[Music] hey cypher here it seems that people are using history as a political bludgeon again and i'm here to ruin that for everyone history is much more nuanced and ambiguous than the rhetoric is capable of dealing with so today let's talk about these 10 myths from soviet history worth busting basically in chronological order now i'm not talking about angola cambodia china congo cuba korea laos madagascar nicaragua vietnam yemen oh you get the idea i'm just talking about common myths surrounding the soviet union's history [Music] people commonly believe that karl marx caused the deaths of millions those regimes of movements calling themselves marxists murdered about 100 million people and enslaved more than a billion wherever marx's ideas were practiced life got worse not by a little but by a lot but this is patently absurd first the man never killed anyone second the deaths he is supposedly responsible for happened decades after his own death and third this idea would incriminate almost every philosopher who ever lived we shouldn't blame nietzsche for the genocides of fascism hegel for the millions dead from nationalism rousseau for the reign of terror or adam smith for the far more people who've died because of capitalist countries that would be absurd marx's economic philosophy was quite different from what was implemented in the soviet union [Music] simply put his idea of communism was stateless more akin to anarchy did marx encourage violent revolution yes absolutely but he also encouraged peaceful revolution the communism of the soviets is called marxist leninism because lenin made his own formulation saying the role of the vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory lenin believed that there should be a political party that ushered in the revolution and controlled it solely because they had the most advanced materialist theory so that's incredibly different from marx's inexorable march of exploitation just because it is derived from marxism does not mean marx is responsible for it and this isn't even talking about the differences between leninism maoism ho chi minh thought the frankfurt school anything following antonio gramsci or whatever it's intellectually dishonest to not be able to differentiate between these things leftists claiming communism has never been tried is basically a meme now this comes from how they defined the word the basic definition is a system in which goods are owned in common and are available to all as needed or a theory advocating elimination of private property by that definition soviet governments were indeed communist of course what most people refer to as communism is simply controlled by a communist party and those governments still exist today many have goods owned in common and try to eliminate private property as much as possible including the soviets but what leftists refer to is some idealized communism the step after socialism where property is collectivized and the state has been eliminated in that way no communism has not been fully implemented no matter what hardcore marxists say [Music] but that is essentially moving the goalposts akin to saying communism will only be tried once it works is a logical fallacy to discount all attempts [Music] the standard story of the cold war begins with the various conferences during world war ii and say tensions between the west and the soviet union truly began when nazism was eradicated of course this forgets a lot of history in the 1930s while the world descended into the depression the communist international called for a popular front to unite against fascism just as president fdr took a less confrontational approach to the ussr by officially recognizing them but this was merely an interlude caused by the great depression and subsequent second world war before that the u.s refused to recognize the soviets until 1933 made fighting their influence an integral part of the fbi committed to a court on sanitare in 1919 akin to the later policy of containment and had actually fought them in conjunction to supporting their opponents during the formative russian civil war at one point in 1918 the allies held more territory in what would become the soviet union than the soviets themselves the red scare of the 1950s was simply a far less violent version of what came just after world war one including a mass deportation to russia called the soviet arc so yeah there's a long history of tensions dating back to 1918 joining me on this one is cody from alternate history hub because this is actually a collaboration in some ways we could imagine different scenarios and that's what his episode is about but here cody is going to tell you about what affects that scenario by disproving the myth surrounding it in the talk about stalinist purges people often portray lenin as though he was not responsible for purges himself this feeds into the idea that stalin was some outlier from soviet history and while that is a subjective idea what is a falsification of that belief is whether there were atrocities during lenin's time and there certainly were in fact lenin could easily be seen as a template for later atrocities under stalin he was orders of magnitude less deadly but hundreds of thousands died under his reign as a result of his purges first there was the disbandment of the constitute assembly where the bolsheviks basically didn't like the results of their first election because the plurality of seats went to the social revolutionaries instead of bolsheviks so they closed off