Thread: "Russophobia" and "Russophilia" :)

Originally Posted by Hanna

I find it hard to believe that somebody would have triggered starvation on purpose. Most people simply wouldn't want to be that cruel, plus there is no realistic motivation.

Almost all European countries have a horrible famine at some point in their history over the last couple of centuries. Ukraine's was quite recent, that's all. Of course, if Ukrainians really believe that they were being starved deliberately, it's not hard to understand that they have an axe to grind.

If a state (that is, an institute that has protecting ppl's safety and their private property as one of its main purposes) instead robs people's houses and steals everything from them, even food, then you can certainly blame such a state for anything that those actions might possibly result in. If the majority of people in the area became victims of starvation because their food had been stolen from them --- it does look like a deliberately triggered starvation.

Almost all European countries have a horrible famine at some point in their history over the last couple of centuries. Ukraine's was quite recent, that's all. Of course, if Ukrainians really believe that they were being starved deliberately, it's not hard to understand that they have an axe to grind.

Ukraine wasn't the only exUSSR territory that suffered from starvation. Almost every region with good soil and developed agriculture suffered - that is South Russia, Belorussia, lands along banks of Volga river, Western Siberia, South Urals and Kazakhstan.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...jpg?uselang=ru
So, Russians suffered from this famine not less than Ukrainians.

Originally Posted by Eric C.

I know one such country, but the problem is, their level of innovation is still stuck in the 1950s xD

The problem of every commie regime is, that it's in fact a two-layer system --- developed capitalism for the "dear leaders", and slavery for everyone else. Such a system will always suck at every aspect.

First. There is always a few years, sometimes a few decades between an innovative research and its final result in production of consumer goods. For example, the physics of solid state semiconducters which gave birth to modern electronics was researched in the 1920-s. By the way, the contribution of Soviet physicists in this field was quite significant. So, if a country produces goods that contain innovations of 1950s - it's very competitive.

Second. You are completely wrong. (Deleted. L.) You haven't lived in the soviet society and can't compare it with liberal capitalism which began after the break down of the Soviet Union. I and millions of Russian people have this experience so it's up to us to decide what is better.

Originally Posted by Eric C.

If a state (that is, an institute that has protecting ppl's safety and their private property as one of its main purposes) instead robs people's houses and steals everything from them, even food, then you can certainly blame such a state for anything that those actions might possibly result in. If the majority of people in the area became victims of starvation because their food had been stolen from them --- it does look like a deliberately triggered starvation.

And Akinfeev let Lee Keun-ho make a 25 meter goal because he wanted Russia to lose to South Korea tonight in Brazil... I wonder if Kerzhakov will have him arrested for treason. LOL!
I think the drought and famine caused the starvation. That and the burning and sabotage of collectivist farms by the Kulaks who opposed the agricultural improvements. If I thought there was anything intentional about it I would call it attempted Ukrainian suicide.
And the more I think about Poroshenko the more I think it's a definite possibility...

Also, I totally do agree with SergeMak. The break-up of the USSR and everything that happened in the 1990's was an important learning curve for Russians. They are the only ones that really know what that was like so they are the people that have to make any final judgements and decide about their future... not us.

An article about the great famine:
Тайны голода 30-х

"По подсчётам В. Кожинова [65], коллективизация и голод привели к тому, что в 1929-1933 годах смертность в стране превысила смертность в предыдущие пять лет НЭПа ( 1924-1928 ) в полтора раза (надо сказать, что совершенно аналогично изменение показателей смертности в России имеется начиная с 1994 года по сравнению со второй половиной 80-х годов). Самое интересно, что после завершения коллективизации, в 1934-1938 годах смертность (включая потери от пресловутых "репрессий") была даже ниже НЭПовских показателей 1924-1928 годов."

