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> GOSPLAN had decades, and access to unlimited men with guns and dogs, to make its plans work. And it failed. I am no fan of oppressive regimes, centralised pl

by wz1000 10y ago

> GOSPLAN had decades, and access to unlimited men with guns and dogs, to make its plans work. And it failed. I am no fan of oppressive regimes, centralised planning or Stalinism, but it always grinds my gears when people point to the collapse of the Soviet Union as the One, Absolute proof that centralised planning is always doomed to failure. While I'm sure that the hierarchy and command structure of the government and economy had their parts to play in the collapse, their importance is often overplayed by gargantuan proportions. At the time of the October Revolution, Russia was a largely agrarian society, which henceforth industrialised and developed remarkably quickly under Stalinist Five-Year-Plans, in the midst of the Great Depression. However, it was still poor and barely industrialised when it was decimated by WWII. Despite this, it recovered to become a major world power that challenged the US during its peak. US GDP has consistently been 3-5 times USSR GDP during the the latter's entire period of existence. Despite this, the pressures of the Cold War forced USSR military spending to match US spending, reaching more than 25% of GDP. Any country in a similar position would be doomed to crack under the economic strain, regardless of the structure of government or economy.

kofejnik 10y ago
Being able to buy toilet paper was a major win (in the '80s), that was planning economy at its finest, not military spending. Or people who had to commute from countryside to large cities to buy cheese and sausage. Source: born in the USSR.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
frozenport 10y ago
>>doomed to crack under the economic strain Actually any normal country would not have wanted to match the US's military spending. It is precisely, this crazy, paranoid, militaristic bureaucracy that people criticize - not the mention any human rights issues.
- wz1000 10y ago
  'Any normal country' doesn't have it's ideological basis declared US public enemy #1, and its growing influence deemed by a "crazy, paranoid militaristic bureaucracy" to be the greatest threat civilization has ever faced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare
  - wtbob 10y ago
    The Red Scare wasn't pure paranoia: it was in reaction to a legitimate threat. The COMINTERN really did want to overthrow the governments of all other countries, and the members thereof really did work towards that goal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_International
    - tim333 10y ago
      Indeed, there was quite a bit of govenment overthrowing, mostly at gunpoint and backed by the USSR. Of the The Black Book of Communism's 94 million estimated victims 74m were outside the USSR so there were issues there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism
  - frozenport 10y ago
    As mentioned by OP the US invested considerably less resources as a fraction of the total trying to fight communism. Contemporary Russian domestic propaganda draws a direct line between the so called "heroic" sacrifices the Soviet people made ( a majority of which were self inflicted) and the sacrifices Russians will yet again make due to EU import bans - which we recall is due to them invading the Ukraine.
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  >Actually any normal country would not have wanted to match the US's military spending. It's pretty normal behavior for most countries to react defensively and aggressively when threatened. Hence: * USA puts nukes in Turkey => USSR puts nukes in Cuba. * USA puts nukes on the Korean DMZ => North Korea creates nuclear weapons program. What's fucking weird is how American propaganda manages to successfully depict these kinds of actions as the unprovoked behaviors of crazed madmen. The same kind of attitude towards Iran is common, too.
zeemonkee3 10y ago
I think it was the fall in oil prices in the late 70s/early 80s - combined with a ruinous invasion of Afghanistan - that finally did in the Soviet Union economically. Putin should take note. Otherwise - despite the appalling human cost of projects such as the White Sea Canal and farm collectivisation - the USSR did indeed become a global power if only for a short period. Red Plenty [1] is an excellent book on the subject. [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/0571225241 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/0571...
- ciupicri 10y ago
  An interesting review of "Red Plenty" can be found at http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/
crdoconnor 10y ago
Yeah, it's funny how many people look at a country that went from agrarian society to first spacefaring society & 2nd most powerful nation in ~40 years and go "obviously their economic system was an abject failure". The level of growth experienced by the SU was unsurpassed. In the 50s the US media was fretting over it being "too successful".
- kofejnik 10y ago
  in the 30s, a lot of European media was reporting about happy life of working people in the USSR (see 'useful idiots')
  - crdoconnor 10y ago
