This was before ww2, during the great break.
Pretty sure I got it from growth crystal, a very dry economics book. I dont remember by which metric but you could probably find it within the first few chapters.
If you mention that the soviet union used tear gas in rare instances and therefore they're authoritarian then I mention that the US frequently tear gasses protestors and BLM organizers keep showing up having shot themselves in the back of the head twice and you dont call them authoritarian that's "whataboutism" and it isnt a fallacy, it is providing context that points out hypocrisy.
You dont want to understand yourself to be a hypocrite but you don't want to change, is what it boils down to. So you do the though terminating "whataboutism" and you can ignore it.
You're literally advocating for the concept of a fallacy which is basically whining "no you can't just provide context nooo that would defeat my point." Which was first used to excuse British colonial brutality and later used to defend lynching.
I've read Trot stuff and found their arguments unconvincing in this context. Global proletarian revolution is something we all have to exercise agency over, if youre in the soviet union you can't just rely on everyone else spontaneously uprising, you have to plan for that not happening. And it didn't happen, so...
I was criticizing people claiming whataboutism, you were doing "but what about people doing whataboutism!" Which is whataboutism.
Not everyone is good at logical processing.
Hence why we are having this conversation.
Okay but how was the soviet union to create a global proletarian revolution? They had to work with what they had.
What was the previous term?
After millions of people had already starved to death. A minor but necessary bump in the road toward industrialization, I’m sure.
It wasn't necessary. They could have foreseen the need for an independent commission to verify the numbers that local officials were reporting. They could have cracked down harder on sabotage of planting and harvesting and the mass slaughter of livestock by kulaks.
Industrialization was necessary. If they didn't push hard for industrialization we might all be speaking German right now. They cut it close to the wire and the mistakes that they made resulted in mass suffering. But there were no more famines with the exception of post ww2 after that famine, in an area that previously frequently had famines, because collectivization worked once the kinks were worked out.
People should steal food from hoarders to redistribute it to starving peasants actually.
If youre talking about grain quotas they stopped taking grain out of the region and started importing food when they realized there was a famine.
They literally have above 90 percent approval according to international studies from people as conservative as fucking Harvard University.
You're wrong about their institutions but regardless of what you think of their institutions they have a popular mandate, which is how democracies define themselves as legitimate.
Non-russians especially in Central Asia voted to not dissolve the USSR at a much higher rate than Russians in 1991, so claiming it was a Russian empire is a bit nonsensical.
Check out the sources on this Wikipedia article
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum