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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   23471 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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Was the Soviet Union like this?

ahem:

Those who ran the Soviet Union had believed that they could plan and manage a new kind of socialist society. But they had discovered that it was impossible to control and predict everything, and the plan had run out of control.

Rather than reveal this, the technocrats began to pretend that everything was still going according to plan. And what emerged instead was a fake version of the society. The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real — because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart.

But everybody had to play along and pretend that it WAS real because no-one could imagine any alternative. [Alexei Yurchak] called it "hypernormalisation". You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it. The fakeness was hypernormal.

Adam Curtis, HyperNormalization, 2016

But everybody had to play along and pretend that it WAS real because no-one could imagine any alternative.

Curtis is such a twat sometimes. No, genius, people were perfectly capable of imagining alternatives, they could sometimes even see them directly, as the Iron Curtain wasn't airtight. Everybody played along because otherwise they'd face punishment ranging from what we call "cancellation" today, to prison, various degrees of torture, or disappearing in mysterious circumstances.

Everybody played along because otherwise they'd face punishment ranging from what we call "cancellation" today, to prison, various degrees of torture, or disappearing in mysterious circumstances.

You are wrong. The great divergence really picked up speed in the late 70s. By that time no one really bothered with oppression seriously. Except probably Ceausescu and Erich Honecker. The whole 80s were spent waiting for the regimes to just die.

I think Gorbachev was doing more than waiting for his regime to die, at least in the 1985-9 period. (After the rest of the Soviet bloc collapses, he does seem to be sitting waiting for the USSR itself to die). I don't know how high his chances of success were ex ante, but he was trying.

And of course Deng in China was trying and succeeding.

You are wrong. The great divergence really picked up speed in the late 70s. By that time no one really bothered with oppression seriously

It wasn't literal stalinist reign of terror, and there's some argument to be made for "oppressive regimes fall apart when they become more permissive", but the way you phrased it is, uh, slightly rosy.

You'd absolutely get booted out of any prestigious position if you said anything commie-skeptical, which is what kept most people in check, but beyond that every Eastern Block country had it's Stasi equivalent that would surveil and imprison political opposition. You didn't even have to do much to cross them, I had a friend who's earliest childhood memory is the secret police bursting through the door to haul of her mother to prison for handing out pamphlets. You'd even see the odd political assasination happening well into the 80's.

He has this very specific thesis and bends the material to it quite a bit (even sometimes using fiction clips without telling you they are). So it's to be taken with a grain of salt as "the BBC man's view on things". But I do think he has a point insomuch as the whole system came crashing down the second that Soviet elites had a preference cascade where they realized most of the people in charge wanted to "liberalize" to a certain degree.

The repression can't be the only force operating because otherwise the Yanayev coup would have succeeded.

He has this very specific thesis and bends the material to it quite a bit (even sometimes using fiction clips without telling you they are). So it's to be taken with a grain of salt as "the BBC man's view on things".

Yeah, that pretty much zeroes in on what drives me up the wall about the guy. Still, you're right, he does regularly come up with interesting ideas, so I can't write him off completely.

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