That’s fine, it basically means hyper focusing on specific words or phrases (keywords) to the point of ignoring or dismissing the rest of what is being said. 

Your point about starting from a low baseline is precisely what makes their progress meaningful. To dismiss the Soviet project because it didn't match a 21st-century ideal is to ignore history entirely. We have to judge societies within their context—what they emerged from, what they faced, and what they tried to build.

Let’s look at your specific claims:

You say the USSR was “barely above the floor” of the Tsarist empire. But that “floor” was a feudal, illiterate, economically backward state where famines were periodic features. The step up wasn’t marginal—it was revolutionary. It meant electrification, universal literacy, the eradication of epidemic diseases, and the industrialization that ultimately stopped the Nazi war machine. This wasn’t a slight upgrade; it was a change in the very category of society.

This brings us to the Gulag system, which you mentioned. It was a harsh penal institution, but its constant comparison to Nazi death camps is a profound distortion that ironically whitewashes the Holocaust. The archival records show most inmates were incarcerated for criminal, not political, offenses. Its peak population percentage was actually lower than that of the modern U.S. prison system. This doesn’t excuse its brutality, but it does mean we must understand it as a flawed and severe justice system, not a tool of genocide.

On Chernobyl and “pride”: attributing a complex technological disaster to a single national vice is not serious analysis. The RBMK reactor had a known design flaw, but the accident resulted from a specific series of safety protocol violations during an unauthorized test. To reduce this to “Soviet pride” ignores the technical and bureaucratic factors at play—factors present in many industrial disasters worldwide, from Bhopal to Deepwater Horizon.

Finally, your critique highlights the persistent double standard in these discussions. The USSR’s failures are treated as inherent to its ideology, while its achievements are dismissed or attributed to coercion. Meanwhile, the profound failures of capitalist states—colonialism, slave economies, destructive wars—are often treated as historical aberrations, not systemic features. If we apply the same contextual and critical lens we use for the USSR to other great powers, the simplistic “evil empire” narrative falls apart.

My core argument isn’t that the USSR was flawless. It’s that to understand it—and to learn from its triumphs and catastrophes—we must move beyond moral caricatures and examine the material and historical conditions that shaped its path. Your framework of judgment seems rooted in the present, not the past it seeks to analyze.

Wow that’s a lot of words. 

I read them, and it’s the same shit as ever other “intellectual anticommunist”