Lefties really don't live in the same reality as the rest of us.

According to a popular old meme, after occupying Lwów the Soviet soldiers didn't know that the poo goes to the loo in civilized society with plumbing so they were shitting straight out of windows and drinking from toilets.

Supowerpower by 1940.

Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile

The automobile and Soviet communism made an odd couple. The quintessential symbol of American economic might and consumerism never achieved iconic status as an engine of Communist progress, in part because it posed an awkward challenge to some basic assumptions of Soviet ideology and practice. In this rich and often witty book, Lewis H. Siegelbaum recounts the life of the Soviet automobile and in the process gives us a fresh perspective on the history and fate of the USSR itself.

Based on sources ranging from official state archives to cartoons, car-enthusiast magazines, and popular films, Cars for Comrades takes us from the construction of the huge "Soviet Detroits," emblems of the utopian phase of Soviet planning, to present-day Togliatti, where the fate of Russia's last auto plant hangs in the balance. The large role played by American businessmen and engineers in the checkered history of Soviet automobile manufacture is one of the book's surprises, and the author points up the ironic parallels between the Soviet story and the decline of the American Detroit. In the interwar years, automobile clubs, car magazines, and the popularity of rally races were signs of a nascent Soviet car culture, its growth slowed by the policies of the Stalinist state and by Russia's intractable "roadlessness". In the postwar years cars appeared with greater frequency in songs, movies, novels, and in propaganda that promised to do better than car-crazy America.

Ultimately, Siegelbaum shows, the automobile epitomized and exacerbated the contradictions between what Soviet communism encouraged and what it provided. To need a car was a mark of support for industrial goals; to want a car for its own sake was something else entirely. Because Soviet cars were both hard to get and chronically unreliable, and such items as gasoline and spare parts so scarce, owning and maintaining them enmeshed citizens in networks of private, semi-illegal, and ideologically heterodox practices that the state was helpless to combat.

FDR industrialized the USSR. Stalin simply got the credit for it.

Stalin was kinda based though. He was a nationalist, hated leftists, and held the high score in Stacking Commies For Mommy until Mao took the crown.

Weren't jeans a huge taboo in many totalitarian areas because it was seen as a symbol of western culture? Fucking pants were enough to get you killed.

There were always people who did.

My Disillusionment in Russia is a fine account of one such person, even if she was actually deported there from America.

In conclusion, the present publication of the chapters missing in the first edition comes at a very significant period in the life of Russia. When the “Nep,” Lenin’s new economic policy, was introduced, there rose the hope of a better day, of a gradual abolition of the policies of terror and persecution. The Communist dictatorship seemed inclined to relax its strangle-hold upon the thoughts and lives of the people. But the hope was short-lived. Since the death of Lenin the Bolsheviki have returned to the terror of the worst days of their régime. Despotism, fearing for its power, seeks safety in blood-shed. As timely as in 1922 is my book to-day.

When the first series of my articles on Russia appeared, in 1922, and later when my book was published in America, I was bitterly attacked and denounced by American radicals of almost every camp. But I felt confident that the time would come when the mask would be torn from the false face of Bolshevism and the great delusion exposed. The time has come even sooner than I anticipated. In most civilized lands — in France, England, Germany, in the Scandinavian and Latin countries, even in America the fog of blind faith is gradually lifting. The reactionary character of the Bolshevik régime is being realized by the masses, its terrorism and persecution of non-Communist opinion condemned. The torture of the political victims of the dictatorship in the prisons of Russia, in the concentration camps of the frozen North and in Siberian exile, is rousing the conscience of the more progressive elements the world over. In almost every country societies for the defence and aid of the politicals imprisoned in Russia have been formed, with the object of securing their liberation and the establishment of freedom of opinion and expression in Russia.

If my work will help in these efforts to throw light upon the real situation in Russia and to awaken the world to the true character of Bolshevism and the fatality of dictatorship — be it Fascist or Communist — I shall bear with equanimity the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of foe or friend. And I shall not regret the travail and struggle of spirit that produced this work, which now, after many vicissitudes, is at last complete in print.

EMMA GOLDMAN.

August, 1925.

Well, they do clearly want the have the option to gulag people, so yeah, they kind of have to

Always have been.

Wait 'til they realize Hitler was a national socialist. And a pioneer in identity politics to boot.

Get it right losers, the Holodomor left a billion Nazis dead!

I agree. The worst are the book smart idots. I think I heard ex quarterback Krapsondick was suppose to be this really smart athlete who got all straight A's in college, yet thought that guy Castro was an alright dude.

Not just Stalin, all communists are definitonally trans.

Male/female to comrade

Ossetians

White

Learn the difference between Asian and Caucasian, it can save your life.

It's a joke, they're all literally Caucasian in this image. But as you can see many Caucasians are Asiatics.

Ossetians, who are basically Iranians of the Caucasus, often do look Oriental as in this pic. But their men do so less than their women.

Speaking of whom, another sample of Russia's women from various ethnic groups but also beyond the Caucasus (with an Ossetian too).

Kinda based considering they were mostly commies.