No, lol. This was like a bingo-card for generic, lazy, unsourced anti-communism. I’ve heard every one of these arguments before.
Deaths by the state - Capitalists, fascists, sabateurs, Tsarists, landlords, and kulaks were targeted by the state. These weren’t random killings, but targeted attacks towards classes of people that had taken up arms against the people, and as such this was popularly supported. The communists weren’t butchers, nor were they killing people willy-nilly.
Famine - Prior to collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s, famine was common in Russia. The kulak system of farming, itself a bourgeois model, was extremely exploitative and very inefficient. The 1930s famine was the last outright famine outside of wartime, and was caused by a combination of weather disaster (which collectivized farming was capable of resisting better) and kulaks killing their crops and livestock to resist the Red Army.
Life Expectancy - Life expectancy climbed not just because of general sanitation, but because housing and employment were gaurunteed, healthcare and education were free and high quality, and millions were directly lifted from poverty. Housing itself didn’t just increase in quantity, but quality, as prior living conditions outside of major cities were in horrible shacks. Deaths due to hypothermia went down dramatically thanks to improved soviet housing.
Lend-Lease - The soviets are understood to have been capable of beating the Nazis without lend-lease. Lend-Lease was very helpful, no doubt, but it arrived after the soviets had turned the tides on the Nazi onslaught.
From 1941 to 1945, total lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union accounted for only 5% of the Soviet GDP in total. And it is a salient point that the majority of the aid was received after the tide of the war had already turned against the Germans on the Eastern Front. The Soviets had already won the critical battles of Moscow and Stalingrad. Germany was already losing the war when Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union had any significant effect, and that effect was minuscule compared with Soviet production at the time. By the time the first Sherman laid its tracks on Soviet soil, the writing was already very much on the wall for the Third Reich.
Although Stalin, Khrushchev, and other Soviet politicians were very complimentary about the Lend-Lease program helping them win the war, the statistics tell a very different story. The noted historian David M. Glantz points out in this regard,
“Lend-Lease aid did not arrive in sufficient quantities to make the difference between defeat and victory in 1941–1942; that achievement must be attributed solely to the Soviet people and to the iron nerve of Stalin, Zhukov, Shaposhnikov, Vasilevsky, and their subordinates….”
He further states that without Lend-Lease, the Soviets still would have won, but the war would have taken 12 to 18 months longer.
Foreign Aid - In all reality, the USSR, Cuba, PRC, and Vietnam don’t recieve much, if anything, in aid. The US Empire is the one that relies on aid, though it doesn’t call it that. The US Empire runs on imperialism. Through export of capital, setting up comprador regimes, and outsourcing while maintaining monopoly on tech, the US Empire plunders the entire global south. Unequal exchange with the global south keeps the south underdeveloped, it’s equal exchange with fellow global south countries like the PRC that is causing actual development in the global south.
No, lol. This was like a bingo-card for generic, lazy, unsourced anti-communism. I’ve heard every one of these arguments before.
Deaths by the state - Capitalists, fascists, sabateurs, Tsarists, landlords, and kulaks were targeted by the state. These weren’t random killings, but targeted attacks towards classes of people that had taken up arms against the people, and as such this was popularly supported. The communists weren’t butchers, nor were they killing people willy-nilly.
Famine - Prior to collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s, famine was common in Russia. The kulak system of farming, itself a bourgeois model, was extremely exploitative and very inefficient. The 1930s famine was the last outright famine outside of wartime, and was caused by a combination of weather disaster (which collectivized farming was capable of resisting better) and kulaks killing their crops and livestock to resist the Red Army.
Life Expectancy - Life expectancy climbed not just because of general sanitation, but because housing and employment were gaurunteed, healthcare and education were free and high quality, and millions were directly lifted from poverty. Housing itself didn’t just increase in quantity, but quality, as prior living conditions outside of major cities were in horrible shacks. Deaths due to hypothermia went down dramatically thanks to improved soviet housing.
Lend-Lease - The soviets are understood to have been capable of beating the Nazis without lend-lease. Lend-Lease was very helpful, no doubt, but it arrived after the soviets had turned the tides on the Nazi onslaught.
Source.
You have no clue what you’re talking about.