Communism

[Arknav555]

I know about the USSR and it's attempt to wipe out every nationality that wasn't russian, but i was thinking more about Tito's regime in Yugoslavia that tried to supress those differences and the USSR's Korenization under lenin administration, i know that communists are still humans who will discriminate no matter the ideology, but considering that communism main goal is to achieve the ideals of international revolution and equality and Victoria 3 timeline is before those things happened, i wanted to know how effective i would be in actively trying to supress discrimination



They're not, socialism is the ideal that everyone is equal, racial and national discrimination are against that ideal, that's why officially the Soviet Union condemn it, in reality that's not what happened, but reality is often disappointing, that's why we have games like Victoria 3 that maybe will allow us to build our socialist utopia

You can build your socialist utopia, as you can build your capitalist utopia in vic 2/vic 3. The challenge is how effective it'd actually be, and I'd argue both should be near impossible. Every system should be flawed and should keep those flaws no matter what the player does. It shouldn't be possible for capitalism to solve wealth inequality, for example.

 

[Evan05]

I hope they add some unique mechanics, such as a internationals mechanic (the first, second, and third international/Comintern) with the aim of coordinating communists across the world. I also hope for special blocs that socialist countries join to work with and defend one another (I really hated how in Vic2 communist powers would often join in against one another rather than forming alliances). In Victoria 2 when you went communist you just got a cool looking flag with a micromanage economy, in Vic3 I hope it really feels like you defending and spreading the proletarian's liberation across the globe.

 

[Evan05]

I know about the USSR and it's attempt to wipe out every nationality that wasn't russian,

lmao

Yeah... that's exactly what happened in the Soviet Union. Which had no persecution based on the nationality at all. /s And I'm not trying to be snarky here, I just think like those two things: socialism and racial/national discrimination are just separate.

The actual heavy handed Russification of the SSRs was pretty much exclusively a trait of the Stalin era. Lenin himself greatly championed the rights of the national peoples of the Union (as mentioned earlier, the Korenizatsiya) and the Bolsheviks themselves stopped the old policies of Tsarist Russia which made Stalin's Russification look like sunshine and rainbows in comparison. After Stalin's death, Khrushchev rehabilitated many of the deported peoples, stopped the deportations, and eased off on ethnic and linguistic restrictions throughout the USSR. It is true throughout the rest of the USSR's existence there was a preference for people, particularly party members and bureaucrats, to understand Russian as a language but this isn't really repressive nor unique to the Soviet Union. Even countries such as the UK, Germany, France, and the USA today expect that you can proficiently use their native languages and educate their kids in said languages and in many professions is outright required.

Was the USSR racially repressive at certain points in its existence? Yes. But to act like it was some dystopian megalomaniac genocide state that wanted to absolutely vaporize every man, woman, and children that wasn't pure blood Russian is just Cold War boomer-tier propaganda.

 

[Ped_Lord]

You can build your socialist utopia, as you can build your capitalist utopia in vic 2/vic 3. The challenge is how effective it'd actually be, and I'd argue both should be near impossible. Every system should be flawed and should keep those flaws no matter what the player does. It shouldn't be possible for capitalism to solve wealth inequality, for example.

i agree, that's why i wanted to know how effective i would be on it, it would be cool if, for example, i was playing with the US and turn communist, but had to work around its discrimination against minority for some time until it reaches more acceptable levels for a comunist nation, but i think we need more information on how the discrimination mechanic actually works to know how that would play out

 

[cmdrk33n]

I think that they should always follow history and not modern politics.

Communism IE Marxism-Leninism / Dictatorship of the Proletariat / "Democratic Centrism" would always be Authoritarian, and the Socdem groups would always be political parties existing within the existing structure of a state.

This Menshevik / Bolshevik dichotomy is historical, simple enough for a game, and works well in Vicky 2.

 

[Vernichtere]

The actual heavy handed Russification of the SSRs was pretty much exclusively a trait of the Stalin era. Lenin himself greatly championed the rights of the national peoples of the Union (as mentioned earlier, the Korenizatsiya) and the Bolsheviks themselves stopped the old policies of Tsarist Russia which made Stalin's Russification look like sunshine and rainbows in comparison. After Stalin's death, Khrushchev rehabilitated many of the deported peoples, stopped the deportations, and eased off on ethnic and linguistic restrictions throughout the USSR. It is true throughout the rest of the USSR's existence there was a preference for people, particularly party members and bureaucrats, to understand Russian as a language but this isn't really repressive nor unique to the Soviet Union. Even countries such as the UK, Germany, France, and the USA today expect that you can proficiently use their native languages and educate their kids in said languages and in many professions is outright required.

