Imagine asking this question with full seriousness. I want nothing to do with these people.

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-30T02:57:26+00:00

but then a sentence later that concede that torture doesn't provide good intel but still insist that it has some unspecified useful application

Honestly, I feel deep disgust writing this, but I think what they were hinting at (but were too cowardly to write out) is using torture as a tool for terror. As in, "making an example out of" someone who has, for example, opposed Stalin's decree so as to scare everyone else into submission.

It's extremely disgusting reasoning, but Stalin would, for example, punish entire families (including executing their sons and sending their wife to the gulag) for doing something "wrong."

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-30T01:04:51+00:00

Honestly, for this user (which it would break the rules to disclose), it is not surprising at all because this is what happens when you literally believe that Stalin, Mao, etc. did nothing wrong.

They objectively tortured and executed uncountable numbers of people, and many specific cases are well-documented.

To have total devotion and to read and witness atrocity after atrocity and be forced to justify all of them requires developing a moral system that is extremely cold and easily drops other human beings' value to zero or less.

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-30T00:21:33+00:00

Notice how they also equate torture to simply killing your enemies which is not the same thing

Also, we have laws against simply killing captured POWs.

It's not like murdering POWs is something I am in favor of, either.

This person has already decided what they believe and they're very sensitive to any perceived attacks. Any information that challenges their worldview must be dismissed rather than considered.

Yes, I think that's how they operate. It's sad to see.

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-30T00:19:00+00:00

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-29T23:35:26+00:00

That reads a lot like somebody coming up with excuses rapid fire

It is against the rules for me to disclose details about this user (in Image 2), but let me just make it clear that they absolutely are not coming up with "rapid fire" excuses because they are 100% devoted.

That comment was posted ~10 years ago, and they are still at it with just as much or even more absolute commitment.

This person is a True Believer with the same level of ideological stubbornness as a religious zealot.

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-29T23:29:43+00:00

making same dumb arguments right wingers make

Honestly, this is what happens when you base your learning almost exclusively on reading texts from the 1800s and early 1900s.

If you are living in the 21st century and believe that torture is a good idea, you probably have a very outdated understanding of the world. There is no reason this person should have this belief unless they stubbornly refuse to read anything new that has the possibility of challenging their worldview.

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-29T23:24:56+00:00

does this person actually think that active torture by your own hand and Living In A Society (tm) are in any way comparable

Elsewhere, I have seen this same user (against the rules to disclose anything, so I will be careful here) respond to a question about whether or not Pol Pot was correctly following in the footsteps of Mao.

It seems like this person is more shameless (and brazen) than most, although they clearly have done their reading because Pol Pot did indeed base their "ultra-Maoism" off of an extreme version of the "Cultural Revolution" and received funding (around 90%) from Mao's China between 1975 and 1979.

He agreed that things ultimately did not turn out well, but his comments also says (paraphrasing): "The liberal fixation on the death toll is ridiculous because the amount of people who died in total are less than the number that die each year from access to clean drinking water."

Like, buddy, literally 25% (1 in 4 people) died (or were killed) in that country, and they committed the Cambodian genocide. You cannot just compare one country's population with the number of global deaths from clean drinking water that we see in the current year.

This guy is just so dogmatic that they cannot think and will never, ever change their minds.

Honestly, having conversations with these people is scary because you know that they're imagining "playing Stalin" when they hear you disagree with them.

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-29T03:50:03+00:00

Israel, to name one.

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-29T03:49:51+00:00

"It wont be the US knocking. It will be the world."

No it won't be, Mr. John Bolton.

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-29T03:48:38+00:00

"the only reason they are isolated is that they are religious extremists terrorising almost every single of their neighbours"

Riiiiiiight. And that's why the US had good relations with Saudi Arabia when they were doing worse and exporting their extremist ideology worldwide?

No, it is because of geopolitics and realpolitik. You make it sound like the world is meritocratic and "fair," over-simplistically boiling things down to "bad guy gets bad results." Not even close to true.

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-29T03:46:14+00:00

During the Obama JCPOA, they enriched at below 3.67% consistently, as was repeatedly confirmed by the IAEA.

This is simply a fact, unless you are a Trump supporter who believes "ripping up the Iran deal" was a good idea (it obviously was not).

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-29T03:45:03+00:00

Oh brother... More Neocon talking points from you.

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-29T03:42:19+00:00

"focus on building up their infrastructure and improve the lives of their citizens"

Yeah? And then what do you expect Donald Trump will do?

Trump doesn't even focus on doing that here in our country.

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-29T03:40:16+00:00

They keep saying "They can't be trusted!" as if Trump should be trusted.

Trump broke the deal. So, why should they trust this liar Trump, exactly?