    Indeed, the apparent success of the Soviet NHS model, for example, in fighting Typhoid, Typhus and Tuberculosis is partly what led to the structure of the British NHS. Had the Tories had their way in the 40s (and without a clear example of success to point to, they may have), the UK would now have an insurance based "show me the money and we treat you" system - the exact kind which Americans are all apparently very happy with.
- wtbob 10y ago
  > Yeah, it's funny how many people look at a country that went from agrarian society to first spacefaring society & 2nd most powerful nation in ~40 years and go "obviously their economic system was an abject failure". The U.S. went from agrarian society to the first spacefaring society to make it to the Moon, and became the most powerful nation on earth, in ~40 years. The issue is not that the Soviets didn't develop: it's that they didn't develop as quickly as they could have, had their central planning not retarded their growth rate. Not to mention their utterly murderous regime.
  - wz1000 10y ago
    > The issue is not that the Soviets didn't develop: it's that they didn't develop as quickly as they could have, had their central planning not retarded their growth rate Even if centralised planning is doomed to retard growth rates(a hypothesis I consider quite plausible), you cannot reasonably confirm that hypothesis, or the extent of the retardation, using the example of Soviet Russia. There were too many factors involved for you to lay so much of the blame on centralised planning. There were multiple geopolitical and economic factors involved, including the fact that USSR was trying to match the military and diplomatic might of an economy triple its size, fought wasteful wars(Wars are a centralized decision in almost all modern countries) and suffered from variations in the rates of global commodities. These factors alone would most likely decimate a country no matter what its economic system.
lostlogin 10y ago
> However, it was still poor and barely industrialised when it was decimated by WWII. The country was killing itself at a fantastic rate during the 30's purges prior to WWII. Stalins complete failure to listen to the advice of the remaining army staff ('that army we can see is about to invade') helped make the situation even more desperate.
wtbob 10y ago
> At the time of the October Revolution, Russia was a largely agrarian society, which henceforth industrialised and developed remarkably quickly under Stalinist Five-Year-Plans, in the midst of the Great Depression. However, it was still poor and barely industrialised when it was decimated by WWII. Despite this, it recovered to become a major world power that challenged the US during its peak. Apologists for the Soviet regime always like to bring up how quickly it developed, but they ignore a) that prior to the Great War Russia was actually quite advanced and b) how quick its development could have been with a market economy. Yes, Russia in 1984 was extremely advanced compared to Russia in 1919 — but the free world in 1984 was far more advanced than the free world in 1919.
- turar 10y ago
  a.) In 1919 Russia was not nearly as advanced as the US or Europe. b.) Unlike the US, Soviet Union came out of WW2 with cities destroyed, and 20% of its population killed, most of them able-bodied men in their prime. Yet, by 1984, the USSR had: - free universal healthcare - largely egalitarian society with very little inequality - free, excellent education system, from K through PhD - women treated equally in the workforce unlike the West - walkable cities with very good public transit What the free world had: - Start of Reagonomics and Thatcherism era - Plenty of cheap consumer goods to buy and waste - Fantastic entertainment industry - White flight and suburban sprawl - Beginning of War on Drugs, sponsorship of Islamic extremism in Afghanistan I guess my point is that one should probably define "advanced" before proceeding to discuss it.
  - evilgenius134 10y ago
    >Equal Pay Act 1970 >National Health Service 1946-1948 >Defining Thatcherism as bad All before 1984. You can't take all the bad parts of the 'West', however you define it, and compare it with a single country.
pipio21 10y ago
USSR GDP was a total lie like the foam missiles. On a totally centralized economy the statistics depend on the Government and of course, they are not real. Specially under Stalin, nobody ever gave a bad number, because he would be murdered as incompetent,this fact led to consequences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor The people in power in the US knew that was totally bogus, but the defense industry benefited immensely from this belief. Look for Argentina recently(Kirchner) where people has gone to prison, their properties confiscated just for publicizing data that went against the official data by law. Something similar happens in China today, and as centralization increases, in the Western world too. The data from central banks are becoming more and more "hocus pocus".
- MagnumOpus 10y ago
  Don't pin the Holodomor on timid statisticians and misunderstandings. It was deliberate, as is stated in the lede of the very article you link to: "actions such as rejection of outside aid, confiscation of all household foodstuffs, and restriction of population movement confer intent, defining the famine as genocide"

