294
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2026
294 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
53355 readers
361 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
I like this one here because it’s the unedited version. As I’m sure you know, you can see the soldier in the bottom right has two watches. It shows how the soviets covered up the looting that their troops did when they reached Berlin.
Another cool historic photo is all those samurai sitting in the sphinx
I ain’t defending nazis! Just pointing out how the Soviet Union edited this photo to make themselves look better
It wasn't even a watch but the wrist compass, they were issued to junior officers and senior NCO's in Red Army, and the soldier in photo was senior NCO.
My God the copium.
Regardless of what the object on this man's wrist is. The Soviet Union edited the image to remove it to cover up the fact that looting was happening.
Your brain on anticommunism: "there was no looting involved but they hidden the looting anyways".
"Tankie" isn't a position, it's a pejorative for those that support and uphold existing socialism.
The ones called "tankies" don't believe Stalin never made mistakes or did nothing wrong. We uphold current and formerly existing socialism, such as the USSR, as genuinely progressive movements, and leaders like Stalin as socialist leaders.
Comparing Trump to Stalin is funny, actually, because no matter the mistakes and errors Stalin made over his decades as the leader of the soviet union, he was never a genocidal imperialist. Looking at what the US Empire, helmed presently by Trump, is doing in Palestine, Venezuela, Iran, Greenland, and the entire global south, it's obvious that Trump is far more of a negative impact on the world.
Of course, Stalin made mistakes, and committed errors, but as the leader of the soviet union helped facilitate doubling of life expectancies, tripling of literacy rates, huge scientific and industrial advancement, free education and healthcare at an expanded access, and more. The soviet union was dramatically better for the workers and peasants than Tsarism, and was better than modern-day capitalism.
Equating the soviet achievements and mistakes entirely to Stalin is also more of a liberal, "great man" critique. Stalin was a leader, yes, but the tremendous gains made by socialism were built by billions of workers and peasants. So too were mistakes and struggles run into along the way. Trying to blame all of the failings of socialism on Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc. is to also place all of their successes on their shoulders. Both are equally wrong frames of analysis.
So yes, "tankies" are just those that uphold existing socialism, not your strawman.
As this is a cultural artifact I'm sure there are many ways of interpreting it, but I thought tankies were the people who think it's right to suppress imperial-backed anti-democratic coups by any means necessary, and that it originated from the events of the Hungarian Revolution.
Yep, I wrote about that more in-depth here. What I'm talking about is the modern usage of the term, especially here on Lemmy.
Wait, what? The USSR wasn't an empire? The Holodomor wasn't a genocide?
The USSR wasn't an empire, no, and the 1930s famine was a tragedy, but wasn't intentional nor inflicted.
The USSR was a socialist federation. It wasn't dominated by finance capital and late stage capitalism, and as such did not share the same drive capitalist countries have to export capital and plunder internationally. The USSR had no colonies nor neocolonies.
As for the 1930s famine, it was caused by a combination of factors, including adverse weather conditions, and bourgeois farmers called "kulaks" burning their crops and killing their livestock as protest against collectivization. There was no intention to cause a famine, nor to steer an existing famine, and as such it was a tragedy but not a genocide.
It's a pejorative for anyone to the left of the western liberal using it.
That is incorrect.
I've yet to be called a tankie.
I also think Marx could have gone a little harder, I'm just not going to pretend that the few states that pretended to try communism didn't also do horrible shit.
Denouncing all existing socialism, present and historical, doesn't meaningfully put you to the left of western liberalism unless you're actively building socialism in another way.
In what way?
No communist party over a socialist state has claimed to have reached communism, nor do so-called "tankies" deny that there are struggles, flaws, and problems run into by existing socialism. These flaws come from existing in reality, and to use the ideal version of socialism, perfect, free from any blemish or struggle, as a club against existing socialism is a deeply western tendency.
It stems from the historic failures of western communists to actually succeed in revolution, coupled with the chauvanism culturally instilled in us westerners that tells us that nobody can be better than us, no matter how bad we are.
That's because you're not to the left of western liberals.
Oh please, you've never even read Marx
There's liberalism and there's being a dronie.
Don't be a dronie.
Go back to reddit
I can't. I got banned for making guillotine "jokes"
I am a meat Popsicle.
Iirc that's an explanation made up later. I don't see why it mattered enough to try to edit out though, should've just went with "so what"
It was made later since the discussion about photo also only surfaced later. And of course there was some looting, but the punishment for it was harsh, so they might want to protect the soldier in photo just in case someone not familiar with Red Army equipment (or anticommunist propagandists) made the accusation. Remember that even Zhukov was once accused of possessing items from looting and was so scared of that accusation he lived in abject fear for few weeks. Ultimately he wasn't officially accused because he was celebrated war hero, but he was sidelined somewhat, he also never forgiven this which might been a factor in him later joining Khrushchev (Losurdo wrote about it i think).
Right, after horrors Soviet soldiers witnessed in occupied USSR and Poland while marching west i'm quite amazed Germany wasn't completely razed to the ground.
I suppose if the Nazis didn't want their capital looted they shouldn't have tried to exterminate poor former peasants.
It's a fascinating photo outside of the main subject. The destroyed city, all the people below, and the crowd of people gathered around the T-34-85 tank at the bottom left. So much to look at!
The soviets were absolutely better than the Nazis, the Nazis committed mass genocide and tried to wipe out jewish and slavic peoples. This is teetering into Double Genocide Theory, a form of holocaust trivialization. The soviet union was a massively progressive movement over its history while the Nazis were brutal butchers.
Theres about 5 million dead Ukrainians who died from famine, and a couple million more who died in the gulag who would tell you it ain’t much of an upgrade
Even including famine, and the mass starvations in soviet prisons during World War II (when the Nazis took Ukraine, the USSR's breadbasket), life expectancy doubled in the USSR compared to pre-socialist levels:
Literacy rates went from 20-30% to 99.9%, healthcare and education were made free and dramatically expanded, and Russia itself went from semi-feudal to space in half a century. Socialism was an incredible success, even if there were flaws and struggles along the way.
Oh you mean from the larger Soviet famine?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%931933