a condemnation of it. I just think that the fifties is an interesting decade, and outside of the wars that Americas has fought, its arguably one of the most popular subjects when disusing US history. It was an interesting time in the county's history.
@Ornate Orator
"I bet I can guess your political ideology if that’s your comment to this video"
I bet you are one of those people that loves to make unsubstantiated assumptions about others!
GargamelGold Well the U.S. did have a booming economy during that time so....
Are there any genuine myths about that time? Like, maybe a few specific cases about cia coups, but I don't think you could make a 10 point list about that time?
@@hanneswiggenhorn2023,
Yes. There are a lot of myths about how good the average person had it back than, along with some myths that deny some of the bad things like how harmful Jim Crow was.
Bruh i got a PragerU ad while watching this. Ironic
lol, nice
I just got Trump 2020 ads.
(I'm not a Trump voter.)
i got 2 trump ads while watching, get on my level
Hey. I win the jackpot then! I got both a Trump and a Prager U ad on this video.
@@sovietunion7643 Judging by your username, you got Trump elected the first time. All the Trump ads anyone gets are your fault!
/s
This video pissed off both conservatives and tankies alike
Hermocras Breadlord,
Which is a good thing in my opinion as well
It’s how you know it’s that good good.
As all good videos involving politics do.
{insert angry comment here}
@@dathn9880 {Insert Angry comment responding to your comment}
Therapist: Mispronounced Brezhnev isn't real, he can't hurt you
The cynical historian: BrEtZnEv
Oe how he mispronounced Niezsche as "Neechee".
bRiTsSnEv
(That's not even the worst pronunciation of the name I've heard if you'll believe it.)
Don't forget that "demokratizatsiya" was mispronounced as "demokratiya"
Good lesson-one note: Greensboro was in NORTH Carolina last time I drove by it.
Thanks, I'll put that in errata
@@matthewhaynes9788 Heyy fellow Spartan. I noticed he mentioned the wrong state too. It's a black mark on the city's history for sure.
Grew up in GSO, NC and my mom avoided driving thru that neighborhood all the time. But she and Daddy sure talked about it lots! (they blamed the Klan)
As a son of SC I appreciate the correction, we already have enough to be ashamed of...
thinks about Myrtle Beach*
*shudders*
"People are using history as a political bludgeon *again*..."
You mean there was a time when people didn't??
Fun fact: Tankie is a mild pejorative handed out to Stalin apologists or authoritarian Communists in general, but the name comes from the Hungarian uprising of 1956. This is important because Stalin was dead at this point. Nikita Khrushchev rolled the tanks into Budapest.
Khrushchev is an authoritarian commie, so it sounds like the term has the same meaning
@@drake1896 He was not as bad as others. That's what you track.
@@SandfordSmythe cant see his comment, what did he/she say?
@@rimworld64 I forget. Probably, he was throwing all into the same pot as Communists.
@@SandfordSmythe lol, he probably thinks fascism and marxism is the same thing too.😂
When I hear of the US saving the USSR it's based on lend lease mostly.
If it was't for lend lease, though, the Soviets wouldve lost badly
Which I might add, the Russians haven't paid back. Still.
Was about to write that
@@IgnoredAdviceProductions Actually no, the failure of Operation Typhoon (which was the best shot of any kind of Axis Eastern victory) happened well before US AID of any meaning arrived, & during the Stalingrad siege only about 10% of what the US-UK would contribute happened. However the war would have hit a stoppage point & just been a continuing cycle of trading area in the Pontic steppe, when historically some cities changed hands 4+ times prior to Kursk.
Would the USSR have lost if the Western Allied powers were never in a position to mount a strong Continental invasion? its plausible, but Axis shortage of fuel makes that a miniscule prospect.
@@intagliooglethorpe8434 Stalin and Zhukov disagree with that assessment
Nitpick: the definition of private property is different under Marx than is used. Personal property is stuff like your house, car and if a crafts person, their tools. Private property is property where the labor of others is extracted, ie a factory. It’s a very different sense. Marx cared about the social relation of exploitation and its mechanics.
I like how in most comment sections you would be getting weather to death but when you explain this here you at least just get ignored
@@jordanjudice4504 the first part of your comment is poorly constructed and the second part entirely ironic. I love it when trolls self immolate.
You mean to tell me Ronald Reagan didn't drop down in his Zord with Maggie Thatcher and George H.W. Bush to smash the Berlin Wall? Dirty Pinko lies!
George H. W. Bush should get more credit for the end of Communism than Regan, he kept his mouth shut during the fall of Communism, rather than dancing on there graves. If he had done that there could have been a coup by the hardliners.
Dude, studying history seems like a bitch and a half 😖 I don't know how you can keep everything so well balanced.
Great video, as always ❤️
Studying history is always important
If you don't learn from history then you're doomed to repeat it.
Nothing against learning history 😅 I was just giving a compliment to The Cynical Historian, because I think it must be very hard to study history and not get incredibly frustrated because of the nature of history as a very complex subject. 😅
Some people have a Passion for it.
@@DrAnarchy69 What about when informal hierarchies appear? IMO just saying "let's get rid of hierarchies" ignores the stability that can come from them, and the problems of a disorganized mess of a system. I think distributing power as equally as possible is the only way forward, though. Being anti-hierarchy doesn't seem like a silver bullet to achieve that, not that you said it was. I like the model of co-ownership personally, like distributing stock and capital ownership. And then making sure decisions have the input of workers in a company, or citizens can be part of the budgeting process for example.
the best thing about Brezhnev’s policies was his insanely thick eyebrows
What was bushier? Stalins moustache or Breshnev's eyebrows?
You can’t teach thick hair.
I used to have a coworker with nearly identical eyebrows. I joked that she was Brezhnev's lovechild. Then I realised that would be an awesome name for a rock band
He has enormous eyebrows but certainly wasn’t anywhere as great as Gaius Marius!
and unwelcomed mouth kisses
Well no Marx believed that there was to be a transitionary period between capitalism and stateless communism, Lenin acknowledges this in The State and Revoltion.
Lol this is like a really basic point of Marxism as well how did he miss that one
I think it's because Marx doesn't really linger on the transition period, it's like 2 or 3 paragraphs in total with a bullet point list.
@@Ariaelyne Nah. Marx and Engels talk a great deal of it in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
@@Pats0c ah, okay, only really read Capital and the Manifesto.
Okay you'rr right on that part but that still doesnt make him responseable for the 100 min deaths unther communist regimes
Can't wait to see the tankies and far-right make accusations of you being Fascist/Communist respectively.
Actual nuance and context tends to piss off the extremists.
When you're being attacked by both sides your doing something right.
@@nicholasrodriguez5578 No... the craziest of fringe people tend to say that stuff.
Who is far right?
@@StormyTrumpJr Ian Rush, so Kenny Dalglish can pass to him.
Yes. As the late great Terry Pratchett once wrote 'Oh for a -ng simple world'.
Thanks for the video, very nice!
Look up the pronunciation of 'Brezhnev', 'zh' is supposed to sound exactly like the 'g' in 'massage'.
Come to think of it, I have heard it pronounced that way. Hilariously enough, the translater for one of the clips I used during that sequence used my pronunciation, so it's obviously a common mistake
@@jindrichdolejs623 that works too. I pronounce both sounds the same way.
@@jindrichdolejs623 It's a common feature of slavic speakers (and Germans like me, too) speaking English - in our accents, those sounds are different because we devoice the end of syllables. That's probably not the reason for this misunderstanding, but it made me think of it :)
For some reason conservatives would never make the mistake of blaming Jesus for deaths caused by Christianity.
