On the Historical Circumstances of ¿Sovietness¿: Socio-economic Aspects of Life in the Former Soviet Union

Essay from the year 2015 in the subject History Europe - Other Countries - European Postwar Period, grade: 92, San Francisco State University, language: English, abstract: This essay takes a closer look at some aspects of life in the former Soviet Union. The Soviet Union emerged out of a utopian vision of a fabricated "shelter" for the workers of the world. Built on the skewed and butchered words of Marx and Engels, empire born revolutionaries in the early twentieth century organized and printed countless newspapers pumped full of their hate of imperialism, capitalism, and inequity. They mustered the strength to remove the Tsars in the midst of the world¿s first grand war toppling the autocratic regime that ruled from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific and from the Arctic Ocean to the Black and Caspian Seas. The work of these fringe extremists, of these intellectual middle-class men, these self-proclaimed emancipators, set the stage for decades of social abuse upon millions of people. The vision for the Soviet Union, as painted by Lenin, and subsequently painted over and framed up by Stalin, was one of a uniform state free of the burdens of choice. The lands and peoples under the Soviet legislative body existed stripped of sovereignty, freedom, expression, and volition. Stalin intended to rip the past out of people to formulate his vision for the future. All peoples, regardless of race, ethnicity, and gender were to be stripped of their cultural backgrounds, their religious roots, their familial affinities, and their geographically embedded social positions. The Soviet people were a new breed birthed into an age of collective destruction. Communities and their timeless histories were inked over with the deep crimson of the flags of the Red Army.