Whitewashing Soviet-Era Tyranny and Failure

As part of my 100-tragic-years-of-communism series in 2017, I wrote a column about dupes and apologists for Soviet tyranny, as well as a column mocking economists who thought communism was producing good results.

The worst part of communism was the depraved brutality that led to 100 million deaths.

But since I’m an economist, let’s focus on the failure of communism to deliver higher living standards.

The Soviet Union, for instance, was a member of the anti-convergence club, falling farther and farther behind the United States over time.

Given these facts, I was shocked to see a report in the New York Times, authored by Ivan Nechepurenko, that waxes nostalgic for “Soviet prosperity” in the country of Georgia (formerly part of the Soviet Union).

I’m not joking. Here are some excerpts.

…those…in poorer parts of the country…pine for a Soviet past that delivered them stable incomes and basic social infrastructure. …the Soviet period…for many people in rural areas…was a time of plenty, when they had jobs and prosperity. …One such town, Chiatura, was once considered a Soviet workers’ paradise… Now, the town center is a shell of what used to be, with shuttered businesses… “We used to live well under Communism,” said Mamia Gabeskeliani, 68, who lives in Zodi, a mining village outside Chiatura. …Sopo Japaridze, an American-educated workers’ rights activist in Tbilisi, said she wanted to see a closer examination of all sides of Georgia’s Soviet past. …But life in Georgia since the collapse of the Soviet Union “has degraded in every way,”…she said, so the benefits of Soviet rule also need to be considered. “Life was much richer,” said Ms. Japaridze.

You may be wondering about Sopo Japaridze, who is identified as a “workers’ rights activist.”

What the reporter should have mentioned is that she’s a lunatic lefty. It only took me one minute of online searching to find some of her strange output, such as “Imagine a World: Utopian Visions of Marxist Feminism” and a presentation to Kasama Project, which openly states that “We are a communist project that fights, in theory and practice, for the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”

To be fair, I’m sure there are some people in Georgia who are nostalgic for the Soviet Union. Some people who had jobs in subsidized industries probably lost status when communism collapsed. And relative status matters to many people.

But if the goal is more prosperity for the masses, then the dissolution of the Soviet Empire was a big plus for Georgia.

Just as it was in Lithuania, Poland, Estonia, and other parts of the former Soviet Bloc that shifted to free markets.

P.S. I wrote back in 2020 about a reprehensible attempt to whitewash East Germany’s Stalinist dictatorship.