"П. Краснов [75] не считает, что число жертв голода было таким большим. Он пишет. "Об отсутствии каких-либо свидетельств многомиллионной гибели населения в те годы говорит наиболее авторитетный исследователь того периода - Земсков , которого никак нельзя заподозрить в симпатиях к Сталину и коммунистам. Он однозначно утверждает, что от голода погибло несколько сотен тысяч человек. Немало! Но, для Царской России - это было обычным делом, а после этого провала Советская Власть навсегда решила проблему голода, извечного бича России (если не брать последствия Гражданской и Отечественной войн, к которым общественный строй имел небольшое отношение). Кроме того, в 1930-33 гг. по территории СССР прокатилась жестокая эпидемия тифа, бича того времени и непременного спутника массовых миграций. Отличить сейчас погибших от тифа и от голода невозможно, скорее всего, это несколько сот тысяч человек, возможно до 1 миллиона." П. Краснов [76] выдвинул предположение о том, что смертность от голода была небольшой, люди же умирали в основном от эпидемии тифа."

Originally Posted by SergeMak

Second. You are completely wrong. (Deleted. L.) You haven't lived in the soviet society and can't compare it with liberal capitalism which began after the break down of the Soviet Union. I and millions of Russian people have this experience so it's up to us to decide what is better.

Well said! Nobody can be in a position to make an honest comparison unless they lived in both societies. Obviously people within Russia have different perspectives, but I'm beginning to notice a trend. I didn't know what make of any of it until I joined here. Also it's obvious that those who left and moved to the USA for example were perhaps not the happiest citizens in the USSR, and also that they taken on opionions projected on them.

Originally Posted by UhOhXplode

I think the drought and famine caused the starvation. That and the burning and sabotage of collectivist farms by the Kulaks who opposed the agricultural improvements.

I wouldn't say of course it was an act of planned genocide against a nation, even though it looks like that from many perspectives. But you can't deny that what the commies did in the countryside in those times was total robbery of everyone who had anything to rob. And just before the famine, it had been food mostly. It went for the "purposes of supplying the working class" or whatever else BS they had to say. So, as the drought destroyed any current food people were growing, they also ran into the total absence of any savings they had made, and that was ultimately why they had literally nothing to eat...

And just in case you don't realize what those "collective farms" are, it goes like this: you're a farmer and you grow stuff and sell stuff from your farm, so now you disown your farm, and give it up to the state, and you're hired by the state to work on {formerly your} farm for something close to the current minimum wage. Pretty tough huh?

Originally Posted by Eric C.

I wouldn't say of course it was an act of planned genocide against a nation, even though it looks like that from many perspectives. But you can't deny that what the commies did in the countryside in those times was total robbery of everyone who had anything to rob. And just before the famine, it had been food mostly. It went for the "purposes of supplying the working class" or whatever else BS they had to say. So, as the drought destroyed any current food people were growing, they also ran into the total absence of any savings they had made, and that was ultimately why they had literally nothing to eat...

And just in case you don't realize what those "collective farms" are, it goes like this: you're a farmer and you grow stuff and sell stuff from your farm, so now you disown your farm, and give it up to the state, and you're hired by the state to work on {formerly your} farm for something close to the current minimum wage. Pretty tough huh?

It would also be very easy to call the Great Depression in America a planned disaster. It's very easy for influential people on Wall Street to control markets and the investors that didn't off themselves made massive amounts of money when it happened.
Or maybe the housing bubble? Goldman-Sachs made a ton of money and drove tons of Americans into poverty.
And there's also the people of Oklahoma who were forced to move to California during the dust bowl period. Have you ever read John Steinbeck's book "The Grapes of Wrath"? The ones that didn't work for slave wages were in prisons or murdered.
But hey, who chopped down all the trees that caused the dust bowl?
#Conspiracy theory

The only one I would consider to be a conspiracy in that list is the housing bubble. But only as a conspiracy of greed by Goldman-Sachs. Btw, dad already pulled out of that company before that happened.
Oh, and don't forget all the 9/11 conspiracy theories, lol. So imo, the 1932-1933 famine is just another conspiracy theory to add to a massive list.

But I think I already said in another post - No, I would never live in a communist country. If other people are fine with that lifestyle that's cool but that wouldn't be me. I don't need that much freedom but I definitely need more freedom than that.
And no way I would ever work for a minimum wage! We discussed that at another forum and I really don't get how anyone could survive with that little money. I get very happy just knowing I will never have to.

