this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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I don't think that's an inherent truth. Just look at Koenigsberg/Kaliningrad. After WW2 the local Germans were expelled and the city and adjacent lands were completely resettled by Russian settlers. You could try to justify it in a million ways, although I don't know if ethnic cleansing can ever have a justification, but that's what happened in the end, in Communist USSR, under Stalin. The reason why today's old Prussia is Russian instead of German, or Polish or Lithuanian.
And the USSR did the same thing in many other places like Poland, DDR, Moldova, Ukraine etc. Settler-colonialism has nothing to do with capitalism or communism. It has more to do with power and controlling the land.
I appreciate that insight, and while I don’t agree, it does give me something to chew on for a while, and another excuse to read the soviet archives to see what they were discussing internally at that time. That archive is a godsend, it’s how you can prove definitively that the Holodomor was not intentional, and that attempts were made to not only ease it, but to preempt it from happening. Attempts which were sabotaged by a class of people who wanted to keep their privileges and place above the ordinary people.
Political archives where there is an incentive to cover up your own actions and lie about production is not an inherently trustworthy source. There were no third party validation of the narratives that corroborate them but plenty that poke holes in them. The reason why the West seemed so untrustworthy relative to the East at the time was due to a relatively free press. Amazing how checks on power degrade trust in one faction but also keep it relatively honest.
Dog you can’t even spell pseudo. You expect me to take anything you say seriously? We’re discussing high level geopolitics, the kind of thing that requires hundreds of hours of reading to even start to understand, and you’re here just projecting whatever you feel as if it holds any weight. The soviet archives were released by CAPITALISTS after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They have been poured over millions of times by thousands of people, there are entire books on the subject. It’s not just a stack of papers, it’s an entire field of study.
So yes, there were third party validations of them. Hundreds of them.