Russia pre and post Οctober Revolution

Hi all,
I wanted to know is

1.what the life was like for Russians before Bolsheviks came to power and what was it like for them under the Tsars, was it better or worse?

2.Did the majority of Russians want a revolution and topple the monarchy?

3.Did Communists improve the lives of Russians during Soviet times?

4.What would Russia have been like if communists had never taken it over?

Thanks

Ill address purely based upon my family perspective:
1) if you werent a land owner or had a high position, life was not very good. My great grandfather owned land and was cossack.

2)Not all Russians. Like my great grandfather.

3)Depends which era. Apparently under Breznev and Kruschev it was pretty decent. Everyone had a roof over their head, food on the table, most of the infrastructure was still new(ish) and maintained. Education was good and such. Some personal freedoms of lets say ease of getting a new car was more difficult but transit system was leaps and bounds better than most western countries.

4) I imagine it wouldnt be different. Eventually the people would have gotten rid of the monarchy or monarchy would have lost all power and be a figure head like everyone else. Industrial revolution would have happened anyway so I imagine a lot of similar industries they have now would have existed. Maybe there would be even more poorer people and average person may be heavily in debt and not own their own homes. Soviet times gave nearly everyone their own flat. So in todays times, most people have their own home.

sepheronx wrote:Ill address purely based upon my family perspective:
1) if you werent a land owner or had a high position, life was not very good. My great grandfather owned land and was cossack.

2)Not all Russians. Like my great grandfather.

3)Depends which era. Apparently under Breznev and Kruschev it was pretty decent. Everyone had a roof over their head, food on the table, most of the infrastructure was still new(ish) and maintained. Education was good and such. Some personal freedoms of lets say ease of getting a new car was more difficult but transit system was leaps and bounds better than most western countries.

4) I imagine it wouldnt be different. Eventually the people would have gotten rid of the monarchy or monarchy would have lost all power and be a figure head like everyone else.  Industrial revolution would have happened anyway so I imagine a lot of similar industries they have now would have existed. Maybe there would be even more poorer people and average person may be heavily in debt and not own their own homes. Soviet times gave nearly everyone their own flat.  So in todays times, most people have their own home.

Are you Russian?
I was born in Russia and my Mum told me that my great grand dad had to flee from his farm (he was a wealthy man) as the Bolsheviks were coming to confiscate all what he had worked for and would have probably arrested him.

I really wonder how it would have worked out for Russia had it not been for the Communist regime. On one hand it was a cruel regime on the other they were a great power with some amazing technological advances. I am not a fan of Communism or Soviet regime but there were a few achievements one could be proud of such as space advancement and the victory over Germans as well as everyone had a job back then, there were no homeless people at all.

Would you say life in Russia are much better now than it was in Soviet times?

Some family is from areas of Russia, or former Russian empire (funny enough, Novorussian territory) while some others are from Lviv (so former Polish territory). I was born here in Canada. Still here in Canada and cannot leave till my Wife more or less is ready.

Some will view their lives worst now than before.  Some will see their lives much better than before.  It all depends on the people really.  There are the liberal Russians who just hate themselves no matter how good they may got it. You can find these people anywhere though and not just Russians (they just get most of the media attention compared to the other national ones with the same attitude).  There are Russians who are happy with even little.  There are Russians who seem to have everything and want more, etc etc etc.  Would I say the system is better now? Yes and No.  I would say yes in the pretext that you can pretty much buy whatever you want, and go wherever you want so long as you have the money to do so.  Life can be very similar to anywhere else so long as you have the money.  The no aspect would be that there isn't the same security as before.  In other words, there are homeless people in Russia, there are really hungry people in Russia.  There are people who can barely obtain the basic necessities.  Most of these issues were not evident till the end of the soviet union (mostly just hungry).  These days, it almost seems like a dog vs dog world like the USA which I am totally against and I think the fellow man is supposed to help their neighbor out, and vice versa.   But this is a byproduct of the glorification of the west.  That also said, the 90's brought a lot of disaster and only in the resent years (maybe decade) has Russia really been trying to fix the issues.  So many issues though are leftovers that it will take decades more to fix.  They are on the right track though.

