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Be on the lookout for CIA propaganda! Tankies LOVE dissenters! (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/the_dunk_tank@hexbear.net
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I'd love to see those Hexbears have an answer for this!

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[–] 71 points 2 years ago (11 children)

I can understand getting fooled and believing all the bad stuff about Mao and Stalin, but I genuinely don’t understand how libs treat Lenin like a great evil. They can’t even give Lenin the “his revolution got out of hand when he died” point. I really don’t see what Lenin did that was extreme. The provisional government was about to be overthrown by reactionaries and they already attempted so before the October Revolution. He took power by popular support and most of his factions enemies were foreign to Russian soil.

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  • [–] 49 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    I really don’t see what Lenin did that was extreme

    According to the historical documentary film Anastasia (2020), he personally owned

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  • [–] 52 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Remember that netflix docu series about the tsar family where they intercut a recreation of their execution with a historian calling it(paraphrased) the most hideous and bestial crime of the 20th century?

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  • [–] 39 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

    Well, to paraphrase Molotov, Lenin was even more harsh than Stalin, particularly to his allies. During the height of the revolution and civil war, if he got a letter from a peasant claiming communist party corruption or malfeasance in an area, he would deputize a university professor and some students to go check it out, and if evidence was found of that corruption or malfeasance to their satisfaction (which had no real legal precedent) they had the discretion to either eject them from the party or, depending on the severity of the offense, just straight up execute them, no trial. Which happened fairly regularly. It was not a case of "We have investigated ourselves and found no wrong doing."

    Even if you think the evidence standards were lax in the USSR during Stalin's time (which imo they were basically the same as pretty much everyone else's at the time, they were just far more aggressive at pursuing legal actions against high level party members and generals) at the helm, he still always had trials before executing people, even going as far as trying people in absentia, something that Lenin would have considered a ridiculous liberal facade.

    Don't get me wrong, these were harsh people, but in comparison to the consequences that would face them and the millions peasants they led if they failed, I don't think they were unnecessarily harsh.

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  • [–] 33 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Even if you think the evidence standards were lax in the USSR during Stalin's time (which imo they were basically the same as pretty much everyone else's at the time

    Yeah people who complain about this don't compare 1930s Soviet courtrooms to 1930s U.S. courtrooms (because that would be whataboitism, not, you know, having perspective). Think of all the people who had confessions beat out of them or got railroaded on the flimsiest of evidence. Think of all the black people who never made it to the courtroom at all.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago

    You don’t understand, the real tragedy is that powerful people had to face consequences for their actions. USSR bad because everyone was executed, but also USSR bad because the elite (lol) was never punished ever

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    Another one I've seen is blaming Lenin for the Russian Civil War and thus hanging all the war deaths on him as well as the deaths from the subsequent famine. He did advocate for turning the imperialist war into a revolutionary (edit: civil) war, so it's not completely absurd, but how many would have died if Russia had stayed in WWI? Insert the Mark Twain quote about the two reigns of terror.

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