ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝

It just came out recently that wealthy Americans and Russians came to the Balkans during the Yugoslav war to hunt and kill civilians for fun.

I’m feeling we’ll end up going over it whether we row or not.

When the USSR came to Hungary, they literally exhausted the syphilis medicine supply of the country for two years with the amount of rape, and the country has had collective PTSD from it for generations.

I’m sure others can bring up other countries, I’m more familiar and am more in touch with the culture of specifically Hungary. It is widely researched and not debated actually that it was so bad, suicides and misogyny spiked in the aftermath, as the people who couldn’t defend their loved ones from often repeated often gang rape either committed suicide, or just internalised that “rape is not so bad” to cope.

600 thousand people were also kidnapped (from a country of less than 10 million) and forced into labour camps for decades, with a third never coming home. This also specifically targeted the local German-Hungarian population (which had nothing to do with Germany, it was a diaspora dating back long into medieval times), so it can also qualify as genocide.

There were also examples of brutal torture, keeping people in cells small enough they couldn’t even sit down, and so on. Had nothing to do with communism, some of the direst things were actually done against communists who wanted to be free from Soviet occupation. It was pure Russian imperialism.

And truth be told, we got off easy compared to some other countries.

And finally, colonialism being “western” in an inherently racist way to view the world. East Asian empires also had colonies, so did most empires around the world.

without ever having colonies or engaging in imperialism

That’s only because the USSR lobbied hard in the UN so that colonialism is defined as having overseas colonies. The “near abroad” is/was a colonial empire.

The USSR was definitely imperialistic, see Hungary 1956, where it crushed a revolution which was not against communism, the revolutionaries were in fact communists, they just wanted to be free of Soviet occupation.

Not debating the accomplishments of the USSR though, it was definitely and improvement on the Russian Empire.

Well, in the USSR it was Ukrainians. Every authoritarian system find its outgroups.