Soviet Union though, for countries like Ukraine, would have been a ton better than it is now.  Just look what they have done to themselves in the last year.  Absolutely disgusting.  Kinda sad when my own family members whom are from Ukraine state that it is just a loser country.  Soviet times is what really helped change that country for the better.  And now they squandered it away.

There was a previous thread ("History of Imperial Russia") where the same question was asked, I will just copy the same post I placed there:
[Imperial Russia] was a mostly rural, peasant country for sure, but with the fastest industrial growth in the world in the late 19th-early 20th centuries. Serfdom was abolished around 1860, and this improved the conditions of many peasants. Most peasants were very poor compared to Western Europeans, but anyway there were a few who were rich, others who could be considered middle class (small landowners), and literacy was also growing fast among peasants and workers. I know a woman whose parents were Byelorussians (Russian-speaking) and moved to Argentina in the 1920's - they were peasants, literate and owned their land, and had good cultural and material life conditions before the revolution. The reforms put in practice by prime-minister Stolypin in the early 20th century gave arable lands in Southern Siberia and low-interest credits for peasants, which also improved their condition. Revolutionaries were so afraid of Stolypin's reforms because, if successful, it would delay or simply abort the revolution they were fighting for (revolutionaries, either liberal or socialist, are evil because they necessarily need the conditions of the people to be extremely bad, otherwise no revolution will ever occur), and he was assassinated by an anarchist in Kiev. Last, there was a thriving middle class in cities, consisting of traders, doctors, professors, lawyers, etc.
Does this mean that everything was perfect in Russia, that everyone was happy before the Revolution? Of course not, there was a lot of injustices, inequalities and oppression, from which revolutionary feelings bred. But the Bolsheviks, striving for a "perfect" society, only made things worse, and a terrible terror regime under Lenin and Stalin came upon Russia that caused dozens of millions to die, many of the brightest people to emigrate, a situation much worse than anything the previous tsars and emperors had ever done, even those considered the bloodiest ones, like Ivan IV. Russia is nowadays in a current difficult demographic situation mostly due to the Bolsheviks - not only the terror from 1917-1953, but also legal abortion and low birth rate have decimated Russian population. Before the Revolution, Russia had a very fast growing population.

'
What's up with shitload of commie apologists in UK media lately? At this rate I expect parade with Soviet banners outside Buckingham Palace .  





Putin’s Russia can’t celebrate its revolutionary past. It has to smother it

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/03/putin-russia-revolution-ignore-centenary




100 years since the Russian Revolution, I'm glad to see Putin leading a capitalist utopia

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/russian-revolution-putin-communism-jeremy-corbyn-karl-marx-capitalism-a8034266.html

PapaDragon wrote:'
What's up with shitload of commie apologists in UK media lately? At this rate I expect parade with Soviet banners outside Buckingham Palace .  





Putin’s Russia can’t celebrate its revolutionary past. It has to smother it

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/03/putin-russia-revolution-ignore-centenary




100 years since the Russian Revolution, I'm glad to see Putin leading a capitalist utopia

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/russian-revolution-putin-communism-jeremy-corbyn-karl-marx-capitalism-a8034266.html

Its good that people are starting to hate free marketeers in the west. The UK, although I hate its posh culture, history and politics with all my heart, has some of the best working class and national socialist(in ters of socialism in one country like the SNP)socialist movements and activists. Russian communists should learn from the british proletariat and should increase their hatred for Russian oligarchs, the Russian bourgeoisie, and Russian right wing capitalist parasitic Abrahamic clergy, just as the British(including celtic nationalist) proletariat hates the oligarchs and Aristocratic fossilized pieces of steaming dogshit in the City of London.

KomissarBojanchev wrote:................. Russian communists should learn from the british proletariat and should increase their hatred for Russian oligarchs, the Russian bourgeoisie, and Russian right wing capitalist parasitic Abrahamic clergy, just as the British(including celtic nationalist) proletariat hates the oligarchs and Aristocratic fossilized pieces of steaming dogshit in the City of London.

ROFL  

Russian commies should just shut the fuck up and fade into oblivion.

They had their chance and they wasted whole century creating and developing fictional nations while simultaneously exterminating Russian population and culture.

