I actually meant the tsar, and I can understand feeling bad for Kerensky (poor man must have been so confused, when all he had to do was get on a train out of Dodge as of mid-late September 1917 and anyone with an ounce of sense could have told him this), but don't hold him up as a leading light of proper management and doing shit the smart way, okay?

[–] melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee -2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yeah I'm just bitter about the Bolsheviks betraying the revolution so they could be on top before it was even finished, abd doing it so completely.

Yes, monarchs were often worse, and Nick was particularly spectacular in that regard. But the USSR is sort of a recognizable legibly-modern example; they had tell communications and (shitty, because they had a chance to be decades ahead of everyone else and noped out) computers and airplanes and stuff. And while they're not the worst, they're well past the "there is no fucking excuse to suck this much" line. So that's my "worse than x" line, and I think the american empire fails on every metric.

To be clear, while I do have criticisms of centralized communism (the centralized part), I think if it were substantially at fault for how much the USSR sucked, Cuba wouldn't have lasted five seconds, much less outlived it and still squeaked by even with the spectacular bullshit challenges it face(d/s)

[–] protozoan_ninja@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Yup, it was a shitshow. If you're a socialist, it's good to study, but maybe in the same spirit as bourgeois revolutionaries might have studied the wreckage of the French Revolution. Or, you know, in the same spirit as Marx and Engels reflecting on the failures of 1848.