this post was inspired by the fact that the chinese communist party is a naked emperor. this lead me to think whether people in ussr or eastern block really believed in marxism-leninism? i mean lot of europeans are basicly state-socialists who hate the rich. from my the parents (my family is from armenia) i take it that the people were basicly utopian socialists who were hopeful for its coming but didnt really understand “historical materialism” ,if you will.
anyways this is not a debate of the ideology but a historical question
by asking a couple of people around who lived in soviet union i am getting the same impression when i talk to 15 yr old chomskyites. money, bad, decedance, coca cola. basicly the people who did believe in socialism were utopian with no grasp of political economy.
Was born in CCCP, moved with my parents over here when I was 3. Don’t personally know much about how it was, though we moved to the USA because it is better.
From what I remember of the 1980s, no one really believed in the socialism anymore since the reality of life in the USSR was so blatantly different from the official version. Of course now many Russians are disappointed in the market reforms (as if there’s really a free market in Russia, it’s been hijacked by the plutocrats) and are nostalgic over the Soviet period.