by wz1000 10y ago

kofejnik 10y ago

Being able to buy toilet paper was a major win (in the '80s), that was planning economy at its finest, not military spending. Or people who had to commute from countryside to large cities to buy cheese and sausage. Source: born in the USSR.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

frozenport 10y ago

>>doomed to crack under the economic strain Actually any normal country would not have wanted to match the US's military spending. It is precisely, this crazy, paranoid, militaristic bureaucracy that people criticize - not the mention any human rights issues.

wz1000 10y ago
'Any normal country' doesn't have it's ideological basis declared US public enemy #1, and its growing influence deemed by a "crazy, paranoid militaristic bureaucracy" to be the greatest threat civilization has ever faced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare
- wtbob 10y ago
  The Red Scare wasn't pure paranoia: it was in reaction to a legitimate threat. The COMINTERN really did want to overthrow the governments of all other countries, and the members thereof really did work towards that goal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_International
  - tim333 10y ago
    Indeed, there was quite a bit of govenment overthrowing, mostly at gunpoint and backed by the USSR. Of the The Black Book of Communism's 94 million estimated victims 74m were outside the USSR so there were issues there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism
- frozenport 10y ago
  As mentioned by OP the US invested considerably less resources as a fraction of the total trying to fight communism. Contemporary Russian domestic propaganda draws a direct line between the so called "heroic" sacrifices the Soviet people made ( a majority of which were self inflicted) and the sacrifices Russians will yet again make due to EU import bans - which we recall is due to them invading the Ukraine.
crdoconnor 10y ago
>Actually any normal country would not have wanted to match the US's military spending. It's pretty normal behavior for most countries to react defensively and aggressively when threatened. Hence: * USA puts nukes in Turkey => USSR puts nukes in Cuba. * USA puts nukes on the Korean DMZ => North Korea creates nuclear weapons program. What's fucking weird is how American propaganda manages to successfully depict these kinds of actions as the unprovoked behaviors of crazed madmen. The same kind of attitude towards Iran is common, too.

zeemonkee3 10y ago

I think it was the fall in oil prices in the late 70s/early 80s - combined with a ruinous invasion of Afghanistan - that finally did in the Soviet Union economically. Putin should take note. Otherwise - despite the appalling human cost of projects such as the White Sea Canal and farm collectivisation - the USSR did indeed become a global power if only for a short period. Red Plenty [1] is an excellent book on the subject. [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/0571225241 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/0571...

ciupicri 10y ago
An interesting review of "Red Plenty" can be found at http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/

crdoconnor 10y ago

Yeah, it's funny how many people look at a country that went from agrarian society to first spacefaring society & 2nd most powerful nation in ~40 years and go "obviously their economic system was an abject failure". The level of growth experienced by the SU was unsurpassed. In the 50s the US media was fretting over it being "too successful".

