4 ms·

The Germans had that delusion too.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
The Germans were well aware of Russia's population at the time. In the 1930s, the Germans produced a huge amount of areal-studies scholarship with regard to the USSR (demographics, ethnography, history, linguistics, etc.). Even today scholars occasionally rely on those papers and monographs, as distasteful as a publication produced under the Nazi regime might be. No, the Germans’ delusion was that these many tens of millions of Soviet citizens were so unhappy with the regime, that they wouldn't rush to defend it.
- mattmanser 6y ago
  To be fair to them, Russia had gone through a civil war 19 years before. If you're listening to the exiles and losers, it's easy to get a false impression. It's a mistake we've seen made through out history time and again (e.g. bay of pigs, CIA adownplaying Castro's popular support, etc.)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- juniper_strong 6y ago
  I was taught that when the Germans invaded, there were industrial cities in the Soviet Union that had been created after World War 1 that weren't even on the German maps at the time of the invasion, the Germans didn't know the extent of Soviet industrialization in the inter-war period. Is that all false?
  - rsj_hn 6y ago
    I'm doubtful. The Soviets were loudly propagandizing their industrial achievements to all who would listen. Something like military bases they would try to hide, but if anything Soviet industrialization was oversold, in the sense that there was a huge fetish for certain production modes such as tons of steel produced, which overstated actual industrialization. To say it another way, this is an example of Goodhart's Law: "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." In the annals of western industrialization, it became common to look at various indexes, for example of tons of steel produced, as a measure of industrial output and thus of GDP per capita. So Soviet Planners decided that they would focus on these traditional indexes as targets, and so created massive overproduction of things like steel, reasoning that this would catapult their industrialization, as measured by the same indexes, upwards. But that's not an apples to apples comparison to western nations measures of GDP, because a society needs many things: butter, milk, bread, steel, coal, clothes, shoes, etc. In a normal market society, these are all produced in rough proportions as people need them, millions of products are produced, so you can pick 100 of them as indexes to track overall economic output as there is no reason to think that the economy would bizarelly produce twice as much steel as it needed. Thus taking a handfull of goods and using them as proxies makes sense. But if you take the same society, and instead of producing a million goods, you only produce 100 according to a plan rather than according to consumer demand, then you can have a situation in which the economy produces twice as much steel as it needs, and so steel production ceases being an accurate proxy for overall production. Thus using western measures to track production of command economies is very challenging. Which is not to say that Soviets didn't industrialize rapidly (at a terrible price in terms of human suffering) but that the bulk of the real gains happened as a result of World War 2 mobilization and the two decades after the end of the war, rather than in the period 1918-1940. The pre-WW2 period saw a doubling of GDP per capita from the start of WW1 to the start of WW2, or a tripling of GDP/capita from the war ravaged state Russia was in after losing WW1 and and the end of the civil war to the start of WW2, but this gain in production was mostly due to shifting production away from agriculture and towards mass production -- sectoral shifts. But because production was planned, the increase in production did not result in a corresponding increase in sectoral productivity (productivity within a sector), which actually declined spectacularly due to collectivization, and so you had an economy in which some goods were massively overproduced even as millions were starving. More information can be found here: https://voxeu.org/article/stalin-and-soviet-industrialisation https://voxeu.org/article/stalin-and-soviet-industrialisatio...
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Also, in WW1 they were counting on the Russians being slow to mobilize. Massive armies are hard to get moving, after all. They were not only wrong on how long it would take for the Russians to mobilize, they also overestimated their chances of knocking out France early.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  They also had a massively exaggerated view of the Soviet leadership’s and system’s incompetence, likely driven by their racial theories.

The Germans were well aware of Russia's population at the time. In the 1930s, the Germans produced a huge amount of areal-studies scholarship with regard to the USSR (demographics, ethnography, history, linguistics, etc.). Even today scholars occasionally rely on those papers and monographs, as distasteful as a publication produced under the Nazi regime might be. No, the Germans’ delusion was that these many tens of millions of Soviet citizens were so unhappy with the regime, that they wouldn't rush to defend it.

mattmanser 6y ago
To be fair to them, Russia had gone through a civil war 19 years before. If you're listening to the exiles and losers, it's easy to get a false impression. It's a mistake we've seen made through out history time and again (e.g. bay of pigs, CIA adownplaying Castro's popular support, etc.)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
juniper_strong 6y ago
I was taught that when the Germans invaded, there were industrial cities in the Soviet Union that had been created after World War 1 that weren't even on the German maps at the time of the invasion, the Germans didn't know the extent of Soviet industrialization in the inter-war period. Is that all false?
- rsj_hn 6y ago
  I'm doubtful. The Soviets were loudly propagandizing their industrial achievements to all who would listen. Something like military bases they would try to hide, but if anything Soviet industrialization was oversold, in the sense that there was a huge fetish for certain production modes such as tons of steel produced, which overstated actual industrialization. To say it another way, this is an example of Goodhart's Law: "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." In the annals of western industrialization, it became common to look at various indexes, for example of tons of steel produced, as a measure of industrial output and thus of GDP per capita. So Soviet Planners decided that they would focus on these traditional indexes as targets, and so created massive overproduction of things like steel, reasoning that this would catapult their industrialization, as measured by the same indexes, upwards. But that's not an apples to apples comparison to western nations measures of GDP, because a society needs many things: butter, milk, bread, steel, coal, clothes, shoes, etc. In a normal market society, these are all produced in rough proportions as people need them, millions of products are produced, so you can pick 100 of them as indexes to track overall economic output as there is no reason to think that the economy would bizarelly produce twice as much steel as it needed. Thus taking a handfull of goods and using them as proxies makes sense. But if you take the same society, and instead of producing a million goods, you only produce 100 according to a plan rather than according to consumer demand, then you can have a situation in which the economy produces twice as much steel as it needs, and so steel production ceases being an accurate proxy for overall production. Thus using western measures to track production of command economies is very challenging. Which is not to say that Soviets didn't industrialize rapidly (at a terrible price in terms of human suffering) but that the bulk of the real gains happened as a result of World War 2 mobilization and the two decades after the end of the war, rather than in the period 1918-1940. The pre-WW2 period saw a doubling of GDP per capita from the start of WW1 to the start of WW2, or a tripling of GDP/capita from the war ravaged state Russia was in after losing WW1 and and the end of the civil war to the start of WW2, but this gain in production was mostly due to shifting production away from agriculture and towards mass production -- sectoral shifts. But because production was planned, the increase in production did not result in a corresponding increase in sectoral productivity (productivity within a sector), which actually declined spectacularly due to collectivization, and so you had an economy in which some goods were massively overproduced even as millions were starving. More information can be found here: https://voxeu.org/article/stalin-and-soviet-industrialisation https://voxeu.org/article/stalin-and-soviet-industrialisatio...
ashtonkem 6y ago
Also, in WW1 they were counting on the Russians being slow to mobilize. Massive armies are hard to get moving, after all. They were not only wrong on how long it would take for the Russians to mobilize, they also overestimated their chances of knocking out France early.
rsynnott 6y ago
They also had a massively exaggerated view of the Soviet leadership’s and system’s incompetence, likely driven by their racial theories.