this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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I'm not aware of material which responds and critiques in good faith, but I can point you to Anna Louise Strong's writing on her lived experience in both the USSR and PRC. It confirms Parenti's writing and discusses the challenges of building a socialist state.
Another interesting thing to consider is the fact that the Soviet government archives were all opened post-coup. If the USSR was indeed a horrible country, we'd have all kinds of academic material going over findings in these primary source documents. We don't. Western historians rushed to Moscow in the 90s only to find nothing that would support their anti-Soviet narratives. Instead there's ML literature discussing the successes and struggles of the Soviet people based on these documents.
I'm interested in first hand accounts. I'll check out Strong's writing.
My only reservation is that internal reports can also be falsified. The incentive to do so would be massaging numbers in order to meet quotas and paint a better picture than is accurate. I think that's probably an overly skeptical narrative. I'd like an honest, if ideologically opposed, attempt to find flaws.
Strong's This Soviet World (1936) mentions a sort of that internal falsification.