It is funny how many comparisons are drawn between Marxism and historical religions.
*Laughs in the crusades*
@@vinylpowell7600 The Crusades have an overall death toll from 1m to 3m but they lasted from 1095 to 1291 so the comparison is kind of retarded since it's a 200 year period.
The period of state murder discussed goes from 1917 to 1939.
@@grimreaper492 atrocities nonetheless. People also seem to forget that crusading armies went on anti-semitic massacres
@@moosesandmeese969 Of course.
It is worth pointing out that, while WW2 was absolutely, unquestionably won on the Eastern front first and foremost, the USSR still got a lot of help there. Not to say that they would’ve definitely failed without, but between so much fuel and bombs being consumed by the Battle of Britain (not to mention the codebreaking of the British Colossus), and the utterly incomprehensibly massive aid sent from the USA via Lend-Lease, Russia’s victory in the East was made considerably easier.
It’s much easier, after all, to just make a metric fuckton of tanks if you’re not also having to make the metric fuckton of trucks, trains and other vehicles that a well-mobilized army needs to fight. And fielding that massive army is considerably easier when the USA is sending literally millions of tons of food over too.
It really was a team effort, and just as the “USA saved the world!” narrative is tiring and inaccurate, so is the frequent counter-narrative of “the USSR could’ve easily won the whole thing by themselves!”
"People say that the allies didn't help us. But it cannot be denied that the Americans sent us materiel without which we could not have formed our reserves or continued the war. The Americans provided vital explosives and gunpowder. And how much steel! Could we really have set up the production of our tanks without American steel? And now they are saying that we had plenty of everything on our own."
-General Georgy Zhukov
The war could not have been won without the combined powers or the USSR, Britain, and America. One missing would change the entire outcome of the war.
Even though he was a mass murdering forkhead, I do think Stalin had the right of it as to how the Axis were defeated, "The British gave time, the Americans gave money, and we gave blood." Probably more than necessary because, as stated, Stalin was a massive tool, but it would have been ugly no matter who was in charge of the USSR at the time, because the Nazis went into the Soviet Union with a "Burn, Kill, Maim!" mentality.
@@ScorpionViper1001 I've never heard that phrasing before, but I think that's very accurate.
@NaCl3 Something also important to consider is the food situation. One has to remember almost to the entirety of Ukraine was under German occupation for a decent amount of time during the german-soviet war. That being the breadbasket for the union would have assisted in beating the Soviets, if not American canned good deliveries. I've heard claims that American canned goods were served in the soviet union till the 70's because of how much aid the USA sent. So while I totally stand by the claim the soviet union could have kicked the Germans out of the soviet union, I'm not sure if they would be able to get to Berlin. Overall though I agree with the tremendous amount of blood the Russians sacrificed in the Second World War.
Hey! Fellow historian from Greece here. It is really brave of you to make this video. Keep up the good work, academic history made public is really tough and it seems that today it's absolutely necessary.
Well hello there fellow academic, welcome to the Cynical History channel
I am a little depressed that you called someone brave for trying to get closer to the truth, and that the statement can be defended. 8(
Hello fellow Greek
Karl Marx was a contemporary of Abraham Lincoln, Joseph Stalin was a contemporary of Walt Disney. That's usually how I explain the era difference we're talking about whenever people try to hold Marx responsible for the Soviet Union.
I still find it cool that Marx once sent a letter to Lincoln to congratulate him on his re-election
Marx was also a big fan of Lincoln and sent him letters
Joseph Stalin was a contemporary of Edgar and Herbert Hoover's.
@@karlwalther The average normie doesn't really know what era those guys are from off the top of their head.
Personally I blame Engles more than marks. Not for any particular reason, but it does silence debate amongst those who don’t know who Engles was. 😂
If you listen carefully, you can hear TIK furiously typing an 8 hour response to this
Who or what is TIK?
Underrated comment good sir.
@@owenmitchell1469 a great WW2 history channel however not so great with the political knowledge or political history
@@owenmitchell1469
A Libertarian who happens to make military history videos on specific battles/campaigns of WW2. Dude has a massive blindspot on the economic side of things. His videos provide a ton of context and so are very long. He really can't check his ideology at the door though and it shows when he stops focusing on the military battle.
UA-cam should bring back comment size limits just for TIK honestly, tell this man he's wrong and he'll give you a doctoral thesis on why he's right while still being wrong.
"Marx's ideas were more akin to anarchy."
Mikhail Bakunin: Am I a joke to you?
Edit: I just realized the guy I meant to talk about was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 🤦🏻♂️
Kropotkin: *sad bread noises*
Yeah, this was the worst take in this video, and I'm surprised how few leftists know about the first international and hague conference
Even the term "soviet" (Council) doesn't assume any state above village level and assumes that sharing resources would work globally with minimal oversight... History isn't kind to optimist ideas.
@@fionafiona1146 Yeah. The councilcoms got ridiculed by Lenin and then kicked out of the party.
Well, it's not wrong. Marx's ideas were more akin to anarchism than to Soviet communism.
I have to commend you: I’ve never heard anyone butcher Brezhnev’s name that badly 😂
one can but try
17:24 - How could anyone still think that it was Reagan who took down the wall when it was clearly Rocky Balboa on Christmas!
Or Rambo in Afghanistan!
only few people would understand☕🗿
Only germans remember it was actually David Hasselhoff.
@@psykikteevee Which once again proves my old theory:
Germans LOVE David Hasselhoff!
"Breadsnef"
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
Hello UA-cam, if this is demonitised then we will all know where you stand........
Goolag
They stand on the side of profit, as does any company that big. The only agenda you can pursue if you want to be a billionaire is ruthless profiteering and market dominance.
@@blackflamefegari5756 I think you mean Googlelag
PraegerU is such a scam.
urine and feces intensifies
@Ornate Orator except they're explicitly right wing
A big grift convincing people to not think and piss on each other so when they do it nobody complains.
@Albert Whisker Ok. If we want to be partisan, I think the Young Turks is a caravan of progressive garbage that constantly gets their facts wrong.
@@tharunthiruseelan4252 That's just being factual.
Poor Marx being blamed for everything
I loved him in a Night at the Opera.
@@bellorusso
PragerU always talks about how much life got worse due to him, but barely mentioned his theories and frameworks of how capitalism exploits people.
I don't agree with all that Marx said, but after I read a bit of him I understood why PragerU smack talked him that much. Because his theories do critiscise very similar systems and groups as the ones that keep PragerU PragerU alive.
@@frocco7125 its because PragurU is literally funded by the Koch brother lol. They dont care about nuance. Just about fooling their 15 year old viewers into unknowingly supporting corporate cronyism
@@Spongebrain97
Yeah lol. They literally made one video on why bribery in politics is not a problem.
@@frocco7125 Its also worth noting that people often forget the context of the time Marx lived. Marx lived in a society dominated by Monarchies and Imperialism. The reasons he called for Violent revolution is because he was living in a society dominated by autocrats whom couldn't be voted out of office, and the only two democracies of the time that existed (US and France), had to win their Democracy through violent Revolution.