kofejnik 10y ago
in the 30s, a lot of European media was reporting about happy life of working people in the USSR (see 'useful idiots')
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  Indeed, the apparent success of the Soviet NHS model, for example, in fighting Typhoid, Typhus and Tuberculosis is partly what led to the structure of the British NHS. Had the Tories had their way in the 40s (and without a clear example of success to point to, they may have), the UK would now have an insurance based "show me the money and we treat you" system - the exact kind which Americans are all apparently very happy with.
wtbob 10y ago
> Yeah, it's funny how many people look at a country that went from agrarian society to first spacefaring society & 2nd most powerful nation in ~40 years and go "obviously their economic system was an abject failure". The U.S. went from agrarian society to the first spacefaring society to make it to the Moon, and became the most powerful nation on earth, in ~40 years. The issue is not that the Soviets didn't develop: it's that they didn't develop as quickly as they could have, had their central planning not retarded their growth rate. Not to mention their utterly murderous regime.
- wz1000 10y ago
  > The issue is not that the Soviets didn't develop: it's that they didn't develop as quickly as they could have, had their central planning not retarded their growth rate Even if centralised planning is doomed to retard growth rates(a hypothesis I consider quite plausible), you cannot reasonably confirm that hypothesis, or the extent of the retardation, using the example of Soviet Russia. There were too many factors involved for you to lay so much of the blame on centralised planning. There were multiple geopolitical and economic factors involved, including the fact that USSR was trying to match the military and diplomatic might of an economy triple its size, fought wasteful wars(Wars are a centralized decision in almost all modern countries) and suffered from variations in the rates of global commodities. These factors alone would most likely decimate a country no matter what its economic system.

lostlogin 10y ago

> However, it was still poor and barely industrialised when it was decimated by WWII. The country was killing itself at a fantastic rate during the 30's purges prior to WWII. Stalins complete failure to listen to the advice of the remaining army staff ('that army we can see is about to invade') helped make the situation even more desperate.

wtbob 10y ago

> At the time of the October Revolution, Russia was a largely agrarian society, which henceforth industrialised and developed remarkably quickly under Stalinist Five-Year-Plans, in the midst of the Great Depression. However, it was still poor and barely industrialised when it was decimated by WWII. Despite this, it recovered to become a major world power that challenged the US during its peak. Apologists for the Soviet regime always like to bring up how quickly it developed, but they ignore a) that prior to the Great War Russia was actually quite advanced and b) how quick its development could have been with a market economy. Yes, Russia in 1984 was extremely advanced compared to Russia in 1919 — but the free world in 1984 was far more advanced than the free world in 1919.

turar 10y ago
a.) In 1919 Russia was not nearly as advanced as the US or Europe. b.) Unlike the US, Soviet Union came out of WW2 with cities destroyed, and 20% of its population killed, most of them able-bodied men in their prime. Yet, by 1984, the USSR had: - free universal healthcare - largely egalitarian society with very little inequality - free, excellent education system, from K through PhD - women treated equally in the workforce unlike the West - walkable cities with very good public transit What the free world had: - Start of Reagonomics and Thatcherism era - Plenty of cheap consumer goods to buy and waste - Fantastic entertainment industry - White flight and suburban sprawl - Beginning of War on Drugs, sponsorship of Islamic extremism in Afghanistan I guess my point is that one should probably define "advanced" before proceeding to discuss it.
- evilgenius134 10y ago
  >Equal Pay Act 1970 >National Health Service 1946-1948 >Defining Thatcherism as bad All before 1984. You can't take all the bad parts of the 'West', however you define it, and compare it with a single country.

pipio21 10y ago

USSR GDP was a total lie like the foam missiles. On a totally centralized economy the statistics depend on the Government and of course, they are not real. Specially under Stalin, nobody ever gave a bad number, because he would be murdered as incompetent,this fact led to consequences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor The people in power in the US knew that was totally bogus, but the defense industry benefited immensely from this belief. Look for Argentina recently(Kirchner) where people has gone to prison, their properties confiscated just for publicizing data that went against the official data by law. Something similar happens in China today, and as centralization increases, in the Western world too. The data from central banks are becoming more and more "hocus pocus".

MagnumOpus 10y ago
Don't pin the Holodomor on timid statisticians and misunderstandings. It was deliberate, as is stated in the lede of the very article you link to: "actions such as rejection of outside aid, confiscation of all household foodstuffs, and restriction of population movement confer intent, defining the famine as genocide"