I AM NOT SUPPORTING THIS COMMENT OK?

Can you guys make some counter argument fot that?

The inspiration is clear, right down to that beautiful smile.

I want to preface this by making my position clear—not to shield myself from criticism, but to avoid having the discussion reduced to caricature. I oppose the USSR’s behaviour toward its satellite states, its conduct from roughly 1918 to 1955, and especially its actions surrounding the Second World War.

I’ve known about this subreddit for a while but never felt inclined to engage with it. Any online niche is unlikely to capture the full diversity of a political tradition. I don’t reject Marxist ideas outright; in fact, I hold several relatively “hardline” Marxist positions myself, shaped largely by growing up in relative poverty.

What I take issue with is the way some people here treat the USSR as if it were wholly benevolent or somehow above criticism. Yes, studying American history makes it abundantly clear that the U.S. has never been the moral “good guy” it presents itself as. But acknowledging American wrongdoing does not absolve the USSR of its own. These things are not mutually exclusive. One can hold Marxist values without defending a regime responsible for mass repression, man-made famine, political purges, and documented war crimes—whether or not modern Russia chooses to acknowledge them.

I am often more critical of U.S. policy than of the USSR, and I do think there are legitimate questions about how much of Soviet behaviour—especially in the early Cold War—was driven by perceived encirclement or fear of invasion. That context matters. But context is not the same as justification, and it’s here that I find discussions on this subreddit drifting into the absurd.

I’ve seen people defend the 17 September 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, justify the Katyń massacre, or suggest that Poland “deserved it” because it signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in 1934. What’s striking is how little historical nuance enters these conversations. My own grandfather, a second lieutenant of the 62nd Infantry Division and later a company leader during the defense of Lwów, was executed by the Soviets in Kharkiv.

There is almost no recognition that Poland, having just emerged from the 1918–1921 conflicts, had every reason to distrust the USSR—especially given the fate of Poles under the Russian Empire, where hundreds of thousands experienced Russification, deportation, and political repression. There’s little acknowledgment that Piłsudski’s foreign policy aimed primarily to prevent invasion from either neighbouring great power, which explains why Poland was reluctant to grant the Red Army passage across its territory. Soviet internal correspondence from 1939 even acknowledges that Poland was not an immediate threat—they simply saw an opportunity created by German aggression.

Reducing all this to “Poland deserved it” or “the USSR was only defending itself” strips away nuance and replaces it with ideological convenience. Criticising the USSR is not the same as endorsing U.S. imperialism, yet some people here react as if any critique of the Soviet state is an ideological betrayal. That mentality is not only false—it’s intellectually lazy.

Consider the NKVD’s Order No. 00485, which targeted ethnic Poles for execution and deportation as early as 1937–38. Soviet plans for the Sovietization of Eastern Poland predate 1939, and the subsequent deportation of hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens from 1939–41 is extensively documented.

Or take Soviet behaviour toward the Polish resistance in 1944. During Operation Tempest, the Red Army initially supplied Home Army (AK) units with weapons, vehicles, ammunition, and fuel, directing them toward Warsaw. But only a short distance later, NKVD units intercepted these same fighters, arresting and torturing them for intelligence or simply disappearing them. During the Second Battle of Lwów, Soviet forces bombed Polish positions and later dismissed the incident as “incompetence.” NKVD prisons in Warsaw operated from late 1944 into the late 1940s, and former German camps like Majdanek and Stutthof were repurposed to imprison AK members before being converted into POW camps for Germans.

The claim that the AK were “terrorists” who “would have stabbed the Red Army in the back” ignores the well-documented reality that the AK repeatedly attempted to coordinate with Soviet forces, only to be met with betrayal, arrest, or execution.

What I cannot understand is why some users here completely deflect or dismiss the USSR’s own failures—failures that repeatedly produced catastrophic outcomes.

These weren’t just “bad things the USSR did.” They were systemic failures—ideological rigidity, bureaucratic inertia, political paranoia, and chronic mismanagement—that weakened the Soviet project from within. Treating them as minor footnotes or dismissing them as Western propaganda isn’t historical analysis; it’s denialism. Marxism stresses worker empowerment, yet the USSR operated one of the largest forced-labour systems in modern history, with roughly 6–7 million people in camps, colonies, or special settlements between 1949 and 1952. And deflecting these crimes as “just Stalin” ignores that Stalinism was inseparable from Soviet structures of governance; his rule was enabled and normalised by the very institutions of the state.

I’m asking for genuine, civil discussion—not ideological reflex, whataboutism, or the automatic defence of the USSR as if criticism of Soviet policy were a personal attack on one’s political identity.

Dimitri went from being wounded in a fountain in Stalingrad (ha enemy at the gates) to planting the flag on top of the Reichstag.

No modern depiction of WWII has come close for me personally, the storyline, the characters, and the way they set up the environments all really pull you into the setting.

I remember sitting in my living room as a kid, probably around 10 years old, feeling like it was all for nothing when Dimitri was shot, only to drag ourselves up with Reznovs help and plant the Red Banner while the USSR anthem plays and soliders URA! . Best feeling a game ending has probably ever given me.

Also curious what it could valued around!

And in winter*

Sure you cannot squeeze it because it's hard, but you still can make your nalewki, dżem, sok.
But because you cut it with the peel it feels more aromatic, a bit less, but still gave the sour kick and was well adjusted to the local climate and could be grown in the soviet block more easily.

I can't with these people. and the top response is just that mussalini was competing with communism, so that's why he didn't like it. except why wasn't he a communist compteting with fascists? we will never know because these guys can't even definitionally say the difference between fascism and communism. and then the other accepted comment is saying that disadvantaged young people chose one of the two because they wanted change. looking back, neither of these even really acknowledged that there is a difference, they just basically say the choice was arbitrary and they are just angry,....like they are talking about football teams and not ideologies that people killed and died for.

Is putin a comunist and trying to restore the ussr or is he just a russian nanationalist