Timeline for Why wasn’t the USSR “rebranded” communist?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 27, 2021 at 8:55 | comment | added | Jan | @vivek lyer: Do you happen to have a reliable source for your Brezhnev quote? All I can find is stuff about "developed socialism". | |
| Mar 27, 2021 at 2:06 | comment | added | Vivek Iyer | Brezhnev said Communism had been achieved.. Kantorovich got a Nobel Prize. How ignorant is 'Jan'? | |
| Feb 19, 2021 at 9:52 | comment | added | Luaan | It's justifiable for the party to call itself communist even if the state isn't - after all, parties are trying to reach a certain goal; it would be weird to point to a "suffrage party" and call them out on the lack of suffrage in society - the point of the party is to change that. Even if there really was a honest communist party that tried to implement "true communism" ASAP, only the most naïve people would expect that to happen overnight, even if such a party had "absolute power" (that is, not having to bother with old institutions and laws and all that). | |
| Feb 17, 2021 at 0:24 | comment | added | Jan | @Jirka Hanika Right, I should not have forgotten the CSSR. Albania also called itself Socialist, but I am not sure if they can count as anybody's satellite. I just had a look into the 1968 and 1974 East German constitutions and they also make it clear that East Germany already is a socialist state. | |
| Feb 16, 2021 at 23:26 | comment | added | Jirka Hanika | @Jan - Czechoslovakia victoriously finished building the socialist system in 1960 and was accordingly renamed the Czechoslovak Socialistic Republic, equipped with a new, socialistic constitution. Moishe's remark does not seem to me spot on. | |
| Feb 16, 2021 at 21:18 | comment | added | Jan | @Moishe Kohan Vietnam calls (and I think called) itself a Socialist Republic. Your remark about never even reaching the socialist stage may actually be spot-on (or maybe stuff for another question): Are there countries that declared to have a complete socialist system, or did they always just "build" a socialist system? | |
| Feb 16, 2021 at 16:46 | comment | added | Moishe Kohan | All true, but there were some early anomalies, such as: Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic was proclaimed in July of 1918 and USSR in 1922, both well-before the socialism was claimed to be established (in 1936) in either one. Another interesting anomaly was that Soviet satellites (or, for this matter PRC, etc) were never named "socialist" and instead branded themselves as combinations of "people's and democratic" entities. I guess, the powers-to-be decided that these countries (unlike Yugoslavia, :)) never reached the socialist stage of development. | |
| Feb 16, 2021 at 14:32 | comment | added | Tom Hosker | Building on the last paragraph in your answer, Article 12 of the 1936 Soviet Constitution states: 'The principle applied in the USSR is that of socialism: From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.' | |
| Feb 16, 2021 at 14:21 | comment | added | Tom Hosker | Yes, I too had come to my conclusion about the statelessness of a genuinely communist society based on references to 'the withering away of the state'. I'm sure it's a tenet that crops up in all sorts of Marxist literature, but the only source I can name off the top of my head is The Gulag Archipelago, in which Solzhenitsyn pokes fun at Stalin's claim that the quickest way to achieve the withering away of the state is for the state to assume absolute power. Solzhenitsyn's hardly an unbiased source, however. | |
| Feb 16, 2021 at 14:05 | comment | added | Jan | @Tom Hosker Probably a consequence of Engels' claim the the state would wither and die ("Der Staat ... stirbt ab", mlwerke.de/me/me19/me19_210.htm). Another point where communist ideas were quite far away from socialist practice. | |
| Feb 16, 2021 at 13:54 | comment | added | Jan | @Tom Hosker That sounds quite familiar. But I do not know where exactly it is from and I did not want to add it without at least looking it up. | |
| Feb 16, 2021 at 13:08 | comment | added | Tom Hosker | As I understand it, in orthodox Marxism, a genuinely communist society would also be stateless, so a "Union of Communist Republics" would be a contradiction in terms. | |
| Feb 16, 2021 at 12:48 | history | answered | Jan | CC BY-SA 4.0 |