Empire of the Absurd: A Brief History of the Absurdities of the Soviet Union
49 comments
·August 9, 2025Herodotus38
This may be covered but one absurdity that I came across was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
When I was an undergraduate working in a molecular biology lab my two mentors, Andrei and Svetlana were Russian emigrants. Andrei taught me, in the 00s, that he couldn’t do the level of molecular biology in Russia because the downstream effects decades later put them far behind in the technical and cultural knowhow. Genetics was banned.
baxtr
> More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents.
Scientists were executed… ok wow
cowcity
Almost certainly not true. Stalin's purges were in the 30s and scientists were surely executed in various contexts (same in the West) but not in the context claimed by this article.
bdamm
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
Der_Einzige
Of course HN has tankies.
pavel_lishin
> scientists were surely executed in various contexts (same in the West)
Name one.
piombisallow
"Same in the West" lmao, when were scientists executed in the West? The 1500s?
jamiek88
What? Wow. There’s a bot for every crackpot now eh?
Duanemclemore
There's a great episode of the podcast The Constant about Lysenkoism. Definitely worth a listen.
I can't find the link at the moment, apologies.
whycome
> Recent Russian studies put the count of lost lives and unborn children as high as 170 million people.
wait, does this just mean pregnancies that didn't reach full term? Or like, a hypothetical number of kids that could have been born?
zdragnar
The Bolsheviks were the first to get a country to legalize elective abortion in 1920. They did so as a temporary measure because so many women would have difficulty raising a child in the post-war environment.
It got to the point where hospitals were overwhelmed and they started setting up dedicated clinics.
They tried making it illegal again in the 30s but brought it back in 1955 because there was such demand.
So, presumably this 170 million number is written by someone who believes a fetus is a unique human life and the prevalence of elective abortion was so high as to be a not insignificant number of "lost lives".
Spooky23
You can play with the scope to tell the story you want. If you scope in WW2 losses as well, about 30M Soviets died. Some other number were injured or disabled. If you look at fertility rates at the time, you can project how many children would have been born, and I’m sure you could be at that number.
Additionally, the after effects of the war and Stalin persisted - the loss of men resulted in higher numbers of childless women.
I lack the information to assess whether 170M is a meaningful number, but on a relative basis, the United States and even China didn’t contend with the sheer destruction and oppression that Soviet people did, and had higher fertility rates. It’s not a “pro” or “anti” Soviet/Russian discussion - the nation’s people suffered in various ways, which had an end result.
j4coh
Lost lives and lost potential is how I read it.
mc32
The 170MM figure is referring to all losses of life like the purges, man-made famines (Holodomor), inept ww ii strategies, as well as “unborn” children. This last one has no reference so it’s impossible to know what that means or how many people they attribute to that.
That said, the problem is a cultural one. The communists poured gas on the tendencies of the Tsars and modern Russia suffers from that legacy still.
Culture is hard to cure and the change has to come from within. Japan had a similar problem but most of the sharp edges were dulled when they made a deal (surrender) with the Americans.
You also see this tendency to cling to bad cultural habits by some enclaves of immigrants. It can take decades of new generations to wipe some of those bad tendencies away. Some people see that as erasure of culture as a bad thing but it can also bring good.
H8crilA
I don't know who is downvoting this comment, but the comment is correct. Russia is a state, not a nation. The Kremlin, in all incarnations - the Tsars, Stalin, the Communist Party, Putin, even the Mongols that used to run it before Moscow, have always been perceived more like an alien force that has landed onto this land, and now one has to submit to it, without questions. This is a lesson that parents pass onto their children, implicitly or explicitly. It could become a nation-state in a relatively short order, though that's certainly going to be bloody. And nukes could be on the table as well - this is why the US was actually opposed to the USSR collapse, a fact that's not widely known today.
keiferski
I look forward to the day when the capitalist and communist eras of the 19th-21st century are analyzed coldly, in the way we look at mercantilism or medieval market towns today.
Because it really seems like both are increasingly inadequate systems for handling modernity, and the obsession with defining one as intrinsically evil and the other the obvious superior option (I’ll let you choose which is which) is such a flattening, unhelpful approach.
Personally, having moved from capitalist America to post-communist Poland, a few things seem true to me:
…the communist era in Poland was a disaster and the country today is unquestionably better off as a modified capitalist one;
…contemporary American culture really seems to be struggling under an unquestioned capitalist ethic;
…the conflict seems artificially egged on from think tanks, corporations, academics, and maybe even the simple alliteration of the letter c (i.e., you don’t hear nearly as much about Capitalism vs. Socialism, even though historically that’s a more accurate label of what governments actually were.)