I mean, the phrase "communism has never been tried" is often used in lieu of "communism has never been achieved". Especially when the definition of most communists of communism is "a stateless, classless, money-less society". It is an oxymoron to call a state communist. More accurate, the Soviet world was "communist aligned". Their ideology was in favor of communism, and their political parties were named to announce their goals. In the same way that a republican party in a constitutional monarchy doesn't necessarily exist within a republic. The Soviet Union refereed to itself, and its fellow aligned nations as socialist. It's in the name, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. And the rhetoric often refereed to the state ideology as socialist. The references of the USSR and PRC being communist come from a particularly western perspective. One influenced by language barriers, propaganda of both sides muddying the water of socialist and communist definitions, and disagreements within the left questioning the legitimacy of variants of socialist and communist ideology.
@Albert Whisker A Soviet is a regional assembly. They grew out of the worker's councils of the Russian Revolution. They were at the time local government. As the Soviet Union changed, so did the role of these local assemblies. Generally a "Soviet Republic" means a constitutional state with a Russian style assembly.
As for the "the US saved the USSR in WWII" thing, while our fighting didn't seem to save them, they still relied heavily on US aid, whether it be weapons, resources, trucks, etc.
Both Stalin and Georgy Zhukov said that they would have lost the war if it weren't for US materiel aid. To what extent that's accurate is debatable, but if the head of state and most decorated soviet general of the war each said that on multuple occasions, then there must be something to it.
There have been efforts to overstate both sides of this issue. There are people, Tankies as Cypher calls them, who have tried to claim that Soviets would have carried through to ultimate victory without a single piece of US equipment if they had had to. They're every bit as wrong as the people claiming that the US beat the NAZIs militarily practically single handedly. I'm generally skeptical of "both sides-ism", but this is a case where it's actually accurate.
@@jesseberg3271 I agree however you can kinda make the claim that the us beat the Japanese navy single handily However I completely disagree we had a lot of help from our allies navies as well and on the ground the Australians and New Zealand and the Indians were immensely helpful in the ground war
Yeah, the whole importance of Stalingrad came from the fact that it was one of the major hubs for lend-lease.
Find that hard to believe, tho I want to give credit where credit is due.
If the soviets we're willing to lose 27M fighting the Reich alone, to our 400K overall, sounds to me like they were doing just fine on their own.
I don't want to over credit or under credit anyone, but I don't think the ussr needed anyone's help in WW2.
That doesn't mean our people didn't make crucial wins and didn't show great bravery both in the Pacific and Europe.
I think the “no one achieved communism” thing is just weird semantics. I think what modern leftist refer to “communism” is just the new term for what Marx called “high phase communism” as opposed to low phase which modern leftist now call socialist. Idk the description of the difference between the two has changed through history for some reason and it’s confusing. Good vid overall though
German language discussions allow for that nitpicking.
That definition is actually used since Lenin.
The main problem leftists have is people pointing to the ussr or china and saying "THIS IS communism, this is what communists want" when those were communist states (countries under the communist party). In the video when he says something along the lines of leftists saying it isn't Communism because it didn't work is mostly correct, because the guidelines for it are the stateless classless society based on blah blah blah, but that isn't to say that it hasn't actually been tried. Just being tried really, really slowly, sometimes to the point of regression
@@smallman9787 are you sure, those aren't Faschists who stuck to their talking points, performing lips service but little else?
I much rather own cute, culty communes that falter without the leaders or recruiting younger.
@@fionafiona1146 I do not understand the question
While it's true that the Normandy Invasion didn't suddenly turn the tide for Soviet Russia on the Eastern Front (Operation Barabarossa was an abject failure by that time), it did present the Third Reich with what Hitler most dreaded: A two front war waged on both fronts by competent foes. This kept Hitler from regrouping and making another run at the "lebensraum" that the Soviet Union had, and to which Hitler felt entitled. So, I wouldn't say the Normandy Invasion "saved" the Soviet Union, but it sure altered the equation firmly in the Allies favor...
Good video; nicely done
Also the Western allies, mostly the US and Commonwealth, fought the Japanese practically alone
True, but it turns out that 84% of the Wehrmacht had deployed to the Eastern Front, including the most seasoned soldiers. Ths is according to the National Review, vol CXIX
Also the USA supplied a lot of the tanks, trucks, ammunition, food, clothing, etc. that the soviets used to defeat the Germans. But you are correct in that the west likes to take more credit than they deserve for stopping Hitler. The Soviets fought twice as many Nazi divisions as the west did, so Normandy would have been a lot more hellish if not for the Russian front.
@@noahedelson3618. Your figures are not quite on it. 80% of Germany's military casualties were suffered fighting the Soviets. By late 44. 33% approx of Germany's Divisions were fighting the Western Allies. (104 Divisions)
While 198 German Divisions were fighting the Soviets. After the failure of the Ardennes offensive. More German Divisions went east.
@@WJV9. Lend Lease was critical in that it meant that Soviet production could focus on weapons production as much raw materials and other essential goods were being sent to the Soviets including food, fuel and even socks and boots.
The British also sent plenty of essential goods.
US supplied many logistical items. tens of thousands of Studebaker trucks. Rolling Stock, railway rails, locomotives as well as lumber for telegraph poles.
This helped greatly in the huge Soviet offensives of 44-45 but it was ultimately the sacrifice and sweat of the Soviet peoples that won through in the end.
As another myth worth debunking: The Soviets single handheld defeated Nazi Germany.
While the Soviets were utterly indispensable to the defeat of Nazi Germany, they were part of a broader effort with the western allies and European resistance movements. Stalin was literally calling for D-day and a second front from the start of 1943 until it happened in 1944. As you said, it was a united effort of various nations and peoples to defeat fascism, hints the name "Allies".
Soviets would have sucked nuts without Britain and America helping them. For example before British radios, Soviets had to use flag signals for their tanks. It's safe to say that Soviets couldn't have succeeded without west, while the same isn't true for west because they had A-bombs
Germany was loosing at d-day it would taken longer to without d-day Europe would been red in the 50-ties.
@@PennyAfNorberg Eeeeh, the Nazis managed to push all the way to the capital and held basically continental Europe. Combine that with Stalin's extremely defensive style of foreign policy and I don't think that would have happened. Though if WWI taught us anything it's that wars can waffle dramatically so I'm leery about making any sort of definite statement.
@@PennyAfNorberg True, The soviets saved Europe from the Nazi. but the Western allies saved Western Europe from the Soviets,
Actually, we committed to the Second Front and an invasion in 1942.
The Berlin wall came down in 1989, two years after Ronald Reagan said ''Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!'' However, neither Reagan nor Gorbachev tore down that wall. That was East Germans, and some could even say Helmut Kohl did this when he promised that ''Deutschland wird wieder vereinigt.'' But it is true that Reagan did not bring down the Berlin Wall. But I give him and Gorbachev all the credit for ending the Cold War.
@Reno Figaro True, but even though Reagan did encourage the Soviet Union to end hostilities, he should not be credited with ending the Cold War. If it wasn't for Gorbachev, the Cold War might never have ended. And we are still fighting a Cold War, this time against Putin.
@Reno Figaro The thawing did begin with the conversations Kennedy and Khrushchev had, but it didn't end the Cold War. Khrushchev was too much of a hardliner when compared to later Soviet Leaders. Sure, he was not as bad as Stalin or Malenkov, but it was Khrushchev's relationship with JFK that led to his downfall in 1964. Brezhnev was far more open to change, even if he was a bigot. Andropov and Chernenko would never have listened to Reagan, but Gorbachev was willing to tear down the wall between Communism and Capitalism. Reagan may not be responsible for bringing down the Berlin Wall, but it was thanks to him and to Gorbachev that the Cold War ended.
