• Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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    9 days ago

    No, it was not. The USSR was a federation of socialist republics that assisted anti-colonial liberation movements, and had no colonies nor neocolonies.

    • Kociamorda@szmer.info
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      8 hours ago

      I know that USSR propaganda said so and sometimes assisted anti-colonial movements in Africa (Africa-Casablanca group) but at the same time USSR met the difinition of exploitation colonialism in cases like: Ukrainian famine (Голодомор) - exporting wheat leaving nothing to the people working in the fields; forcing people in Azerbeijan to work in oil field to extract oil for USSR; doing atomic bomb tests in Kazachstan contaminating land and getting over a million of people lose their health. Also USSR fought with non-leninist/stalinist leftist forces in the SSRs for example Musavat in Azerbeijan od Polska Partia Socjalistyczna in Poland.

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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        8 hours ago

        The USSR did not meet the definition of colonialism. Collectivization of agriculture in the USSR resulted in dramatic improvements in crop yields, the problem was the weather disasters in the 1930s and the bourgeois kulak reaction, burning the crops and killing the livestock. Azerbeijan was not forced into labor, but their resources were used by the USSR as a part of the soviet ecomomy and their energy independence. Testing atomic bombs is not colonialism either.

        The fight between Marxists and anti-soviet “leftists” is not colonialism, nor was it simply due to differences in opinion, but instead because people were organizing against socialism in a way easily taken advantage of by western forces.

        It isn’t merely “soviet propaganda,” it’s an honest description of history from a Marxist, proletarian perspective.