/lit/ - Literature

>>21034552
>Imagine in 1920 you are an illiterate hungry peasant and 40 years later you are living in a world power full industrialized eating better than the average american and sending men to space.
Pretty much and it's hard for people living now to imagine the transition from ass-backwards feudalism to an atomic-powered society when all of that stuff was brand new and with ordinary working people being treated as the heroes who get medals too for once. I think Putin is a reactionary in some ways but there's a reason why Lenin's tomb is still on Red Square even if some of the people around him might want to get rid of it. There are a lot of people in Russia who would flip out and it'd be a problem. The attempts starting in the 90s to shock the country backwards runs up against the problem that the revolution irreversibly propelled it forward.

Also an interesting book by a historian who is revising the history of Barbarossa in 1941. It was a complete shitshow of course with Soviet divisions getting lost and running out of gas and getting destroyed but it complicates the German side the story too, since it was also a shitshow, and it turned out that the Communist Party was actually quite popular (gee really) in many places the Germans were overrunning, so people were burning their villages and heading east, denying the Germans propaganda victories (troops marching into a burning village doesn't exactly make for good visuals), and the fact was that Soviet communism proved a better vehicle at mobilizing the population for a long-term war than national socialism was for Germany.