Wow, so we are on rewriting history now?
“Lenin” and his cronies caused a massive famines with their own hands.
Substantial percentage of population died of hunger on a very fertile soil without any natural disaster [0].
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%93...
The Wikipedia’s article I linked in the previous comment has a good overview.
Also the list of famines worldwide [1] does’t confirm your statement with famine every 10 years. And especially there were very few famines with millions of dead from hunger before on the eastern eu territory - the one in 19xx was man-made in its entirety.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_and_famines_in_Russia...
> From the beginning of the 11th to the end of the 16th century, on the territory of Russia for every century there were 8 crop failures, which were repeated every 13 years, sometimes causing prolonged famine in a significant territory.
(That was already right there in your Wikipedia link. Sources are more scattered regarding the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, but it's all there if you search for it. One thing I was just reminded of is that in the 19th century and up until 1917, the Russian Empire maintained communal granaries to combat recurring famine, but to no avail.)
> After 1947 there were no known famines.
There were just few of such magnitude in the entire world in all of our knowledge.
Some other cultures still has the practice of “talking to your family” even after you turn 18.
My relatives who remember famine of 1930-x and the help of soviets were still alive when I already was an adult.
And you would fucking be crazy to call a person born in 1920-s in Russia a product of a western state department.
Besides the ideological component here being embarrassingly incoherent (the bad was caused by "authoritarian power" in general; the good was caused by "a new authoritarian power" in particular) your facts are plain wrong. The low baseline was pre-Mao (and pre-Lenin) when famine, illiteracy, technological impoverishment, and labor immobility was the rule. Deng's opening up certainly was something, but it undoubtedly stood upon the shoulders of the Mao era. Even the WEF agrees: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/06/how-china-got-rich-4...
> But the “conventional wisdom” ignores the fact that — even inclusive of the serious mistakes, lost lives and lost years that some insist define the early decades after 1949 — the foundations laid during Mao’s rule, including land reform and redistribution, substantial investments in heavy industry, public health, literacy, electrification, and transportation gave China a substantial leg up. These developments positioned China for takeoff well ahead of the official inauguration of Reform and Opening in 1978. While Deng’s reforms catalyzed China’s economic takeoff, they built upon critical foundations established during Mao’s era, which are often overlooked.
Even the WEF is wrong, of course, because they do the usual thing of inflating the importance of GDP; GDP has virtually no applicability to a socialist economy and the "revitalization" you speak of was, as far as its quantitative measure, a magic trick. A literal capitalization upon decades of labor mobilization.