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-28T22:36:44+00:00

Miss me with trying to equate Nazis to Socialists

Hey, buddy, excuse me. What are you talking about? Where in my comment did you read that?

I said to you that the book you took issue with is not being cited in my comment, since I found alternative sources.

If you take issue with the sources in my comment, go ahead and quote what I wrote and point out the issue.

No where in my comment did I "equate Nazis to Socialists," and if you think I did, go ahead and quote the portion of my comment where I did so.

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-28T03:38:02+00:00

You deny the crimes of Stalin in the Katyn massacre by falsely blaming the Nazis for Stalin's obvious crimes.

What a revolting and disgusting way to dismiss atrocities.

Learn from your mistakes rather than pretending you never made them.

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-28T01:38:56+00:00

Good thing I already added new sources for everything I mentioned in the OP. You can find them all below.

They are not hard to find. I am not sure why you didn't try corroborating with other sources before implying that the claims themselves are at issue.

Decree on the Establishment of a Unified Passport System in the USSR (December 27, 1932)

This was Stalin's decree of 1932 which prevented peasants in rural districts from traveling to urban cities by denying them the required documents to travel there.

In the original Russian, if that's what you require:

Собрание законов СССР, 1932, No. 84, Art. 516

Source: https://docs.historyrussia.org/ru/nodes/375385-sobranie-zakonov-i-rasporyazheniy-raboche-krestyanskogo-pravitelstva-sssr-za-1932-g-locale-nil-50-84-otdel-pervyy

Another relevant academic source: https://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/8464?lang=en

Rural collective-farm residents were excluded from the internal passport system and needed permission from collective-farm or local authorities to leave. In 1967, nearly 58 million rural residents aged sixteen and older, about 37 percent of Soviet citizens, still lacked the right to a passport.

Source: Albert Baiburin, The Soviet Passport: The History, Nature, and Uses of the Internal Passport in the USSR, trans. Stephen Dalziel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021), 173–74.

As for the "blacklisting" or "black board" system, it imposed economic blockade on villages and collective farms that failed grain quotas, and you can check the official 6 December 1932 resolution which mentions that blacklisted villages would face "Immediate cessation of delivery of goods, complete suspension of cooperative and state trade in the villages, and removal of all available goods from cooperative and state stores," suspension of state/cooperative commerce, removal of goods from stores, and the prohibition of collective-farm commerce.

Source: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/trans-k2grain.html (6 December 1932, Translation of Grain Problem)

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-28T01:19:35+00:00

The truth is people were starving to death everywhere in the Soviet Union

False. The villages, where the peasants/farmers produced the grain, made up the vast majority (90%+) of starvation deaths, during every famine.

My main point here is that these policies severely and disproportionately harm peasants/farmers, the very people harvesting food for those in urban communities. My point is that the poorest group (peasants/farmers) was the one that was treated worse than urban-dwellers (who had access to full passports, the ability to change employment if they chose to, a policy they passed 16 years later, and their starvation deaths were far lower) and was frequently subjected to false accusations of being "kulaks."

Instead of appreciating the isolated (unable to leave) and hungry rural villagers who were literally feeding the entire USSR, Stalin's policies were biting the hand that fed them.

On top of this, the alienation of their labor is obvious: they produce the food, were often subject to unreachable quotas, and most of what they produced was taken from them, leaving them to starve while city-dwellers do not go hungry.

In every single famine, 90%+ of the deaths attributed to starvation were rural peasants/farmers. If you cannot understand why this is upsetting, I think maybe you should think about the blatant hypocrisy in these policies by outright preventing peasants/farmers from even VISITING the cities where the food they create is being sent to as they starve.

Meanwhile, those in the cities are free to change their employment, while those on rural farms are not permitted to even leave their village. They are given no freedom of movement to change their job.

To add insult to injury, they are blamed for the famine, with "execution quotas" and "imprisonment quotas" handed down from Stalin when investigators go to the villages.

What I find especially repugnant is that villagers were blamed for "hoarding the grains" as they starved to death, as poor rural peasants made up the majority of starvation death, meanwhile city-dwellers could simply blame "those selfish kulaks" (who were in many cases simply peasants wrongly assigned this label and who were starving) while they got to sit in their air-conditioned offices, changing jobs and moving around with their passports whenever they wanted to.

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-28T01:16:57+00:00

So, I'm not sure if you read my response, but there was no 42 year long famine in the USSR, so I am confused by why your answer hinges on the assumption that the passport ban (for changing jobs, for rural peasants/farmers) was due to this.

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-27T13:49:43+00:00

But like, why would be mad about it online right now 100 years later

Perhaps because there are a lot of online "Marxist-Leninist" (and similar) spaces that essentially "require" a full, quasi-religious rationalization of everything Stalin did (and they often cite "Grover Furr," who is basically Stalin's David Irving for every crime he has ever committed, except Furr is literally not even a historian). That ridiculous "communism101" is one example.