Was the USSR racially repressive at certain points in its existence? Yes. But to act like it was some dystopian megalomaniac genocide state that wanted to absolutely vaporize every man, woman, and children that wasn't pure blood Russian is just Cold War boomer-tier propaganda.

The Soviet Union had several phases in this regard. The post-Stalin policy is also separate again. To say now that it all came down to a thorough Russification is not the right thing to do. A number of languages were only standardized in the Soviet Union. Even under Stalin one cannot speak of a ban on languages.

Yes, there was nationalism, anti-Semitism and racism. Which is also not in contradiction to the teaching. Remnants of the old remain for a long time and can also lead to regression.

Yes, the Soviet Union had Russian as its lingua franca. However, great care was taken to ensure proportional representation in appointing the offices. You have to realize that something like a national culture in the broad masses only became possible with the construction of accessible schools and universities. That was also true of the Russians themselves. It is nice if there was Tolstoy or Chekhov. Only that was the culture of a very thin population. From a Western perspective, most of the characters in the Soviet Union were simply Russians. But that was not the case.

The Soviet Union did not disintegrate because the individual nationalities were angry. The project as such came to a standstill. It is one thing to industrialize a rural population. Another story is to meet the needs of an urban population in terms of consumption and participation. That was what failed. Nationalism then followed.

 

[MagnusDux]

The actual heavy handed Russification of the SSRs was pretty much exclusively a trait of the Stalin era.

The cossacks where victims of deportation and genocides started by Lenin. To say that repressive policies in the Soviet Union only started with Stalin is factually incorrect and a great disrespect for the 100-200 thousand people killed during Red Terror.

Tito's regime in Yugoslavia that tried to supress those differences

Yugoslav killings of Croat and Slovene POW and civilians

Yugoslav killings of Dalmatians and Italians

 

[XeroSilver]

Alot of these sources use "best estimates" ranging from in the millions to just ten thousand. Considering a country as large and unwieldy as Russia the true number will probably elude us. Considering the usual transfer of power between any regime and in such a state that Russia was in at the time these numbers do have potential explanations of related war time conditions. Regardless Victoria should allow for the National Bolsheviks to run rampant to their hearts content as well as for Marxists, Marxist Leninists etc to eliminate boundaries of race to further class consciousness.

 

[alanschu]

Yes, there was nationalism, anti-Semitism and racism. Which is also not in contradiction to the teaching. Remnants of the old remain for a long time and can also lead to regression.

I'm 100% not an expert on Soviet Union, but I think similar things happened with respect to religion? Officially an atheist state, I know there were times the church was targeted, but I assume that there were also times of simply recognizing that people had their faith and going hard after them would just create unnecessary troubles?

(Maybe it wasn't the case, but just feels like that's what I'd do in that type of situation anyways haha)

 

[Marcus Pica]

The cossacks where victims of deportation and genocides started by Lenin. To say that repressive policies in the Soviet Union only started with Stalin is factually incorrect and a great disrespect for the 100-200 thousand people killed during Red Terror.

Yugoslav killings of Croat and Slovene POW and civilians

Yugoslav killings of Dalmatians and Italians

These killings are not connected to ethnocides at all, rather they are more ideological killings. In case of Yugoslavia, mostly Slovenes were the ones killing Slovene and Croat faschist POWs.

EDIT:Killings of POWs during or in the few months after the war was present all around Europe, including rhe West (France, Belgium etc.)

 

[Kaspar Osraige]

Said Croat POW's mostly being Ustashe fascists, who had the project of killing1/3 of Serbians, driving 1/3 of them to adjacent countries and forcefully converting 1/3 of them. They were the bloodiest movement in Europe after Nazis with a death toll of hundred thousands of Serbians.

 

[PedroLuiz]

I think a good example of this sort of issue in real life is the field of economics. Economics is an objective science, completely divorced from politics, right? Every well-educated economist ultimately comes to the same conclusions, right? Not so fast. There are economists all across the political spectrum, from libertarians to social democrats to Marxists and everything in between. Many are also politically active, so you can't say their work is divorced from politics.

there are basically three types of Economists: Communists, Social-democrats and right-wing Liberals. To pretend there is a spectrum between those in economics is to be ignorant or dishonest about economics, the only changes they make is how zealous they are about their school of thought

 

[ImperatorLJ]

As long as it is not "Communism = USSR," and there are different expressions of leftism in game like there was historically -- I'll be happy.