…and that neither capitalism or communism has ever really been implemented in a pure sense.
Which is all a long way of saying that Mark Fisher’s quote seems more true every day, not as a pessimistic statement but just one describing a lack of imagination and the inability to transcend the debate:
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
nradov
I can imagine a lot. In every possible scenario, the end of capitalism means disaster for the entire human race.
simlevesque
Can you prove that capitalism isn't gonna end the entire human race ?
I'm sure you can imagine anything but that's not really helpful.
nradov
Can you prove that any other economic system isn't going to end the entire human race.
keiferski
This is exactly the kind of low effort, no imagination response that I was referring to. No discussion of alternatives, no acknowledgement that maybe there are some issues with the current capitalist system, etc.
Just apocalyptic language, with no openness to the idea that yeah, communism was a terrible system, but maybe that doesn’t automatically imply that contemporary capitalism is inherently the best system.
nradov
Do you have anything constructive to offer or are you going to stick with low effort criticism without even proposing an alternative? So far all you have are weak complaints, totally disconnected from objective reality.
nilamo
That seems awfully defeatist and with a very negative view of the human spirit.
I can imagine the end of Capitalism, and it looks like Star Trek.
socalgal2
Star Trek ignores real estate. Who gets the penthouse and who gets the first floor apartment next to the noisy space port. who gets the house with the beach view and who just get views of the wall of the neighboring building.
nradov
Nothing in Star Trek even makes any sense. It's a completely artificial universe, constructed as a background for telling fun stories. From the perspective of alternative economic systems it's no different than children's fairy tales.
I am an optimist and capitalism looks like success. It's the exact opposite of defeatism.
vectorcrumb
Might this be available in some ebook format somewhere?
croes
I guess the post is caused by this article
immibis
History doesn't repeat exactly, but it rhymes. America is collapsing in a not dissimilar way to the Soviet Union.
kmoser
> While nazism and its crimes were condemned after World War II, making the return of this form of totalitarianism impossible [...]
This didn't age well.
kergonath
Entertaining, but not to be taken too seriously. The author himself says that it’s very subjective and not thoroughly fact-checked. Even then, the digs at the Kievan Rus’ are… well, absurd. Also, I don’t know of any European country without its share of demented and paranoid rulers. But England is not Henry VIII and Germany is not Hitler.
Also, this
> But let us start with the Communist Manifesto which is the holiest tome of communist ideology and can be called the red gospel.
is a pearl of unintended absurd humour. In this case, when someone applies their beliefs and frame of mind to a foreign object without actually understanding it.
In the end I agree with the author that all life if absurd, it’s just a matter of point of view.
nikanj
Nazi Germany never put up fences to stop their people from leaving. The Soviet Union did. That’s my metric for the standard of living in them
derelicta
Nice propaganda piece from the NED or the Victims of Communism Foundation lol
null
matheusmoreira
> While nazism and its crimes were condemned after World War II [...] this has not happened with communism.
This resonates quite deeply. In my country nazis go straight to jail but communists walk our soil completely unpunished. They have half a dozen political parties, are well coordinated, are popular and are constantly elected by the population when they promise them heaven on earth. This is especially ironic since nazism is short for national socialism.
Communism is alive and well in Latin America. Brazilian president Lula declared to CNN his intention to install communism in my country not even a week ago. It has been his intention for over 40 years. He and his party has been in power for over 20 years. Yet people act as though it was fake news.
simlevesque
It's not fake news it's good news.
> On the other hand, life was secure. There were no bank loans, therefore there were no bank fees or percents. There was no real worry over one’s job or workplace; one was available for everyone. Wages were low, but fear of losing one’s job was almost nonexistent. A person pretended to work; the state pretended to pay him. Living accommodations were crowded and faint hope existed to find a better apartment, but all had a roof over their heads.There had to be, since homelessness was forbidden by law.
> Nowadays, there exist people who yearn for that mollusk-like life.
This isn't an inaccurate description, and yes, it's not exactly a utopian state to find yourself in.
But I'm not going to chuckle at the hypothetical people we're supposed to pity for wanting this; I bet there are quite a few people in the United States alone who would love to have this life, who would love to have a guaranteed job, a guaranteed roof over their heads, and the heads of their children.