the building by force mensheviks and srs lost power slowly through internal division rebellion and bolshevik control they were either absorbed into the party after the civil war or lived in exile then there was the red terror a secret police called the cheka had formed early on to fight whom they deemed counter-revolutionaries it was resolved in 1918 that in the present situation the safeguarding of the rear by means of terror is necessary it is necessary to safeguard the soviet republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps that all persons associated with white guard organizations plots and rebellions are liable to be shot the cheka was a sloppy agency and we don't have good numbers for the people killed as a result but a safe number is around a hundred thousand summary executions just as the craziness of the civil war calmed down in 1920 a growing opposition movement formed in the communist party two rebellions flared up in 1921 one among sailors who carried the original october revolution and the other among peasants who felt they lost their representation with the purging of the srs so this worker's opposition attempted to fill the void but through representation manipulation and an order by lenin these people were declared the anarcho-syndicalist deviation and purged and i haven't talked about lenin's decolocization or decosixation killing many more be sure to check out his episode when you're done with this one [Music] here come the tankies which is a derogatory name for a communist who defends stalinism they believe there's some sort of conspiracy to besmirch stalin's name after the fact it's insane i know but they also have a lot of these other myths to thank for supporting their ideology if one cornerstone of anti-communist rhetoric is disproven then these people feel justified in claiming it all is incorrect this gets particularly bad with holodomor denial you see in 1932 a famine struck the soviet union but ukraine somehow worst of all the odd thing was that ukraine was the breadbasket of the soviet union and the harvest there was enough to sustain the region turns out the soviets often by direct order of stalin himself mismanaged the yield there is an open question of intentionality but in either case this was a man-made disaster and that's not to mention the atrocities committed by stalin over his quarter-century reign here's an incomplete list around 20 million people were sent to work in labor camps called gulags often under the worst conditions possible executions were meted out regularly until well into world war ii from soviet records we can take a minimum of 3.3 million deaths and estimates of those that went unrecorded take that to as high as 20 million but that high estimate was given prior to post-soviet records access a safe bet would be 6.5 million either way that's a tremendous amount of carnage under stalin's reign it's a common refrain in america that we saved everyone by joining world war ii after pearl harbor but we often forget the eastern front [Music] even when we remember it we tend to act as though the normandy invasion and allied bombing allowed the soviets to succeed but this forgets what were the turning points on the eastern front the battle of stalingrad ended in february of 1943 and the battle of kursk in august which were the turning points of the eastern front the normandy invasion did not begin until june of the following year the western allies got bogged down in italy instead allied strategic bombing did begin in mid-1942 but german forces were already fighting in stalingrad by that point with far more loss of life industry and infrastructure for the soviets they turned the tide of nazi power first this is a film about a people who for all time shattered the legend of nazi invincibility this is a film about victory and defeat german victory and german defeat so in another sense the soviets prevailing allowed d-day to succeed not the other way around everyone worked together hence the name allies but it is incorrect to discount the key contributions of the ussr in 1941 they tried for moscow and failed in 1942 they tried for the caucasus and failed in 1943 and for as many more years as necessary they will not only be resisted wherever their failing power strikes but they will be attacked attacked and attacked by these united people of these united nations [Music] a lot of folks try to fight western propaganda by claiming the us was imperialistic and the soviets did not act in the same way but if the u.s during the cold war can be called imperialistic then the soviets can many times over an empire is basically a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority when communists or jingoistic americans assert this about the us or ussr it means one of those countries asserted political hegemony over another the soviets pointed to anywhere the u.s propped up anti-communist regimes from south korea to peru but that was far more subtle than the soviets who held immense hegemony over the eastern bloc and their central asian satellites let alone implicit support of other communist groups from nicaragua to north korea if the vietnam war represents american imperialism then afghanistan represents the soviet version their control was particularly bad in the eastern bloc where they squashed many rebellions from supposedly independent states and pushed for massive internal surveillance stalin basically made the position of general secretary the highest position in the soviet bureaucracy but this has