this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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The Soviet Union was, if not a traditional dictatorship, absolutely a totalitarian autocracy. Stalin was a brutal dictator and his successors were chosen by the communist party. Elections in the USSR were for show.
Life was miserable almost from the start of the Bolshevik revolution for most people. The USSR's implementation of communism was so bad, it's become cliche.
"Life was miserable almost from the start of the Bolshevik revolution for most people", said the romanovs.
People like you should be forced to live under conditions like Tsarist Russia.
Allow me to repeat myself:
Yep. Democracy doesn't mean "choose between parties," it's about the actual impact you can have on policy. More people in China feel that they have a voice in politics than people in the US, despite the US having 2 parties.
Choosing between parties is arguably less democratic because in many countries with such a system, like the USA, you basically just have corporations/corporate media choosing the candidates, so your "choice" is between corporate candidates, so corporations always win. There is no option to reject the nominee entirely, while in China's system you can reject the nominee. you can just straight up veto candidates.
Westerners often also look at the very end of the process and ignore everything leading up to it. They will say "there's only one candidate on the ballot!" as proof it's undemocratic (even though this happens all the time in the US too...). But this ignores the entire democratic process leading up to how the candidate gets on the ballot in the first place. In Cuba for example, candidates getting on the ballot is a two-year long process resulting from local elections and meetings with mass organizations, but they ignore this entire process and just focus on the final election at the very end.
100% agreed, excellent comment.
You can feel free to read the sources I listed, rather than posting unsourced anecdotes as "gotchas." Further, the ability of the party to purge Nazis ended up being important.