Originally Posted by UhOhXplode

I get very happy just knowing I will never have to.

Never say never. It's not that I'm wishing a poor life on you, in fact, I hope you'll never have to live like that. It's just most of those Ukrainians refugees never thought they would end up living in a war zone and etc.

One thing that the life teaches you (also it usually does that the hard way) is that you can never be 100% sure of what will happen in the future

Originally Posted by iCake

Never say never. It's not that I'm wishing a poor life on you, in fact, I hope you'll never have to live like that. It's just most of those Ukrainians refugees never thought they would end up living in a war zone and etc.

One thing that the life teaches you (also it usually does that the hard way) is that you can never be 100% sure of what will happen in the future

That's a really scary thought but we did discuss that at another forum. I won't repeat what they said (lol) but their comments weren't as civil and helpful as yours. But I am learning because one of them taught me how to make something he called breakfast soup.
It's made with something called Rammen noodles (noodles that look like a scrub pad) and American cheese slices (it's a wonky cheese that feels like soft rubber) and an egg and some veggies. It definitely wasn't a Croque-monsieur but I was really surprised about the flavor. It was really cheap food but it had an amazing flavor. So maybe I could adapt.

Anyway, I've been trying to not think about the war in Ukraine. I saw a picture of an old woman standing in her shelled house by what was left of her stove. She was crying and I was thinking omg! what if that had been my grandma. It really bites because you can see that she's too old to work and get her house and all her stuff back. I hope that somebody can help all those people so they can get their stuff back.

Originally Posted by Hanna

As for the that whole starvation-in-Ukraine episode; it was one of the many things that came to the light in the 90s, wasn't it? We will never know about the "what if" speculation.

Well, actually, a bit earlier than that. Welsh journalist Gareth Jones was able to visit Ukraine in 1933, and after returning to the West, he published the following on 29 March:

I walked along through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, 'There is no bread. We are dying'. This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. I tramped through the black earth region because that was once the richest farmland in Russia and because the correspondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves what is happening.

In the train a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it and devoured it. The Communist subsided. I stayed overnight in a village where there used to be two hundred oxen and where there now are six. The peasants were eating the cattle fodder and had only a month's supply left. They told me that many had already died of hunger. Two soldiers came to arrest a thief. They warned me against travel by night, as there were too many 'starving' desperate men.

This very quickly got the Kremlin's attention, because just two days later, Stalinist жополиз extraordinaire Walter Duranty (then the New York Times' correspondent in Moscow) attempted to rebut Jones' account of a developing famine as an exaggeration, and implied that Jones was deliberately trying to discredit the USSR.

And Jones responded to Duranty:

"My final evidence is based on my talks with hundreds of peasants. They were not the “kulaks”- those mythical scapegoats for the hunger in Russia-but ordinary peasants. I talked with them alone in Russian and jotted down their conversations, which are an unanswerable indictment of Soviet agricultural policy. The peasants said emphatically that the famine was worse than in 1921 and that fellow-villagers had died or were dying.

So, knowledge of this "episode" is not something that became known to the world only in the 1990s, after the Soviet period -- though it was nearly impossible to discuss it within the USSR until the period of glasnost in the 1980s.

I find it hard to believe that somebody would have triggered starvation on purpose. Most people simply wouldn't want to be that cruel, plus there is no realistic motivation.

It seems quite believable to me that Stalin wanted to starve SOME towns/villages "on purpose" -- namely, those areas that he considered to be pockets of anti-Soviet resistance in Ukraine and elsewhere -- but that the final number of deaths may have been a lot higher than he deliberately planned. (Farmers and their families who have died from starvation can't be forced to work digging coal or laying railroads, after all.)

I agree, though, that the famine (and the overall misery caused by the forced collectivization) should not be generally counted as "intentional genocide" of a people.

And just in case you don't realize what those "collective farms" are, it goes like this: you're a farmer and you grow stuff and sell stuff from your farm, so now you disown your farm, and give it up to the state, and you're hired by the state to work on {formerly your} farm for something close to the current minimum wage.

