The GDR government wanted the Berlin Wall, not the Soviets

All the arguments used for “Failing USSR” are also applied to “Failing New York” and “Failing California”.

If the United States is so great, why did Edward Snowden move to Moscow? If Texas is so great, why is Elon Musk still spending all his time in San Fransisco?

migration from the eastern bloc wasn’t actually that bad outside of East->West Germany, and that was because the west germans literally bribed people who’d already gotten fantastic state-funded educations in the east

People want to move to the imperial core to get a share of the spoils. It’s not like people in communist countries want to move to the places capitalism exploits the most. They aren’t trying to escape communism to go work in a third-world sweatshop or mine.

there are some accounts in one of the :parenti: books about how former communist, and particularly east german, people were hoodwinked and took everything they had from socialism for granted.

If the USSR wanted to keep workers in, that means it understood that it couldn’t function without them. Does your current country act like it understands this?

If we’re talking the Berlin Wall in specific, this passage from chapter 8 of William Blum’s Killing Hope: US Military & CIA Interventions since WWII is very relevant.

The Association of Political Refugees from the East, and the Investigating Committee of Freedom-minded Jurists of the Soviet Zone, were two of the other groups involved in the campaign against East Germany. The actions carried out by these operatives ran the spectrum from juvenile delinquency to terrorism; anything “to make the commies look bad”. It added up to the following remarkable record:

• through explosives, arson, short circuiting, and other methods they damaged power stations, shipyards, a dam, canals, docks, public buildings, gas stations, shops, a radio station, outdoor stands, public transportation;
• derailed freight trains, seriously injuring workers; burned 12 cars of a freight train and destroyed air pressure hoses of others;
• blew up road and railway bridges; placed explosives on a railway bridge of the Berlin-Moscow line but these were discovered in time—hundreds would have been killed;
• used special acids to damage vital factory machinery; put sand in the turbine of a factory, bringing it to a standstill; set fire to a tile-producing factory; promoted work slow-downs in factories; stole blueprints and samples of new technical developments;
• killed 7,000 cows of a co-operative dairy by poisoning the wax coating of the wire used to bale the cows’ corn fodder;
• added soap to powdered milk destined for East German schools;
• raided and wrecked left-wing offices in East and West Berlin, stole membership lists; assaulted and kidnapped leftists and, on occasion, murdered them;
• set off stink bombs to disrupt political meetings
• floated balloons which burst in the air, scattering thousands of propaganda pamphlets down upon East Germans;
• were in possession, when arrested, of a large quantity of the poison cantharidin with which it was planned to produce poisoned cigarettes to kill leading East Germans;
• attempted to disrupt the World Youth Festival in East Berlin by sending out forged invitations, false promises of free bed and board, false notices of cancellations; carried out attacks on participants with explosives, firebombs, and tire-puncturing equipment; set fire to a wooden bridge on a main motorway leading to the festival;
• forged and distributed large quantities of food ration cards—for example, for 60,000 pounds of meat—to cause confusion, shortages and resentment;
• sent out forged tax notices and other government directives and documents to foster disorganization and inefficiency within industry and unions;
• “gave considerable aid and comfort” to East Germans who staged an uprising on 17 June 1953; during and after the uprising, the US radio station in West Berlin, RIAS (Radio In the American Sector), issued inflammatory broadcasts into East Germany appealing to the populace to resist the government; RIAS also broadcast warnings to witnesses in at least one East German criminal case being monitored by the Investigating Committee of Freedom-minded Jurists of the Soviet Zone that they would be added to the committee’s files of “accused persons” if they lied.

Although many hundreds of the American agents were caught and tried by East Germany, the ease with which they could pass back and forth between the two sectors and infiltrate different enterprises without any language barrier provided opportunities for the CIA unmatched anywhere else in Eastern Europe.

Throughout the 1950s, the East Germans and the Soviet Union repeatedly lodged complaints with the Soviets’ erstwhile allies in the West and with the United Nations about specific sabotage and espionage activities and called for the closure of the offices in West Germany they claimed were responsible, and for which they provided names and addresses. Inevitably the East Germans began to tighten up entry into the country from the West.

The West also bedeviled the East with a vigorous campaign of recruiting East German professionals and skilled workers. Eventually, this led to a severe labor and production crisis in the East, and in August 1961, to the building of the infamous Berlin Wall.

