this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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Because the Soviet Union was an autocratic surveillance state wasn't it? At least that's what I learned about GDR and projected it to other communist states.
The Soviet Union was a democratically run socialist economy, as was the GDR. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference. Further, surveillance in socialist countries pales in comparison to modern capitalist surveillance and data harvesting.