So, over the past year I have learnt so much about the amazing achievements these men (and the party they were the leaders of) did that I was never taught. I’ve ‘semi-intentionally’ deprogrammed myself of so much anti-communism bullshit while having to live with that most still in the West, based upon misinformation, view them as ‘evil, 100 quintillion deaths, dictator, psychopath where muh freedoms’.
The reason I am focusing on Stalin and Mao in particular in this post is, to be very open, due to a truth-seeking hyperfixation that I must satisfy so I can move on to the next topic of intense, dopamine chasing, obsession. Yeah I love being me. Anyway, propaganda, mythologising, exaggerating and misattributed blame brushed aside, what is left?
I am quite knowledgeable of, thanks to some high quality M-L documentaries, educational videos and podcast episodes, the more obvious wrongdoings such as the Great Leap Forward killing of pests worsening the famine, purges of comrades who were legitimately innocent, re-criminalising homosexuality, support of Khmer Rouge and ethnic deportations to name a few.
I wouldn’t mind hearing more obscure examples, or a deeper analysis of the mistakes and unjustifiable actions I am already aware of. And as much as a few good book recommendations probably would give me the answers I crave, I am lowkey illiterate with long-form reading thanks to my ADHD (still waiting on meds after being diagnosed 8 months ago).
Oh and I think proles of the round table did a few episodes on Stalin that might be informative. I don’t remember them and they still likely suffer from the citation problem, but they’re probably good
Also forgot to mention the Soviet Archives in my comment, but that’s where most good information is going to lead back to. But they didn’t become accessible to the West until the fall of the USSR (and I believe they were closed again iirc) and since they’re not in English and they contradict anticommunist claims their information has been slow to permeate into western academia. You can find a very small portion of them available online, but sometimes you’ll follow the citation trail back to a reference to an Archives document and you can’t really verify it because there’s no way to read it. But at least if it’s pointing to something in the Archives it’s slightly more trustworthy than something citing Conquest.
Thank you for writing all of that, it was very enlightening. And goddamit comrade, I am jealous of your intellect 😅.
I think most people (I know I desperately do) desire a clear objective truth to the past and present world yet pretty much everything, as far as I am aware, is muddied by subjective information. I’d love if I could have some magic fact dispenser teach me the truth about whatever I wanted.
I’m going to go learn some more about historiography as you weren’t the only commenter to bring that up.