The passage starts on page 61 of the pdf, and corresponding citations are on page 228.

Generally, people on this site will say not to entertain “debates” in general and that can be pretty good feedback.

For your edification though, here are a few points to consider. These are all, pretty much taken from :parenti: 's Blackshirts and Reds or Against Empire

• Question the premise. Is it true that soooo many people left? The US and the west ALWAYS play up any individuals that leave a “communist” or “socialist” country. In fact the US has a policy of mostly taking in refugees from these countries. The US rarely, if ever, takes in refugees from people fleeing their puppet regimes. It would make them look bad (Chile and much of South America is a great example)
• Parenti does say we need to be honest with ways in which people in the Soviet Union were dissatisfied with not having access to “the latest fashions, or Jordans, or whatever the fuck materialist thing you want to put here”. But he points out that once the Soviet Union was dissolved people yearned to have it back. They took for granted that their basic needs were taken care of. It should also be noted that the Soviet Union was driven to ramp up military spending early on due to the hostilities of the West. They would much rather have spent funds on other things, and even had discussions with the West about trying to dial back hostilities so they could devote efforts on things other than military spending. But the west said fuck you.

If you think a cheeky response would be suitable, “If America is so great, why are they moving to mexico in record numbers?” :

https://www.businessinsider.com/number-of-people-moving-from-us-to-mexico-2019-5

https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/us-citizens-moving-to-mx-record-numbers/

Basically though, people move for lots of reasons, and the reasons and rates of movement can vary depending on national or global events. It helps if you can get them to narrow down a specific period of migration. That said, a lot of the time liberals are thinking about people leaving the USSR in the late 80’s and early 90s as it was getting turbo-fucked by neoliberalism and being actively destroyed – which, shockingly, was the major driver of people leaving at that time.

For the GDR, see:

1. “What You Should Know About the Wall”
2. “The Berlin Wall: Another Cold War Myth” by William Blum (author of Killing Hope)

For the Soviet Union, this is a thing you hear about many countries (Cuba and the DPRK for example). Since it’s not accompanied by any data, you can simply say that people also immigrated to the USSR (or wherever else). This is equally valid. They don’t know how many people immigrated to and from the Soviet Union, but they have an image cultivated by years of propaganda: so ask them. They’ll be forced to tell you that they don’t know. Then you will be done with it.

People leave their country for a million reasons, but every person who left the Soviet Union got lit up by the propaganda machine so we tend to think that way more people did it than actually did. The Soviets themselves put rules in place to try and prevent certain high-value people from leaving, like nuclear engineers, and this created a lot of friction between a certain class of professional and the state - but taken as a whole Soviet emigration wasn’t much different than, say, American emigration today.

edit: East Germany is a different story, along with German-speaking minorities being expelled from Eastern Europe after World War 2. With the power of hindsight I think it’s safe to say that the East German authorities mishandled the situation and made things worse for a long time before it stabilized, which is why 1/5 of East Germans left the country - but it did stabilize, with emigration dropping precipitously after 1953 with Stalin’s death.

The soviet union was great, in comparison to everything before and after on the same land

I assume you mean the Berlin wall. East germany was much poorer than west germany. This was the case before WW2, and it is still poorer today. It wasn’t helped by events like the Dresden bombings or Russia taking some of its industrial capital as reparations

East germany quickly produced the most educated working class it ever had with free universities. West germany had better wages and more treats because of their wealth. Therefore, people flocked to the west. That doesn’t mean east germany was inherently worse under socialism! They simply started with worse material conditions. The wall was an ‘authoritarian’ measure to prevent brain drain. I don’t know if it was the best option, but I understand why it was built. Perhaps a compromise could have been freedom of movement within the eastern bloc, to give people the opportunity to build socialism elsewhere if they wanted

Socialism isn’t utopian, but it is the most democratic way to distribute and build the resources we have, and give people the most opportunities. The entire USSR was always way poorer than the US, or modern China, but it accomplished so much more for the common person than its successor states ever will

The Stalin personality cult era after WWII when he was slipping off into dementia while suffering delusions doesn’t really need to be defended. Even the USSR admonished Stalin for his mismanagement and cruelty.

Emigration slowed down during the Khrushchev era, and then picked up again after the Afghanistan war debacle began unfolding. So it is not like it was constant either.

maybe the wall was not there to keep the people in but to keep the capitalists out?