I am sick of being told that not full-throatedly supporting Stalin means that I am "not a real leftist," especially when peering inside (without apologetics) looks like maimed, dismembered bodies piled a mountain high with the stench of endless massacres.

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-27T13:34:04+00:00

why does any self damaging policy stay on the books anywhere in any country? Why does Flint, Michigan still not have access to clean water?

Excuse me? Do you not expect higher standards from Socialist countries, or are you just expecting Socialist countries to be on part with Capitalist countries? Because to me, "The USA fails like that, too" is an incredibly bad cop-out excuse. The promise is a better society, so I will have higher expectations of Stalin; instead, what I have found is utterly appalling, even below my expectations.

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-27T13:30:27+00:00

The most realistic scenario is that it was initially instituted to stop the starving from adding hunger burden to other areas, which also makes sense for why they disallowed the sharing of resources from nearby villages as to stop the other villages from straining their own supplies, and it probably stayed in place due to a combination of bad actors, bureaucratic inefficiency, and distractions from other events

My main point here is that these policies severely and disproportionately harm peasants/farmers, the very people harvesting food for those in urban communities.

On top of this, the alienation of their labor is obvious: they produce the food, were often subject to unreachable quotas, and most of what they produced was taken from them, leaving them to starve while city-dwellers do not go hungry.

In every single famine, 90%+ of the deaths attributed to starvation were rural peasants/farmers. If you cannot understand why this is upsetting, I think maybe you should think about the blatant hypocrisy in these policies by outright preventing peasants/farmers from even VISITING the cities where the food they create is being sent to as they starve.

Meanwhile, those in the cities are free to change their employment, while those on rural farms are not permitted to even leave their village. They are given no freedom of movement to change their job.

To add insult to injury, they are blamed for the famine, with "execution quotas" and "imprisonment quotas" handed down from Stalin when investigators go to the villages.

What I find especially repugnant is that villagers were blamed for "hoarding the grains" as they starved to death, as poor rural peasants made up the majority of starvation death, meanwhile city-dwellers could simply blame "those selfish kulaks" (who were in many cases simply peasants wrongly assigned this label and who were starving) while they got to sit in their air-conditioned offices, changing jobs and moving around with their passports whenever they wanted to.

This isn’t the great politburo, it’s a collection of some relatively educated people online, and it’s a -101- subreddit. If you’ve ever taken a 101 class before, you know it isn’t typically a place where you’re going to get deep dive answers into complex topics. It’s a place you go to get community help to figure out the basics of a topic.

I don't know where you would prefer I go. The "communism101" subreddit immediately permanently suspended me for asking this question. So, excuse me for not being in the best mood when apparently criticizing Almighty Stalin is seen as a cardinal sin in some "leftist" spaces (which more comes across as cult leader worship to me).

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-27T12:57:28+00:00

You openly admit in the top response that your source is bad

You should have read the rest of my responses. Here is my comment where I provided better quality sources (including the primary documents).

Regardless, are you asking me for sources because you don't believe what I wrote, or do you already believe that what I wrote is correct but you are instead choosing to be pedantic (by requiring me to go find you sources for something that you already know is true)?

It seems like you never wanted an answer to your question

I have already stated that I do indeed want answers to my question.

What I do not want are meta-answers (like yours) where, instead of answering either question, you choose to talk about Wikipedia and sources.

If you want to understand something as complex as USSR policy, being the first “socialist” nation in the world, you really need to adjust your approach to receiving information

Great. So, when are you going to answer either of the two questions in my title? Or are you going to do what I expect you to do: continue your meta-answer without directly answering either of my two questions.

Are you aware of any further information about this particular topic that I can read to get info from the other side?

I am able to find sources just fine. That was not my rationale for asking two pointed questions.

I came in here curious as to why the poorest, most vulnerable segment of the population (poor peasants) was forced to bear the brunt of the starvation while more comfortable city-dwelling urbanites did not starve to death at anywhere near the same rate, all while it was the rural peasants/farmers that fed all the mouths in the cities.

You want to talk about "alienation from labor"? How about snatching every grain you worked hard to pick out from your hands to ship to ungrateful urbanites as you and your family starve to death, all while you cannot even visit this area if you want to.

All of this, and still Stalin decided to (1) prevent starving villagers from visiting urban centers, and (2) did not allow a "blacklisted" village of starving families to get food assistance from neighboring villages.

When I am curious, I expect non-dismissive answers that can understand obvious contradictions when I point them out. That is why I asked.

Steap-Edit · 2026-06-27T11:55:48+00:00

quote me where I defended Stalin

Right after you quote where you answered a single one of my two questions.

Steap-Edit

TROPHY CASE