memes

Let me get this straight. To you, a famine produced unintentionally through policy that spiked class war and originated primarily from rich farmers sabotaging the crops and livestock as a response to their lands being collectivized in the first successful collectivization of a country in the history of the Earth, is to you as morally depraved as the English colonists literally starving Irish to death because of colonial and racist beliefs?

I don't know choosing to not feed people when there is enough food to feed everyone seems a lot worse than choosing which people to not feed during a time of famine.

Obviously more people die from the famine, but at least that's due to a lack of resources and not a manufactured scarcity

Again, not any worse than any other country of the time.

If you had actually read anything on the "decriminalization" of homosexuality in Soviet Russia after 1917, you'd know that there was not really any social movement on the side of legalizing homosexuality. The fact that its criminalization was repealed is mostly due to Bolsheviks wanting to repeal essentially all Russian Imperial law.

Homosexuality wasn't even well-understood at the time, they conflated gender and sexuality, which is why only male homosexuality was criminalized. The Soviet Union, due to it being heir to a very patriarchal society, wanted "stronger men and workers", and lesbians were seen as a more masculine version of men (which was accepted) whereas gays were seen as "feminized men", which was seen negatively.

Even then, my point is that after the 40s most of the theorists of socialism were fucking killed at the hands of Nazis, and that's one of the biggest reasons why social policy didn't develop sufficiently in the Soviet Union. But even so, the criminalization of homosexuality for the most part wasn't particularly prosecuted compared to many countries, there's a difference between something being illegal and something being prosecuted.

All in all: yes, they should have done better, but the material conditions of the moment didn't really allow for much better.

My former boss was in a gulag for most of his teens. He was not paid and to this day he has no idea what crime he was convicted of.

Maybe your former boss was bullshitting you. Maybe he knew precisely why he was in prison, but didn’t want to admit his crimes to his employees. It’s pretty common for ex-cons to falsely claim innocence.

He just knows he served time and was targeted by guards because he was Jewish and the Soviets were very bigoted.

There were many prominent Jews in the Bolshevik revolution, and Jews continued to be active members of the Communist Party, in soviets, and in the Politburo.

Surely people going to jail for the wrong reason is something exclusive to the Soviet Union and not to all countries with a legal system? Like, damn, I feel sorry for your boss, but in dire circumstances such as those of the late 30s / early 40s in the USSR, excesses and abuses were sadly made because of the overwhelming conditions.

Your boss may have spent his teens in a gulag, but the fact that he lived to tell you that is because the Soviets managed to miraculously defeat the Nazis and prevent them from genociding the Slavic peoples they categorised as "Untermenschen" according to the infamous "Generalplan Ost", which implied genocide of almost all people between Germany and the Urals. If it wasn't for the Soviets, your former boss would have been murdered in a concentration camp by the nazis.

The diet bit is correct because Soviets typically have less meat and more veggies in their diet as well as less sugar.

In a form of a piece of lead

You could literally open up a book someday and check your info, gulag inmates were paid. Wages were lower than those of a free worker, but nothing like the modern slavery that the USA uses in its prison system for example.

Where did I say ALL gulags were in Siberia

By using the cliche of "forced labor to the cold Siberia", you're propagating misinformation about the system, willingly or not. The fact that the majority of Gulags were in fact not in Siberia is kind of a strong statement in that it shows that the intent of gulags was not that of mass-murder of dissidents (which is the claim anticommunists like you normally do). The vast majority of gulag inmates were actually not political dissidents, but normal criminals. The gulag system was the prison system of the USSR for all crimes. Why would you send your average criminal who stole from another person to a death camp instead of trying to reform them? Why did most of the deaths in gulags coincide with a famine that affected the entire Soviet Union during a war and not before or after that? Why did the Gulag system, at its peak during the mass hysteria against nazism, have a number of prisoners similar to that of the modern USA? Maybe if you weren't a propagandized misinformation spreader you could answer any of those questions. But no, you can't, because you haven't lifted the cover of one book in your entire life.

Stalin was alive in 60s?

I brought up the 60s because the Soviet Union was essentially industrialised by then. In 1917, when the Bolsheviks get to power, the former Russian Empire was a predominantly agrarian country where 80+% of people worked the land and the life expectancy was <30 years, there was no industry to speak of. The civil war which the fascists started, and in which England, France and the USA invaded Soviet Russia for the sin of being communist and gave material aid and troops to the pro-tsarist fascists, and which came right after WW1, left the country in a state of utter destruction, and the economy didn't recover to pre-WW1 levels until 1929, the year when the first 5-year-plan was adopted. Industrialization of the Soviet Union was FAST as lightning, with GDP growths above 10% per year, the fastest industrialization process in history up to that point (and only surpassed by China to this day). But in 1941, as you may know, the Nazis invaded the country, and murdered about 27 million Soviet Citizens and essentially leveled the entire country west of Stalingrad. After 1945, the industrialization progress continued to its previous speed together with the reconstruction of the country, but it isn't until at least the 60s when you can say the country was properly industrialized. This is why I said the 60s, because comparing a predominantly feudal country in terms of food security to our modern standards is an exercise of either ignorance of bad faith. So tell me, are you arguing from ignorance or from bad faith?

What you're doing is called a "thought stopper" or "conversation stopper". It is used in propaganda for hundreds of years.