But they didn't end the cold war did they! The USA wanted to break up and impoverish Russia and when that failed the thaw - never a full melt - resumed in earnest. The period 1989-1991 was just a lull in the USA's desire to dominate the world. The same with China from 1982-2001. And now the USA wants to talky on both China and Russia, just like it did in the first cold war. Will they succeed a second time? Only time will tell.
Apparently,it was torn down due to an accident.Someone gave the wrong date,so when thousands of people lined up at the wall,the officers decided "We could either tell them the truth & have them wait 24 hours,OR we could take a few hammers right now & break the wall."...
@@BrunoMaricFromZagreb So they did give them the hammers and the Germans broke the wall.
Socialist (though not leninist) here, while I do have some small disagreements with some points, overall, this is one of the most fair looks at Soviet history I've seen from a non-socialist/non-leftist channel, keep it up!
Same here (through the lenses of a orthodox marxist)
As a distributist (kinda economicly left) I've noticed some mistakes but otherwise a good video
@@CatholicPiccolo What mistakes did you notice?
@@dashiellgillingham4579 One thing I noticed is that Nietzsche inspiring fascism
@@dashiellgillingham4579 he defined communism as no private property and tried to suggest the Soviet Union was communist
17:25 No it was David Hasselhoff
That would be awesome
I thought it was Pink Floyd who tore down The Wall. Or maybe just Roger Waters.
@@louisduarte8763 Nah, it was the Scorpions...
@@hubertblastinoff9001 I didn't see them dancing on the wall.
Right! Talking of Soviet history. This shouldn't cause any fuss.
“Ussr wasn’t imperialistic”
Poland, Hungary, and Ukraine said otherwise
Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Finland, Afghanistan, North Korea, Georgia, and Mongolia say otherwise as well.
@@starmaker75 Poland and Hungary are democratic. They just elected parties you dislike.
And to an extent, Vietnam
@@stanleyrogouski So imperialism is justified if it puts in regimes we like? How's that different from 'Murican capitalist imperialist justifications?
@@stanleyrogouski Whether it would have been better or not for the Soviets to collapse is a different point than the one discussed in the video and by the original poster. It was the question of whether the Soviet actions in the Cold War could be called imperialism. Hopefully we agree on that. I'd also like to imagine there was a way for Hungary and Poland to avoid far right regimes without Soviet tanks in their countries. And at any rate, suggesting there wasn't is basically paternalism, the forefather of imperialism.
Thank you, this was a much more realistic perspective than what is normally claimed to be accurate. 👍
I like how this video isn't just "WELL ACKTUALLYY" retorts to standard statements, and isn't just anti-Soviet but gives a fair shake when it comes to WW2 and some anti-Soviet misconceptions too . That's some good evaluation.
As a Russian, I must say “thank you” for including the song “Moscau” by the group Genghis Khan.
I got ads, so glad this video is still monetized.
we'll see how long that lasts, but that's why I didn't make a big deal of it
@@CynicalHistorian keep 'em in list form. UA-cam loves a list of things for some reason
Bump, still got ads on my playthrough
I got ads too. It's both heartening (to know that they're not attempting to silence you down at the moment) and annoying (because, well, they are ads right in the middle of the flippin' video!) at the same time.
2 weeks later. Still got ads
yOu LeFtiST sOYbOy yoU
More like "You regressive fascist pig!" Because he was mostly dealing with far-left myths
Oddly enough, it was capitalist America that spread soy to the world and started marketing it as flavored sludge.
@@JackClockerinos I saw a mix of debunking both right and left myths. He gave a decent defense of Marx himself, tried to show that Stalin was the very worst of the Soviet GenSecs rather than the norm (but correctly emphasized the norm was bad and went all the way back to Lenin,) gave credit where credit is due with the Soviets being responsible for whooping Hitler's butt, and also pointing out if the US did imperialisms (and we did) then the Soviets did imperialisms too (and they did.) And rightly pointed out the Cultural Marxism thing is nonsense.
Any reactionaries about to say: "But the Frankfurt School was real" So was the Illuminati, they still aren't controlling the world. They're a defunct inconsequential Bavarian freethought group that would have been forgotten if not for the same scarmongering over democracy back in the late 18th/early 19th centuries that reactionaries do today over socialism. And the Frankfurt School are a bunch of sociology dorks that tried to make Marxist ideas more popular to the general 'Murican public without having a revolution and failed miserably.
What the fuck is a soyboy anyway?
Jack Clock tankies aren’t real leftists
All: Regan brought down the Soviet Wall!
Pizza Hut: 😭 (cries in Pizza)
*Reagan
Don Regan was Ronald Reagan's Treasury Secretary.
What I feel a lot of people miss is that the disaster in Russia, Stalinism, was a consequence of the failure of the international revolutionary wave in Europe, most importantly in Germany. Lenin was under no delusions about Russia alone not being able to go from a feudal backwater into anything resembling socialism, and knew he needed the support of the international communist movement. Because, if they tried to build "socialism in one country" they'd be alone in this quest and would be starved for resources. In order to survive, they'd need to conduct trade with capitalist powers, make compromises with them, which means participation on the global market and the accumulation of capital, and oh, look where we are now.
it was not without trying, tho. Trotskii (the non-Latin Romanisation of that name) was eager to foment revolution. If it would not spark on its own, he was more than happy to carry it forward at the point of Krasnii Armiya (Red Army) bayonets. Interestingly enough, there were Communist mini-revolutions throughout central and eastern Europe shortly after the Great War - Munich; Bavaria as a whole; the Soviet Republic of Hungary under Bela Kun...
It was only after the Poles were finally able to no-sell the Red Army at Warsaw and see them off that Staling figured it would be better to strengthen his forces at home before sending them out again - thus "Socialism in one State/Country" (This was sourced from "The Age of Social Catastrophe" by Robert Gellately)
Lenin's New Economic Policy was actually viewed as a treason against Marxist ideology, but he knew it had to be done in order to balance the Union's books and get some hard currency in the treasury. Once it accomplished those modest goals, it went out with the bath water and the Terror could begin in earnest
This is also following the revolution and fighting the (foreign-backed) White Army in the Russian civil war, which probably played a part in a lot of later decisions.
@@shannonstrobel6727 "Trotskii was more than happy to carry it forward at the point of Red Army bayonets"
That's completely wrong though. What Trotsky actually said about the prospect of 'spreading revolution' by the soviet military was that it would be totally opposed to his position and that of the Bolsheviks. Quoting Trotsky himself in the Dewey commission: "A revolution by the Red Army would be the worst adventurism. To try to impose revolution on other people by the Red Army would be adventurism."
@@shannonstrobel6727 Non-latin romanisation is an oxymoron, given that romanisation explicitly is the conversion from a non-latin to a latin alphabet. More than that, the final letter in Trotsky's cyrilic spelling more closely resembles a "y" or "j", not an "i"
While that is true, I think we all should agree that Lenin is to blame for selling the global revolution scenario as "historically inevitable" when in fact it was a HUGE gamble with a very low chance of success.
when you state basic facts.
therefore offending tankies and conservatives.
middleroadism is a logical fallacy.
Great video:)
But what you said at 15:09 seems to me to need attention. Not all Gulags were abolished right after Stalin's death; just the majority of them - the Gulag of Perm-36 remained open and functional until 1987. Krushchev's destalinization didn't happen over night, instead 'taking three steps forward and two steps back'. By the time he was ousted, Gulags had yet to be wiped off the face of the Earth.
If I'm wrong, please correct me.