Which might have been okay if it had turned out that the collectivized farms would be Ultra-Efficient and Super-Duper-Productive (which was, of course, the Communist Party's prediction) and therefore yielded 20-30 times as much food per man-hour of labor (or per hectare of land) as the "outdated" private agriculture had.

But that's NOT what happened -- agriculture was always a disappointingly under-performing sector of the Soviet economy, even during periods when the USSR was self-sufficient in food and didn't have to rely on imports.

The above-mentioned Walter Duranty tried to rationalize the brutality of the First Five-Year Plan by writing "you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs" -- but the bitter joke was that, in the end, farm collectivization never resulted in the promised "omelets", even after breaking millions of human "eggs."

It took 3 posts in "russophobia" topic to come to standard "stalin, commie, labor camps, north korea etc" argument. Even pol pot, collective farms and famine are there. Whereas russiphobia is much older than aforecited historical facts and has nothing to do with most of them.
These are just tools for anti-russian propaganda to keep russophobia alive.
When i said that it was not that bad in the USSR od 60s - 80s i didn't mean that i wanted to bring it back. I just meant that it wan't bad. Stalin's USSR and the USSR after changes of 60s were two different countries but that just doesn't fit in russophobes' binary mode of thinking. Victims of anti-russian propaganda just can't get over their old formula russian=soviet=commie. They couldn't expect russia to survive the disaster of 90s so they just didn't inven't anything new. And now being stuck in cold war they just sound funny.
Now Russia is modern capitalist democracy, it's not perfect but not worse then others. Free country (more free than most of the west). It also has a luxury that's just unaffordable for almost all western countries - it's sovereing and independent. Of course there's a high price it has to pay for that, but i believe it's worth it. And ut 's just inacceptable for those who didn't expect it. THat's why they prefer to stay in their bubble of the past. But after one stays in the past too long the awakening can be rather painful and frustrating. Lest they wake up too late.

Many sportsmen who participated in Sochi Olympics 2014, before they came to Sochi, seriously thought there is no toilet paper in Russia and brought their own paper with them. What else to say after that?

This is the Russophobia and Russophilia thread? LOL. My bad. I thought it was Ancient History 101.
It is really strange that so many people diss the USSR... except the Russians that lived there. They don't seem to have any serious issues with it.
But I looked at my monitor and it claims that it's 2014 so I really don't get how the USSR or some Cambodian tyrant is relevant to Russia today.

And yeah, Russia is sovereign, strong, and independent but it's also the future of space exploration. Russia has the RD-180 rocket engine and that's serious levels up from the US Merlin-1C. Since our country turned the space program over to private corporations, we need 9 Merlin-1C's just to get the million pounds of thrust required for near-Earth orbits. That's 9 Merlin-1C engines or just 1 RD-180. And don't forget, the MIR space station was built and constantly manned for over 10 years. The US Sky Lab space stations 2-4 were manned for less than 6 months. And now the new Angara heavy-lift vehicle is scheduled for a test launch at Plesetsk cosmodrome in just 6 days. Now we're talking serious manned, deep-space capability!

No way! If this was the 1910's then yeah, I'd discuss that part of ancient history. But this is 2014 and any ethnic group of people that can accomplish what Russia is still accomplishing in manned space flight totally is worth friending. Russia=space=the future.
So yeah, I think Russophobia totally would disappear if the conversation was limited to the 21st century, accomplishments, and personal experience with Russians. You can't know anything about anybody until you meet them dead-on and without prejudice.
It doesn't mean you'll like every Russian you meet or that Russians would like every American they meet but hey, only very strange (or drunk) people like everybody they meet, lol.

I also think it's pretty wonky when people accuse Russians of being too aggressive. What? More aggressive than us? Not even! It's aggressiveness that builds strong nations and explores space. The non-aggressive Earthlings are living in under-developed, 3rd world countries... like California.
LOL @ the toilet paper issue! But yeah, I can believe there would be people stupid enough to buy into that.

Originally Posted by UhOhXplode

It is really strange that so many people diss the USSR... except the Russians that lived there. They don't seem to have any serious issues with it.