PapaDragon wrote:

KomissarBojanchev wrote:................. Russian communists should learn from the british proletariat and should increase their hatred for Russian oligarchs, the Russian bourgeoisie, and Russian right wing capitalist parasitic Abrahamic clergy, just as the British(including celtic nationalist) proletariat hates the oligarchs and Aristocratic fossilized pieces of steaming dogshit in the City of London.

ROFL  

Russian commies should just shut the fuck up and fade into oblivion.

They had their chance and they wasted whole century creating and developing fictional nations while simultaneously exterminating Russian population and culture.

Fictional nations? Are you shitting me? During the USSR people were far more russified. Ukraine was created by right wing austrohungarian imperialists, not the soviets.

Extermination. Where the soviet population had a constant population growth? It was under the free market where Russia experienced a larger population catastrophe than the nazi genocides. And a t fat corrupt clergy subsidized by an elitist degenerate germanic aristocracy, plus a jewish exploitative bourgeoisie has nothing to do with Russian culture. The soviets returned to actual Russian culture of the peasant and the worker, turned in a new positive direction which espoused economic equality, collectivism, atheism from abrahamic BS.

The religious oligarchic scum had its chance for 20 years, now they should return the means of production that they didnt destroy to the Russian proletariat.

The religious oligarchic scum had its chance for 20 years, now they should return the means of production that they didnt destroy to the Russian proletariat.

"Proletariat"???

Bwahahahahahaha, you did not just say that word, holy shit!!!   

Are you going to start singing some Le Internationale now?

Holy shit, you are too funny but if your stated age is correct it's quite understandable.

Anyway, what's the rush? Commies had 80 years to do their thing so it's only fair that "religious oligarchic scum" do rest of their term. So that's 50 more years according to your calendar.

Let's see how they do first.

Holy shit, you are too funny but if your stated age is correct it's quite understandable.

I don't want to live in a free market oligarchic shithole world the rest of my life

Let's see how they do first.

We saw how they did. They destroyed the Russian population, the Russian space industry, Russian technological development, etc. They ruined Russian foreign policy towards rapprochement to the capitalist parasite known as the EU and the US. The soviets did their best to support the nation under completely impossible circumstances(multiple foreign invasions and genocides, reactionary terror, and constant sanctions and an arms race caused by the Western Empire).

I don't want to live in a free market oligarchic shithole world the rest of my life

Well you should put that in writing and mail it to your parents/grandparents. Same goes for everyone in East Europe.

We saw how they did. They destroyed the Russian population, the Russian space industry, Russian technological development, etc. They ruined Russian foreign policy towards rapprochement to the capitalist parasite known as the EU and the US. 

True. Still just a joke compared to what commies did in their first 20 years.

PapaDragon wrote:'
What's up with shitload of commie apologists in UK media lately? At this rate I expect parade with Soviet banners outside Buckingham Palace .  





Putin’s Russia can’t celebrate its revolutionary past. It has to smother it

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/03/putin-russia-revolution-ignore-centenary




100 years since the Russian Revolution, I'm glad to see Putin leading a capitalist utopia

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/russian-revolution-putin-communism-jeremy-corbyn-karl-marx-capitalism-a8034266.html

This must be part of the cunning propaganda playbook in NATO paragons of democracy. You see, first they accuse Russia
of not acknowledging the crimes of the commies. When Russia puts up memorials like the recent one in Moscow, and the
cathedral on grounds where repressions were staged en masse, these NATO scumbag liars need to push the opposite angle
and claim that Russia is dissing the commies too much. Russia needs to always be doing wrong even if that means that NATO
propagandists are in spasms of revisionism.

F*ck NATO propagandists. They are the only ones who can swallow the shit they are peddling.

KomissarBojanchev wrote:

PapaDragon wrote:

KomissarBojanchev wrote:................. Russian communists should learn from the british proletariat and should increase their hatred for Russian oligarchs, the Russian bourgeoisie, and Russian right wing capitalist parasitic Abrahamic clergy, just as the British(including celtic nationalist) proletariat hates the oligarchs and Aristocratic fossilized pieces of steaming dogshit in the City of London.

ROFL  

Russian commies should just shut the fuck up and fade into oblivion.

They had their chance and they wasted whole century creating and developing fictional nations while simultaneously exterminating Russian population and culture.