 

[Vernichtere]

Said Croat POW's mostly being Ustashe fascists, who had the project of killing1/3 of Serbians, driving 1/3 of them to adjacent countries and forcefully converting 1/3 of them. They were the bloodiest movement in Europe after Nazis with a death toll of hundred thousands of Serbians.

In the end, it doesn't matter. Yes, most of the examples relate to wars. Rather, the point is that people don't suddenly turn into saints. The red flag does not mean that nationalism will disappear overnight. It just means that internationalism is mostly part of the ideology and that it is more difficult to justify permanent discrimination.


Compared to the time, the communist countries were less affected by racism and persecution on the basis of nationality.

The Cossacks were not persecuted on the basis of the Etnie. It was seen as a form of social organization that was hostile. To see the Don Cossacks as a separate nationality is difficult to say the least.

 

[VineFynn]

there are basically three types of Economists: Communists, Social-democrats and right-wing Liberals. To pretend there is a spectrum between those in economics is to be ignorant or dishonest about economics, the only changes they make is how zealous they are about their school of thought

Where on earth did you get this idea from? It's patent nonsense. Even the most diehard "schools of thought are still relevant" types (who are in the minority) don't suppose that economists align themselves this way.

Where do all of the kooky heterodox schools fit into this? Or the myriad fields of econ that have basically bugger all to do with anything you might associate with these labels, like industrial econ or behavioural? I can't even begin to discern how you would go about determining whether a given monetary policy transmission model was 'right-wing liberal' or 'social democrat'. Any more than how you could say a particular model of the atom was pro or anti-nuclear weapons.

 

[Belph]

I think that they should always follow history and not modern politics.

Communism IE Marxism-Leninism / Dictatorship of the Proletariat / "Democratic Centrism" would always be Authoritarian, and the Socdem groups would always be political parties existing within the existing structure of a state.

This Menshevik / Bolshevik dichotomy is historical, simple enough for a game, and works well in Vicky 2.

I really hope that they don't define ideologies as "authoritarian" or not, it is an infantile understanding of political ideology propagated by the political compass.

As for the "Menshevik/Bolshevik dichotomy" that is overly reductive even for the Russian context, leaving out the agrarian SRs, Anarchists, the actual Social Democrats of the Trudoviks/Popular Socialists and other minor socialist groupings. Marxism-Leninism would not exist until the very end of the games timeframe and was the specific product of the success of the Russian Revolution combined with failure abroad, and it shouldn't be presented as an option outside of similar circumstances. Calling the Mensheviks Social Democrats as if they were on par with say the SPD is inaccurate in my opinion too, many were much more radical.

I think the best thing to do is to avoid slapping labels on ideologies beyond broad things like "Socialist", "Liberal", "Reactionary", ETC, and let a groups policies determine what they actually are, with localization for specific policy combinations.

 

[PedroLuiz]

This is patent nonsense. Even the most "schools of thought still exist"-types don't suppose that economists align themselves this way.

there are still economists that reject 200 years of research just because X theory of value kills their ideology... it's not because you have a current ideological consensus that economics isn't basically politics with extra steps. "Orthodoxy" and "Heterodoxy" is a concept that belongs to religion only

 

[VineFynn]

there are still economists that reject 200 years of research just because X theory of value kills their ideology... it's not because you have a current ideological consensus that economics isn't basically politics with extra steps. "Orthodoxy" and "Heterodoxy" is a concept that belongs to religion only

Yeah, those economists are basically irrelevant to the state of the field. Most don't even deserve to be called economists. When was the last time an Austrian made a significant contribution to econ?

The expressions "mainstream" (not orthodox) and heterodox are used because they get the point across, not because of any connection to religion or dogma. It's mostly the heterodox people who focus on the notion, anyway. Most people have better things to do.

 

[Kuantum]

In real life, socialist regimes usually tried to supress racial and cultural discrimination

What do you mean by, "In real life"?

 

[Morbus Bubbonicus]

The cossacks where victims of deportation and genocides started by Lenin. To say that repressive policies in the Soviet Union only started with Stalin is factually incorrect and a great disrespect for the 100-200 thousand people killed during Red Terror.

You forgot to mention that before that - during Krasnov's reign of Don Republic of 1918-1920 there were mass killings of anyone who were conntected to communist sympathisers, numbering tens of thousands. And "sympathisers" included familiy members, wives and children of those who joined red army. Presenting decossafication as a sudden desire to elimitate some group, without any reasoning behind it, is whitewashing one side in favor of another and devaluing deaths of victims of cossack ethnic cleansing campaigns.