writing about Soviet history at https://xitter.cf/t.co/ayItpd4Pqi
Joined July 2009
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High child mortality was a persistent problem for remote communities in the Soviet north and Siberia, and the push to provide greater maternal and infant care by expanding nurseries into these regions was not a colonial endeavor but a public health one.
The USSR was generally quite progressive in its institutional support for minority languages and cultures, but policy also varied greatly by period, with some major failures as well that shouldnt be ignored.
Lenin and Stalin safeguarded minority-language education rights, even while Russian was made the lingua franca under Stalinism. However, Khrushchev’s education reforms opened the door to Russification by weakening (but not eliminating) the institutional protections for native-language instruction, while elevating Russian.
In practice, boarding schools attended by indigenous youth in the 60s privileged Russian, while native-language instruction was poorly implemented and organised despite the official bilingual policy. This was a major failure. Still, this was very different from the genocidal Canadian residential school system that had cultural and linguistic annihilation as state policy
Sources
“'Catching a Child': Giving Birth Under Nomadic Conditions. The Methods of Pre- and Postnatal Care of the Nenets Mothers and Babies” by Zoia Vylka Ravna
“The Reform of Day Nurseries in the Soviet Union: Towards a Preschool Education System (1945–1970s)” by Dorena Caroli
“Infant Mortality and the History of Maternal and Child Welfare in Russia and the USSR” by A. Avdeev
If you were actually familiar with the scholarship, you would know that a great number of historians view the French Revolution sympathetically. This favourable interpretation was dominant throughout the 20th century and remains very influential. It has nothing to do with TikTok.
The Revolution was a formative event in the development of political liberalism, dismantling a hereditary social order and enshrining the principle of legal equality. The broader social transformation it represented was inarguably good, even if some episodes within it were not. Whatever its excesses or shortcomings, we are better off for it.
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Zelensky is absolutely right. In 1991, Ukraine inherited an extraordinary economic foundation, with a highly educated workforce, formidable scientific and industrial capacity (including Antonov and the Donbass and Krivbas industrial regions), vast natural resources and some of the world’s best agricultural land.
Politically, too, Ukraine had considerable advantages. Under Brezhnev (who came from Dnepropetrovsk region), officials associated with the Ukrainian party apparatus occupied many of the Soviet Union’s most powerful positions. Ukraine therefore entered independence with an established political and managerial elite.
It also emerged without any responsibility for Soviet external debt (which Moscow was forced to assume in exchange for Soviet overseas assets).
Yet just 15 years later, Ukraine’s GDP per capita was roughly half that of Russia and Poland in purchasing power terms, while in nominal US dollars, the disparity was even greater.
Zelensky:
They called Ukraine the Soviet Union's forge of talent.
There were so many scientists, engineers, universities, a huge intelligentsia.
Many people who came from Ukraine went on to run various institutions and ministries in the Soviet Union.
Ukraine was the intellectual part of the Soviet Union.
Ukraine was always involved in rocket manufacturing. The biggest rocket manufacturing was here, nuclear weapons, which Ukraine handed over. A lot of things were made in Ukraine.
after history 👤 retweeted
I think a lot of people still don't fully realize how severe the genocide against Native Americans was.
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In case you missed it - our newest episode of Reimagining Soviet Georgia is on the new book “The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and their Afterlives” with the author David Leupold
Links below ⬇️
@ReimaginingG
The Soviets did pathologize anti-communist dissent as mental illness, but the framing of political critique in psychiatric terms was hardly unique to so-called “totalitarian” regimes. Western psychiatrists closely collaborate with counter-terrorism agencies to pathologize muslims and there is next to no evidence that "terrorism" is caused by psychological abnormality or mental illness
As another example, the British governments abuse of IRA prisoners involved horrific torture, which was legitimized by their belief that the prisoners suffered a kind of psychological abnormality that blocked "normal reasoning."
The West has long cited the USSR to reinforce its own claims to scientific objectivity, obscuring and deflecting from the ways in which their regimes have instrumentalized science to political imperatives
This is the exact argument Stalin used to shutter cultural institutions of "enemy nations." By bringing back collective punishment and persecution of wrongthink with none of the socialism, the EU would be making the worst possible version of 21st century Stalinism
Dozens of EU lawmakers have called for Russian cultural centres to be shut down across the bloc, describing them as hubs for espionage and influence operations.
A cross-party group of 71 MEPs is demanding legal mechanisms to close the Russian Houses still operating in 15 member states.
The initiative was led by Lithuanian MEP Rasa Jukneviciene. The centres are operated by Rossotrudnichestvo, Russia’s state cultural cooperation agency, which is under EU sanctions.
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Off the top of my head... Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Solaris and Andrei Rublev; Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Klimov’s Come and See and Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don amd Grossman’s Life and Fate. Shostakovich’s symphonies and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Deineka’s paintings.
Matt, can you seriously claim that the art Russia has produced in the 35 years since the USSR collapsed is superior to what it produced during the Soviet period?
This is pretty much indistinguishable from the defense offered by Nazis on trial in Nuremberg who insisted that the genocide of Jews fell outside their departmental purview or decision-making. Of course, that did not absolve their active participation within a genocidal enterprise.
Even without military command authority, the VP is a statutory member of the National Security Council and a participant in war planning cabinet meetings. That means she helped facilitate and legitimize a genocide. The whole state apparatus bears responsibility
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With respect, i think we're gonna be more than okay. We've got Sam Kriss, Ben Burgis, Catherine Liu—and that's not even counting wise elders like Vivek Chibber and Wolfgang Streeck, firebrand writers like Bhaskar Sunkara and Tyler Austin Harper, and scholar-activists like Aaron B