For those who interested in life in late USSR I'd recommend watching "Служебный роман" movie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR-1...ViDwsbTd9SV5gz
link seems to still work despite that new youtube copyright policy
Unlike most other movies of that time this represents REAL life of soviet office workers of that time.

english subtitles suck btw

No, but think about it; It's NOT strange that people from English speaking countries think that life in the USSR was awful and everything there was a total failure, or really oppressive.

There are probably thousands of "documentaries" (read: propaganda) about exactly that, from the BBC, Discovery Channel, History Channel and various American media outlets.

Not to mention literally hundreds or thousands of Hollywood films where Russia and Russians are portrayed negatively. An American stops the evil Russian plan and saves some beautiful girl who is super grateful.

I think it's almost impossible for a normal person not to be affected by that.

I watched that kind of stuff for the first time, in the 1990s. English speaking TV on cable was just a revelation for me - for a while I couldn't get enough of it.

I have to admit, I mostly believed these documentaries, and was totally shocked. It seemed that people in Russia were downright cruel for allowing certain things to go on, not to mention the leaders who appeared incompetent and ruthless.

And I believed it, despite the fact that I had visited the USSR several times. I figured: "Well, I only saw central Leningrad really, and tourist areas in Latvia. It must have been that the rest of the country was terrible and only a few big cities and tourist areas were good."

Now I feel very torn about it: Nobody wants to be an apologetic for a cruel regime, or feel that they are affected by propaganda. On the other hand - I personally don't think the USSR was an evil empire and I saw nothing at all to give any indication in that direction.

Since there is so much misinformation, I feel that the ONLY credible source of information about this, is the people who experienced it themselves. I.e. people here like Alex_krsk, Basil77, Crocodile and others who have been speaking about it.

Of course, there is a mixed bag from them as well - but you can definitely see a pattern.

Oh and another thing that came up here several times that just isn't true, is that people who visited the USSR as tourists, weren't allowed to walk around freely. The suggestion being that they were only allowed to see "approved" sights. Well that is just not true. I am not going to bore anybody with tourism stories from my childhood, but neither my trips, or several other trips that I heard of, required guides all the time. I think it was needed for translation mainly, and for the same reason that you might use a guide in any other country. Lots of people drove their cars to the Black Sea, hardly with a guide in their car.

Originally Posted by Alex_krsk

For those who interested in life in late USSR I'd recommend watching "Служебный роман" movie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR-1...ViDwsbTd9SV5gz
link seems to still work despite that new youtube copyright policy
Unlike most other movies of that time this represents REAL life of soviet office workers of that time.

english subtitles suck btw

I've seen it Somebody recommended it when I first joined this forum. Gosh, so much nicer than offices I work in.... Nice film.

However - I think this film depicts Moscow, right? Rural USSR was somewhat backwards, wasn't it - and went through hell in the 90s when state jobs and subsidies died. It was really sad, to see how the Russian countryside just feel through the floor in the 1990s. I just hope they are back on their feet. I don't know myself. But in Moscow it seems people have been doing fine most of the time.

But on the hygiene articles issue: Actually, there was a certain imo standard female product that was not available in the USSR. Of course, there were alternatives - but very old fashioned. I really don't know why the USSR didn't come up with a bit more choice on that front. Today I am sure Russia has the same Johnson & Johnson products as everyone else though.

LOL @ the toilet paper issue! But yeah, I can believe there would be people stupid enough to buy into that.

I don't know what the current "toilet-paper standards" are in major Russian cities.

I do recall very well from the early 1990s, however, that:

(1) Public restrooms quite often had no toilet paper at all;

(2) When public restrooms did have paper for wiping your butt, it was often squares cut from old newspapers.

(3) While it was easy to find "real" toilet paper on rolls at Russian stores, it's only a slight exaggeration to say that you could use the stuff as a substitute for sandpaper.

(4) Soft, comfortable, absorbent toilet paper could also be found in some Russian stores, but the label was always in English or some other Western European language. (I can remember some Russian friends marveling over the extreme comfort of "pre-moistened towelettes" imported from Italy, because they were SO MUCH NICER than the toilet paper actually manufactured in Russia.)

