this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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Reread it: it mentioned nothing of the sort. There are worse kinds of power than economic. That was the criticism: trading economic inequality for a more pernicious, repressive inequality in political authority.
The Soviet state did not even recognize inherent human rights: according to Soviet legal doctrine, the state is the source of human rights.
Resources don't make up for a lack of liberty, especially when rights there are worth nothing. The political repression isn't great: suppression of rights such as freedom of speech, assembly, & movement; punishment of dissent; crackdown on unauthorized political activities. State terrorism isn't great: secret police, purges, mass executions & surveillance, persecution of dissidents, labor camps. How is life there worth living if the secret police could just disappear you or take it away the moment an authority deems you inconvenient?
For all its faults, market-based liberal democracies don't have that. They don't have Soviet legal theorists treating rule of law, civil liberties, protection of law as excesses of "bourgeois morality".
By guaranteeing access to education, healthcare, housing, retirement and work to everyone, the Soviet Union de-facto promoted human rights more than any other state at the time. You simply don't care about the welfare state if you think those aren't human rights in the most obvious sense. Whether some state "signs a declaration" is worthless, the important and measurable thing are the outcomes, and by any metric, the Soviets excelled in them.
You're just a western supremacist if you truly believe that. The USA has literally bombed its citizens for their political opinions. It holds the highest prison population in the world by a long shot, comparable to the height of the Soviet prison system during World War 2. There are currently fascist henchmen legally disappearing citizens based on the colour of their skin, 25% of black men go through prison at some point in their lives...
And those are only the sins within the empire. Go ask a Palestinian, an Iraqi, an Irani, an Afghan, a Mexican, a Korean, a Vietnamese, a Cuban or a Congolese what they think of American support of human rights. Go ask an Algerian, a Malian, a Burkinabe what they think of French support of human rights. Go ask a Guatemalan, a Peruvian or an Ecuadorian what they think of Spanish support of human rights. The USSR, by fighting against colonialism and imperialism, was the de-facto biggest supporter of human rights in the world. Not having colonies was the ultimate expression of support for the equality of all humans.
Sure, there where excesses in repression in the USSR when they were under threat of extermination at the hands of Nazis according to Generalplan Ost. After WW2, the prison population was reduced to the lowest the region has seen (remember what came before and after the Soviet Union), and persecution was stopped as there was no longer a Nazi threat. Sure, excesses were made, but the country was under the heaviest duress possible, and it still managed to save a hundred million lives from poverty, disease, and outright extermination.
You don't really believe in human rights if you don't think that raising life expectancy from 28 to 70 years of age in 40 years isn't a miracle.