Fictional nations? Are you shitting me? During the USSR people were far more russified. Ukraine was created by right wing austrohungarian imperialists, not the soviets.

Extermination. Where the soviet population had a constant population growth? It was under the free market where Russia experienced a larger population catastrophe than the nazi genocides. And a t fat corrupt clergy subsidized by an elitist degenerate germanic aristocracy, plus a jewish exploitative bourgeoisie has nothing to do with Russian culture. The soviets returned to actual Russian culture of the peasant and the worker, turned in a new positive direction which espoused economic equality, collectivism, atheism from abrahamic BS.

The religious oligarchic scum had its chance for 20 years, now they should return the means of production that they didnt destroy to the Russian proletariat.

Ukraine was created by Sweden, they came from there on their boats.

Ukraine even wanted to become part of Sweden during the mid-17th century, Bohdan Chmielnicki himself was scheming it.

What they did not teach you in either Soviet or Bulgarian schools is that the Ukrainian Cossack "freedom fighters" rebelled under Chmielnicki against Poland, in part because the Polish government and nobility refused to make them into nobles. There were some other causes also, but that refusal to ennoble the Zaporozhian Cossacks was one of the major ones.

Yes, these "anti-feudal freedom fighters" wanted to become nobles, and to have their own serfs who would work for them. At that time there were many Polish nobles who did not have any serfs, and there were even some who did not own any land and were very poor.

With the percentage of the nobility in the Belarussian-Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, variously estimated at 6-12% of the total population and being one of the largest in Europe, the Polish government's refusal is totally understandable. Even decades before that the Polish government cracked-down on the so-called "heraldic adoptions" for the same reason, so as to not inflate the percentage of the nobility even more. By comparison in Hungary the nobility was 5%, in Spain 5% (or 8%?), in England 2%, while in France it was lowest at only 1%.

So there was not even a real ethnic or religious discrimination, only a government which refused to inflate the percentage of the nobility. On the other hand, the motivations of many of these Cossack "freedom fighters" were totally base, selfish, and clearly not anti-feudal.



So this whole thing is much older than even the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.


Should I even mention Askold?

'
Seriously, what is up with this commie surge these days. Could it be that McCarthy was right? 

Now we have another (surprise, British) clown claiming that communism was perfectly fine but that it failed because of, you guessed it, Russians:



How Russia’s revolutionaries won the battle but lost the war


http://www.arabnews.com/node/1188421



I mean, never mind the fact that whole thing was load of bullshit that would have failed miserably no matter where experiment was conducted, no sir, system was fine, it's just that those dastardly Russians fucked up their promised Utopia... Fucking snowflakes... 

The Russians are to blame argument is pure retardation. How come communism failed in China, Vietnam, and elsewhere? China
was fully in charge of its own house from 1949 onward. Vietnam was independent from both China and the USSR. How about
North Korea? Are all those examples the failure of Russians?

The British can't think straight when it comes to Russia. I attribute this to an inferiority complex. The British may have had
an empire on which the sun never set, but today they just have Old Blighty and are Uncle Scumbag's pet poodle. But the
Russian "inferiors" have a real resource empire in their borders and give Uncle Scumbag the middle finger.

kvs wrote:How come communism failed in China, Vietnam

??? failed ???

When the Soviet union collapsed , it was unexpected . The army was present . And the popular movement could have been suppressed by force . But it would have delayed the return to socialist system . It was better to let the population "win " .

Someone said : " .....this has set back the cause of socialism for another two hundred years ." Two hundred years is a short time in social terms .


Now I think that we are all going to die by global warming . Before we achieve a capitalist paradise . Before a socialist shangree la .

Rich are getting richer and poor are getting poorer, while the population ages... waiting to hear why every man for himeself democracy is so much better than communism...

BTW there was democracy 200 years ago on a pirate ship, but not today on a British Destroyer... explain that.

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/11/05/leftist-filmmaker-celebrates-bolshevik-takover-russia-triumph-ordinary-people-unchallenged-sky-news/

British Russia haters have jumped the shark.

eehnie wrote:

kvs wrote:How come communism failed in China, Vietnam

??? failed ???

