Analysis of the Situation by Jason Unruhe
Here is the main article
gone
It's hard to fathom people being nostalgic about the USSR...
Anything presented to someone in the right way at the right point of their life can stand to become a lifelong fixation.
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It's hard to fathom people being nostalgic about the USSR...
It's not hard to fathom wanting the state take care of you when you can't thrive in capitalism kek
2:48Spatial Mind The guy was sticking his dick in an infants mouth, it was so fucking disturbing
I was very curious when you had mentioned this in private, but a few other things hold precedence, luckily, we can address this here now.
I’ll be primarily focused on the source given it’s the actual support for the hypothesis. Also, keep in mind that I’m writing this in pieces but I have watched the whole video, read the whole article named as the source (plus a few others on the to get a feel for the site), and have gone over all the polls and analyzed them purely from a statistical standpoint in hopes to validate them.
The specific hypothesis is “Workers in eastern Europe and former Soviet states prefer socialism” which is the headline of the article you shared and practically the name of this thread.
“Former Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s approval rating has hit a record high of 70 percent amongst Russians, according to a study published by the Levada polling center. (Stalin’s approval rating among Russians hits record high, The Moscow Times, 16 April 2019)”
The start of the article is an initial Red Flag because Russia is not in Eastern Europe and the poll does not implicate a preference towards Socialism. More troublesome than that, the source for the statement is from another article that states “A record 70 percent of Russians approve of Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s role in Russian history” which is a misreporting of the actual poll. Leveda which is the polling center sampled 1600 Russians across 52 regions in Russian and asked and is merely testing for a positive, neutral, or negative perception of Stalin. Positive perception is defined as the sum of ‘admiration’, ‘respect’, and ‘sympathy’. Negative perception is defined as the sum of ‘dislike’, ‘fear’ and ‘disgust’. As you can see the constraints of this poll are defined very specifically and do not implicate the hypothesis because Stalin is not equivalent to Socialism. Not only is this logically obvious Levada goes so far of stating the reasoning behind the increase positive perception and that reasoning shares no obvious correlation with a positive perception towards Socialism:
“These changes reveal only one attitude to be stable: praise for Stalin’s contributions to winning the Great Patriotic War. This assessment is stereotypical amongst Russians, and its significance has not changed substantially over the past ten years (68% in 2008 versus 64% in 2018). Conversely, acceptance of the view that Stalin is guilty of killing millions of innocent people was almost one and a half times lower in 2018 than in 2016, having dropped from 62% to 44%. At the same time, the percentage of respondents who declined to answer increased significantly (from 16% to 29%). It is worth noting that the number of respondents who struggled to answer increased in relation to all positions, although such a substantial decline in support was observed only in relation to Stalin’s culpability in the Purges and the Great Terror.” (Levada, paragraph 4)
They are using, knowingly or unknowingly, a classic propaganda technique called Transfer that utilizes the notion of Association from psychology. They make an initial unrelated statement about Stalin, one of the leading figures in the Ideology the site promotes, and then build a false equivalency between the statement and the hypothesis in order to normalize the hypothesis instead of actually supporting it in a meaningful way.
“We are used to reading opinion polls, and being justifiably sceptical about their findings. Very often, a tiny proportion of the public is polled, and the methodology is key to determining the responses and therefore the outcomes. In ‘the west’, so-called ‘opinion polling’ is in general a technique of population manipulation, rather than one of enquiring science.
In this case, however, we note the general hostility of those conducting such polls – as evidenced by the liberal sprinkling of their reporting with the terms ‘regime’ and ‘dictator’ in relation to the socialist and workers’ states, while they refer to the corrupt capitalist kleptocracies now installed as having brought the great benefits of ‘freedom, jeans, open borders and coca-cola’. Understanding that bourgeois biases were stacked against an accurate recording of the people’s hatred of their present exploitation, we can begin to glimpse a greater truth that lies beneath.