Whether you are right or not depends on how you use the term "Gulag". If you are referring to the "Chief Administration of Camps", that was dissolved in 1960, during destalinization. If you are referring to the camps themselves (and considering the context, and how the English-speaking world in general uses the term "Gulag", you certainly are), then yes, you are correct: there were still gulags _(plural)_ operating into the late-1980s. For more information: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
Gulag was a prison system. What do you mean by abolishing? Can you imagine a country without a prison?
14:46 - a small correction. The third term (or first, rather, as it was the first to be announced) was ускоре́ние (acceleration), cf. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uskoreniye Democratisation was only added later and was not that central. Perestroika and glasnost were the big ones (after uskoreniye failed and was phased out in 1987 in favor of the more ambitious perestroika).
Yuri Andropov targeted corruption that had flourished under Leonid Brezhnev, implemented economic and social reforms, and elevated Mikhail Gorbachev within the ranks of government knowing Gorbachev wanted reform. To say he was "essentially the same" as Brezhnev is misleading and not covering his time in power is a real missed opportunity.
Honestly, I don't think this guy is as good as he and his subscribers think he is.
Your point on Andropov is an excellent one.
Some others are the massive amount of aid that the US supplied to the Soviets. Millions of tons of grain and crude oil, refined petroleum products, gunpowder, millions of pairs of boots, anti-tank weapons, medicine, and hundreds of thousands of jeeps and heavy trucks.
These allowed the Soviets to free up millions of men for the war effort and allowed them to reduce famine and allowed them to focus on weapon production.
I mean, anyone who has read about World War Two in any detail knows that the Eastern Front was far more bloody than the Western Front.
@@libertatemadvocatus1797 The way I see it, if it weren't for the western allies the Soviet Union would have had a far higher casualty rate. Looking at post-ww2 Europe, the Russians kept Europe from speaking German and the United States kept Europe from speaking Russian
A really good video and meticulously even-handed.
I have spent countless hours debating these points with a lot of folks, both my fellow leftists and with those to my right.
I feel like I lose brain cells whenever i hear either a leftist say "communism has never been tried" because even if we go by the Marxist definition, they still tried, they just didn't accomplish it.
Rosa Luxemburg was literally criticizing Lenin's purges in 1918 in her pamphlet on the Russian Revolution, which led to her famous quote "Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently".
The idea Stalin has been "besmirched" is the one I've probably spent the most time having to argue about because even if Stalin's atrocities were exaggerated by anti-communists, you can't exaggerate something if it didn't happen. As you said, the most reliable estimates we have right now say 6.5 million deaths. While it's not as high as the older estimates of 20 million deaths, that's still a huge number of deaths Stalin was responsible for.
Ive probably spent just as much time on the imperialism issue as I have on Stalin. I mean come on! Soviet imperialism literally split the global communist movement not once, but twice! First with Mao, and then with the western communists after the Prague Spring leading to the development of Eurocommunism! I mean Czechoslovakia was trying to chart a new course for socialism for their own country and this was seen as a threat not to socialism, but to Soviet Hegemony! The Soviets were literally prepared to go to war with Yugoslavia to bring it back into the Soviet sphere of influence in the 1950s!
Oh, you lost American kids...
You'd have to learn history first but you can't because you have stand up comedians, not historians there in the US.
"Rosa Luxemburg was literally criticizing Lenin's purges in 1918 in her pamphlet on the Russian Revolution..."
And how it ended up on Rosa?
Do you know when the so called Red terror started? Was it maybe after the White terror and the attempted assassination of Lenin?
"the most reliable estimates we have right now say 6.5 million deaths"
Reliable? On what bases? On the Holodomor myth? Why the biggest US ally, Britain is not recognizing that myth?
Why Kazakhstan that very probably suffered more from that famine is not recognizing that myth?
I still believe Tito had Stalin whacked.
"Stop sending people to kill me. We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle... if you don't stop sending killers, I'll send one to Moscow and I won't have to send another."
@@smokyondagrass2353 personally I think it was actually a stroke like the autopsy said. I’m not big on conspiracies.
@@simplicius11 1) I have a degree in history and cypher is getting his PhD
2) Please read Rosa’s writings. Also I’m not sure how that has any relevance to her murder given she didn’t have state power, while Lenin did
3) Accoridng to the Soviet archives
4) Britain recognizes the Holomodor happened, it just doesn’t call it a genocide, because that classification is disputed.
@@SunflowerSocialist te autopsy said it was a stroke. Though the timing of the message was so close, also I reàd somewhere that Stalin was about to send another Assassin before his stroke.
It was funny to think about
The US did not save the USSR. Chiang Kai Shek did, a fact now acknowledged by the PRC. How did he save the USSR? Because without his determination to defeat the Japanese, China would have collapsed before Barbarossa even began. With China out of the war Japan would have been in a position to fulfill her obligations under the Tripartite Pact and strike the Soviet Union in the East. The Soviets would have lost a two front war in the summer of 1941.
Japan also played an indirect role. The Army wanted to go North in 1941 but instead the US embargo forced the decision to go South. This was communicated to Stalin by Richard Sorge in the fall of 1941. Stalin was able to move troops from the far east to Moscow front in late 1941 for the counterattack that threw the Germans back from the gates of Moscow.
WWII was a global war in which events in one theater had tremendous influence in other theaters.
If you ask me, Lenin and the Soviet Union betrayed their ideals when they violently put down the Krondstadt sailors. The men of the Baltic Fleet had been some of the most devoted Bolsheviks and served the party since the February Revolution, and Lenin stabbed them in the back when they became unsatisfied with how Lenin was handling the revolution.
Another Myth: "In the USSR, everything was free."
Actually, they did not have a Welfare state as understood in the Capitalist West. If you were Unemployed and you weren't a Pensioneer or Disabled, you were left to die starving. All the "free stuff" were actually in payment of your Labor. The higher your Job Post, the more perks you got.
What they did have was a Job Guarantee for all who seek to have one.
I mean yeah, if you're able and are looking for work, you get provided, and vice versa, that why i hate it when american said communist are lazy and get thing for free
And also, soviet actually have programs to help the disable tho
I don’t get why nuance regarding the USSR is so hard. Like in America, most of us acknowledge the good ideas and successes that came out of American society without denying all the atrocities committed in America’s past and present. Many social democrats admire much of what FDR did, but they don’t pretend things like Japanese Internment, Redlining or the Dresden bombings are justified/didn’t happen.
"without denying all the atrocities commited by America's past and present" - I (not an American) got the impression that people who praise America, usually, exactly don't do that, sadly
@Lynnix Varjo
People who praise America definitely don’t have that nuance. A lot of America’s past and current atrocities are filtered out, so many Americans are unaware of a lot of it. Younger Americans are generally more aware of it, although even among young people, the full extent of what America does is often not completely grasped. So it’s not denialism or justification as much as it is just complete ignorance.
Our problem is we tend to see history as a binary, either "good stuff" or "bad stuff" committed by "heros" or "villains".
Until we take off that filter we'll never be able to truly objectively look at what happened.
@Randall Briggs
The USSR was responsible for significant economic, technological, medical, political, scientific and cultural progress both within the USSR and also in other parts of the world. I can’t possibly go through all of them, but a few examples that come to mind are the massive expansions to women’s rights (especially compared to the West), ending homelessness, massive expansions to worker’s rights and huge increases in educational attainment. The USSR was a noble attempt at achieving economic democracy and while it fell short in a lot of ways, soviet democracy on the local level offered more opportunities for democratic participation than what is seen almost anywhere else in the modern world.
@Randall Briggs
Also Hitler was going to invade either way. Stalin was just ensuring they had a buffer zone since Britain and France had already refused to form a pact with the Soviet Union in opposition to Germany.
1:50 fittingly when discussing Marx, he puts on German music...
As a communist with very mixed feelings about the USSR, this video was remarkably fair.
@Kayoshie Flametail I am not sure if there was ever an era that was truly all around "good", just as I do not believe that about the United States. I do, however, believe that there were certain things that the USSR did that were worthy of praise, namely the immense reduction of poverty and improvement of living conditions over the course of its existence, improved women's rights over the west, free housing, free education, a guaranteed job, quality public transport, support for anti-colonialism (even if merely ostensible), many new scientific and technological advancements like the cell-phone, etc.
My general opinion on the USSR is that it was a flawed experiment that did some things poorly but other things well. However, the fact that it was able to achieve such a level of development despite instant and fierce opposition from the west, as well as the enormous toll of WWII, is nothing short of remarkable.
@Kayoshie Flametail Is it more complicated than "US bad because missiles in Turkey first" ? If so I am curious
@@ecashman kruschev was an ass, the worst leader for USSR and my parents grew up in USSR kazakhstan. He gave away crimea to ukraine like some gift
Wow. I expected some bashing to anyone who claims to be communist in the comment section. When I saw all the civil responses and even curious questions my humanity restored just a little bit. Even if I disagree with some economical themes associated with communism, .... It makes me think that ultimately it is an effort to make people to be more close together and to be more at peace (just one of many, I don't imply it is the only one please don't censor me current government lol). Humanity should work together to accomplish peace and prosperity and not just kill each other because of labels (just labels, choose any color any text font whatever, it is not like peoples have not committed atrocities without any justification).
10:45 I have seen some historians argue that the turning point was sometime before the Battle of Moscow
I could see that argument. The standard one is Stalingrad
I would argue sometime in the late fall Blau campaign given that was the closest the USSR came to clasping
@@CynicalHistorian
Ian Kershaw, writes in his Hitler bio it was his choice to divert troops from attacking Moscow and Leningrad
"Operation Typhoon"
To attack Stalingrad instead,
Which destabilised and broke the momentum of the German assault and led to stagnation and eventual retreat.
Operation Bagration was probably the turning point.
The turning point was when Germany invaded the USSR (I know that there are scenarios where the Soviets may have collapsed, but the German's lack of oil pretty much doomed them from the start).
Great video as always and well researched!
6:40 The constituent assembly was a redundant body, sort of just a vestigial organ left over from the dual power (provisional government of the state Duma and the Petrograd soviet) government formed after the February revolution. Really from the October revolution onwards the Soviet was in control. It consisted of other parties besides the bolsheviks too, that being the Left SRs, the Mezhrainosty, and some elements of the mensheviks. Of course, the left SRs would end up being opposed to the policies of the bolsheviks, but that stems from the bolsheviks signing brest-litovsk, not from the constituent assembly being dissolved.
Cypher, check your sources. Illuminati are reptiles.
That is quite funny
Actually they’re synapsids, which aren’t reptiles.
@@tompatterson1548 nope its reptilian beings from center of the earth....source: Dude, trust me
The reptilians were planted by the Illuminati! They're fake aliens!
@@BradyPostma but the illuminati are also planning an invasion from the dark side of the moon to reenslave the Reptilians. Source: Alex Jones
This is interesting. Maybe it's because I had better teachers in high school or maybe it's because I've heard about them from other sources, but some of these myths I've either never heard of or I knew they were myths in the first place. Also, bigots and conspiracy theorists will never rest, will they? The further they "argue" the more entertaining it becomes to see how flat they fall at the first hurdle... if they can make it that far!
Haha!
Many of these myths I never thought anyone seriously believed, but then I started reading the comments...
@@CynicalHistorian I'd hate to imagine the worst of them, man. It's understandable if previous myths have been established and are holdovers from the Red Scare eras (a handful of holdouts isn't too alarming; we're all raised to believe certain things), but to view them as absolute fact without considering origin, context and the like is quite ridiculous. Stay safe, Cypher.
@@CynicalHistorian Honestly the internet is filled with idiots on both sides of the spectrum shouting at each other while extremists on both sides who make idiotic statements.
@@unkown686 The internet is like the world. If you randomly select a number of people from anywhere in the world (let's say a number bigger than 1000), you will always get a certain % of criminals, extremists ect. And the most extreme an least knowledgable are always the loudest...
I would argue that the Western and Eastern fronts worked in tandem., rather than competitors as is so often portrayed. Any German forces and materiel deployed to one front will be too far to be able to help the other. In this way, by splitting the German's ability to fight in two, a sort of domino effect was created. When everything was deployed to the soviet front, Italy was left wide open. And when more material and men had to be sent to normandy, it made things easier for the soviets.
TLDR: The western front helped the eastern one, and the eastern front helped the west.
That's true. But the two front war was much less of an issue in WW2 than WW1. Most of the fighting was done in the East and without the Western front, the nazis would still loose, although a bit later.
@@Yezu666 This is questionable. The African and Italian theaters of war tied down a lot of German manpower, over half the Luftwaffe, and knocked Italy out of the war. Hardly an insignificant achievement.
Leshy the ussr was very close to collapsing, if Hitler was able to capture the caucuses and continue the war machine longer the soviet regime could have disintegrated.
@@elbucho8867 That still wouldn't have stopped their manpower shortages or cracked intel that the British were giving to the Soviets. Cry some more.
Already Black Nazi Germany would lose the war regardless if the Soviets regime collapsed, which was a possibility if they captured Moscow and the caucuses. I’m just saying what likely could have happened. What do you mean cry some more, why would I cry for the nazis?
The disbanding of the Constituent Assembly is kinda differently potrayed. Bolsheviks at the time were in a coalition with a larger section of the Social Revolitionaries, the left SRs, who split from the Right SRs a few days or weeks ( I forgot exactly ) before the elections, so this split was not manifested in the election results. The first goverment that the Bolsheviks entered was a coalition government with the Left SRs that lasted all up until end of February/March of 1918 and the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty.
The votes for Left SR's were counted with the right wing
@@normalizedinsanity4873 yes, thats what I said
I'm not a user who normally likes videos, I'm more of a sharer. But after the shenanigans you told us about recently, from now on I will start liking your videos too. That is whenever I remember and when I'm not too distracted by the great content in your videos. If I wasn't a poor student I'd do more. For now it's liking and sharing. For all its failures and flaws, I do appreciate the rigorous accessibility to great content UA-cam provides for anyone with decent internet access. Which is mindboggeling when you really think about it. Evidently when pulled into a historical perspective. Please stay with us. You have so much potential to grow. Ah, so. There you go. Like. My first one in what must be a relatively long time (not in a historical perspective).
Thanks. I don't think I actually hit the like button all too often myself
Lenin purges anarchist,social revolutionaries. Lenin was like Stalin very,very much
IF the US can be said to be responsible for Soviet victory in WWII, then it's only the lend lease program that could allow one to make that claim.
I also think the lend-lease was very important for the Soviet victory. Important for the victory . Not the only thing that led to it.
The Empire of Japan let American merchant vessels send lend-lease to the Soviet Union even after 1941 because of the battle of Khalkin Gol (or the Nomonhan incident) and its redirection of Japan's ambitions towards naval dominance in the Pacific. They chose fighting the USA over committing to fighting the Republic of China and the USSR both at once.