WTF, are you even aware of the economic systems in China and Vietnam today...they are not communism.

GarryB wrote:Rich are getting richer and poor are getting poorer, while the population ages... waiting to hear why every man for himeself democracy is so much better than communism...

BTW there was democracy 200 years ago on a pirate ship, but not today on a British Destroyer... explain that.

The Russian masses are better off today than they were in 1990. This is reflected in the fact that consumption of alcohol has
dropped below the levels seen under Gorbachev's draconian control measures, but without any controls. The argument that
the rich are getting richer is irrelevant if the masses are experiencing improved living conditions. No more idiotic shortages of
essentials (e.g. food) and finally proper development of transport infrastructure.

But Russian capitalism is not really western capitalism since it has a lot of hold over elements of communism. For example,
big companies still provide social services. As always, the Devil is in the details and simple generalizations about Russia
and other countries are likely to be wrong.

eehnie wrote:

kvs wrote:How come communism failed in China, Vietnam

??? failed ???

Yes and it resulted in Russia loosing historically Russian territories, cities and towns in the Ukraine, entire Belarus, the Baltics and the -stans. That's what communism ultimately achieved for Russia, a shrinking land mass(and national identity) in key European and central Asian regions. Also, military retreat on all fronts, Eastern Europe, old Russia proper, central Asia, Mongolia and the Middle East.

<slow 80s movie clap>

kvs wrote:http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/11/05/leftist-filmmaker-celebrates-bolshevik-takover-russia-triumph-ordinary-people-unchallenged-sky-news/

British Russia haters have jumped the shark.

Oh man this is fucking gold:

...“People think that history is one long evil continuum, from Lenin, to Stalin, to the Gulag, to the Holocaust, to Putin,” she adds, before asserting that this is “incredibly wrong”....

So Red Terror and Civil War were just unfortunate side effects of spontaneous implementation of their Utopia but real problem is Putin and modern Russia? Those two are worse than Red Terror?

Because all it's needed is just one more genocidal coup d'etat and everything will be fine? You can't make this shit up...oh wait, you can. 

If they love communism so much maybe they should try it themselves for a change, damn thing was already field tested extensively. I say go for it, make West great again! 

PapaDragon wrote:

kvs wrote:http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/11/05/leftist-filmmaker-celebrates-bolshevik-takover-russia-triumph-ordinary-people-unchallenged-sky-news/

British Russia haters have jumped the shark.

Oh man this is fucking gold:

...“People think that history is one long evil continuum, from Lenin, to Stalin, to the Gulag, to the Holocaust, to Putin,” she adds, before asserting that this is “incredibly wrong”....

So Red Terror and Civil War were just unfortunate side effects of spontaneous implementation of their Utopia but real problem is Putin and modern Russia? Those two are worse than Red Terror?

Because all it's needed is just one more genocidal coup d'etat and everything will be fine? You can't make this shit up...oh wait, you can. 

If they love communism so much maybe they should try it themselves for a change, damn thing was already field tested extensively. I say go for it, make West great again! 

The mind boggles. I won't get into the value of theoretical communism. But the Red Terror and subsequent repressions were some of the
worst cases of evil butchery of innocents in history. To make out Putin's administrations to be worse than those periods is grotesquely
obscene revisionism. Where are the millions of Putin's victims? Under Yeltsin, over 8 million Russians died from shock therapy
monetarist economic voodoo. I don't hear a squeak about Yeltsin's regime. Under Putin Russia's population has begun to grow again.
And Putin released over 200,000 from jail back during the 2000s. There are no gulags and no capital punishment in Russia since before 1991.

But I see a pattern here. When Russians have representative government that looks out for their interests, then Russia is bad, bad, bad.
But when Russia is rule by a criminal regime that is preoccupied with slaughtering Russians or destroying Russia's economy, then that
is just dandy. Western pundits and academics were praising the USSR during the 1920s and 1930s. The Cold War started when
thing actually normalized in the USSR. The best period of the USSR was after WWII until 1991. The late 40s and most of the 50s
were rough due to WWII and Stalin was still in power until 1953. But the excesses seen before WWII were no longer there. You
could say the 1960s were the USSR golden era. But then after the mid 1970s stagnation set in and the communist elite decided to
go capitalist.