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Soon (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/memes@lemmy.ml
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[–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

Saying that USSR didn't extract wealth from other countries in the block, treating them as colonies is a huge stretch. All the political control was crntralized in Moskow, Russia promoted a vast resource extraction, specially from Ukraine, imposed language suppression, cultural assimilation and demographic engineering e.g. Holodomor.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    No, this is wrong.

    1. The Soviet economic system was federated and planned. The political control in Moscow wasn't absolute by any stretch.

    2. The various Soviet Republics were not colonies, not by any stretch. Resources and goods were shipped around the whole system as needed, not just imported into Moscow.

    3. There was no forcible cultural assimilation. There was a huge effort to cultivate a soviet identity, but there wasn't an attempt to erase cultural identity. The famine in the 1930s was caused by natural causes, not "demographic engineering," grain was re-allocated to Ukraine once it was known that there were famine conditions. There was forcible re-allocation of various ethnic groups like Koreans, which did exist, but this isn't the same claim you made either in scope or character.

    So no. The USSR was not imperialist, not by the correct concept of imperialism as a form of international extraction, nor the vague "Soviet Bad" thing you tried to make it out to be.

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