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The USSR didn't have the great depression, but they did have the HoloDomor or terror famine of Ukraine between 1932 and 1933 and the wider Soviet Famine of that

• sudosysgen 5y ago
  Yes, the Soviet famines were due to erroneous data due to dysfunctional bureacracies. Which is exactly why "pen and paper" are an issue.
  • lumost 5y ago
    Calling the famine an issue of erroneous data does a disservice to the victims. Millions of people don't starve while having their food confiscated at gun point due to an accounting error.
    • sudosysgen 5y ago
      It's the proximate cause. As we all know it had horrible effects. Had the USSR been able to accurately measure food production it wouldn't have happened, so it is indeed the proximal cause.
      • betwixthewires 5y ago
        The interesting thing about market economies is that the economy itself measures the food and distributes it in a maximally efficient manner when left unmolested, no central planner needed. Distributed economies will always be more efficient than planned economies, because everyone on a distributed economy participates in the cognitive load of measuring and distributing resources, so the network has more processing power and less latency than a centrally planned economy.
        • lucian1900 5y ago
          And yet many starved during the Great Depression as food was being destroyed to prevent its price from cratering. Also, planning can be distributed too. Historically it always has been, to varying degrees depending on technology available.
          • betwixthewires 5y ago
            Do you have a source that food was destroyed to prevent it's price cratering and that caused starvation? Usually if there's demand for food it's price won't crater, and the fact that people were starving tells me there was said demand. Of course if that is the case that that happened, that's an external (government) intervention in a market. Planning is distributed, in market economies. Central planning by definition cannot be distributed.
            • sudosysgen 5y ago
              Planned economies can definitely be planned in a distributed manner. Especially anarchist-leaning planned economics has many possible frameworks for this.
              • betwixthewires 5y ago
                I'd like more information on these anarchist leaning planned economics schemes that plan an economy on a distributed manner if you have it, examples or links would be cool.
            • lucian1900 5y ago
              Before the revolution, landlords in agricultural areas were already selling food to the industrial cities, with prices subject to market forces. After the revolution, the state planned this trade and set fixed prices for food so industrial workers could afford it. Since these prices were lower than what the landlords wanted to extract, they destroyed food rather than sell it to the state. “Fraud, famine and fascism” by Tottle has many quotes from primary sources, here’s a few http://marxism.halkcephesi.net/Ludo%20Martens/node77.html http://marxism.halkcephesi.net/Ludo%20Martens/node77.html Planning hasn’t been entirely centralised in any socialist country. There is naturally a lot of back and forth when determining what an area needs and what it can produce. A lot of planning is also delegated locally for matters that don’t affect other areas. Ultimately planning is the essential part, while some amount of centralisation is useful for optimisation to avoid merely local optimums.
  • nradov 5y ago
    The Soviet famines were intentional genocide. Communist Party leaders always had plenty to eat. https://victimsofcommunism.org/ https://victimsofcommunism.org/
    • lucian1900 5y ago
      A source founded and run by fascists is perhaps not ideal.
    • sudosysgen 5y ago
      This used to be believed by academic historians, until the opening of the Soviet Archives in 1992, and now the consensus is that it wasn't, it was just really bad data. The link you're citing had multiple authors resign due to academic dishonesty and is funded by the US government, therefore making it state propaganda.
      • nradov 5y ago
        People died. That was not due to bad data.
• lucian1900 5y ago
  It’s worth looking at primary sources for “Holodomor”, a depressing amount are from Ukrainian fascists. The consensus among historians is that there was indeed a famine, one of the periodic environmental ones in the region. Planning was indeed slow to react to the famine and the sabotage by landlords, so food aid arrived late. It was also the last famine in the region. The landlords that destroyed food were expropriated, land was collectivised and agriculture was industrialised. Talk to any older Ukrainians and they’ll tell you there was plenty of food throughout their lifetimes until the 90s after the USSR was defeated.