15 ms·

> Collectivization and aggressive food taxes on the peasantry had led to a pig breeding crisis, a reduction in livestock and, ultimately, mass famine in 1930-33

> Collectivization and aggressive food taxes on the peasantry had led to a pig breeding crisis, a reduction in livestock and, ultimately, mass famine in 1930-33. Ah, the malicious incompetence of Soviet ideology is why they had "fish day." I remember a joke from visiting Ukraine. "A sausage is the best fish." They had a lot of wonderful sausages too...

nine_k 5y ago
Collectivization was about crushing the independent peasantry, which was created about 15 years before, when the Bolsheviks confiscated land from large landowners hand handed it to landless peasants. It created a class which was too pro-capitalist and too economically independent for the later Bolsheviks' taste. So the land was effectively taken back again. But the aggressive food taxes were not incompetence, but a calculated sacrifice. Food was one of the very few items the young USSR was able to export. It was paid in gold, because the Bretton Woods system was still in force, and real currencies were backed with gold. Yes, the USSR exported a lot of food right at the time its own citizens were dying from famine. The USSR then paid that gold for technology, in particular, for buying entire factories from the US. American firms built a number of large car, truck, and tractor factories, and taught the workers the then-current advanced manufacturing technologies. These factories were later converted to produce military trucks and tanks, which played a key role in WWII. BTW the Soviets were shrewd and bold, and of course cheated: they did not pay the last tranche of the gold once the last factory was completed according to the contract. In a few years, WWII started, and the point became moot for decades.
- baybal2 5y ago
  That's what the urban legend tells. Yes, USSR splashed gold left, and right on fancy things from the West, including the Moscow metro, but it wasn't US factories which played anything in USSR's WW2 preparations, or anything. USSR wasn't any kind of industrial giant by the time WW2 started. That's a purest propaganda myth. Stalin was terrible in running the economy, probably even more than any subsequent USSR's ruler. Sputnik was possible mostly thanks to post-war short growth spurt resulting from undoing Stalin's biggest economic blunders.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    I'm not here to glorify Stalin; he was a pretty bad guy. But read about Occidental Petroleum, Armand Hammer, and how that guy sold the Ford tractors and built Soviet tractor plants for a nice sum in gold at the time when nobody wanted to touch commerce with USSR with a ten-foot pole. These plants later produced a lot of tanks for WWII. USSR was not an industrial giant by 1940. Still, without buying Western tech, it would be even less of a giant.
    - brnt 5y ago
      Stalin admitted it just once, at the end of the summit in Teheran.
    - baybal2 5y ago
      > These plants later produced a lot of tanks for WWII. That's a plainest myth every moderately educated schoolchild in Russia knows.
      - tuukkah 5y ago
        Perhaps moderately brainwashed?
      - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volgograd_Tractor_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volgograd_Tractor_Plant
        baybal2 5y ago
        I knew somebody will come, and post that there. That particular factory stood semi idle for nearly a decade, and stood well in rank to showpiece Union's engineering like Moscow metro. It's nearly certain that the original factory built Albert Kahn only managed to make a few thousand units before accidents, a fire, breakdowns, and complete inadequacy of the fitting necessitated a complete rebuild (at the time, it was said to be "random, wrong, and sometimes completely unneeded equipment") It was rebuilt, expanded, and retooled multiple times before they can manufacture even a "tin can" (as was called by Union's soldiers) T-26 tank. And yes, the story of T-34 going to frontlines right from the assembly lines is a gross exaggeration. No Americans had much of a role in USSR's alleged industrial proves on the eve, and during WW2 aside from Lend-lease, it was the fantastic, enormous resource expenditure which did. The country remained largely agricultural until mid-late seventies.
pydry 5y ago
It was less about ideology and more about Stalin's desire to industrialize so that they didn't get overrun in the next war. Under a capitalist system with similar paranoia about the defence of their exposed western border they probably would have faced something similar. Ireland's 1850 famine was another example of a grain exporting region being milked into famine during a bad harvest by an absent ruler.

nine_k 5y ago

Collectivization was about crushing the independent peasantry, which was created about 15 years before, when the Bolsheviks confiscated land from large landowners hand handed it to landless peasants. It created a class which was too pro-capitalist and too economically independent for the later Bolsheviks' taste. So the land was effectively taken back again. But the aggressive food taxes were not incompetence, but a calculated sacrifice. Food was one of the very few items the young USSR was able to export. It was paid in gold, because the Bretton Woods system was still in force, and real currencies were backed with gold. Yes, the USSR exported a lot of food right at the time its own citizens were dying from famine. The USSR then paid that gold for technology, in particular, for buying entire factories from the US. American firms built a number of large car, truck, and tractor factories, and taught the workers the then-current advanced manufacturing technologies. These factories were later converted to produce military trucks and tanks, which played a key role in WWII. BTW the Soviets were shrewd and bold, and of course cheated: they did not pay the last tranche of the gold once the last factory was completed according to the contract. In a few years, WWII started, and the point became moot for decades.

baybal2 5y ago
That's what the urban legend tells. Yes, USSR splashed gold left, and right on fancy things from the West, including the Moscow metro, but it wasn't US factories which played anything in USSR's WW2 preparations, or anything. USSR wasn't any kind of industrial giant by the time WW2 started. That's a purest propaganda myth. Stalin was terrible in running the economy, probably even more than any subsequent USSR's ruler. Sputnik was possible mostly thanks to post-war short growth spurt resulting from undoing Stalin's biggest economic blunders.
- nine_k 5y ago
  I'm not here to glorify Stalin; he was a pretty bad guy. But read about Occidental Petroleum, Armand Hammer, and how that guy sold the Ford tractors and built Soviet tractor plants for a nice sum in gold at the time when nobody wanted to touch commerce with USSR with a ten-foot pole. These plants later produced a lot of tanks for WWII. USSR was not an industrial giant by 1940. Still, without buying Western tech, it would be even less of a giant.
  - brnt 5y ago
    Stalin admitted it just once, at the end of the summit in Teheran.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    > These plants later produced a lot of tanks for WWII. That's a plainest myth every moderately educated schoolchild in Russia knows.
    - tuukkah 5y ago
      Perhaps moderately brainwashed?
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volgograd_Tractor_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volgograd_Tractor_Plant
      - baybal2 5y ago
        I knew somebody will come, and post that there. That particular factory stood semi idle for nearly a decade, and stood well in rank to showpiece Union's engineering like Moscow metro. It's nearly certain that the original factory built Albert Kahn only managed to make a few thousand units before accidents, a fire, breakdowns, and complete inadequacy of the fitting necessitated a complete rebuild (at the time, it was said to be "random, wrong, and sometimes completely unneeded equipment") It was rebuilt, expanded, and retooled multiple times before they can manufacture even a "tin can" (as was called by Union's soldiers) T-26 tank. And yes, the story of T-34 going to frontlines right from the assembly lines is a gross exaggeration. No Americans had much of a role in USSR's alleged industrial proves on the eve, and during WW2 aside from Lend-lease, it was the fantastic, enormous resource expenditure which did. The country remained largely agricultural until mid-late seventies.

pydry 5y ago

It was less about ideology and more about Stalin's desire to industrialize so that they didn't get overrun in the next war. Under a capitalist system with similar paranoia about the defence of their exposed western border they probably would have faced something similar. Ireland's 1850 famine was another example of a grain exporting region being milked into famine during a bad harvest by an absent ruler.