given rise to the notion that the soviet union was the same in 1938 during the great purge as it was in 1974 during the de taunt which was a decade-long thawing of tensions between the soviet union and western countries the idea of 1934-1974 being exactly the same is absurd on the face of it each gen sec had his own policies khrushchev explicitly denied stalinism creating a program of destalinization and trying whatever program might work bretznev was extremely conservative focused on stability that brought about stagnation andropov and trinenko were short-lived and essentially the same as bretznev and finally gorbachev pushed for perestroika meaning restructuring and a series of reforms including glasnost as an openness and democratia i'll let you guess what that means gorbachev was the last one due to the situation with the information of independence the purges and mass executions of stalin's reign were a thing of the past in 1953 and the main administration of corrective labor camps and settlements or gulags for short were fully abolished a few months after stalin's death history has changed over time and to think of everything as being the same as it was in 1938 is anachronistic to say the least ah anti-communism if you've got someone you dislike just call him a pink okami from union leaders in the us through hollywood to the civil rights movement if they have a dissident voice they must be part of a soviet plot anyone associated with the communist party was labeled as such a practice that continues to this day there is a very long history of people using red baiting to suppress dissident voices in 1919 a bunch of lynchings were blamed on the red scare so they called it red summer less violent but still just as dumb joseph mccarthy famously advertised a list of names that he could never produce but sure dragged a bunch of people down with a prolonged witch hunt simply being associated with communism was enough to get you labeled a spy and often not even that have you no sense of decency sir at long last have you left no sense of decency the soviets did have organizations to sponsor subversion among us citizens but it was never pervasive similarly cultural marxism is a term used even today to disparage anyone even though it's actually an anti-semitic conspiracy theory proposed by the nazis as cultural bolshevism to attack marxists in frankfurt a few of those marxists managed to escape the nazi regime just to be met with the same conspiracists in right or the america you'll still see these claims today possibly in the comments section it's meant to silence people through underhanded threats of violence and for those who are going to say the term postmodern neo-marxist instead postmodernism is contradictory to marxism so they're perpetuating the same violent ideology [Music] it's not like reagan said mr gorbachev tear down this wall and it magically happened pat buchanan made an entire speech saying that and ronald reagan won the cold war it is just about time that my old colleagues gave ronald reagan the full credit he deserves for leading america to victory in the cold war but everyone who studies the fall of 20th century communism doesn't really study the west all that much generally people look inward sure there were economic pressures exerted by the success of the west but the ussr was perfectly capable of coping with that they had for decades reagan wasn't even president when the berlin wall fell now there's endless historiographic arguments over what caused what like how responsible are gorbachev's policies was the economic stagnation of bretznev's time part of a larger economic change was the eastern bloc ever fully subjugated by soviet hegemony and how much was the loss of soviet satellite states from 1989 onward responsible for the ultimate downfall of the communist party following the attempted coup of 1991 these are all open questions none of which result with the answer reagan did it you'll see a lot of anti-semites claiming the soviets were jews firstly they were explicitly atheists so that doesn't make sense so racists will point to lenin's grandmother possibly being jewish before converting but lenin had no idea plus stalin actually committed several anti-semitic atrocities sure he created the jewish autonomous oblast in 1934 but that doesn't change the fact that he targeted jews calling them rootless cosmopolitans and committing a couple of purges against them before he died but that won't stop racists from connecting their anti-semitism to their anti-communism it was fundamental to nazism and most modern examples follow those same bigoted ways after the vietnam war white supremacists in the us did just that they even claimed zionists occupied the government or zog for short they inaugurated the revived white power movement in 1979 by shooting into a crowd of communists in greensboro south carolina killing five this racist anti-communism eventually morphed into claims of the illuminati or new world order controlling everything this kind of conspiracism remains today and is the cause of much violence in our society so i can't wait to see the lunacy in the comments section for this one this is the sonorous war cry of a very angry frog if they get too nasty i'll disable them no spreading hate in my comments section it's not a distinct household house and pepper that fluting adolf says it isn't fair he's being oppressed anyways please think about donating to my patreon cause this is most likely getting demonetized [Music] so [Music] you