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And you cited a website that denies the Uyghur Genocide and the Holodomor.

You’re doing genocide denial.

Right. Beria was well known for his trigger discipline.

It wasn’t that impressive for the people living there. Otherwise they wouldn’t have rejected it.

Debunked, according to a genocide denying Russian propaganda asset.

To portray the opinion of Stalinists. Which they contrast with actual data and the opinions of actual historians.

How about you cite some of those liberals, instead of a tankie rag?

“Expand as an ideology” is a strange way to say, “they weren’t shot for disagreeing with the Party.”

The reforms didn’t weaken the economy. The economy was weak, therefore there were reforms. And it’s not cherrypicking, the Soviet system worked poorly, objectively.

Nostalgia doesn’t prove anything. What they feel now has nothing to do with what the people felt at the time.

Read Robert Conquest.

No, you denied that the Soviet Union was a dictatorship. The GDP does not effect that.

And books describing the Soviet Union as a totalitarian dictatorship are used as reference. Wikipedia is providing a variety of opinions of the Soviet government. It’s not declaring Pat Sloan the sole source of truth on the question of human rights in the Soviet Union.

You clearly don’t care about being righteous or correct.

This is a good example of one of things people hate about lemmy.

Communism fan boying, implicit denial of genocides committed by communist powers, out in the open on the front page.

So, you’re denying that glasnost allowed for political dissent?

Second, no they didn’t.

Finally, it does not matter because we were debating whether or not the Soviet Union was a dictatorship, which the literacy rate has nothing to do with.

Well-respected by Tankies, not by actual historians.

We weren’t debating the quality of the Soviet Union. We were debating whether or not it was a dictatorship.

That’s what dissent is.

Nothing you said disputes it being a dictatorship. The people could not choose their leaders, there were no limits on the power of their leaders, er go it was a dictatorship. None of your “pros” matter. And that’s before we get into the lack of freedom of speech and press and total absence of transparency, meaning that I have no reason to trust those supposed accomplishments.

What is complicated about it?

The reforms you refer to allowed for political dissent. If the Soviet Union was some worker’s paradise, then allowing people complain wouldn’t change anything.

The simple reality is that the Soviet Union was a dictatorship that only survived as long as it did because it was a dictatorship. Once people had the option of opposing Communist rule, they did. And that is what killed the Soviet Union. Not some conspiracy by the United States or the kulaks.

Yeah.

The CIA is why the Soviets fell. Not corruption or incompetence.

I didn’t change my story. Anyone who looks at this argument will see that and that you have taken the Blue Pill until you ODed on it.

I don’t consider “not actively opposing” to be the same thing as “involvement.”

Your sole cite was by an economist directly profiting from the Putin regime.

For all your demands of sources you have not provided a single bit of evidence of anything you have alleged. Even that article sucking off Putin couldn’t offer any evidence of US involvement other than Sullivan encouraging Ukraine not to bow to Putin. Do you have any actual evidence of US involvement in Euromaidan? Of Ukrainians being blocked from participating in elections?

It’s not moving the goalposts. Also, you haven’t alleged any “actions” the US did other than not disaproving of the Kremlin’s puppet getting booted out of office.

Blaming NATO expansionism is effectively denying the agency of Ukraine. So yeah, saying the US is responsible for Putin’s hard on for Ukraine is an attack on Ukrainians.

What’s pathetic is your apparent worship of Sachs.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230806172854/https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/03/20/open-letter-to-jeffrey-sachs-on-the-russia-ukraine-war/

Putting blame for the war anywhere but the Russians is effectively blaming Ukraine.

Putin has also spoken in front of the EU. It does not make Sachs’s opinion anything other than stupid.

I’m basing my beliefs of off the expertise of the hundreds if not thousands of experts who agree that Sachs is a moron.

I’m not getting paid by Russia to shill for them on RT propaganda shows. That’s what.

It don’t see how blaming Ukraine for starting the war helps the Ukrainians.

You’re begging the question. NATO isn’t escalating. It wasn’t a coup.

I’m not shifting the goalposts. The mere fact the US supported Euromaidan is not the same as the whole thing being a CIA coup.

Except you’re not listening to geopolitical experts. You’re listening to an economist’s opinion on geopolitics, platformed only by Russian assets that is contradicted by most actual geopolitical experts on Earth.

I ask again: how do I source proof of something not happening.

I am not. You’re just parroting the nonsense the whores of the Kremlin have been putting out for a decade.

There was never any promise by the US not let Ukraine into NATO. Even if there was, Russia has done enough to justify saying that promise doesn’t matter anymore.

Sure, the US supported Euromaidan. That doesn’t make it a CIA plot. Why shouldn’t we support protests against a corrupt, authoritarian regime backed by our biggest opponent on the international stage? You and the overestimated Mr. Sachs reach the conclusion that because Ukraine leaving the Russian sphere was in America’s interest, America must have acted to cause it, despite the total lack of actual evidence.

Here’s an idea: maybe Russia wouldn’t have to worry about encirclement if it didn’t constantly threaten it’s neighbors.

I’m saying that Euromaidan was a popular revolt against the corrupt, pro-Russian government which the CIA has no meaningful influence on.

I don’t understand where this “blanket denial” stuff is coming from.

That is not at all what I claimed and I don’t understand how you could interpret what I said as meaning that.

How should I prove that the Euromaidan wasn’t some right wing CIA coup? How do you prove a negative?