this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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is "soviet nostalgia" an actually viable tool for socialist agitation in former eastern bloc states, what are your thoughts on it and the organisations which rely on it? (hexbear.net)
submitted 4 days ago by Lisitsyn@hexbear.net to c/askchapo@hexbear.net
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my opinionwhen you look at the political scene in eastern europe, the primary way communist parties try to gain support is to appeal to disaffected 40-60'ish people with some form or another of "ostalgie" or "soviet nostalgia". there's nothing principally wrong with it, but i feel it is way too oriented towards the past instead of the future. "look what we had" is good for some but ultimately it isn't enough to build movements. you see communist parties who still refuse to recognise the collapse of the ussr.

my gripe with this isn't that i disagree with them ideologically or morally, as the liberals do, the problem is the union is definitively gone. there is no hope of restoring it, there hasn't been for nearly 40 years. we need to start from the beginning again, the old structures have been fully dismantled and the union will not return, not in the next few decades.

this is ignoring the fact that this is really only appealing to.. well.. 50 to 70 year olds. we should focus our agitprop and work towards the youth of our countries instead of a group of people who ultimately will go "extinct" soon.

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[–] Cimbazarov@hexbear.net 19 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (4 children)

Socialism is inherently materialist. With other movements you'll see a reverence to some mythological past which is used to try to unify people (e.g. Italy and the Roman empire, Germany and the Volk, America and the 50s) which are all idealist. Socialism is about unifying people based on class. I think we need to move on from the soviet union and not try to romanticize it to try to make it some goal society should strive for. If the goal is becoming the soviet union, then we lose sight of dialectical materialism, why the soviet union developed the way it did, and how to learn from it as social scientists.

[–] MizuTama@hexbear.net 10 points 4 days ago (1 children)

But is reverence the same as nostalgia? Sure, often nostalgia is an unclear yearning for the past, but it can have direct intent, and sometimes that yearning is related to the possibilities of the past had and that particular aspect still has merit for agitation, no? For this, I mean the possibilities of development provided by socialism. It is a fact that the situation for modern Eastern European countries is different, and the tactics should have differences, but if you're trying to argue for moving towards a socialist system, most would consider it a "return" due to having history with it. I'm not Eastern European, so I'm mostly speculating, but trying to detach from the soviet union and move on, to many laymen is the same as detaching from socialism, no? The goal wouldn't be returning to the USSR but returning to socialism.

[–] Cimbazarov@hexbear.net 9 points 4 days ago

The goal wouldn't be returning to the USSR but returning to socialism.

Yea that would be the challenge in using nostalgia of the past. That being said I think it has some use in agitation, but it's more important to follow class dynamics and unify people based on class.

I also missed that the question was specific to Eastern Europe, so idk how strongly the Soviet Union affects the culture

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