Over the past decade, polls have been conducted in each of the former democratic republics, allowing us to gauge their experience of the wonders of free-market (ie, monopoly) capitalism. A number of well-known western-European capitalist journals seem to be shocked at their reported results. Bourgeois journalists couch their own surprise in customary cynicism and dismiss the longing of eastern European workers for the return of the decency and optimism of their lost socialist systems as ‘nostalgia’. In Germany, they have even coined the term ‘Ostalgia’ – a longing for the return of the socialist (east) German Democratic Republic (GDR).
Subtly twisting words to suit their agenda, these reporters attempt to cover up the truth when discussing the reality of working-class power and actual opinions of east European workers, derived from the lived experience of workers from the former socialist states. This kind of con game has long existed when discussing any country that doesn’t have a system of government of which western capitalism approves.”
A huge irrelevant strawman that not only fails to support their hypothesis in any way that also leads to…..
“The full articles are linked to, and we invite you to read them – bearing in mind that every piece of data is used as a pretext for a subjective and irrelevant conclusion in order to launch an unwarranted attack on socialism. If the youth want socialism, they are ‘young and naive and not experienced enough in life’. If the old that lived under socialism want their socialist systems back, they are ‘nostalgic’ fossils, lamenting for their lost youth.
If we ignore the commentary and listen instead to the source, we will find that our old comrades – who have lived and experienced both socialism and the capitalist reaction, counter-revolution and restoration – themselves provide detailed and nuanced reasons for preferring socialism.”
Them stating that you should not trust the interpretation of others or the statisticians who conducted the polls but instead know that all the data leads to one undeniable fact…the Eastern bloc wants socialism.
The bias here is so blatant.
Are they at least correct?
The first source provided as evidence states:
“The majority of Russians polled in a 2016 study said they would prefer living under the old Soviet Union and would like to see the socialist system and the Soviet state restored.” and it too calls upon a poll from Levada Center. Once again Levada polled 1600 Russians from 52 regions. Once again the article misreports the poll which asks three questions:
DO YOU REGRET THE COLLAPSE OF THE USSR? (one answer)
WHAT DO YOU REGRET MOST OF ALL ABOUT THE COLLAPSE OF THE USSR? (as a percentage of respondents who regret the collapse of the USSR; respondents were presented with a card from which they could choose more than one answer; ranked in descending order according to November 2018)
DO YOU CURRENTLY THINK THAT THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION WAS INEVITABLE OR COULD HAVE BEEN AVOIDED? (one answer)
The study does not address the preference between living in or not in the USSR, it addresses regret, reason for regret, and an opinion on the fate of the USSR. You can reasonably argue that the first category under the second question “The destruction of the unified economic system” and I’ll give it to you for arguments sake. Unfortunately, as seen from the data there is substantial variation in in opinion for the data given time. This is actually alluded to from the start, levada states “3.4% for indicators around 50%” is their margin of error and for a sample N=1600 it should be well below 3%. Essentially those who conducted the study are stating they have below average confidence in the study.
The second source provided as evidence is straight from Gallup. The poll itself was conducted between June and August of 2013 in Armenia, Azerbeijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, kyrhzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikstan, Turkmenistan, and Ukraine. The sample size is N=1000 with a maximum margin of error of 2.7% to 3.8% so this which is a very uncomfortable interval, but the standard for N=1000 is 3%.
Ignoring any sampling or bias related error, this poll still does not support your hypothesis because perceiving Harm is not equivalent to a preference towards Socialism. Furthermore, this study is missing a huge sample size given it does not poll several relevant ex-soviet bloc. With that, this study is effectively useless in my eyes do to its poor results and lack of rigor. But, lets give your article the benefit and say that this study is valid and implicates a preference towards Socialism. There is still a problem of demographic as it relates to your hypothesis because the poll also reveals that younger and educated individuals (15 - 44) are more likely to see benefit compared to older individuals 45 – 65+. So these countries do not merely view the break up as harmful, different groups are more or less likely to hold that opinion, and younger individuals are more likely to disagree with you if you trust your own source.