@@SuperRichyrich11 True. Did you notice a particular partisan slant to this video, or is it just me?
@@jacobbeitner8796 Lend-lease wasn't the only factor, of course, but it was an indispensable one. Here are a few choice quotes for all to consider:
"'I want to tell you what, from the Russian point of view, the president and the United States have done for victory in this war,' Stalin said. 'The most important things in this war are the machines.... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war.'"
"Nikita Khrushchev, future premier of the USSR, admitted in his memoirs that Lend-Lease was vital: 'Just imagine how we would have advanced from Stalingrad to Berlin without [American transport]. Our losses would have been colossal because we would have had no manoeuvrability . . . Without [US food supplies] we wouldn’t have been able to feed our army. We had lost our most fertile lands - the Ukraine and the northern Caucasus.'
"Khrushchev went further and admitted: 'Several times I heard Stalin acknowledge [Lend-Lease] within the small circle of people around him. He said that . . . if we had had to deal with Germany one-to-one we would not have been able to cope because we lost so much of our country.'"
"'If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war,' he wrote in his memoirs. 'One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me.'"
"In 1963, KGB monitoring recorded Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov saying: 'People say that the allies didn't help us. But it cannot be denied that the Americans sent us materiel without which we could not have formed our reserves or continued the war. The Americans provided vital explosives and gunpowder. And how much steel! Could we really have set up the production of our tanks without American steel? And now they are saying that we had plenty of everything on our own.'"
@@jordanwutkee2548 agreed!
My great-grandfather was a member of the CPSU from 1948 until 1992, and he said that Communism had never been fully implemented. In the Soviet Union, Communism was the idealized version spoken of by Marx, Engels, and to a lesser extent, Lenin. However, even being a member of the party was something he resented. He knew that the collapse of the Soviet Union was inevitable after Stalin's death. He was forced to stay after Malenkov was removed from power in 1954, but he left the party only a week after Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet Union officially ceased to exist.
Marx hoped for a proletariat revolution in advanced nations such as Germany, England, or America; countries with developed economies and a fairly well-educated population and trained work force. He did not view the Russian Empire of his time suitable for such a revolution as it represented the opposite of what he thought necessary for successful communism.
10:20 I didn't expect to hear Russian Dancing Men.
Really liked this video!!! I would love if you did more in this style, debunking myths from all across history and from all over the world
Really? This is the sort of thing that gets demonetized? What on Earth could be considered controversial in this video? The lack of Cold War jingoism? There were no "pro-Soviet" statements in it, nor were there any "anti-Western" statements. Still a threat? Wow!
And of course Ronald Reagan didn't destroy the Berlin wall. We all know that was Helmut Kohl! *giggle giggle*
It wasn't demonitized, he just foresaw the possibility. Also youtube isn't good, but it's not mccarthyist, no one is looking for antiwestern videos to take down. It's more like it's bad for advertisers to be associated with fascism/racism so it's in youtubes interest to prevent that, but they want to do it efficiently so rather than evaluating modern fascist content, which is rampant on the site, they just pull adds from things with too many bad words like Hitler.
Kind of like when they tried to keep adult content from kids and a lot of non-adult lgbt content got flagged as well.
UA-cam as a whole doesn't care about anything but revenue, for better and for worse.
Game idea: every time he says 'Bretsneff' instead of Brezhnev, take a shot of Stolichnaya in the name of the glorious motherland. For the 'Ahhhhndropov' and 'Neechie' bonus rounds, take three shots for each.
My poor liver, lol
Wisconsin guy here. You might have some fun introducing some of your hangers-on to the history of the Wisconsin socialist party, who ran the city of Milwaukee for a big chunk of the early 20th Century. Wisconsin sent a socialist to Congress, sent quite a few to the State legislature, and did it all fair and square -by winning elections. The socialists were clean as a whistle, and were responsible many ideas that were adopted in many other states. All this is lost, even to many citizens of Milwaukee. This history is fading...
Theres two of us in Wi. We are becoming mindless servants to eugenisists here by gerrymandering.
Killdozer remembers!
The only possibly justifiable argument for the US 'saving' the Soviet Union in WW2 would be based on the industrial materials sent their in the first two years following Barbarosa. This consisted of things like railroad cars, trucks and fuel that acted to jump-start the ability of the USSR to extract it's own resources and make it's own weapons on a mass scale. While that scaling up would still have occurred without the aid the delay might have been fatal if it had allowed the Nazis to take the Caucuses and it's oil.
By the start of WW2 the USSR was already heavily industrialized and extracting resources. Lend lease undoubtedly helped them in the war, though
I think it's important to think about the different communist ideologies, before saying it was tried. The communism tankies advocate for was tried many times. The communism anarchocommunists fight for, wasn't tried so far.
@Red Baron Well yeah, it was tried, but it didn't fail cuz it wasnt a good system, it failed cuz for example the fascists in spain invaded the communes and killed them all. Anarchocommunism ''failed'' cuz outside powers forced themselves onto them
What’s the cartoon at the end with Hitler and the Devil?
A WWII Disney cartoon extolling the wonders of the Boys Rifle
My cat prescribed to the communist ideology. She started dressing like Lenin and raised the hammer and sickle in our living room. She learned and only spoke Russian. I drew the line when she set up a Gulag in our spare bedroom and forced me to work in it. I took down her "iron curtain" she set up dividing our living room and sent her packing. She took her manifesto but returned three days later with the stars and stripes flag in her paw and vowed to stop her forced ideology and I took her back in. We've gotten along just fine since.
Cats are naturally communists. They demand everything be shared with them no matter what
It's hard to translate communist ideology into Feline because it has only one form of possessive pronoun, and it's the first-person singular such.
@@CynicalHistorianTrue. My cats try to commandeer my favorite chair all the time.
Pussies!
History is grey, simple as that
On point 10 about Reagan, from what I've heard, the Soviets were obsessed with matching the US militarily to maintain M.A.D. but Reagan's massive ramp up of military spending meant the Soviets effectively grinded their economies down trying to keep up which slowly lead to the Soviet Union disbanding from the pressure.
That is, indeed, a major contributor. It had generally gone the opposite direction in the '70s with the US military stagnating and the Soviet military expanding and updating at a greater pace. Reagan stoked the arms race so much it panicked the Soviet leadership and their military spending became so high it became even more crippling. With the already faulty top-down planned economy of the USSR, it was the last straw.
The Soviet Economy was already stagnating and becoming enormously dysfunctional by the time Reagan became President. The reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Economy is far more nuanced than high military spending
Is this something that people repeated so much it became truth because almost everybody says it or is there some real evidence that supports this? As far as i know the Soviets were heavy on military spending throughout whole cold war so if they went even more crazy with it, it should be very easy to verify yet i never saw any signs that this is the case.
@@robertkalinic335 I don't know about the Soviets going "even more crazy with it", but I do know the world was nearly destroyed during the Able Archer 83 incident, much of it a result from the total alarm in the Soviet Union over Reagan's "Star Wars" plan. The ramp up in US military spending caused the Soviets to effective give up resulting in the INF Treaty. The point was that the Soviets were obsessed with keeping up with the US military, which meant a disproportionate amount of funding went into military spending instead of the economy resulting in a economy that would steadily shrink. Reagan's massive ramp up is supposedly the death blow where the Soviets officially couldn't keep up and their economies ground down.
I've seen estimates of Soviet military spending, in the 1980s, of between 12 and 30 percent of GNP. Of course, it's a lot of estimation as the USSR leadership was never forthcoming about such details of the state. Their absolutely massive military of the time was rather obvious, however. It made the US military look quite small in comparison. Yet the USSR didn't quite have the economic power of the US to back up such a huge arsenal. The estimates do have a solid basis.
Nuance? That’s a centrist dog whistle! Filthy Centrist!
"ZH" in Brezhnev is pronounced as [ʒ], like "G" in "genre"
Ch-Eye-Na!
Dude when you played Moskau I freaking died
One thing regarding Lenin:
His idea of Vanguard Party did not come because they thought they were the most advanced theorist, but because of two things:
1st - The lack of practical theory regarding the way to get to power
2nd - The absolute lack of industrialisation of the Russian Empire
Not unlike Blanquism or even some Jacobinist ideas during the French Revolution, the idea was that a temporary authoritarian phase was necessary to ready the social and political conditions for actual socialist and then later communist political organisation. It's also quite unfair to put all the problem on the pure theoretical dimension when it comes to what happened with the October Revolution when the thing that was probably the most impactful on future policies was the civil war, not unlike the French Revolution.
The plan was to create a vanguard party made and led by workers, democratically organized, that would conduct industrialisation, what they called "socialist primitive accumulation of capital", basically doing the same step of industrialisation the capitalist world did but in an organized, planned and faster fashion. Increasing agricultural productivity, then investing these gains in productivity in industrialisation to develop an actual working class that would directly be organized around socialism and so could directly transition to communism.
But, of course, civil war, political repression, old tsarist administration, a lot of factors come into play when we consider what happened.
Wasnt there the whole split between the anarchists and marxists where the anarchists ended up telling Marx "if you create this authoritarian state to manage things after the revolution then it will just hold onto power and never go away", or something like that?
@@Loregamorl Yes, and they were right. Leninism and the idea of a vanguard party is nothing more than a front for the establishment of a permanent autocracy.
@@DonHaka The entire history of Marxism Leninism would beg to differ.
@@DonHaka Don’t make me laugh. In every M-L state its been a bunch of elitist oligarchs that have been in power, just like any other fascist state. And yes, one person has often controlled these states; see prominent Nazi sympathizer Stalin for more details.
@@Loregamorl Sort of, It was the Hague congress in 1872
Though it should be mentioned that they were anarchists so any government was defined as authoritarian automatically and Marx was advocating a democracy not a totalitarian dictatorship.
Communist, anarchist or capilalist I think we can all agree that the soviet music slaps
If by this you mean that it is good, then absolutely yes
Facts
For number 6, I want to stress that I do not believe that one side alone could have won ww2, east or west. It was the combination of both sides' indomitable will that eventually broke Germany, and being stretched INCREDIBLY thin didnt hurt, either.
Sailors of the merchant marine, like my uncle, who was torpedoed twice hauling goods to Murmansk are forgotten by those most benefitted.
The Soviets had the rare metal known as Stalinium forged from Stalin's sweat, vodka, and Lenin's toenails, which made every bullet and missile bounce off. The Germans have been reported to lose so hard that they started praying to a god named "Gaijin" to nerf the metal.
I disagree Soviet industry was supprior to German industry and the Soviets had vast swaths of man power not to mention the Germans lacked oil, were invading an extremely resilient army, and was dealing with poor supply in poor temperatures, the only real disadvantage the Soviets had was tech, and lacking some more special natural resources, Germany had no real chance at defeating the Soviets the only reason they did so well in the first place was because Stalin was caught off guard. The allies certainly hastened the end of world war 2, but they did not win it, the Soviets did.
@@sparrow6604 alright, we shall address these in the order you placed them. Firstly, I dont know where you heard soviet industry was superior to german industry, but it is simply not true. The soviets, or russians at the time, did not start truly industrializing until the 1900s, whereas germany had been near fully industrialized by its unification in 1871, the only holdouts being cities where the guilds held power, preventing industialization in those areas entirely. The germans did lack oil, but they absolutely knew this, making strides in coal liquefaction technology, and making a trade agreement giving them near exclusive rights to the Baku oil fields, a stipulation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Also, most soviet industry cut so many corners, that vehicles would simply break down on the way to the front. The soviets, I'll grant you, were extremely resilient, but they were mostly untrained conscripts, and russia has had a crippling alcohol addiction since the 1500s, an addiction stalin only fueled to keep the masses complacent. Soviet tech was surprisingly up to date for the time, as they heavily cooperated with research with the allies and even the germans before the war. They were only truly behind in air technology, a disadvantage that would shaft them and lose them more than they should have. I will grant you, supply was poor in the east, but that is because the best equipment was saved for the western front. Hitler knew the allies would attempt an invasion, so he kept the atlantikwall needlessly stacked. I say that the soviets could not have won alone, not because I dont like the soviets, but because I genuinely believe it. To say the soviets could have won alone is to downplay the stunning effectiveness of allied bombing raids on both morale and industry, and SEVERELY undersells the genuinely fierce and violent resistance that French, Dutch, Polish, and Yugoslav armies took part in. Not to mention in heavily masks the utter incompetence of Stalin's USSR.
@@texo456 in difference in industrialization was overtook by Stalin’s industrialization programs as deadly as they were they were effective by 1943 the Soviets were out producing the Germans in 3-1 and were out producing aircraft by over 10000, granted your right in saying Soviet equipment was inferior but it also didn’t matter even before the war Soviet industry was superior so allied bombing didn’t have that much of an effect, also morale bombing did not do much to stop the Germans from fighting, like what do soldiers say on the eastern front care if a city hundreds of miles away was bombed . Also supply in the east was bad because of how much land they had to supply, also what equipment was being saved for the west? France fell in 1940, and didn’t land again properly until 1944, (unless maybe Italy was eating up equipment? Also what does equipment have to do with supply? Did better tanks magically mean better supply? Or am I misunderstanding what your saying? As for oil that’s fair the Germans had made a lot of progress in synthetics. The partisans also did alot of stuff but it wasent like they won the war, heavy industry won the war and the Soviets simply had more.
No Xi Jinping thought? 1/10
Xi thought: Everyone gets some honey!
@@CynicalHistorian
Xi Thought: Here, have some honey. It's local.
Chinese Citizens and The World: The bees! Not the bees! They're in my eyes! Aaagggghhhh!
Pretend to be socialist while being capitalist
Another fantastic analysis video.
That's pretty post-modernist neo-marxist of you, we all know that David Hasselhoff ended the cold war.
So you’re a hardcore Marxist, but do you djent?
Marxcore
Alright, as a communist, speaking for my cadre of like 4 people, we gotta own up to 2. It's technically true that we haven't seen the end goal of communism, but by any common definition, it's an unhelpful argument.
The problem is also tankies who themselves arent really even lefitists. They'll champion china and north korea for instance simply because they "call" themselves communists and they stand up to the west but thats literally just that. One is an absolute monarchy that doesnt care about the needs of workers while the other is a capitalist dictatorship with zero regulations on government sponsored big business
Comrade :)
There are so many different leftist ideologies and takes on what communism is that any "achkually, gobunism was tried, you leftists are just deranged" is like going to every single different christian church with their own take on christianity and saying "you are all the same, and your ideology is this definition i will make that only some of you have in common or slightly agree with"
@not Shane kid you've never seen 2 leftists debate each other and it shows. also, marx has his own definition, and the dictionary he used isnt really a good mirror of it
@not Shane kid Anarcho Communism, State Communism, Primitivist Communism, ect