Sure, it's possible that things have greatly improved since then -- but if so, then it's a rather recent improvement, and the notion that "it's difficult to find good TP in Russia" is hardly what I would call a развесистая клюква (in the sense of a "baseless stereotype".)

Oh seriously!
no American quality toilet paper = very evil country

For goodness sakes; if it's there when you need it and it can do the job, it doesn't need to be triple-sheet extra fluffy cream-coloured Princess Deluxe....!

According to guidebooks I've come across, the standard recycled European toilet paper isn't good enough for sensitive American butts either...
It makes me laugh.

Maybe that's the secret of how to win a war against America - just deprive her of loo paper...


--------------------

Below: Example of what I was talking about earlier. Listen to the extremely dramatized voice... use of "experts", dramatic sound effects and unsubstantiated claims. No attempt at giving any other perspective on the events described.

This is NOT an objective documentary it has a very clear agenda and message. This type of presentation IS propaganda, a text-book example! There are literally hundreds if not thousands near identical "documentaries" and the BBC among others love them.

If this type of information is ALL you ever saw about the USSR, then of course, that's what you'll believe.

Initially they are jumping back and forth between the civil war in Russia and the 1930s as if it was the same period. This appears to be a fairly recent documentary but it's worthy of the cold war, in it's exaggerated one-sidedness.

Originally Posted by Eric C.

If a state (that is, an institute that has protecting ppl's safety and their private property as one of its main purposes) instead robs people's houses and steals everything from them, even food, then you can certainly blame such a state for anything that those actions might possibly result in. If the majority of people in the area became victims of starvation because their food had been stolen from them --- it does look like a deliberately triggered starvation.

My father is native Ukrainian from South Russian Belgorod region. He was born in 1931, his parents were just simple peasants so he is one of those who survived the "starvation". Of course, he was too young to remember this time in detail but he talked with his parents, and he doesn't agree with your estimate of those events.
On the other hand, talking about protecting of people's private property, I would recommend to you to read the Constitution of Russian Federation. It says that in our country all type of property are equally respected. That means, that if the state has a duty to protect private property, it also has the same responsibility towards all other types of property - municipal, state, social, join-stock and so on. During the Soviet period of history a great industry was built in the Soviet Union - thousands of plants and factories. All this assets didn't belong to a certain person or a group of people - they were in a socialist property - the property of all Soviet people. So, how could it happen that all this property suddenly became a property of certain oligarchs in the 1990s when the liberal capitalist reforms started in the country approved by the Western politicians? Do you know what results these brought to Russian people? I'll tell you: deindustrialisation, impoverishment, social inequality, criminalization, corruption, decline in life expectancy, decline of birth-rate, terrorism ans so on. All this I saw in plenty an example with my own eyes. Have you ever worked without getting paid for three and more months when the inflation rate was more than 30%? I did. Have you ever received you wage not in money but in some natural goods, as, for example, sausage? I did.
So don't tell me about the great liberal values and the bad life in the Soviet Union.
Life in the Soviet Union was not easy, but there was a positive dynamic almost during the whole Soviet period. People always new, that to-day we maybe don't live very good, but to-morrow it will be better, and it really would happen.

Originally Posted by SergeMak

. Have you ever worked without getting paid for three and more months when the inflation rate was more than 30%? I did. Have you ever received you wage not in money but in some natural goods, as, for example, sausage? I did.
So don't tell me about the great liberal values and the bad life in the Soviet Union.

But now it's much better than in 90s and much bettre than in the USSR so maybe it's not that bad with tose "liberal values".

Originally Posted by SergeMak

.
Life in the Soviet Union was not easy, but there was a positive dynamic almost during the whole Soviet period. People always new, that to-day we maybe don't live very good, but to-morrow it will be better, and it really would happen.

I'm afraid it wouldn't. Those were only promises, things stayed the same every year. But i may be wrong considering china. Chinese managed to make reforms without revolutions. Whie the rgime in china is still much more strict than in USSR (which is ok with the western media btw when russia is always accused in some laws that are more strict in those western countries)