is "soviet nostalgia" an actually viable tool for socialist agitation in former eastern bloc states, what are your thoughts on it and the organisations which rely on it? (hexbear.net)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

25 comments fedilink hide all child comments

my opinion

when you look at the political scene in eastern europe, the primary way communist parties try to gain support is to appeal to disaffected 40-60'ish people with some form or another of "ostalgie" or "soviet nostalgia". there's nothing principally wrong with it, but i feel it is way too oriented towards the past instead of the future. "look what we had" is good for some but ultimately it isn't enough to build movements. you see communist parties who still refuse to recognise the collapse of the ussr.

my gripe with this isn't that i disagree with them ideologically or morally, as the liberals do, the problem is the union is definitively gone. there is no hope of restoring it, there hasn't been for nearly 40 years. we need to start from the beginning again, the old structures have been fully dismantled and the union will not return, not in the next few decades.

this is ignoring the fact that this is really only appealing to.. well.. 50 to 70 year olds. we should focus our agitprop and work towards the youth of our countries instead of a group of people who ultimately will go "extinct" soon.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] [email protected] 16 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I'm so fucking tired of the "nostalgia" narrative. Any positive mention of past governments in post-communist states is framed this way, which only serves to invalidate those ideas, reduce them to rose-tinted glasses.

Instead of bringing freedom and prosperity, the regime change brought unimaginable suffering, caused millions of excess deaths, largest peacetime life expectancy drop, a gigantic proportion of population reduced to abject poverty, a country of 300 million thrust from first to thirld world overnight with entirely predictable human cost.

Outside of post-soviet states, nobody who's people went through this kind of trauma and loss is asked "awww, are you nostalgic for the times before millions died in vain? are you nostalgic for the times before widespread child prostitution, homelessness, ethnic cleansing, fratricidal wars, hyperinflation, crippling unemployment?"

Not a single person from a post-communist state gets to bring up the immense human cost of capitalism without someone chiming in to bring the word "nostalgia" into the discussion, because people are so conditioned to frame those discussions this way it's like an itch they have to scratch. And this is no matter whether the discussion happens in a post-communist state or in the West, both sides have been equally conditioned.

And I'm just so. fucking. tired of this shit.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

The disastrous and illegal transition back to capitalism is blamed as a failure of communism. Capitalism is treated as a natural state of humanity, and all suffering within it is because we just aren't doing it hard enough, or completely justified for failing The Line.

this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025

49 points (100.0% liked)

askchapo

23058 readers

156 users here now

Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.

Rules:

Posts must ask a question.
If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.
Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.
Try [email protected] if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]